NEWS FLASH

500 Miles Of Gulf Coast Still Being Oiled By BP Crude | “About 491 miles of coastline in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida were contaminated by BP oil as of July 9, the last available tally from field inspections,” a NOAA spokesman tells Bloomberg. There are five miles of beaches and eight miles of marsh “heavily oiled” in Louisiana. However, support for scientific studies of the full scope of the spill, says oceanographer Robert Weisberg, is “a little too late.”