"Calmer winds and higher humidity on Wednesday gave the army of firefighters battling several major blazes in north and west Texas hope of halting the worst wildfires in the state's history."
"In February, the Obama administration declared the Pacific walrus to be at risk of extinction because its Arctic habitat was melting. But it declined to list the marine mammal as an endangered species, saying a backlog of other animals faced greater peril."
"A blowout at a natural gas well in rural northern Pennsylvania spilled thousands of gallons of chemical-laced water Wednesday, contaminating a stream and leading officials to ask seven families who live nearby to evacuate as crews struggled to stop the gusher."
BP's response to the Gulf spill disaster often made it seem callous and arrogant. It was a textbook example of how not to do public relations.
"BP Plc filed a lawsuit for more than $42 billion against Halliburton, which cemented the blown-out well which caused the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, after claiming a similar sum from rig owner Transocean."
"Last spring, as BP's unchecked gusher of oil began to spread across the Gulf of Mexico, University of Miami oceanographer Jerald Ault tried to answer the question that was on everyone's lips: What will this do to the Gulf?"
A former employee of a restaurant in Acadia National Park won a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit over records the National Park Service had refused to release, about a 2008 incident when he was among those detained by Park Service police.
If you spend a lot of time researching things on the Internet as part of your reporting, the online Data Science Toolkit, which is especially handy with geographic data, and a book by Pete Warden could make parts of your job a lot easier.
Denial of news media access to Gulf beaches has been an issue since the Deepwater Horizon disaster. There's tussling over access to (and interpretation of) scientific information on possible impacts of the spill on the Gulf ecosystem. And The Guardian obtained >30,000 pages of BP in-house memos FOIA'd by Greenpeace, which suggest BP was working hard to influence the results of the research it was paying for.
A top Wisconsin Republican party official on March 17 filed a request under the state's freedom-of-information law for emails written by University of Wisconsin's William J. Cronon, after the professor blogged about the American Legislative Exchange Council, an anti-regulatory group that lobbies state legislatures.
