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TRIPOLI, Libya – The former Libyan intelligence officer Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, who was convicted of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, has died in Libya, his brother told AFP on Sunday. "He died an hour ago," Abdelhakim al-Megrahi said, putting the time of death at shortly after 1:00pm local time. The UK Foreign Office could not confirm the report Sunday, however it said it was "seeking further information." Megrahi, 60, was convicted in a Scottish court in 2001 for his role in the December 1998 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. Most of those killed in the bombing of the Boeing 747...

The Lockerbie bomber has been given an emergency blood transfusion following a sudden deterioration in his health, his brother revealed last night. Libyan Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, who is suffering from terminal cancer, was taken from his home in Tripoli to the intensive care unit of a private hospital. The news came less than a fortnight after he celebrated his 60th birthday. He was released from prison in August 2009 on compassionate grounds with three months to live, but has survived for more than two-and-a-half years. … Last night, Megrahi's condition was not known, but his wife Aisha was...

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...

CNN found al-Megrahi under the care of his family in his palatial Tripoli villa Sunday. STORY HIGHLIGHTS Tripoli, Libya (CNN) -- Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset al-Megrahi is comatose, near death and likely to take secrets of the attack on Pan Am Flight 103 to his grave.

Tripoli, Libya (CNN) -- Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset al-Megrahi is comatose, near death and likely to take secrets of the attack on Pan Am Flight 103 to his grave. CNN found al-Megrahi under the care of his family in his palatial Tripoli villa Sunday, surviving on oxygen and an intravenous drip. The cancer-stricken former Libyan intelligence officer may be the last man alive who knows precisely who in the Libya government authorized the bombing, which killed 270 people. "We just give him oxygen. Nobody gives us any advice," his son, Khaled Elmegarhi, told CNN. Al-Megrahi was freed from a prison...

A Spanish research team, using 3-D reflection seismology, has for the first time mapped the geomorphological features of the Ebro river basin 5 to 6 million years ago. The images obtained show that the surface analysed is today 2.5 or 3 kilometres below the sea bed. "The results shed light on the way in which the sea level fell during the Messinian (between 5.33 and 6 million years ago), and imply that the subsequent inundation of the river margins happened extremely quickly," says Roger Urgeles, lead author of the study and a researcher at the Department of Marine Geology of...

For 48 days and nights, the Deepwater Horizon well spewed oil into the Gulf of Mexico, when it could have been shut down. We now know this: It is very likely that if the top kill had been designed to deliver more than 109 bpm of 16.4 ppg drilling fluid below the BOP stack for a sustained period, the Macondo blowout could have been stopped between May 26-28, 2010. Given that the well was successfully shut-in with the capping stack in July, and that the subsequent bullhead (static) kill was successful, certainly a higher rate top kill would have been...

Ministers secretly advised Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan regime how to secure the successful early release of the Lockerbie bomber, documents obtained by The Daily Telegraph have disclosed. A Foreign Office minister sent Libyan officials detailed legal advice on how to use Abdelbaset al-Megrahi’s cancer diagnosis to ensure he was released from a Scottish prison on compassionate grounds. The Duke of York is also said to have played a behind-the-scenes role in encouraging the terrorist’s release. The Libyans closely followed the advice which led to the controversial release of Megrahi – who was convicted of the murder of 270 passengers on Pan...

Energy: A new analysis of the effects of the offshore drilling moratorium shows more to worry about than beaches and tourism. Massive job loss and economic hardship lie ahead, and we're doing it on purpose. It's been 100 days since the Deepwater Horizon disaster cast a pall over America's energy future while endangering the environment onshore and off. Whether it was due to negligence or the inherent dangers of deep-water drilling, it pales in comparison to the self-inflicted wound of increased energy regulation and taxes and the Obama administration's moratorium. President Obama has succeeded in turning a crisis into an...

Scottish officials say US memo giving grudging support to freeing Abdelbaset al-Megrahi undermines president's criticisms Barack Obama is under growing pressure to release a letter that reveals the US grudgingly supported freeing the Lockerbie bomber on compassionate grounds. The letter was sent to Scottish ministers by a senior diplomat at the US embassy in London last August, eight days before Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was released from prison because he was dying from inoperable prostate cancer. Obama's administration has refused to allow publication of the letter, in which the US says allowing Megrahi to live at home in Scotland would be "far...

David Cameron is to order the release of secret Government documents disclosing how BP pushed Labour ministers to agree to a controversial deal which led to the release of the Lockerbie bomber. The release of the confidential memos and letters could pave the way for a full British inquiry into the alleged involvement of the oil giant in the release last year of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence officer.

LONDON — A doctor who said the man convicted of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 had only three months to live now says the Libyan could survive another 10 years, London's Sunday Times reported. Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, who was convicted of 270 counts of murder for being behind the 1988 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, was released on compassionate grounds in 2009, after doctors said he only had a few months to live.

A U.S. Senate panel on Wednesday voted to remove the cap on damage claims that BP PLC and other companies would have to pay for disasters like the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee approved the measure by a voice vote. The current limit on claims for damage that goes beyond the costs of cleanup is $75 million. That is widely regarded on Capitol Hill as too low. The U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee will on Thursday take up a related measure to remove the liability cap for offshore operations. It isn't clear...

WHEN Adolf Hitler was building up the Nazi movement in the 1920s, leading up to his taking power in the 1930s, he deliberately sought to activate people who did not normally pay much attention to politics. Such people were a valuable addition to his political base, since they were particularly susceptible to Hitler's rhetoric and had far less basis for questioning his assumptions or his conclusions. "Useful idiots" was the term supposedly coined by V.I. Lenin to describe similarly unthinking supporters of his dictatorship in the Soviet Union. Put differently, a democracy needs informed citizens if it is to thrive,...

Energy Policy: Our interior secretary plans to reinstate the offshore drilling moratorium struck down by a federal judge. But if deep-water drilling is so unsafe, why are we helping Brazil drill nearly three times as deep? Maybe Secretary Ken Salazar can explain why Britain and others can safely drill in the North Sea and no other nation has suspended its offshore drilling. Yet there he was Tuesday saying he'll reissue a reworded moratorium that will make it clear to dunces like U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman why offshore drilling is unsafe. As with health care reform and other issues, the...

Environment: Our growing addiction to alternative energy was killing aquatic life in the Gulf long before the Deepwater Horizon spill. Abandoning oil will kill more and also release more carbon dioxide into the air. President Obama sees the oil spill as a chance to make the planet a greener place by weaning us off fossil fuels and pushing us toward alternative energy. The earth and the Gulf of Mexico have indeed been getting greener lately, thanks to agricultural runoff due to a mandated surge in biofuels such as ethanol. Before the first gallon gushed from Deepwater Horizon, there existed an...

As I write this on Monday night, there are rumors around that BP will agree to President Barack Obama's demand that the oil giant "voluntarily" put about $30 billion into a fund to be administered by the government to compensate victims of the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster. Now, no one disputes that this is a real disaster and that BP acted irresponsibly in commissioning Trans-Ocean and Halliburton to drill for oil in waters so deep that if a failure occurred there would be no way to fix it -- at least until major damage had been done. BP, Trans-Ocean,...

If you watched (or read) The President's Oval Office speech to the nation, please let us know if you feel better. Because our sense is that this went over like a ton of bricks, at least based on our reading of it and the flash reactions we've seen on Twitter. Some of the details up top are fine: It's great that a ton of folks going to be deployed in the cleanup, and strongarming BP to set up a cleanup fund is probably a good move. But the second half of the speech killed the strong opening, because it turned...

Live from the Oval Office! It's Barack Obama and the State of the Sham Wow, Gulf Oil Spill edition!Starring TOTUS as Barack Obama! Featuring: Robert Gibbs in a special YouTube after the speech infomercial.

Q: President Obama finally meets this week with BP chief Tony Hayward on the Gulf oil spill. From a leadership perspective, which man has been the less effective in his handling of the crisis? What should he have done differently? Tony Hayward has done a terrible job for BP's shareholders and employees even as he has seemingly followed the conventional wisdom about dealing with disasters. That wisdom is: admit responsibility, apologize, promise to rectify any damages, and act with contrition. BP has done all that, even as its stock has lost about 40 percent of its value, its public approval...

The UK Is Now Freaking Out About The U.S. Reaction To BP Gregory White Jun. 10, 2010, 10:29 AM The UK is freaking out right now about the U.S. reaction to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Major Conservative political leader and Mayor of London Boris Johnson has called President Barack Obama's language "anti-British" after the President called BP 'British Petroleum' rather than its modern name. Conservative Lord Tebbit's quote is just too vitriolic to paraphrase. From The Daily Mail: "The whole might of American wealth and technology is displayed as utterly unable to deal with the disastrous spill -...

Energy Policy: The advisory board on offshore drilling says it never endorsed a moratorium, which was added later by the interior secretary. The only thing transparent about this administration is its lies. Experts brought together by the Obama administration to review offshore drilling safety were asked to review recommendations in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. They did not give their blessing to the six-month drilling moratorium announced by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and have accused him of deliberately appending their report to make it seem like they did. According to the New Orleans Times Picayune, Salazar's May 27...

Three days after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch government offered to help. It was willing to provide ships outfitted with oil-skimming booms, and it proposed a plan for building sand barriers to protect sensitive marshlands. The response from the Obama administration and BP, which are coordinating the cleanup: “The embassy got a nice letter from the administration that said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,'” said Geert Visser, consul general for the Netherlands in Houston.

Leadership: The president says he went to the Gulf to find out whose derriere to kick. After he gets his foot out of his own mouth, perhaps he can talk to us about that Coast Guard memo. Scapegoating has become a hallmark of this administration. Certainly BP was responsible for the safe operation and maintenance of Deepwater Horizon. But after an accident in federal waters the federal government, which has a plan to save the entire planet from greenhouse gases, had no plan to save the Gulf from a single gushing well, with the possible exception of finger-pointing. In this...

More fun from this morning’s exercise in ass-kicking on “Today”. Skip ahead to 2:36 for the key bit. The One’s logic, such as it is, is that it’s not worth talking to Tony Hayward because he’ll only end up giving him the runaround — a curious position coming from a guy who campaigned on the virtues of “dialogue” and who’s been locked in halting negotiations with Iran for fully 16 months. Even Lauer is openly incredulous. Captain Kickass has nothing to say to a guy who potentially holds the fate of his presidency in his hands? Even after yesterday’s hair-raising...

As criticism of the Obama administration's response to the massive oil spill in the Gulf, a new report claims the president was told by a government official in April just how much damage BP's exploded offshore rig would cause. Days after the Deepwater Horizon rig blew up, Carol Browner, head of the White House's Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, told Obama the explosion would result in a never-before-seen disaster, senior White House aides told The Daily Beast. Browner said trying to cap a well a mile deep in the ocean was unprecedented and that oil would spew into...

The Economy: As if the latest measly numbers on our jobless recovery weren't bad enough, along comes the administration to pile disaster upon disaster by slapping a six-month ban on deep-water drilling. When President Obama visited Louisiana on May 1, he talked about the possibility that the oil gushing from BP's Deepwater Horizon well could "jeopardize the livelihoods of thousands of Americans who call this place home." Now the administration's response could jeopardize the livelihoods of tens of thousands more. In a letter sent to Obama on Wednesday, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal challenged the president's decision to suspend deepwater drilling...

PENSACOLA BEACH, Fla. — The smell of oil hangs heavy in the sea air. Children with plastic shovels scoop up clumps of goo in the waves. Beachcombers collect tarballs as if they were seashells. The oil has now reached the shores of four Gulf states — Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Swimmers at Pensacola Beach rushed out of the water after wading into the mess, while other beachgoers inspected the clumps with fascination, some taking pictures. Children were seen playing with the globs as if they were Play-Doh. Randy Ivie, a charter boat captain, broke down in tears as tried...

Energy: An administration never enthusiastic about offshore drilling is using the Gulf oil spill as an excuse to suspend Arctic exploration. Who could've seen that coming? Now we'll be more dependent on foreign oil. Suspicions in some quarters that the administration was being deliberately lax in its response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in order to pursue a larger, anti-domestic energy agenda were met with derision. But if not deliberate, the effect is the same as the administration prepares to shut down our search for new oil. President Obama on Thursday announced a suspension...

Accountability: Democrats have finally gotten around to blaming the Bush administration for the Gulf oil disaster. We wonder when this administration will take responsibility for anything. Asked on the "Imus in the Morning" program Tuesday on Fox Business Network if the Obama administration is to blame for the damaging fallout of the spill, Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., actually said, "Well, you know, they come into office a year ago with all of this. And so, after the last eight years ... " before being interrupted by a perplexed Imus. We too are perplexed. George W. Bush was blamed for the...

Emergencies: As frustration with the federal response grows, Louisiana's governor lashes out at the feds for doing little except blame BP for the Gulf oil spill. Meanwhile, Congress sees a chance to raise your gas taxes. While the Obama administration continues on its quest to fundamentally transform America, the largely unabated Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico threatens to fundamentally transform the ecosystems and economy of Louisiana and the Gulf region. The federal government's response so far has consisted largely of scapegoating BP and ignoring its own responsibilities and lack of preparation, railing against Big Oil, while Congress...

When it comes to mainstream media reportage on Gov. Palin, the Don Henley classic “Dirty Laundry” could not be more apropos. The closing lyric to Don Henley’s “Dirty Laundry” is, We can do the innuendo, we can dance and sing When it’s said and done, we haven’t told you a thing We all know that crap is king, give us dirty laundry For most of the media “crap is king,” when writing stories about Gov. Palin. Editorializing in news stories is the principal reason why we refer to the “lamestream” media as such. A blatant example of this is an...

To find out how much damage the Deepwater Horizon accident has caused the environment, experts are collecting water samples from the Gulf of Mexico for testing. But the federal government is requiring these samples to be tested at ONE laboratory (TDI Brooks International's B&B Laboratories) which does work for the petroleum industry, including BP, owner of the offshore oil platform that blew up and sank. In addition to this potential conflict of interest, federal officials have mandated that BP gets to hire the companies that collect data as part of efforts to rescue wildlife covered with oil. "Everywhere you look,...

Tensions between the Obama administration and the scientific community over the gulf oil spill are escalating, with prominent oceanographers accusing the government of failing to conduct an adequate scientific analysis of the damage and of allowing BP to obscure the spill’s true scope. The scientists assert that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other agencies have been slow to investigate the magnitude of the spill and the damage it is causing in the deep ocean.

The BP Spill: Tuesday on Capitol Hill, oil executives were subjected to the Senate's latest show trial. Senators did not say the accident in federal waters was a federal responsibility or that nature spills more oil every day. The morning hearing by the Energy and Natural Resources Committee chaired by Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico and the afternoon session before California Sen. Barbara Boxer's Environmental and Public Works Committee prove White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's dictum that a good crisis is a terrible thing to waste — especially when your goal is exploiting the Deepwater Horizon disaster...

Though his agency was charged with coordinating the federal response to the major oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Department of the Interior chief of staff Tom Strickland was in the Grand Canyon with his wife last week participating in activities that included white-water rafting, ABC News has learned. Other leaders of the Interior Department were focused on the Gulf, joined by other agencies and literally thousands of other employees. But Strickland’s participation in a trip that administration officials insisted was “work-focused” raised eyebrows among other Obama administration officials and even within even his own department, sources told ABC...

Feel Sorry for BP? It was 21 years ago that the Exxon Valdez leaked oil and unleashed torrents of environmental hysteria. Rothbard got it right in his piece "Why Not Feel Sorry for Exxon?" After the British Petroleum–hired oil rig exploded last week, the environmentalists went nuts yet again, using the occasion to flail a private corporation and wail about the plight of the "ecosystem," which somehow managed to survive and thrive after the Exxon debacle. The comparison is complicated by how much worse this event is for BP. Eleven people died. BP market shares have been pummeled. So long...

A lot of people have wondered why its taken Obama so long to respond to the oil spill disaster in the Gulf. Well, now we know. During the 2008 election cycle, individuals and political action committees associated with BP — a Center for Responsive Politics’ “heavy hitter” — contributed half a million dollars to federal candidates. About 40 percent of these donations went to Democrats. The top recipient of BP-related donations during the 2008 cycle was President Barack Obama himself, who collected $71,000.

Media Bias: As the Gulf Coast faced ecological disaster, the president yukked it up with White House correspondents. His Saturday radio address didn't even mention the oil spill. President Bush, call your office. Rarely has media sycophancy been on such sharp display as in the largely indifferent response to President Obama's own indifference to the oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The coverage has been far different from that given to President Bush's handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The White House announced Saturday morning that Obama would head to the Gulf Coast on Sunday, just a...

The Obama administration has lacked vision and urgency in responding to the worst environmental disaster it has faced. The oil gushing from the destroyed rig into the Gulf of Mexico has overwhelmed the industry and local governments, and only Washington can muster the resources to meet such an ominous threat to the entire coast. Yet the president did not send his top environmental aides and mobilize the Navy and Air Force until Friday — after the giant slick already had reached the fragile marshes and shorelines of the Mississippi Delta...President Barack Obama met U2's Bono in the Oval Office on...

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. Here's another update on the disaster that befell Transocean Ltd. (RIG: NYSE) and BP (BP: NYSE) last week in the Gulf of Mexico. (Thanks to OI reader Steve, in Texas, for sending some of the photos in today’s alert.) As you know by now, the drilling vessel Deepwater Horizon exploded, burned and sank last week, with the loss of 11 workers and injuries to many more. What happened? What's happening now? What's going to happen? I've spent the weekend working to piece things together. An Ill-fated Discovery According to news accounts,...

Energy: The administration has banned new offshore drilling until the Gulf oil spill is investigated. Was its heart in it anyway? It seems environmental concerns apply only to certain forms of energy. No one pays much attention to the aquatic "dead zones" that have appeared off our shores at the mouths of our rivers due to agricultural runoff created by mandates for corn-based ethanol. Ethanol is green energy, good energy — never mind that such biofuels drive up food prices, increase hunger around the world and damage the environment in their own way. The explosion that blew apart an oil...

An army of workers conducted frantic combat on Thursday with booms, chemicals and even fire to limit the damage from a massive oil spill invading the Mississippi River delta. Pushed by swift southeasterly winds, the arrival of the oil slick opened a new chapter in the Deepwater Horizon disaster saga, both environmentally and politically as lawmakers in Washington raised the heat on the offshore energy industry. Federal regulators sent a SWAT team of inspectors into the Gulf of Mexico area to ensure compliance with safety rules on deep water drilling rigs. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal declared a state of emergency...

NEW ORLEANS – No oil appeared to be leaking after a drilling rig exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico, the Coast Guard said Friday, though officials were trying to contain what spilled from the blast and prevent any threat to the coast's fragile ecosystem.

Emergency crews in the Gulf of Mexico are deploying containment booms along the U.S. coastline as a massive oil slick from a damaged deepwater well approaches land. Experts say the slick might reach Mississippi River delta portions of the state of Louisiana by late Thursday. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, says the sandy shores of the Louisiana delta lie directly in the path of the expanding oil slick as it moves west. Meteorologists say winds have been constant for several days, pushing the slick from the site of the damaged Horizon Deepwater oil rig. The rig exploded...

Energy: An amazing number of oil finds have been made this year, including the biggest in California in 35 years. If the world is running out of oil, why do we keep finding more of it? The mantra of the anti-drilling crowd has been that oil companies like to sit on their leases and the oil in the ground, hoping to drive up the price. They should use the leases they have or lose them, these critics say. They also like to add that the world is running out of oil so it doesn't matter anyway. Occidental Petroleum hasn't been...

Energy: An amazing number of oil finds have been made this year, including the biggest in California in 35 years. If the world is running out of oil, why do we keep finding more of it? The mantra of the anti-drilling crowd has been that oil companies like to sit on their leases and the oil in the ground, hoping to drive up the price. They should use the leases they have or lose them, these critics say. They also like to add that the world is running out of oil so it doesn't matter anyway. Occidental Petroleum hasn't been...

Energy Policy: Ignoring peak-oil Cassandras, BP has made another giant oil find in the Gulf of Mexico. We're not running out of oil. Our government just doesn't want us to look for it.The world is running out of oil and good riddance. That's the environmentalists' mantra. But since the first well was drilled near Titusville, Pa., 150 years ago, the prophecy has gone unfulfilled. Trouble is, those darn greedy oil companies keep finding the stuff. Oil has been produced in the Gulf of Mexico since the first well was drilled by Kerr-McGee Corp. in 1947. Some of the wells are...

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- President-elect Barack Obama will nominate Nobel laureate Steven Chu as energy secretary and Lisa Jackson to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, according to media reports Wednesday. Obama is also expected to name Carol Browner as energy 'czar,' the reports said. Chu, a Chinese-American, won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1997.