Top Ten US News Stories in 2010. The worst oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry started on Apr. 20, after an explosion at the BP-run Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 workers aboard and gushed close to 5 million barrels of crude into the Gulf's waters until it was sufficiently capped on July 15 (the undersea well was deemed "effectively dead" only on Sept. 19). The extent of the damage after a summer of "oil plumes" and ineffectual "top kills" is still being measured, its costs still counted. More than 6,000 birds, some 600 sea turtles and 100 dolphins perished. The fisheries of the region have been devastated, as was the Gulf coast's tourism industry.
The Obama Administration took a lot of flak for not stemming the gushing oil faster, and found itself largely beholden to the technical savvy of BP's engineers. BP was public enemy no. 1 for the summer, and took an estimated $40 billion hit for plunging the U.S. in this cruddy mess. Next Rise of the Tea Party. Top Ten 2010 Religious Stories. When the local community board in late May approved a proposal to establish an Islamic center amid the strip clubs and liquor stores of downtown Manhattan, the outrage did not come from offended Muslims.
Instead, a litany of protests came from a variety of groups — some inspired by Tea Party ideology, others by still-tangible memories of the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center a few blocks south of the proposed location of the center, and many by undisguised xenophobia. Though not actually at the site of the vanished twin towers, Park51 came to be known as the "Ground Zero Mosque," with its every financial and religious transaction scrutinized microscopically and sharp political divides emerging around it. In the process, it became the emblem of an ugly nationwide debate over the assimilation of Muslims into America and the limits of the so-called American melting pot. Next The Vatican and the Child Abuse Scandal. The Top Ten Most Overexposed News Stories in 2010. Top Ten Underreported Stories for 2010. Secretary of State Colin Powell cautioned President George W.
Bush against invading Iraq on the basis of the Pottery Barn rule: "You break it, you own it. " But things worked out differently: Iraq was broken, but it's never been owned by Washington. On the contrary, seven years and counting of a war that economists have concluded will cost America more than $3 trillion has produced an unstable Iraq in which Iran wields more political influence than the U.S. does. Violence continues, albeit at levels far lower than the worst days of 2006. But as the U.S. prepares to honor its obligation, under a treaty reached by President Bush and the Iraqi government two years ago, to withdraw all its forces by the end of 2011, Iraq's destiny remains unclear. The American media's appetite for Iraq stories has declined sharply, keeping with the public's diminishing interest in a story with no satisfactory ending. Next Jihadists Take Somalia.
Top Ten Oddball News Stories. Top Ten Crime Stories. When police in Lima arrested Joran van der Sloot in May 2010 for the murder of Stephany Flores Ramirez, another mysterious saga appeared to be at an end. The young Dutchman had been at the center of the investigation into the disappearance of Natalee Holloway, a young American who went missing in Aruba in 2005 after leaving a bar late at night with van der Sloot and two of his friends. Her body has yet to be found, and van der Sloot's many retracted versions of what happened made prosecution difficult. But the Flores murder may have sealed his fate. According to Peruvian police, he was furious that Flores was snooping into his laptop and asking questions about Holloway. "It was an invasion of my privacy. Next Borderline Killings: When Murder Becomes Politics. Top Ten Global News Stories of 2010. The Jan. 12 earthquake that rocked the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince may not have been the highest-magnitude tremor in recent memory, but it certainly seemed the most cataclysmic.
Within hours, more than a million people became homeless. Buildings across much of the city and its suburbs were reduced to rubble. Some 230,000 people died, and hundreds of thousands of others were injured. The international response was swift, with dozens of countries sending aid, rescue teams and military personnel to stabilize the situation. But the damage has been devastating and profound in what is one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere. Next WikiLeaks.