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Nearly two years after the worst accidental offshore oil spill in the history of the energy industry, some of the biggest companies in the world are busy pointing their legal fingers at one another in court over who has to pay what in claims, damages and fines over the deadly Deepwater Horizon oil spill. A federal judge this week ruled that BP is still obligated to a clause in its contract with Transocean that would protect the rig owner from damages related to the spill. That means BP still has to shell out money to settle claims filed by those...

A Coast Guard inspection of a freighter docked at the Port of Longview "didn't uncover or reveal anything," a Coast Guard spokesman said Saturday, but the crew members are not allowed off the ship and security will be maintained until the ship leaves. "We were not expecting to find anything," Lt. Cmdr. Glynn Smith, the Coast Guard's public affairs officer for the Pacific area, said Saturday by telephone from his office in Alameda, Calif. The search was routine, according to the Coast Guard, but Longview officials said the security crackdown is the most port activity since the Sept. 11, 2001,...

Throughout the months-long 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, scientists expressed surprise at the development and relatively speedy disappearance of giant plumes of subsea oil and gas that jetted from the wellhead and refused to surface. A new study explains how bacteria degraded the plumes so efficiently: A succession of hydrocarbon-noshing species mushroomed because their movable feasts were repeatedly replenished. Only about 15 percent of the BP gusher floated up to form giant surface slicks, a second new study finds. Natural gas constituents and dissolvable chemicals amounting to twice that mass remained near the seafloor, creating the...

Today, I’m going to say some nice things about BP and some not so nice things about the lawyers who are suing BP. Please don’t spill your coffee. As horrific as the Deepwater Horizon accident was in April 2010 — killing 11 rig employees, while pouring millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico — BP has performed quite admirably in its aftermath. It has spared no expense in cleaning up the oil. It has set aside $1 billion to restore the environment and coastal ecosystem. It underwrote an advertising campaign to lure tourists back to the Gulf...

Solar failuresThe Orange County Register December 29, 2011 10:03 AM Sooner or later, the laws of economics prevail, even in heavily subsidized industries like solar power. The latest evidence that government manipulation cannot overcome economic reality is the decision by BP PLC, the giant British energy company, to leave the solar power business. BP has developed solar energy for 40 years and for more than a decade touted its “Beyond Petroleum” campaign. The Wall Street Journal suggested, however, that BP’s solar experiment was more gimmick than serious investment. BP spent millions trying to go green, but simultaneously spent billions on...

Alan D. Bersin, commissioner of the 57,000-employee U.S. Customs and Border Protection, will resign effective December 30, he said Thursday. Bersin was appointed to the post by President Barack Obama on March 27, 2010. He notified the president of his resignation Thursday, he said in a statement. "My service as commissioner has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my public life," Bersin said. "I am immensely proud of the significant and meaningful achievements we have made on our borders and at our nation's ports of entry over nearly two years. "Through innovative solutions and strengthened partnerships, we have...

The Monty Python defense. My goodness. Joltin' Joe Lieberman announces a Senate Homeland Security investigation on F&F "inter-ageny miscommunication" and the head of Border Patrol runs away the very same day. Folks, just received this statement by email: Statement from Alan D. Bersin, Commissioner, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Earlier today, I notified the President of my intent to resign as Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection effective Dec. 30. I have expressed my deep gratitude and appreciation to President Obama and Secretary Napolitano for the opportunity to have led such an exceptional organization and for the confidence they...

Oil giant BP is preparing to exit the solar industry entirely. BP is preparing to wind down its BP Solar unit and sell-off the stakes it has in various projects around the world. A document announcing the decision to the 100 employees who will be affected says changes in the solar industry have left BP unable to achieve sufficient margins in the sector. It says the decision is made with regret after a “near 40-year commitment to solar energy”. A BP spokesman confirms the move and says that over the last six months "regrettably we have come to the decision...

The savage violence among cartel rivals in Mexico and Central American countries for control over drug smuggling routes into the United States to supply degenerate addicts and party people is among the top ten underreported stories in 2011 as reported by Nate Rawlings for Time. Of course, maybe the story is widely ignored because the media has swallowed the lies from the Obama administration that there is no evidence of any spillover violence into the United States, and as long as it's only people in other countries getting killed the self-absorbed hacks who otherwise call themselves journalists -- some of...

BP on Monday accused Halliburton of destroying potentially damaging internal test results that showed that the cement it used to secure the Macondo well that blew out in the Gulf of Mexico last year was unstable.

When Zach Taylor, a retired U.S. Border Patrol supervisory agent, talked about the situation on the U.S. border with Mexico, he didn't pull any punches. Disputing assertions by Barack Obama, the president, and Janet Napolitano, head of Homeland Security, that the border is "safer than it's been in years," Taylor was blunt in his disagreement: "It's more dangerous than I've seen in my 26 years in the Border Patrol." According to Taylor, ever since the Border Patrol was moved from the jurisdiction of the Justice Department after 9/11 to the Department of Homeland Security, it's become a political tool of...

Reporting from Taft, Calif.— Anywhere else, linking an aromatic cup of coffee and a gooey glob of oil would quickly kill a restaurant. Not so in Taft, Calif., the Taft Crude Coffee House is a popular stop for hot coffee or iced mocha. And in an era when oil spills tend to be environmental disasters, people here are happy to provide directions to the Lakeview Gusher, even though it spewed more than 9 million barrels of oil, nearly twice the amount spilled in 2010 from the Deepwater Horizon, the ill-fated British Petroleum rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Over 18...

Lady Justice has tossed aside her blindfold and tipped her scale. A border-crossing drug smuggler walks free while the officer who arrested him has been jailed. In the age of Obama, the law has been turned upside down. U.S. Border Patrol Agent Jesus E. Diaz Jr. is set to spend the next two years behind bars after being sentenced last month for what the Justice Department called deprivation of an illegal-immigrant suspect’s constitutional right to freedom from the use of unreasonable force. The unnamed Mexican suspect, who was 15 at the time of his arrest in 2008, received immunity from...

Leadership: President Obama told CEOs in Hawaii that the U.S. had been "lazy" in attracting foreign investment. Actually, the White House has been pretty busy demonizing it. The Obama administration has a record of making life miserable for foreign investors that put their capital on the line to create jobs in the U.S. Politically wedded to special interests such as Big Labor, White House officials have hurled scurrilous charges against foreign companies and muscled others in ways no domestic company would tolerate. Foreign investors also have been targets of punitive regulations disguised as "patriotism" and had contracts kicked out from...

Transocean Offshore Deepwater Drilling Inc.has filed a motion for summary judgment in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana requesting the court to compel BP to honor its contractual obligation to defend, indemnify and hold harmless Transocean for damages associated with BP's failure to contain flow from its Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The contract between BP and Transocean for the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig contains industry-standard reciprocal indemnity provisions that apportion risk and quantify liabilities between the two companies. In the contract, which was signed in 1998 and extended several times...

Justice: Another border patrol agent faces prison after arresting an illegal alien smuggling drugs. When not being killed by guns funneled into Mexico by their own government, they are prosecuted for doing their job. In a case reminiscent of an earlier injustice against those protecting our borders, Border Patrol Agent Jesus E. "Chito" Diaz Jr. has been sentenced to two years in prison by U.S. District Judge Alia Moses Ludlum in San Antonio. The illegal alien he arrested for drug smuggling goes free. In November 2009, Diaz was named in a federal grand jury indictment after an October 2008 arrest...

BP won approval from the Interior Department to drill its first exploratory oil well in the Gulf of Mexico since the blowout of its Macondo well a year and a half ago touched off the country’s worst offshore environmental disaster. The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement said that BP met more stringent safety requirements devised by the federal government in the aftermath of the disaster. The company also planned to follow even tougher voluntary standards that exceeded the government’s rules. “This permit was approved only after thorough well design, blowout preventer, and containment capability reviews,” said bureau director Michael...

Are students that promote the black panther ideology and the Office of Diversity in league together at the University of Minnesota - Duluth (UMD)? It would would appear so in the video below. The events took place last week as one young man, Phil Cleary, handed out pocket Constitutions on campus in honor of Constitution Day. He had a table with literature promoting Youth for Western Civilization, a group dedicated to traditional values and western civilization, and engaged in students and faculty passing by. Then, the leftists showed up to heckle. The young man in the video, Blair Jordon Moses,...

Energy Policy: Deep-water drilling will resume in the Florida Strait when a giant, semi-submersible oil rig en route from Singapore arrives later this fall. The bad news is it will not be American. While U.S. oil and energy prices "necessarily skyrocket," as President Obama once said they would under energy policies that have imposed a de facto ban on offshore drilling, a massive Chinese-built semi-submersible oil rig is on its way from Singapore to a drilling position off northwest Cuba perhaps as little as 50 miles from Key West, Fla. The long-predicted move could come as early as November, as...

WASHINGTON - CBS News has obtained secretly recorded conversations that raise questions as to whether some evidence is being withheld in the murder of a Border Patrol agent. (Scroll down to listen to the audio) The tapes were recorded approximately mid-March 2011 by the primary gun dealer cooperating with ATF in its "Fast and Furious" operation: Andre Howard, owner of Lone Wolf Trading Company in Glendale, Arizona. He's talking with the lead case ATF case agent Hope MacAllister. The tapes have been turned over to Congressional investigators and the Inspector General. As CBS News first reported last February, the Bureau...

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A federal magistrate refused Wednesday to order the White House to provide BP PLC with emails by a former top adviser to President Barack Obama about the administration's response to last summer's massive Gulf oil spill. A lawyer for the oil giant had argued that emails by Carol Browner, Obama's former adviser on energy and climate matters, and three other officials in the Executive Office of the President could shed light on the White House's role in estimating the rate of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico from the company's blown-out well. But U.S. Magistrate...

CHICAGO — BP wants to stop paying most people affected by the massive 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill for potential future damages because the region has recovered, a document released Friday said. The tourism industry is booming, all federal fishing grounds have reopened, and the shrimp catch has been plentiful, BP said. "The current economic data do not suggest that individual and business claimants face a material risk of future loss caused by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill," BP said in a 29-page document filed with the Gulf Coast Claim Facility, which is handling compensation claims. ... The compensation...

When workers dismantled the ARCO corporate logo at the former Arco Arena earlier this year, it served as a fitting symbol of the company's California retrenchment. Known for selling cheap gasoline and for its 24-hour ampm convenience stores, ARCO has been a dominant player in the state's petroleum industry for decades. It is California's largest gasoline distributor, with more than 20 percent of the market. But since last year's deadly Gulf of Mexico oil spill, parent BP PLC has either sold off or put up for sale most of its California assets. They include: [snip] The divestitures are notable because...

He maybe the president of the most powerful nation in the world, but his car still needs filling up with petrol. Workers at a garage in Pimlico today told of their astonishment after Barack Obama's car and the presidential entourage pulled up for refuelling. The armoured limousine, nicknamed "The Beast", arrived with six other vehicles and police escort at a BP petrol station on Vauxhall Bridge Road during the president's state visit to London. Onlookers said the cars took up the entire forecourt when they arrived yesterday at around 3pm.

CANNES, France (AFP) – Peter Fonda launched a four-letter attack on US President Barack Obama at the Cannes film festival on Wednesday, calling him a traitor over the handling of the aftermath of the Gulf oil spill. The star of the 1969 road movie "Easy Rider" was in Cannes for the premiere of "The Big Fix" by Rebecca and Josh Tickell, the only feature documentary in the official selection at the Cannes film festival this year. Fonda -- a keen environmentalist and co-producer of the film which centres on the explosion of the BP oil rig Deepwater Horizon, the ensuing...

NEW YORK (AP) -- Oil giant BP could announce as early as Monday that it plans to buy out the Russian partners in its joint venture TNK-BP Ltd., according to a story posted Sunday night by the Wall Street Journal. The deal would transfer a 50 percent stake from a company called AAR, which is controlled by a group of Russian billionaires, to Russian state oil company OAO Rosneft, the Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter. More importantly, it would clear the way for BP's plans to explore for oil in the Arctic Sea north of Russia, a...

Testing is set to resume next week on the blowout preventer that failed to stop gushing oil at BP's Macondo well, but an independent federal agency that has been probing the disaster will not be permitted to participate. Under a federal judge's ruling, the only witnesses allowed during the examination at a NASA facility in New Orleans will be representatives of the Justice Department, oil spill victims in a broad class-action lawsuit and three companies linked to the disaster. That shuts the door to the Chemical Safety Board… CSB has investigated more than 50 industrial accidents in its two-decade history...

In the next week, how many times will you hear that the April 20 Deepwater Horizon oil spill was the worst environmental catastrophe in American history? This assessment was plausible when first uttered by President Obama almost a year ago, but now it’s clear that the worst never happened. The Deepwater spill has largely disappeared — dispersed, evaporated, and eaten by bacteria. Its impact on sea life appears minimal. Yet politicians, activists, trial lawyers, and environmental journalists persist in perpetuating this myth. Why? Pinning disasters on the environmental lobby’s hobby horse du jour defines the battlespace, increases the power of...

WASHINGTON -- People familiar with the investigation of the Gulf oil spill say manslaughter and perjury are among the possible violations being explored by Justice Department investigators still in the early stages of their probe.

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration failed to set up an "effective" communications system during last year's BP oil spill and threatened its own credibility by "severely restricting" the release of "timely, accurate information," according to a newly released report commissioned by the U.S. Coast Guard. Quietly posted on the Coast Guard's website two weeks ago, the report offers the first major assessment of the federal government's communications efforts during the worst oil spill in U.S. history. "Several layers of review and approval by the White House and (Department of Homeland Security)

PASCAGOULA, Miss. — Documents provided by the administrator of BP's claims fund for Gulf oil spill victims show the oil giant agreed to increase his law firm's monthly compensation from $850,000 to $1.25 million. The documents furnished Friday to The Associated Press include a letter from former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey to claims czar Kenneth Feinberg. Mukasey stated his belief that the extra money was warranted because Feinberg's duties had grown. Mukasey was asked by Feinberg to weigh in on how reasonable his compensation was. The pay hike, detailed in a Tuesday letter from Mukasey to

Two weeks ago, we asked whether Interior Secretary Ken Salazar considered himself above the law by ignoring court orders to resume the permitting process for deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Now we learn that Salazar may have misled Congress and the public on the number of drilling permit applications he is ignoring. Yesterday, Senator David Vitter (R-LA) accused Salazar, along with Michael Bromwich, the director of the new Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Regulation and Enforcement, of using bogus figures. During Congressional testimony on March 2, and on other occasions, Salazar and Bromwich used much lower figures...

The day that LSE sold its soul to Libya: BP chief makes oil deal with Gaddafi... and drags prestigious university into disrepute By Michael Seamark Last updated at 1:33 AM on 5th March 2011 . •BP boss who signed £545m oil pact was lobbying for university too In a desert tent outside Colonel Gaddafi's home town of Sirte four years ago, Tony Blair shook hands with the Libyan dictator in a controversial 'blood money' deal which laid the foundations for the release of the Lockerbie bomber. Also inside the tent was Peter Sutherland, then chairman of BP, who subsequently announced...

Earlier today I accused Interior Secretary Ken Salazar of a "cynical" approach to issuing deepwater drilling permits for the Gulf of Mexico. I did not realize how right I was. According to Kristen Hays of Reuters: BP Plc, whose Macondo well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico caused the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history last year, co-owns the well that was granted the first deepwater drilling permit since the disaster. BP is Noble Energy Inc's partner in the well, holding a 46.5 percent interest, BP said. Noble operates the Santiago well that received a permit from U.S....

LONDON (AP) -- The former Libyan justice minister has reportedly said that the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing had blackmailed Libyan ruler Moammar Gadhafi into securing his release by threatening to expose his role in the attack. The Sunday Times newspaper quoted Mustafa Abdel-Jalil as saying that Abdel Baset al-Megrahi had warned Gadhafi that he would "reveal everything" about the 1988 bombing of an American flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, if he wasn't rescued from a Scottish prison.

Three Major Firms Pull Out of Climate Change Alliance ConocoPhillips, BP America and Caterpillar pulled out of a leading alliance of businesses and environmental groups pushing for climate change legislation on Tuesday, citing complaints that the bills under consideration are unfair to American industry. The sudden pullout of three corporate giants from a leading alliance of businesses and environmental groups could be the death knell for climate change legislation languishing on Capitol Hill. ConocoPhillips, BP America and Caterpillar's announced Tuesday they will pull out of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, citing complaints that the bills now in Congress are unfair...

The former Labour Government did "all it could" to help Libya secure the release of the Lockerbie bomber, Britain's most senior civil servant said today. David Cameron will this afternoon publish a dossier of 150 pages of letters, memos and minutes related to the case after he promised Barack Obama, the US President, to review all the paperwork and see what could be made public. In an accompanying report, Sir Gus O'Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, concludes: "Policy was ... progressively developed that Her Majesty's Government should do all it could ... to facilitate an appeal by the Libyans to the...

Energy Policy: An administration that has no respect for Congress, the courts or the Constitution has been found in contempt for reissuing a drilling moratorium that a U.S. district judge found overly broad. The Obama administration's trouble with the courts has continued with a judge's ruling last week that the Interior Department's reinstating of a drilling moratorium followed by a de facto moratorium via an overly restrictive permitting process constituted contempt. The administration had issued a drilling moratorium in May in waters deeper than 500 feet after the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig off Louisiana that...

Attorney General Jim Hood wants to hear from whistle-blowers with inside information about how the Gulf Coast Claims Facility is operating. Hood believes GCCF administrator Ken Feinberg “stiff-armed” claimants on emergency and interim claims because they required no release of the right to sue BP and other parties responsible for the April 2010 Gulf oil catastrophe. When claimants grew desperate, Hood believes, GCCF rolled out final payments that do require waiving the right to sue. “They’re not following the law,” Hood said. “They’re just trying to coerce people into signing these releases.” Hood has urged Gulf residents to continue filing...

NEW ORLEANS -- The embattled administrator of the $20 billion compensation fund for Gulf oil-spill victims is not independent from BP and must stop telling potential claimants he is, a federal judge ruled Wednesday, just hours after the fund czar released details on how final payments would be determined.

The federal judge who struck down the Obama administration's moratorium on deepwater drilling after the Gulf oil spill held the Interior Department in contempt Wednesday, and ordered the federal agency to pay attorneys' fees for several offshore oil companies. "Such dismissive conduct, viewed in tandem with the reimposition of a second blanket and substantively identical moratorium and in light of the national importance of this case, provide this court with clear and convincing evidence of the government's contempt of this court's preliminary injunction order," he wrote.

While the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the Obama administration's subsequent six-month moratorium on deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico are common knowledge, the fact that the federal government has turned the tragic accident into an ongoing economic calamity seems to be drawing scant attention. Though the drilling moratorium was officially lifted three months ago, it has been replaced with an ongoing de facto ban.  But the full scope and damaging consequences of the federal government's reactions to the gulf spill go well beyond deep-water drilling. While the moratorium was limited to deep-water rigs, the work stoppage...

The While House oil-spill commission made it official today: The entire oil industry, not BP, is evil and potentially the source of another Deepwater-sized spill. Thus the entire oil industry, which has already been punished by the administration with its drilling moratorium and slowdown in permitting, should be punished further with massive new regulations and fees. Those conclusions were virtually predetermined when the administration appointed a panel heavily stacked with academics and environmentalists. And those findings are wrong. Why? A simple reality check:

Federal study confirms microbes have eaten most of the Gulf Oil Spill A study by researchers from Texas A&M and University of California in Santa Barbara have found that all of the methane gas released from the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico have been consumed by tiny microbes. Methane gas amounts 100,000 times higher than normal at the time of their release have completely disappeared after only 120 days. Some scientists had raised concerns that dissolved methane and other oil residue would continue to plague the Gulf for years or even decades. This is turning out not...

New Orleans restaurants seem to have recovered after the BP oil spillBy Brett Anderson, The Times-Picayune Published: Sunday, December 26, 2010, 8:45 AM The days of explaining exotic species of Hawaiian finfish to puzzled locals have passed at Grand Isle restaurant. After struggling through months when the oyster bar would sit idle for weeks on end, supplies from Terrebonne Parish and Galveston Bay are now readily available. Grouper may still be more difficult to come by than usual, but at least it's not Chilean. Still, David Pearson, a partner in Grand Isle, a Warehouse District seafood restaurant, is not resting...

<p>The worst of the explosions gutted the Deepwater Horizon stem to stern.</p> <p>Crew members were cut down by shrapnel, hurled across rooms and buried under smoking wreckage. Some were swallowed by fireballs that raced through the oil rig’s shattered interior. Dazed and battered survivors, half-naked and dripping in highly combustible gas, crawled inch by inch in pitch darkness, willing themselves to the lifeboat deck.</p>

A source close to the family of the Lockerbie bomber Abdul Baset al Megrahi told Sky News Thursday his death is imminent and every day is "expected to be his last." Suffering from prostate cancer, the Libyan's health has rapidly deteriorated -- and his relatives said he has been in a coma and on life support for around a week. Al Megrahi -- who was convicted of killing 270 people by bombing a Pan Am jet in 1988 -- has been unable to walk for a number of weeks and is not expected to recover.

Last week’s reversal on offshore oil drilling by Barack Obama didn’t go over well with likely US voters, according to a new Rasmussen survey. Sixty percent support offshore drilling in principle, and 48% oppose the ban directly, with only 35% supporting Obama’s reversal. A majority expect economic damage and higher fuel prices as a result: A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 54% of Likely U.S. Voters believe the new seven-year ban will increase gas prices, while just 11% think it will make gas prices go down. Twenty-five percent (25%) expect the ban to have no impact on...

Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, has circulated across the internet an encrypted “poison pill” cache of uncensored documents suspected to include files on BP and Guantanamo Bay.

None of the three Kingman County Commissioners will be prevented from voting on a special-use permit application for British Petroleum's wind energy project because of potential conflicts of interest. Earlier this month, Kingman County Counselor Frank Meisenheimer requested an opinion from the Kansas Governemtnal Ethics Commission regarding potential conflicts of interest for all three: * Commissioners Earl Reno and John Steffen and/or Steffen's immediate family own real estate in Kingman County, which is leased to BP for wind farm use. Both have previously received lease payments from BP. Also, Reno's land is in the general area expected to be developed...