National News

There is speculation about a last minute settlement. But if that doesn’t happen, a federal judge in New Orleans will today begin hearing arguments about BP’s liability for the 2010 oil rig explosion and spill in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 men and led to one of the biggest environmental disasters in the nation’s history.

At stake: Billions of dollars in potential penalties.

As NPR’s Carrie Johnson explained on Morning Edition, federal Justice Department officials say they intend to prove that BP acted with recklessness and is guilty of gross negligence for the series of mistakes that led to the explosion. The company will argue that the blame should be shared with the other firms that performed various roles at the rig.

And it could be years before some of those “unanticipated environmental damages” show up, NPR’s Debbie Elliott added on Morning Edition. As people on the Gulf Coast can attest, she said, there are still hundreds of miles of oiled shoreland in Louisiana and tar balls still wash up on the beaches of Alabama when there are storms in the Gulf.

It could be a couple decades, Debbie said, before all the environmental consequences of the spill are known.

BP and other companies that were doing work on the rig have settled some other cases related to the spill. Bloomberg News has a timeline with details.

Defense News reports:

“The move came nine days after the Pentagon cleared the F-35B jump-jet variant, designed for the U.S. Marines, to resume tests after a monthlong suspension. Both suspensions are due to problems with the engines. It also comes at a time when the program is facing increased scrutiny from lawmakers and senior DoD officials.

“Unlike the last suspension, which was only for the B variant, this suspension affects all three variants: the F-35A Air Force conventional takeoff version, the F35-B for the Marines, and the F35-C carrier variant for the Navy.”

The AP reports that Kyra Hawn, Joint Program Office spokeswoman, said a routine inspection “revealed a crack on a low pressure turbine blade of an F135 engine…”

“Unprecedented in scale and ambition, the Lockheed Martin-run F-35 program has been beset by cost overruns, delays and design problems,” Wired’s Danger Room reports. “The Pentagon has steadily downgraded the plane’s performance specs. Even so, it struggles to match its required blend of stealth, maneuverability, speed and range.”

The brief formally asks the court to declare unconstitutional a specific part of DOMA called Section 3. That’s the part that bars recognition of same-sex marriages for purposes of federal benefits such as income taxes or federal employee benefits. The brief points out that there are more than 1,000 federal statues and programs that come into play depending on a person’s marital status.

The Obama administration notes that some of these couples are legally married so targeting them is “a harsh form of discrimination that bears no relation to their ability to contribute to society.” Moreover, it violates the constitutional guarantee of equal protection, the brief states.

An article in Buzzfeed explains that the administration’s brief argues for heightened scrutiny of the law because it singles out gay people.

The administration’s filing to the Supreme Court is not exactly a surprise. In Obama’s inaugural address last month, he stood by his position in favor of same-sex marriage:

“Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law — for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.”

The primary challenge to the administration’s position comes from House Republicans through the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group (BLAG). That group filed its own brief this week that advocates settling the issue through the democratic process, not through the courts.

The Obama administration’s brief disputes that position, stating several reasons why letting voters decide on the legal status of same-sex marriage is inappropriate. It sites the long history of discrimination gays and lesbians have faced; that sexual orientation bears no relation to the ability to contribute to society; and that sexual orientation is a core part of identity with broad scientific evidence that it is not a voluntary choice. Finally, the brief states:

“Fourth, gay and lesbian people are a minority group with limited political power. Although some of the harshest and most overt forms of discrimination against gay and lesbian people have receded, that progress has hardly been uniform (either temporally or geographically), and has in significant respects been the result of judicial enforcement of the Constitution, not political action.”

In its article about the administration’s brief, Politico points out that there are concessions to the other side. The brief acknowledges that “DOMA could pass a so-called ‘rational basis’ test applied to laws that don’t veer into sensitive issues like race or gender. The Justice Department also says the law may not have been the product of ‘hostile animus’ against gay people.”

Politico also has a link to the full-text of the brief, if you want to read it for yourself.

“The fragments contain a standard number of minerals, including olivine, pyroxene, troilite and kamacite,” scientist Viktor Grokhovsky of the Urals Federal University, told the Voice of Russia. “These minerals that can be discovered only in outer space confirm the fragments’ extraterrestrial nature.”

That means that before it shattered windows in the city of Chelyabinsk and turned people around the world into gawkers fascinated by a calamity — and by the amazing video footage of it — the meteor spent billions of years traveling through space.

When it detonated over Russia, the explosion was powerful enough to be “detected by 17 nuclear monitoring stations around the globe,” as The Christian Science Monitor reports.

The meteor, which may have weighed as much as 10,000 tons and measured about 55 feet across, was traveling at an estimated 11 miles per second when it reached Earth, according to a report at io9.

“Chondrites are some of the most primitive rocks in the solar system,” says Britain’s Natural History Museum. “These 4.5-billion-year-old meteorites have not changed much from the asteroid they came from.”

The museum says the meteor’s name — pronounced with a hard “K” sound — comes from the Greek word for grains of sand.

But in the region where the meteor fell, the chondrite goes by another title: a chance to cash in. As NPR’s David Greene tells Linda Wertheimer on Morning Edition, people have been scrambling to collect pieces of the famous meteor.

“A 16-year-old pulled one out of his pocket and said, ‘Here’s a piece of the meteor, right here,” David says. “And this black market is developing. People have been coming to these villages and offering $100, $200 for little handfuls of space debris. The government’s worried that people are going to be trying to sell it fraudulently. So, this whole new economic reality is developing around this stuff.”

Scientists searching for invasive species in Lake Tahoe scooped up a bright orange goldfish measuring nearly a foot and a half long and weighing more than 4 pounds, according to the website Live Science. (You can see it here.)

Environmental scientist Sudeep Chandra says a survey has uncovered a “nice corner” of the lake where about 15 other giant goldfish were living, apparently after being dumped there by aquarium owners.

Finding that many domestic goldfish (scientific name Carassius auratus) in one place is “an indication that they were schooling and spawning,” Chandra tells Live Science.

“It’s unclear whether the giant fish were introduced as fully grown adults, or while they were still small, Chandra said. But even a small creature can have a big impact, if there are enough of them.

“The goldfish are just one of several species of invasive warm-water fishes in Lake Tahoe. ‘The invasion is resulting in the consumption of native species,’ Chandra said. What’s more, the invasive fish excrete nutrients that cause algal blooms, which threaten to muddy Tahoe’s clear waters.”

The story goes on to explain that aquarium dumping has become “a common practice in the United States and elsewhere, and it’s taking a toll on native wildlife.”

Sue Williams, a professor at the University of California, Davis, Bodega Marine Laboratory, co-authored a study that found the aquarium trade has contributed to one-third of the world’s worst aquatic and invasive species problems.