Full text of president’s remarks below…
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John L. Wathen’s summarized comments on the dumping of coal ash on poor, mostly black Uniontown residents in Alabama’s Black Belt.

It’s “clearly an environmental justice community where TVA transferred to the Kingston coal ash disaster. It was not cleaned up, simply moved to Uniontown, Alabama,” Wathen said.

Complaints filed with Lisa Jackson, the director of EPA, “took months to answer and then very weakly,” he said. “It seems that EPA is trying to protect TVA and it’s need to dispose of the disaster instead on the fine people of Perry County, Alabama. Coal ash is a toxic product and should be treated as one.”

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There is a correlation between religion and poverty, and in countries with more wealth, religion is considered important on average by less than half the population, according to Gallup’s latest poll on the subject.

Religiosity is strongly related to per-capita income worldwide. In the poorest countries 95 percent of adults say religion is an important part of their daily lives, compared with only 47 percent who say the same in the world’s richest countries.

Gallup surveys in 114 countries in 2009 show that religion continues to play an important role in many people’s lives worldwide. The global median proportion of adults who say religion is an important part of their daily lives is 84 percent, unchanged from what Gallup has found in other years. In 10 countries and areas, at least 98 percent say religion is important in their daily lives.

Each of the most religious countries is relatively poor, with a per-capita GDP below $5,000. This reflects the strong relationship between a country’s socioeconomic status and the religiosity of its residents.

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Despite persistent denials from BP officials, thousands of pounds of weathered oil is being pulled from under the surface of Pensacola Bay every day, according to the Pensacola News Journal.

“During more than a dozen interviews last week, BP officials and spokespeople for a number of government agencies working on the Deepwater Horizon Oil spill response denied knowledge of oil in the bay,” the paper reports.

But on Friday, Coast Guard Lt. Stephen West with the Incident Command Post finally confirmed an area of oil a quarter of a mile long and up to 50 to 60 feet off Barrancas Beach at Pensacola Naval Air Station, and admitted that buckets of sunken oil were being pulled up in another area of Pensacola Bay, near Fort Pickens at Gulf Islands National Seashore. Then on Saturday, Scott Piggott, who heads the Escambia and Santa Rosa cleanup operation for BP, said cleanup workers began noticing the submerged oil at Barrancas Beach.