National Public Radio: President Obama is expected to lift a decades-old ban on oil and gas drilling along much of the U.S. Atlantic coast and northern Alaska as part of an effort to reduce foreign imports and win support for an energy and climate bill. The changes would allow drilling on tracts as close as 50 miles to the Virginia shore, and end a longstanding moratorium on drilling from Delaware to Florida. Exploration in the Gulf of Mexico would be expanded eastward, and swaths north of Alaska would be …