Free Republic

A U.S. appeals court on Thursday blocked Royal Dutch Shell from drilling oil wells off Alaska's North Slope after finding that the Interior Department had failed to conduct an environmental study before issuing the company's drilling permit. In a long-awaited ruling, the court said that the Minerals Management Service, the U.S. government agency in charge of offshore leasing, had violated the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act by failing to take a "hard look" at the impact that offshore drilling would have on bowhead whales in the Beaufort Sea as well as indigenous communities on the North Slope. The decision canceled...

SAN FRANCISCO—The U.S. Navy agreed in a settlement approved Tuesday to limit where it operates certain sonar systems criticized by environmentalists as a threat to whales and other marine mammals. The settlement approved Tuesday by a federal judge in San Francisco restricts the Navy's use of low-frequency sonar to specific military training areas near Hawaii and in the western Pacific Ocean.