FORTUNE — Few ecological disasters have been as confounding as the massive and devastating die-off of the world’s honeybees. The phenomenon of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) — in which disoriented honeybees die far from their hives — has kept scientists, beekeepers, and regulators desperately seeking the cause. After all, the honeybee, nature’s ultimate utility player, pollinates a third of all the food we eat and contributes an estimated $15 billion in annual agriculture revenue to the U.S. economy.The long list of possible suspects has included pests, viruses, fungi, and also pesticides, particularly so-called neonicotinoids, a class of neurotoxins that kills insects by attacking their nervous systems. For years, their leading manufacturer, Bayer Crop Science, a subsidiary of the German pharmaceutical giant Bayer AG (… Read ahead
Source: money.cnn.com
On Monday, vacationing beach residents awoke to a foul smell when thousands of dead fish washed ashore on a small island on the east side of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, CNN reports. … 
As BP workers finished pouring cement into the well as a first step to permanently sealing it today, environmental groups and scientists – including those working with government agencies to calculate the scale and effects of the spill – said White House officials had painted far too optimistic a picture of a report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (Noaa) into the fate of the oil. “Recent reports seem to say that about 75% of the oil is taken care of and that is just not true,” said John Kessler, of Texas A&M University, who led a National Science Foundation on-site study of the spill. “The fact is that 50% to 75% of the material that came out of the well is still in the water. It’s just in a dissolved or dispersed form.” With work progressing on the final phase of the “static kill” sealing of the well, Thad Allen, the Obama administration’s top official on the spill, told reporters there would be no new oil in the Gulf. But those assurances failed to satisfy scientists and environmental groups, who disputed the claim by Carol Browner, the White House energy and climate adviser, that “the vast majority of oil is gone”. In Louisiana, state wildlife officials told CNN that tar balls and patches of oil were still washing up in the marshes and coastal areas of St Bernard, Plaquemines and Jefferson parishes. Susan Shaw, a marine toxicologist and director of the Marine Environmental Research Institute, said the White House had been too quick to declare the oil was gone. “The blanket statement that the public understood is that most of the oil has disappeared. That is not true. About 50% of it is still in the water,” she said. Like other scientists, she said the report failed to explain how it reached its estimates on the amount of oil that was biodegraded naturally, or dispersed with chemicals. “There are a lot of unanswered questions.” Even the White House’s own estimates still left a spill five times the size of that from the Exxon Valdez, she said, with long-term consequences that would be unknown for years to come. Terry Hazen, the head of ecology at the Lawrence Berkeley national laboratory, who studied the spill for Noaa, said his teams could find no trace of oil on the surface or in the deep between 2km and 100km from the well site last week. “Whatever was put into the environment, it is undetectable in the water column and the surface of water,” he said. But he added: “That is not true though in the marshes or on some of the shorelines. We do know there is still oil out there.” He also said there were potential weaknesses in the analysis because of Noaa’s assumptions about the size of the spill. “When they do all of the inventories trying to estimate all of the oil and where it went there is pretty wide margins of estimates of how much was actually coming out of the well head,” he said. “That complicates everything.” However, such nuances were overshadowed by the White House, which staged a high-profile event on Wednesday to announce that the well had stopped flowing, and that the consequences of the spill were not as catastrophic as once feared. Francesca Griffo, senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the White House had stepped on more nuanced statements from Noaa scientists. “When these reports go through the spin machine they get distorted,” she said. “If you look closely at this report, it makes it very clear that this is not over.” Rick Steiner, a former University of Alaska marine biologist, suggested that the White House had been too eager to try to put the oil spill behind it, with Democrats in Congress facing tough election fights in November. “It seems that there was a rush to declare this done, and there were obvious political objectives there,” he said. “Even if there is not a drop of oil out there, and it had truly magically vanished, it would still be an environmental disaster caused by the toxic shock of the release of 5m barrels of oil.” … 
Above Top Secret is reporting that their investigative piece into the killing of Mustangs on public lands to allow BP to receive drilling leases and oil pipeline permits on public lands is being picked up by CNN. The ATS report investigates the relationship of corruption between BP and the Federal Government, which includes … 
BPs Deepwater Horizon oil spill off the coast of Louisiana and the company-led assault to contain it isnt limited to the water. A less obvious twist to the nations worst environmental disaster is drifting on the winds, suggesting tar balls arent all Texas will see of the crisis. And while the oil must surrender to the shore, bad air knows no boundaries. Its the same from New Iberia, Louisiana, to Pensacola, Florida, said Wilma Subra, hailed by CNN as another Erin Brockovitch and by the Guardian UK newspaper this week as possibly BP CEO … 
One thing that’s accepted as a given in D.C. is that there’s nothing amiss when people constantly cycle back and forth between raking in big bucks consulting for private-sector clients and going on the air to share ostensibly independent political commentary. While people constantly obsess about the revolving door between government and lobbying, this other revolving door — between consulting and on-air commentary — gets almost no attention at all, even though it’s widespread. But now comes a situation that’s focusing a bit of attention on it: The case of two CNN contributors, Alex Castellanos and Hilary Rosen, and their work for BP. This morning’s Washington Post … 
Karenna Gore Schiff, the oldest daughter of former Vice President Al Gore and Tipper Gore, has separated from her husband, Dr. Andrew Schiff, after 13 years of marriage, two sources close to the former vice president tell CNN. This news comes just a week after the former vice president and Mrs. Gore announced their own separation after 40 years of marriage. Gore Schiff is 36 years old, a graduate of Harvard University and Columbia Law School. She married Andrew Schiff in 1997. They have three children. Reached by CNN, Gore Schiff declined to comment on the story. …