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By Tom Bergin and Jonathan Stempel LONDON/NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - BP Plc has delayed by one week the start of a massive trial to decide who should pay for the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, to allow more time to cut a deal with tens of thousands of businesses and individuals affected by the disaster. In a statement on Sunday, BP said the start date for the trial in New Orleans federal court has been pushed back to March 5 from February 27.

The death toll from Sunday’s magnitude 7.2 earthquake in the Van Province in eastern Turkey has now risen to over 500 people , and will undoubtedly continue to rise as rescuers continue to search the hundreds of buildings that collapsed during the shaking. The tectonic forces ultimately responsible are quite straightforward to explain, but as is often the case, the picture becomes more complicated when we take a closer look – a fact that has consequences for the people caught up in this disaster. The big tectonic picture [More]

After a major earthquake or flood, people need help but can be hard to find. A new technique--using tracking data from phones to figure out where people have fled to--could make it easier to get them help.

Almost every car company in the world relies on Renesas computer chips for its electronics. The only factory in the world where Renesas chips are made is in Naka, Japan. Devastated by the March earthquake, the factory had to get quickly back into chips.

By Geoff Brumfiel of Nature magazine Scientists in California are reporting raised levels of radioactive chemicals in the atmosphere in the weeks following the disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. [More]

By Roberta Rampton WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. task force examining the disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant expects to find ways to improve safety at the country's 104 U.S. nuclear plants but has not found any major problems in its first 30 days of work

TOKYO (Reuters) - Workers at Japan's crippled nuclear plant began putting up equipment on Tuesday to allow the start of repairs to its cooling systems, key to bringing reactors under control after they were badly damaged in the March 11 quake and tsunami. Soldiers moved to within 10 km (6 miles) of the Fukushima complex to search for those still missing following the disaster, the first time the military is conducting searches in this area since the plant began leaking radiation after the disaster hit. [More]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Serious safety lapses by oil rig owner and operator Transocean Ltd contributed to the massive blowout and spill at a BP Plc well in the Gulf of Mexico, the Coast Guard said in a report on the 2010 disaster.

You may recall that BP nearly obliterated the Louisiana and Florida coasts last year following the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, which saw approximately 205 million gallons of oil dumped into the Gulf of Mexico (seen above from space). There's no way to get around the issue in the oil company's first corporate social responsibility report since the disaster--but that hasn't stopped BP from trying.

By Risa Maeda TOKYO, March 22 (Reuters) - Japan's economy may not feel the harshest blow from this month's disasters until summer, when surging power demand could spark a new round of power blackouts in Tokyo and its neighbouring prefectures which account for 40 percent of the country's GDP.

On March 11, a powerful, 8.9-magnitude quake hit northeast Japan, triggering a tsunami with 10-meter-high waves that reached the U.S. West Coast.