Attorney Kenneth Feinberg oversees payments from the Gulf of Mexico’s $20 billion oil spill fund, but some claimants have criticized his firm’s processing of the 500,000 claims sparked by the country’s worst environmental disaster. His law firm's monthly compensation has grown from $850,000 to $1.25 million as its duties have expanded.

For many politicians along the Gulf Coast, the oil spill has had an unexpected positive spillover effect – increased exposure and popularity. With the clear exception of BP and its doomed CEO, Tony Hayward, the oil spill has given politicians the opportunity to bond more closely with their constituents along the Gulf Coast.

BP finally has some good news to report: A recently installed 75 ton cap has, for the first time in 85 days, stopped the flood of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico from a broken wellhead. While the damage to Gulf shores may have been relatively light thus far, anywhere between 93.5 and 184 million gallons of crude oil has likely contaminated those waters.

Over the weekend, BP began working to place a new cap on the gushing Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico. The old cap, estimated to divert 15,000 barrels of oil a day, was removed Saturday, in order to make room for the new one. This has allowed oil from the well to gush unimpeded. If all goes according to plan, the new cap should contain all the oil from the well, an estimated 60,000 to 80,000 barrels of oil a day.

Just when it seemed like the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico couldn't get any worse, hurricane season has officially begun. The tropical storm called Alex has been upgraded to a hurricane and is expected to make landfall in the next 24 hours.

Rough seas caused by Alex's winds are not only disrupting the cleanup of the BP oil spill, it's also having an impact on the already distressed shrimpers and seafood processors in the region. To find out how the seafood industry is reacting first-hand, we talk to Dean Blanchard. He's planning on sticking out the storm, and tells The Takeaway how this latest setback is affecting his livelihood in Grand Isle, Louisiana.

Since the start of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, neither BP nor politicians nor the smartest engineers and technicians in America have been able to cap the well and contain the damage.

Some Americans say we are looking to the wrong people for answers, and should instead be directing our requests to a higher power.

BP's Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster hits the two month mark this weekend. Since April 20, oil has been gushing into the Gulf, wreaking havoc on the thousands who make a living from those waters. Natural disasters, like Hurricane Katrina, leave residents devastated but able to begin repair once the crisis passes. The current nightmare has lasted two months, and the oil already in the Gulf will cause longterm environmental damage even once the well is capped. What kind of toll do these unknowns take on people's mental health?

In 1979, an explosion on the Ixtoc 1 oil platform caused the world's worst accidental oil spill 50 miles off Mexico's Gulf Coast. 140 million gallons of oil gushed into the Gulf. It took more than nine months to cap the leak. The BBC has launched a series, "Oil and Water" in which they will explore the impacts of an oil-based economy in various locations around the world. As a part of the series, BBC reporters traveled to Mexico's beaches only to find the effects of the Ixtoc spill are still being felt today, more than thirty years after the explosion.

The commercial fishing industry in the Gulf of Mexico has been hit hard by the huge oil spill. Fishing has been closed off in a third of the Gulf and fish production has been reduced significantly, as many in the industry have been diverted from their daily work to assist with the clean-up effort in the region. Now seafood markets across the country are beginning to feel the strain and seafood prices are on the rise.

Across the country, a groundswell of public outrage continues to grow against oil giant BP as oil continues to leak into the Gulf of Mexico. That's despite the news that a cap is helping to collect between 10,000 and 20,000 gallons of oil a day. Some Twitter users, irritated at the situation, have vented their outrage to the Twitter user @BP.

Unfortunately, @BP is not that BP. It's the Twitter handle of Bryan Pendleton, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon who says a typical tweet is "'clean it up, followed by an expletive."

The BP oil leak on the Deepwater Horizon has passed the six-week mark and continues to gush oil into the Gulf of Mexico.  Many are now asking how the company continually received permission to drill with 760 safety violations.

It has been nearly six weeks since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, sunk, and started to spill oil in the Gulf. There are many aspects to the story, and it’s easy to get distracted by the live feed webcam of the underwater oil spill and the hourly reports on BP’s latest attempts to fix the leak. Yet a larger question looms on the horizon: how different will life be on the Gulf Coast be for residents and visitors once this mess is over?

On the foggy evening of September 16, 1969 the oil barge Florida ran aground off Cape Cod in West Falmouth, Massachusetts. 189,000 gallons of fuel spilled into Buzzards Bay, a major transit route for transporting heating and industrial oil and gasoline. Scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have studied the oil spill extensively and the institution’s research has influenced national standards for cleaning up oil.

Oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak continues to gush into the Gulf Coast Ocean at a rate of around 210,000 gallons per day, leaving engineers and cleanup crews with two massive challenges: stopping the leak, and mopping up the oil that has already made its way into the water.

Last night at around 8:00 p.m. the "Joe Griffin," a 280-foot container boat, left Port Fourchoun, Louisiana for a fifty mile trip to the site of the collapsed Deepwater Horizon oil rig.

The Deepwater Horizon disaster isn't the first time massive amounts of oil have gushed into the Gulf of Mexico. In 1979, an exploratory well, Ixtoc I, blew out in the same waters, amounting to the second largest oil spill in world history. And other spills in 1979, 1990 and 1993 have dumped thousands of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. How do these past events inform what may come next, for both human residents of the Gulf coast and the environment as a whole?

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is currently estimated to be roughly the size of Puerto Rico; wind and currents are slowly moving it towards the shores of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

President Obama traveled to Louisiana yesterday for a first-hand briefing on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The "Deepwater Horizon" oil rig exploded on April 20th, rupturing its well and eventually sinking into the Gulf. An estimated 200,000 gallons of oil are gushing into the Gulf each day, as federal government and BP officials frantically explore options to contain the spill.