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Gulf oil spill turning ‘unbelievably bad'

disaster: Crude leak could persist through summer

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By Renee Schoof / McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON – With a quick solution ominously uncertain, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is on track to become an unprecedented economic and environmental disaster with millions of gallons of oil destroying an ecosystem as well as a way of life.

BP America said Monday that it would take another 75 days to finish one of two relief wells it’s drilling to shut down the flow.

By then, if the spill doesn’t worsen and the relief well stops the leak, some 20 million gallons of oil will be swirling in the Gulf, nearly double the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989.

Unlike the Alaska spill, which coated a rock-strewn bay, BP’s oil will cling to a spongelike coast, entering the pores of mangrove forests and sea-grass beds and the breeding grounds for crabs, shrimp and oysters.

Already some of the richest fishing grounds of the Gulf are off-limits, idling thousands of commercial fishermen.

Some restaurants in New Orleans and elsewhere are either out of homegrown oysters or are down to less than a week’s supply.

In Mississippi, charter boats and hotels are reporting declines in business.

“It’s going to be unbelievably bad,” said Jeremy Jackson, a professor of oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. “This is a problem that won’t go away for a decade.”

In the first meeting between First Lady Michelle Obama and French First Lady Carla Bruni, Bruni asked Obama if she and President Obama had ever kept visitors waiting while they had sex, according to a new book.

Washington (CNN) - A new book reveals an unusually personal–and apparently awkward–moment during the first encounter between First Lady Michelle Obama and France's First Lady, Carla Bruni.

The book's author, Newsweek editor Jonathan Alter, writes that Bruni, "delighted in telling friends that she shocked Michelle Obama at their first meeting."

Alter describes the meeting between the first ladies in which Bruni boasted that she and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, "once kept another foreign leader waiting while they finished having sex."

"Bruni wanted to know if, like the Sarkozys, Michelle and the president had ever kept anyone waiting that way," Alter writes. "Michelle laughed nervously and said no."