News Bites: AP blasts the Times over spill story, gay miner sues Massey Energy and more

“Stephen Baldwin, the youngest of the acting Baldwin brothers (and perhaps the nuttiest), has sued Kevin Costner over investments in a device that BP used in trying to clean up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill,” The Philadelphia Daily News reports.

“The federal suit filed in New Orleans by Baldwin and his friend, Spyridon Contogouris, claims Costner and his business partner Patrick Smith duped them out of their take from an $18 million deal for BP to purchase oil-separating centrifuges from a company they formed after the April 20 spill.”

Young people are looking to nuclear power as a career path.

“Three decades after the partial meltdown of a reactor at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, further expansion of nuclear power has remained at a standstill. Years of stagnant hiring led to ‘a greatly reduced interest among undergraduates in nuclear science and engineering programs,’ the American Physical Society, an independent group of physicists, said in a recent report, finding that the number of college nuclear engineering programs had dropped from 66 in the early 1980s to 30 in 2008,” The Times-Picayune of New Orleans reports.

And a gay miner is suing a Massey Energy subsidiary, claiming sexual harassment.

“Troubled coal producer Massey Energy Co. is facing more legal problems, this time in the form of a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by a gay miner,” Bloomberg reports.

“Sam Hall’s lawsuit claims he endured years of verbal abuse and threats from co-workers and managers at several Massey mines in West Virginia. The lawsuit names Massey subsidiary Spartan Mining Co. and a Spartan foreman as defendants.”