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Oil Spill: Why the BP Settlement Is Just the Beginning of the End

Lawyers representing the oil giant BP on one side, and more than 100,000 Gulf Coast residents on the other, were set to show up at the court of U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier on Monday morning. There they would have begun contesting one of the biggest class-action lawsuits in American history, fighting over the responsibility [...]

Oil Spill: Six Months On, the Stain is Still on the Gulf Coast—and the Rest of Us

A few weeks after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, triggering the biggest oil spill in U.S. history, I wrote the first cover story for TIME on the accident. We called it “The Meaning of the Mess,” and while I spent a few pages recounting how the explosion had occurred, [...]

Oil Spill: BP Ponies Up for Mental Health

We’ve sent a lot of criticism BP’s way during the past four months of the oil spill, so it’s only fair to give notice when they do the right thing. After weeks of experts calling attention to the potential problems—and states like Louisiana asking for fund—BP announced that it would provide $52 million for behavioral [...]