Spill Damage Could Last Decades
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on June 7th, 2010 4:31 am by HL
Spill Damage Could Last Decades
Achenbach & Brown, Washington Post
Snorkeling along a coral reef near Veracruz, Mexico, in 2002, Texas biologist Wes Tunnell spotted what looked like a ledge of rock covered in sand, shells, algae and hermit crabs. He knew, from years of research at the reef, that it probably wasn't a rock at all. He stabbed it with his diving knife. His blade pulled up gunk.”Sure enough, it was tar from the Ixtoc spill,” Tunnell said.Twenty-three years earlier, in 1979, an oil well named Ixtoc I had a blowout in 150 feet of water in the southern Gulf of Mexico. The Mexican national oil company Pemex tried to kill the well with…
Don’t Get Mad, Mr. President. Get Even.
Frank Rich, New York Times
IT turns out there is something harder to find than a fix for BP’s leak: Barack Obama’s boiling point.The frantic and fruitless nationwide search for the president’s temper is now our sole dependable comic relief from the tragedy in the gulf. Only The Onion could have imagined the White House briefing last week where a CBS News correspondent asked the press secretary, Robert Gibbs, if he had “really seen rage from the president” and to “describe it.” Gibbs came up with Obama’s “clenched jaw”…
Time for a Kinder, Gentler Israel
Daniel Kurtzer, Washington Post
Of the many confounding aspects of Monday's flotilla fiasco, one of the most curious is the monotone quality of Israel's response. Within hours of the Israeli assault on an aid ship bound for Gaza, while the dead and wounded were still being evacuated from the scene, Israel's deputy foreign minister delivered a verbal broadside that became his nation's public line: The flotilla organizers are terrorist sympathizers, they ambushed Israeli forces, and they are responsible for what followed.
The Boys of Pointe Du Hoc
President Ronald Reagan, (June 6, 1984)
(Remarks delivered by President Reagan celebrating the 40th Anniversary of D-Day, June 6, 1984 Normandy, France)We're here to mark that day in history when the Allied armies joined in battle to reclaim this continent to liberty. For four long years, much of Europe had been under a terrible shadow. Free nations had fallen, Jews cried out in the camps, millions cried out for liberation. Europe was enslaved, and the world prayed for its rescue. Here, in Normandy, the rescue began. Here, the Allies stood and fought against tyranny, in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human…