NATIONAL
February 24, 2014 | By Molly Hennessy-Fiske
A portion of the lower Mississippi River reopened Monday after a weekend oil spill, but another stretch remained closed, leaving 29 ships stuck, according to U.S. Coast Guard officials. Officials had closed a 65-mile stretch of the river and the port of New Orleans after 31,500 gallons of light crude oil spilled from a barge that ran into a towboat Saturday about 50 miles west of New Orleans. On Monday, officials reopened a portion of the river east of the spill to vessels with Coast Guard approval.
NATIONAL
January 2, 2014 | By Ralph Vartabedian
A federal safety alert Thursday warned that crude oil flowing out of new fields in North Dakota may be more flammable than expected, a caution that comes several days after a train carrying about 3.5 million gallons of the same oil crashed in the state and set off a massive explosion. The accident on the BNSF Railway, the fourth such explosion in North America involving crude oil trains, has fed mounting concerns over public safety as the rail industry sharply increases the use of rail to transport surging crude production in North Dakota, Texas and Colorado.
WORLD
June 4, 2012 | By Mark Magnier, Los Angeles Times
ALANG, India - For the ship formerly known as the Exxon Valdez, even sailing quietly into the sunset is proving difficult. Now called the Oriental Nicety, it's floating off India in a kind of high-seas limbo as a court decides whether the vessel that dumped 11 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska's unspoiled Prince William Sound in 1989 can be hacked apart in this forlorn graveyard for once-mighty ships. Local environmentalists have petitioned the High Court here in the western state of Gujarat to block its entry pending an onboard inspection for toxic chemicals, including mercury, arsenic and asbestos.
BUSINESS
March 20, 2012 | Bloomberg News
The ship once known as the Exxon Valdez has been sold for scrap 23 years after causing the worst tanker spill in U.S. history, which led to new designs for oil carriers. Now called the Oriental Nicety, the vessel was sold for about $16 million to Global Marketing Systems Inc. in Maryland, the world's biggest cash buyer of ships for demolition. Converted into an ore carrier in 2007, it changed owners and names four times after the 1989 accident, American Bureau of Shipping records show.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
May 19, 2011 | By Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times
President Obama has nominated an Alaska Supreme Court justice who earlier served on Planned Parenthood's board and battled Big Oil over the Exxon Valdez spill to a seat on the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The White House announced late Wednesday that it was proposing Justice Morgan Christen for one of three open seats on the San Francisco-based appeals court. The proposed elevation of the 49-year-old Washington state native was made on the eve of a contentious vote called in the Senate Judiciary Committee on Obama's first nomination to the 9th Circuit, that of UC Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu, which has languished in the Senate for 15 months.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
December 1, 2010 | By Bettina Boxall, Los Angeles Times
Richard N. Goldman, a San Francisco philanthropist and civic leader who co-founded the Goldman Environmental Prize to recognize grass-roots environmental activism around the world, has died. He was 90. Goldman, a passionate supporter of environmental causes, the Jewish community and Israel, died Monday at his San Francisco home, according to his family. The Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, created in 1951 by Goldman and his wife, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, has given away more than $680 million since its inception.