The Los Angeles Times is reporting this morning that former interior Secretary Gale A. Norton (above) is being investigated to determine if she illegally used her position to benefit Royal Dutch Shell PLC. Royal Dutch Shell hired Norton after she left the Interior Department. Interior in 2006 awarded three oil shale leases on federal land in Colorado to a Royal Dutch subsidiary. Reporters Jim Tankersley and Josh Meyer wrote that a Rand Corp. expert said the "deal could net the company hundreds of billions of dollars."

"The investigation's main focus is whether Norton violated a law that prohibits federal employees from discussing employment with a company if they are involved in dealings with the government that could benefit the firm, law enforcement and Interior officials said," the Times reported. The investigation began during the last months of the George W. Bush administration.

Norton, 55, is the former attorney general of Colorado and has been a long-time backer of oil shale development. The leases were granted to the Royal Dutch Shell subsidiary in 2006 on the recommendation of a team representing several federal agencies. In December of that year, Norton went to work for Shell. Five leases covering up to 25,000 acres, mostly in rural Colorado, were granted. Shell was the only company to be granted more than one lease.

Black workers from the Deep South came to West Virginia looking for work. What they found in the tunnel was a death sentence.

All those whirling wind turbines out there are causing havoc with weather radar, or so says the Associated Press. "Some wind farms have appeared on Doppler radar as either a tornado or a violent thunderstorm," wrote Dirk Lammers. "The National Weather Service received a frantic warning from an emergency worker in Kansas who had access to radar images and thought he’d seen a tornado. What he actually saw was an image of wind turbines with fast moving blades." 

This is a case where a human eye is better than a computer. The turbines can set off an automatic alert from a Doppler radar. (Wind farms built within 11 miles of a Doppler site seem to have the biggest effect.) But when a real, live weather person looks at the screen, she can tell a real tornado from a blip caused by turbines. Software can remove stationary obstacles — mountains, buildings — but there is no fix yet for removing moving turbines.

Weather people are aghast that anyone trained on reading a radar would be fooled. However, it appears that the Royal Air Force's air traffic radars have been fooled, too. 

Ken Ward Jr. at the Charleston Gazette asks, "What will Obama do now about mountaintop removal?" Good question. The destructive form of strip mining — remove the top of the mountain, take coal, dump waste in the valley below — has been the subject of litigation and rulemaking. Obama hoped to beef up regulation of mountaintop mining, but now a federal judge has said the government is moving too quickly. It was trying to reverse a Bush administration mining rule without going through the proper procedures.

Ward notes that the situation "put the National Mining Association in the position of being the ones arguing for good government (this after eight years of having a seat at the table, in the room, guiding Bush administration policies on mountaintop removal and most other energy issues)." The coal boys were the ones saying government was working behind closed doors. And the judge agreed.

But now what? "Somewhere in the middle, what appears absolutely certain is that neither side is really clear at all on what the Obama administration’s position is, what exactly its goals are, or what exactly the rules on when permits will or won’t be issue are," Ward writes. "The transparency promised by President Obama across government generally,  and by White House officials and regulatory agencies on mountaintop removal specifically, just isn’t there."