Dina Cappiello

The Republican-controlled Congress cleared a bill Wednesday to construct the Keystone XL oil pipeline, setting up a confrontation with President Barack Obama, who has promised to veto the measure.

A federal appeals court upheld the first-ever regulations aimed at reducing the gases blamed for global warming, handing down perhaps the most significant decision on the issue since a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that greenhouse gases could be controlled as air pollutants.

Since President Barack Obama took office, Republicans have complained that the EPA has been too tough on oil and gas producers. But an Associated Press analysis of enforcement data over the past decade finds that's not the case.

The Obama administration Tuesday cautiously offered up more areas in the Gulf of Mexico and off Alaska's coast to oil and gas drilling, but it didn't go far enough to satisfy Republicans.

After the nation's largest offshore oil spill and a series of pipeline breaks, GOP presidential candidates are still pushing an aggressive policy of oil and gas drilling that echoes the party's rallying cry from four years ago.

BP bears ultimate responsibility for the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history, a key government panel said Wednesday in a report that assigns more blame to the company than other investigations and could hurt its effort to fend off criminal charges and billions of dollars in penalties.

A key federal report puts ultimate responsibility on BP for the catastrophic failures leading to the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history and the deaths of 11 rig workers, especially regarding the cement seal that was put in place the day before the explosion that triggered the spill.

A BP scientist identified a previously unreported deposit of flammable gas that could have played a role in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, but the oil giant failed to divulge the finding to government investigators for as long as a year, according to interviews and documents obtained by The Associated Press.