New York Times: Companies involved in offshore drilling and the government agencies that regulate drilling should take a more robust and systematic approach to ensuring safety, a team of scientific experts advised on Wednesday in a report on last year`s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Experts from the National Academy of Engineering and the National Research Council found that the explosion on the oil rig, which killed 11 workers and gushed five million barrels of oil into the gulf, followed...

Reuters: U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said on Wednesday that the results of the first offshore oil and gas lease sale held since the last year's BP oil spill demonstrate that industry is still interested in drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. The lease sale, which wrapped up on Wednesday, received a total of $712 million in bids.

New York Times: The British oil company BP said Friday that Cameron International, one of its contractors in the oil well that exploded last year in the Gulf of Mexico, has agreed to pay $250 million to settle claims related to the ensuing spill. Cameron, based in Houston, designed and manufactured the so-called blowout preventer on the rig, which failed to stop the oil from spilling. The settlement, which is BP’s fourth so far with companies that worked on some parts of the well, was not an admission of liability...

Inter Press Service: Several leading European electricity providers and nuclear power plant constructors now count as part of the collateral damage caused by the tsunami that destroyed the Japanese nuclear power plant of Fukushima last March. In reference to the German government’s decision to phase out nuclear power soon after the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, Johannes Teyssen, CEO of E.ON, one of Germany’s leading electricity providers and power plant operators, warned the public that the industry’s balance...