Pipeline

Pacific Gas & Electric Co. announced Monday that it will pay $70 million in restitution to the Bay Area city of San Bruno for a pipeline explosion that killed eight people and destroyed a neighborhood two years ago. "This money will be used for the benefit of all the citizens of our city and to help us, as a community, get beyond the tragedy and devastation caused by PG&E's explosion and fire," Mayor Jim Ruane said. The utility plans to provide the money to San Bruno within 30 days.

Silver Lake residents can't wait for this construction job to bite the dust. More than two dozen residents living along the path of a $40-million water pipe project say they are suffering respiratory problems from particulate matter stirred up by construction trucks and heavy-duty trenching machines. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is replacing a massive neighborhood water conduit as part of a larger, federally mandated plan to retire the Silver Lake and Ivanhoe reservoirs, which are exposed to airborne contaminants.

As the U.S. and Pakistan struggle to patch up frayed ties, plans for a Pakistani-Iranian natural gas pipeline further threaten the fragile partnership. Pakistan desperately needs new energy sources and has made it clear that it plans to forge ahead with the pipeline to bring in natural gas from Iran, despite warnings from the U.S. that Islamabad could be hit with economic sanctions if it follows through with the project. "If built, [it] could raise serious concerns under the Iran Sanctions Act. We have made that absolutely clear," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said at a congressional hearing last month.

With gas prices becoming a high-octane campaign issue, the Democratic-led Senate defeated a Republican effort Thursday to advance the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline. The vote to attach the project to a must-pass transportation bill required 60 votes to advance. It received 56, with 11 Democrats joining Republicans in support; 42 senators voted no. President Obama had called senators to urge a no vote. "We hope that the Congress will ... not waste its time with ineffectual, sham legislation," White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said.

The prime minister is talking about being "held hostage" by U.S. interests. Radio ads blare, "Stand up to this foreign bully. " A Twitter account tells of a "secret plan to target Canada: exposed!" Could this be Canada? The cheerful northern neighbor: supplier of troops to unpleasant U.S.-led foreign conflicts, reliable trade partner, ally in holding terrorism back from North America's shores, not to mention the No. 1 supplier of America's oil? Canada's recent push for the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline to carry oil from the tar sands of Alberta to the nation's West Coast, where it would be sent to China, has been marked by uncharacteristic defiance.

President Obama may have nixed a permit for the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline, but that hasn't stopped the Canadian company that wants to build the 1,660-mile structure from going to court to force the cooperation of landowners who don't want it crossing their land. The issue erupted into a noisy protest Friday in Paris, Texas, where farm manager Julia Trigg Crawford has sought a temporary restraining order to prevent the company, TransCanada, from beginning any construction or digging on her property until issues of legal jurisdiction are decided.

With the U.S. Senate poised to begin debate on a bill that would greenlight the controversial Keystone XL pipeline as early as Tuesday, activists and other citizens have barraged the Senate with more than 350,000 petitions opposing the legislation in less than five hours. Activists Bill McKibben , Robert Redford and other celebs such as Kyra Sedgwick and Ian Somerhalder have joined the Natural Resources Defense Council, 350.org, the Sierra Club and other groups in coordinating the petition effort . The goal is 500,000 messages to the Senate by Tuesday.

An internal audit cleared the State Department of major missteps and conflicts of interest in its environmental review of the Keystone XL pipeline, but faulted the agency for its lack of scientific expertise and for not adequately considering alternative routes. The report by the State Department's Office of Inspector General "determined that the department did not violate its role as an unbiased oversight agency. " But it found that the State Department was hampered by its lack of expertise in handling an environmental review on the scale of Keystone XL, a $7-billion, multiyear oil transport project that would wind 1,700 miles from Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf Coast of Texas.

Biotech giant Amgen, fresh off mixed earnings, said it will shell out $1.16 billion to broaden its product pipeline by buying fellow drug developer Micromet Inc. Thousand Oaks-based Amgen is already one of the world's premier pharmaceutical firms, but it's saddled with mostly older products, such as anemia treatment Epogen and arthritis medication Enbrel. Its portfolio is facing more competition and high expenses as similar products hit the market, analysts said. Amgen's profit in 2011 fell 20.4% year over year - largely because of higher costs - to about $3.7 billion, or $4.07 a share, the company said after the markets closed Thursday.