charged with trying to blow up an american airlines plane with explosives hidden in his underwear. he s acting as his own attorney. violence between egypt s christians and muslims may lead to new legal protection for religious minorities. a group described as thugs attacked christian protestors. that happened on sunday. at least 25 people were killed after the army and police got into the mix. well, egypt s prime minister says he s going to push a law that is making religious discrimination a crime. but experts say there is only so much that he can do during military rule. the problem, john, is we ve got 24 men, that s the supreme council of the armed forces. they re like the wizard of oz. they re behind a curtain. they re ruling egypt without any responsibility. so they have the power and no responsibility, and then you have this prime minister, a decent man, who has the responsibility but he s got no power. egypt has set parliamentary elections for november 28, and a
other reconnaissance of the gulf. the grid out in the gulf every day, all we re seeing right now is light sheening. so light, it s not recoverable on skimmers so it s good news. we don t want people to let their guards in. there s still a lot of oil. so we re not ready to pull back and say, hey, look, the danger s over. we re prepared with the aspects, our barges, our booms, and skimmers to protect the coast if oil does surface. in the meantime, what does it look like down there now, as compared to what it was at the height of this disaster? well, most of the heavy oil has been removed off the beaches. and efforts are still ongoing right now to continue to clean the perimeter of the marshes. but on a daily basis, we still see tar balls and tar patties wash ashore. i spent the day on grand isle, and there was a significant amount of tar balls that washed up on shore.
and i talked to the night crew, and they witnessed the same thing last night with tar balls and tar patties. is there any hypocriticals that this is going to be scaled back now because of the optimistic reports? no, what you re going see happen is the next faze of the cleanup process, they re going to clean it to the point it s reopened. remove the heavy oil. washing the sand with a big washing machine. and now we re going to be sitting down with the environmental agencies. department of environmental quality, epa, department of assessment guide, what criteria do we need, to be able to reopen the beaches for human use. we still have it closed from the high water mark down to the water line. people can t go there. we have it fenced off. now, we re going to enter into the next phase, the testing process to clean up the beaches to allow humans to start using it again. we saw pictures just a second ago of the brown pelicans out
been removed off the beaches. and efforts are still ongoing right now to continue to clean the perimeter of the marshes. but on a daily basis, we still see tar balls and tar patties washing ashore. i spent the day yesterday on grand isle and there was a significant amount of tar balls and tar patties that washed up from the night before and on my way here i talked to the crews on the night shift and they witnessed the same thing last night. tar balls and tar patties. so maybe things are beginning to turn in the whole gulf oil disaster. coming up, california s ban on same-sex marriage overturned. a judge ruled that moral disapproval was not enough to save prop 8. we ll hear from both sides of the issue. you don t want to miss the conversation we have coming up.
skimmers, to go out there and clean up the pockets of the black, thick crude oil that he is talking about. that s what they have been attacking. now, this doesn t apply to the oil that is in the water column, and the tar balls and the tar patties and all those other things we have heard talked about that is underneath the surface of the water. that is still there. and that s something that is still going to be affecting the shovel for quite some time. but at this point as far as the oil on the surface, just the oil on the surface, tony, he says we re looking at possibly weeks, maybe a month or so, before that oil finally disappears. so then the question is, when does the oil that is below the surface, when does that come to the surface and start to pose real problems? that s a question for down the road, i suppose. david mattingly for us, david, good to see you, appreciate it, thank you. in other top stories we re following for you, closing arguments under way in the federal corrup