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Sunday, January 8, 2012
Saturday, January 7, 2012
BP oil spill payments to resume after fee wrinkle (AP)
NEW ORLEANS ? Payments to those damaged by BP's massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico resumed Wednesday, a day after administrators of the $20 billion fund stopped the flow of money, saying they were unclear on how to assess a 6 percent fee for lawyers handling claims.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier said payments made after Dec. 30 would have to include a 6 percent fee for trial lawyers affiliated with a steering committee helping plaintiffs with oil spill litigation against BP PLC.
The Gulf Coast Claims Facility said it froze payments on Tuesday in response to the Dec. 28 ruling that said disbursements made on and after Nov. 7, 2011, should include the fee.
Barbier's clarification on Wednesday spared the facility the prospect of asking 9,000 people compensated in November and December to pay for attorneys' fees. About $260 million had been paid to claimants between Nov. 7 and the end of December, the facility said. Nov. 7 was the date when plaintiffs' attorneys first asked the court to establish a fund to cover fees.
The oil spill began after the April 20, 2010, explosion aboard the BP-leased drilling rig Deepwater Horizon off the southeastern Louisiana coast. The explosion and fire that burned for two days killed 11 workers aboard the rig that sank after two days.
More than 200 million gallons of oil flowed from the well a mile below the Gulf surface before it was capped in July, soiling coastal habitat, fouling fishing grounds and causing a near-panic for Gulf Coast businesses reliant on tourism.
BP set up the $20 billion fund to compensate victims. So far about $5.8 billion in damages has been paid.
The issue of attorneys' fees remains contentious.
The Louisiana attorney general and lawyers not affiliated with the steering committee say they plan to appeal Barbier's ruling. Under it, 4 percent of payments to Louisiana will have to be set aside to cover attorneys' fees. The state opposes that.
Mike Stag, a lawyer not with the steering committee, questioned why his clients ? hundreds of whom are settling their claims outside of federal court ? should have to pay into the attorneys' fund. Stag said he represents about 1,000 people and businesses across the Gulf Coast. He said his law firm went to great lengths to prove his clients' cases without any help from the steering committee. He said Barbier's ruling left many questions open about how to pay fees.
"We are concerned about fairness and about delay," he said. "We don't think it's beneficial to the clients"
Steve Herman, a lead attorney on the steering committee, said any move to overturn Barbier's ruling was an "effort to refight an issue that has already been decided by the court."
The steering committee and its associates are made up of about 340 lawyers from 90 firms who are working on the sprawling legal case against BP on behalf of more than 120,000 claimants. In court filings, the lawyers say that they have spent 230,000 hours and $11.5 million on the case, and that an escrow account should be set up to pay them for their work.
Lawyers not affiliated with the steering committee said Barbier's order unfairly compensates those lawyers who are part of it.
Louisiana lawyer Daniel Becnel questioned how much work the steering committee attorneys have actually done. He said much of the legal work against BP was accomplished during Coast Guard and congressional hearings and investigations. He said the committee has duplicated that work.
"You have to do something to get your attorneys' fees," said Becnel, who is not part of the steering committee. "We're all beside ourselves."
Herman, for the steering committee, said that the Coast Guard investigation and testimony were not "generally admissible" in civil court "so facts and opinions had to be independently established."
Meanwhile, BP, Transocean Ltd., Halliburton and other companies involved in the spill have blamed each other in lawsuits. Civil and criminal investigations into who is responsible for the nation's worst offshore oil spill are ongoing.
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Drew Barrymore engaged to Will Kopelman (omg!)
NEW YORK (AP) ? Drew Barrymore is engaged to art consultant Will Kopelman.
Barrymore's publicist confirmed the engagement Friday. The couple were reportedly engaged over the holidays in Sun Valley, Idaho. It will be the actress' third marriage.
Us Weekly first reported the engagement. A photo of the pair, in which Barrymore sports a diamond ring, was released to People magazine.
The 36-year-old Barrymore was briefly married to Jeremy Thomas in 1994 and to comedian Tom Green in 2001.
Kopelman is the son of former Chanel CEO Arie Kopelman.
___
Online:
http://www.drewbarrymore.com/
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Friday, January 6, 2012
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The Putco Chrome Trim Tank Cover greatly enhances the look of your vehicle. These easily install in minutes; simply peel and stick. Made with automotive grade ABS chrome, this set is modeled to withstand the most extreme elements, and is guaranteed with the NeveRust lifetime warranty.
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Source: http://www.lnycotwcg.info/18e20g21v370.html
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Thursday, January 5, 2012
Expert: Wastewater well in Ohio triggered quakes
CLEVELAND (AP) ? A northeast Ohio well used to dispose of wastewater from oil and gas drilling almost certainly caused a series of 11 minor quakes in the Youngstown area since last spring, a seismologist investigating the quakes said Monday.
Research is continuing on the now-shuttered injection well at Youngstown and seismic activity, but it might take a year for the wastewater-related rumblings in the earth to dissipate, said John Armbruster of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York.
Brine wastewater dumped in wells comes from drilling operations, including the so-called fracking process to extract gas from underground shale that has been a source of concern among environmental groups and some property owners. Injection wells have also been suspected in quakes in Ashtabula in far northeast Ohio, and in Arkansas, Colorado, and Oklahoma, Armbruster said.
Thousands of gallons (liters) of brine were injected daily into the Youngstown well that opened in 2010 until its owner, Northstar Disposal Services LLC, agreed Friday to stop injecting the waste into the earth as a precaution while authorities assessed any potential links to the quakes.
After the latest and largest quake Saturday at 4.0 magnitude, state officials announced their beliefs that injecting wastewater near a fault line had created enough pressure to cause seismic activity. They said four inactive wells within a five-mile (8 kilometer) radius of the Youngstown well would remain closed. But they also stressed that injection wells are different from drilling wells that employ fracking.
Armbruster said Monday he expects more quakes will occur despite the shutdown of the Youngstown well.
"The earthquakes will trickle on as a kind of a cascading process once you've caused them to occur," he said. "This one year of pumping is a pulse that has been pushed into the ground, and it's going to be spreading out for at least a year."
The quakes began last March with the most recent on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve each occurring within 100 meters (yards) of the injection well. The Saturday quake in McDonald, outside of Youngstown, caused no serious injuries or property damage.
Youngstown Democrat Rep. Robert Hagan on Monday renewed his call for a moratorium on fracking and well injection disposal to allow a review of safety issues.
"If it's safe, I want to do it," he said in a telephone interview. "If it's not, I don't want to be part and parcel to destruction of the environment and the fake promise of jobs."
He said a moratorium "really is what we should be doing, mostly toward the injection wells, but we should be asking questions on drilling itself."
A spokesman for Gov. John Kasich, an outspoken supporter of the growing oil and natural gas industry in Ohio, said the shale industry shouldn't be punished for a fracking byproduct.
"That would be the equivalent of shutting down the auto industry because a scrap tire dump caught fire somewhere," said Kasich spokesman Rob Nichols.
He said 177 deep injection wells have operated without incident in Ohio for decades and the Youngstown well was closed within 24 hours of a study detailing how close a Christmas Eve quake was to the well.
The industry-supported Ohio Oil and Gas Association said the rash of quakes was "a rare and isolated event that should not cast doubt about the effectiveness" of injection wells.
Such wells "have been used safely and reliably as a disposal method for wastewater from oil and gas operations in the U.S. since the 1930s," the association's executive vice president, Thomas E. Stewart, said in a statement Monday.
Environmentalists are critical of the hydraulic fracturing process, called fracking, which utilizes chemical-laced water and sand to blast deep into the ground and free the shale gas. Critics fear the process itself or the drilling liquid, which can contain carcinogens, could contaminate water supplies, either below ground, by spills, or in disposed wastewater.
Permits allowing hydraulic fracturing in Ohio's portion of the Marcellus and the deeper Utica Shale formations rose from one in 2006 to at least 32 in 2011.
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Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Home monitoring may help manage and reduce costs for heart failure
ScienceDaily (Jan. 3, 2012) ? Heart failure affects 5.8 million people in the U.S. alone and is responsible for nearly 1 million hospitalizations each year, most resulting from a build-up of body fluid in the lungs and other organs due to the heart's inability to pump effectively. The disease needs to be closely tracked in order to avoid such hospitalizations, and home-monitoring interventions may be especially useful, UCLA researchers say.
In their new paper, the UCLA authors discuss the importance of heart failure disease-management and early identification, as well as the treatment of body-fluid congestion, using a number of home-monitoring strategies, including self-care, such as daily weighing and medication management; phone calls from a nurse or automated response system; home health visits; and telemedicine and remote monitoring with implantable and external devices to track vital information.
The field of heart failure home-monitoring is fairly new. Further study will help assess optimal approaches, such as identifying which patients may benefit the most from such monitoring, and will determine which health data -- blood pressure or shortness of breath, for example -- may be the best to monitor. Promising new technologies, including devices to track heart-ventricle and pulmonary artery pressures, which are closely related to congestion development and clinical outcomes, may be particularly promising.
The authors suggest that the best approach is most likely multi-pronged, including monitoring along with patient follow-up and feedback.
UCLA is currently running Better Effectiveness After Transition-Heart Failure (BEAT-HF), a multicenter trial testing enhanced transitions of care and telemonitoring for patients recently hospitalized with heart failure.
Authors include Dr. Gregg C. Fonarow, UCLA's Eliot Corday Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine and Science, director of the Ahmanson-UCLA Cardiomyopathy Center, and co-chief of clinical cardiology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
The Ahmanson Foundation and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality funded the research. Fonarow has served as a consultant for Medtronic.
The research appears in the Jan. 10 online edition of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
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