"A congressional stampede to pass  oil spill legislation gathered momentum Thursday as a Senate committee voted to impose tougher penalties on water polluters, and lawmakers unveiled a comprehensive bill to strengthen environmental and safety rules on offshore drilling."

"More than two months after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Pensacola awoke Wednesday to the largest onslaught of black crude on Florida's coast, as more than nine miles of white shoreline and beaches were soaked with syrupy oil."

"Federal immigration officials have been visiting command centers on the Gulf Coast to check the immigration status of response workers hired by BP and its contractors to clean up the immense oil spill."

"The nations of East and Central Africa and some of the world's largest conservation organizations have developed a 10-year conservation action plan to save thousands of endangered eastern chimpanzees."

"Louisiana is married to the oil and gas business, for better or for worse. The energy industry depends on Louisiana to supply 30 percent of the nation's oil supply, and Louisiana depends on the industry as the state's biggest economic engine. But there is a cost, as the Deepwater Horizon has proven."

"A single Asian carp has been found for the first time beyond the electric barriers constructed to keep the dreaded invasive species out of the Great Lakes, state and federal officials announced Wednesday."

"Canada will phase out older coal-fired power plants to cut the country's greenhouse gas emissions, Environment Minister Jim Prentice said on Wednesday, as it moves to make natural-gas fired plants the new clean-power standard."

One major BP drilling project, three miles off the coast of Alaska, has been exempted from the Obama administration's moratorium on offshore drilling. Regulators are calling it "onshore" because it is built on an artificial island.

"Fearing that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will deal a severe blow to the bluefin tuna, an environmental group is demanding that the government declare the fish an endangered species, setting off extensive new protections under federal law."

"Three years of talks aimed at reducing whaling activity by Japan, Norway and Iceland broke down Wednesday, leaving management of the population of the world's largest animals essentially in the hands of whale hunters."