A Belle Chasse woman who acted as a federal environmental agent offering fake oil spill cleanup training classes in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster was sentenced to prison this week, the U.S. District attorney’s office announced Friday. Connie M. Knight, 47, will serve 57 months in a federal penitentiary. She also was ordered to pay $25,000 in restitution to her 950 victims.

More of BP's millions are headed to the Louisiana's imperiled Gulf Coast. Today, Governor Bobby Jindal and key politicians of local and state government announced that BP had agreed to an additional $340 million in projects for Louisiana's Gulf Coast region, projects that the Governor promised would help restore critical coastal infrastructure necessary for storm protection and restoring land and wildlife to the region.

The feds ended a group of of claim for more than a dozen people this week. The U.S. Attorney's office indicted 15 people this week accused of gaming the claims system set up by BP and the federal government following the Big Oozy. The fraudulent claims for reimbursement for financial harm caused by 2010’s BP Deepwater Horizon disaster totaled more than $300,000 in damages, U.S. District Attorney Dana Boente alleged in court documents filed Thursday. 

While locals were transfixed with tales of bomb robots and former political kingpins going to jail, a bevy of lawyers and reporters from all over were hunkered down at the federal courthouse. BP, the feds, the state and other parties began their trial today to determine what the responsible parties have to pay for the Big Oozy. The courtroom tussle is expected to last all day, every day for months. Thanks to the wonders of Twitter and Judge Carl Barbier's embrace of technology, members of the public who can't sit through the whole thing can find out what's happening in the courtroom. Click through for the best tweets from today's opening statements:

Barring an eleventh-hour settlement, BP is set to unleash another unchecked torrent on the Gulf Coast that will require many days to solve. This time, however, the action won't be at the bottom of the Gulf, but in federal court on Poydras St. And it might even be more gross.

BP and the feds will settle the rest of the Big Oozy blame game in the court. The British oil giant is sending signals this week that they're ready to go to trial with the U.S. government, and let a judge decide how much the company will have to pay for the 2010 Gulf oil disaster. The meat of the trial, set to begin Monday in federal court in New Orleans, will determine whether BP was "grossly negligent" in its operating of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig.

As of today, BP is officially guilty of federal crimes in the Big Oozy. In U.S. District Court, the oil giant entered guilty pleas to 14 counts stemming from the Deepwater Horizon disaster and subsequent torrent of oil unleashed on the Gulf of Mexico in April, 2010. The British company was officially "sentenced" to pay $4 billion in criminal, but the day was devoid of courtroom drama as the number was worked out beforehand as part of a deal announced in November, 2012.

BP already acknowledged its criminality for the Big Oozy. Today, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon comes clean. Transocean agreed to enter a guilty plea to a criminal charge for the 2010 disaster, and pay $1.4 billion in settlement money to the feds, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. One billion dollars worth of settlement money will go toward paying for Clean Water Act penalties. The Swiss company promised to shell out another $400,000 for settling civil and criminal penalties.

In the Gulf, sheen appears once again to be winning - at least for now. BP's underwater robots recently completed their latest mission back to the bottom of the Gulf, and this time they came up empty. The ROVs (remotely operated vehicles) were looking for the source of the latest mystery oil sheen that has persistently hovering about the wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon since November, but found nothing on their expedition, which ended Saturday.

Showing once again that he's well aware of the equal importance of perception and reality, David Vitter wrote a letter to BP today to urge the oil giant to make good on some of the post-Big Oozy promises they aired in the papers and on TV. In the letter, Louisiana's junior senator tells BP big shot Lamar McKay that the company shouldn't be hiring European contractors to do Gulf of Mexico work.