The owners of a stricken container ship wrecked on a reef off a popular New Zealand holiday spot have been charged with causing the country's worst environmental disaster in decades, maritime officials said on Thursday.

Daina Shipping, a unit of Greece's Costamare Inc., has been charged with discharging harmful substances after its 47,230-tonne Liberian-flagged ship Rena struck a reef about 20 km (12 miles) off Tauranga, New Zealand's biggest export port, in early October.

Hydrofluoric acid (HF) leaked from an alkylation unit at BP Plc's 406,570-barrels-per-day refinery in Texas City, Texas on Tuesday morning, triggering alarms in the plant and warnings to area residents, company and city officials said.

No injuries were reported at the refinery, the fifth-largest in the United States, or in the surrounding community, the officials said.

"We have a small leak of hydrofluoric acid at the refinery," BP spokesman Tom Mueller said shortly after 10 a.m. local time. "Water is being sprayed on it. We expect to secure the leak shortly."

Atomic Energy Authority officials, along with other stakeholders, collected samples in the deep sea upto four kilometres in the Beruwala area, to check whether they were contaminated due to the radiation leak in Japan.

Atomic Energy Authority Sectional Head Wijeya A. Waduge told The Island yesterday that the earlier test had been done on surface water and no radioactive particles had been found.

Says this will uphold the noble ideals of Olympic Movement

The Union Sports Ministry has written to the International Olympic Committee (IOC), urging it to cancel the sponsorship of Dow Chemical for the London Olympics. In a letter, dated February 24, to IOC president Jacques Rogge, the Ministry's joint secretary Rahul Bhatnagar said that such a step by the IOC would assuage the “feelings of millions of people”

Ambernath: Two workers died and another two were left critically ill following a leak in a newly-opened chemical plant at the Anand Nagar MIDC in Ambernath.
The police said the incident occurred on Tuesday morning when the four were working in the chemical unit situated on plot number 4. A chemical started leaking, following which the authorities asked some workers to collect it in a drum. The four men did so, finished their work for the day and returned home. It was only then that the workers realized something was wrong as they started feeling unwell.

The U.S. Senate unanimously approved a pipeline safety bill on Monday that would require strength-testing of old pipes and hike fines for safety violations after a series of accidents and explosions.

The legislation was sparked by an explosion a year ago in San Bruno, California, on a line owned by Pacific Gas & Electric Co. The explosion destroyed a neighborhood and killed eight people.

A chemical leak in Dammam, in Saudi Arabia's oil-rich Eastern Province, has forced some schools to shut down and sent 13 people to hospital with breathing problems, sources and civil defense authorities said on Wednesday.

The leak has been brought under control, officials said. The civil defense authority said in a statement that it was notified of the leak late on Tuesday.

"There's a cloud over the industrial city," Major General Mohammed al-Ghamdi, director of civil defense in the Eastern Province, told al-Ekhbariya television.

Government officials failed to distribute to thousands of people pills that could have minimized radiation risks from the March nuclear accident, government documents show.

The disclosure is the latest evidence of government neglect of emergency procedures in the chaotic days after the disaster, in which an earthquake and tsunami damaged the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

A salt water pipeline leak offshore Alabama has forced ExxonMobil to halt gas production in the Mobile Bay area of the Gulf of Mexico, the company said on Thursday.

A sheen was detected on the water on Tuesday night, one mile south of Dauphin Island where ExxonMobil runs a number of subsea natural gas pipelines, prompting the company to shut in 280 million cubic feet per day of natural gas production.

An oil spill off the coast of China at a field operated by ConocoPhillips has sparked concerns about discrimination against foreign companies and underscored how Chinese regulators are getting stricter on pollution.

China, the world’s biggest consumer of energy, has ambitious plans to develop offshore oil and gas, particularly in the challenging but gas-rich terrain of the South China Sea.