The first of nine proposed major solar energy plants easily won the approval of California regulators Wednesday, reports David Baker in the San Francisco Chronicle -- as firms battle technical hurdles and race against the clock.

If you really want to know how laws are made, watch this narrative. According to Phil Willon of the Los Angeles Times, California’s two US senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, are demanding answers from the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management in the wake of eight fatalities and ten other injuries during an off-road race held on publicly-owned land in the Southern California desert.

In the wake of a horrific crash at an off-road race in the Southern California desert, survivors and observers are blaming the promoter and federal Bureau of Land Management for setting up the tragedy, according to Phil Willon and David Zahniser of the Los Angeles Times. Eight were killed Saturday night when a race vehicle soared into the air, hit a large rock on the way down and violently rolled over onto a knot of fans.

The final hurdle has been cleared in a controversial plan to round up thousands of wild horses from federal land straddling the California-Nevada border.  As the Associated Press reports, the Ninth Circuit court of appeals in San Francisco rejected a stay requested by critics of the Bureau of Land Management’s plan to round up about 2,000 wild horses by helicopter.

There are still rivers in the U.S. that are relatively pristine. The Chetco River, which flows from Siskiyou Mountains and into the Pacific Ocean in southern Oregon, is one of those. The conservation group American Rivers recently listed The Chetco River as one of the 10 most endangered rivers in America, because a developer is proposing to mine for gold in the Chetco's waters. Gold mining is never pretty, and often leaves behind an environmental disaster.

Though it may lack the symbolic heft of nailing a replica of the Ten Commandments to a courthouse wall or the ubiquity of the words “under God” in the post-1954 Pledge of Allegiance, a solitary cross on a desolate hillock deep in the Mojave Desert – a cross that must be maintained by the Department of the Interior – remains a vexing focus for lingering culture wars.

Government Executives' Katherine McIntire Peters picks up on the fact that the same day Barack Obama pledged to cap carbon emissions, Interior Sec. Ken Salazar announced 38 sites where the federal government will lease land for oil and natural gas ...

Kim Murphy of the Los Angeles Times reports:

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Thursday scrapped a plan, authorized in the last days of the Bush administration, to nearly quadruple the allowable logging on federal lands in western Oregon -- including many prized old-growth stands -- and open up protected northern ...

Central New Mexico is a great place for large solar and wind arrays -- the one being proposed could take the place of several coal-fired power plants -- but power lines coming out of the region would cross territories where sandhill cranes and other wildlife live. Juliet Eilperin and ...

The Bureau of Land Management discovered serious structural problems in the Crandall Canyon Mine in Utah in 2004, three years before its collapse killed six miners and three experts sent in to rescue them, the Associated Press reports.  BLM, which is part of the Interior Department, never communicated ...