Disasters

"Royal Dutch Shell may be able to resume Arctic oil and gas exploration if the Interior Department sticks to the timeline it filed to the U.S. District Court of Alaska."

"Mitra Colic stands in the shell of her home, anguished by the worst flooding in the Balkans in 150 years. "I have moments when I cry and think: What next? Can I go on like this?" she says."

"Albany, New York Sheriff Craig Apple assured a room of concerned citizens that county emergency crews were prepared to handle an oil-train accident involving three or four tank cars."

"Glenn Wilson needed a favor on Saturday, and he knew he didn’t have to ask. He wanted to take his son surf fishing, so he drove from his house by the bay in Point Pleasant and parked in his mother-in-law’s driveway in Ocean Beach, two blocks from the sea."

"Federal environmental officials said Thursday that they have reached a deal with Duke Energy to clean up its mess from a massive coal ash spill into the Dan River that coated 70 miles of the waterway in North Carolina and Virginia with toxic gray sludge."

"British oil giant BP plans to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to require that businesses prove the Gulf of Mexico oil spill caused them financial losses before they can collect money from a multibillion-dollar settlement of private claims resulting from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster."

"The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Thursday predicted a "near or below normal" 2014 Atlantic hurricane season, with eight to 13 tropical storms and three to six hurricanes, one or two of which would reach major Category 3 status."

"A Japanese court ruled against allowing the restart of a nuclear power plant west of Tokyo on Wednesday, its operator said, a rare case in which anti-nuclear plaintiffs have successfully won a ruling to shut down reactors."

"The government has no way of fully knowing which U.S. chemical facilities stock ammonium nitrate, the substance that exploded last year at a Texas fertilizer plant and killed 14 people, congressional investigators say. Outdated federal policies, poor information sharing with states and a raft of industry exemptions point to scant federal oversight, says a new report obtained by The Associated Press."