BP oil leak threatens to bust bedrock!

The US government has ordered oil giant BP to offer a plan for opening the capped oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, after a seep was found threatening to leak into the bedrock.

"I direct you to provide me a written procedure for opening the choke valve as quickly as possible without damaging the well should hydrocarbon seepage near the well head be confirmed," AFP quoted US Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen as saying in a letter to BP chief managing director Bob Dudley on Sunday.

The order came after reports of a methane seep detected at a distance from the well and undetermined anomalies at the well head.

The authority also ordered BP to report on a "detected seep" and other "anomalies" near the oil well as experts monitor the seabed for cracks.

"Given the current observations from the test, including the detected seep a distance from the well and undetermined anomalies at the well head, monitoring of the seabed is of paramount importance during the test period," the official added.

Experts say this could mean more leaks are being sprung.

The Coast Guard admiral has given the energy corporate 24 hours to provide a new method without damaging the well but BP says three days are needed to start the process.

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Engineers Detect Seepage Near BP's Capped Oil Well!

Engineers monitoring BP's damaged well in the Gulf of Mexico detected seepage on the ocean floor that could mean problems with the cap that has stopped oil from gushing into the water, the U.S. government's top oil spill official said on Sunday.

Earlier on Sunday, BP officials had expressed hope that the test of the cap which began Thursday could continue until a relief well can permanently seal the leak next month. Oil gushed from the deepsea Maconda well for nearly three months until the new cap was put in place last week.

But late on Sunday, the U.S. government released a letter to BP Chief Managing Director Bob Dudley from retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen that referred to seepage near the mile-deep (1.6 km-deep) well as well as "undetermined anomalies at the well head."

"I direct you to provide me a written procedure for opening the choke valve as quickly as possible without damaging the well should hydrocarbon seepage near the well head be confirmed," Allen wrote.

The worst oil spill in U.S. history has caused an economic and environmental disaster in five states along the Gulf Coast, hurt President Barack Obama's approval ratings and complicated traditionally close ties with Britain.

Those concerns are sure to be discussed when British Prime Minister David Cameron meets Obama in Washington on Tuesday.

The plan had been for BP to resume siphoning the oil after the completion of the pressure tests on the well, which extends 2.5 miles (4 km) under the seabed, to judge if it is able to withstand the process to seal the leak.

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The Real Terrorists, 9/11 FOIAs Denied, Economic Realism

Blame Game: BP says Gulf oil seep may not be from its well

July 19 (Reuters) - Oil giant BP Plc (BP.L) said a seep detected in the Gulf of Mexico may not be related to its blown out Macondo well, which has caused the biggest offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

Spokesman Robert Wine said on Monday that BP engineers were the source of information behind comments from the government's top official overseeing the spill response effort, Admiral Thad Allen, that a seep was detected "a distance from the well".

"The data is being reviewed by the government's technical team," Wine said.

Last week a cap was placed on the well, halting the flow of oil for the first time in three months.

If the data confirmed that Macondo was the source of the seep, the choke on the cap would be opened, and oil flowed to support vessels on the surface, Wine said. (Reporting by Tom Bergin; editing by Simon Jessop)

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSWLA865620100719

Biden: Pullout in Afghanistan may start small

Vice President Biden said Sunday that progress in Afghanistan has been "a tough slog," but he said U.S. troops will begin leaving in July 2011.

"It could be as few as a couple thousand troops. It could be more. But there will be a transition," Biden said. The interview was taped late last week but broadcast Sunday.

Speaking on ABC's This Week, Biden said U.S. and NATO forces will be able to turn over some of the 34 military districts in Afghanistan to locally trained forces as planned, but he acknowledged the training of Afghan troops hasn't gone smoothly.

"We are in the process, which is painfully slow and difficult, of training up Afghani forces in order to put them in a position they can deal with their own insurgents," he said. "There is, for the first time now, a real attempt and a policy of trying to figure out how to reconcile those in the Taliban who are doing it for the pay, who are not the Mullah Omars of the world, into the government of Afghanistan."

Biden said he was not insulted by disparaging remarks made about him by Gen. Stanley McChrystal in Rolling Stone magazine, adding he believed they were made over policy differences not personalities.

President Obama replaced McChrystal as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan because of those remarks and other comments made by McChrystal's aides. McChrystal, who is retiring from the Army, was replaced by Gen. David Petraeus.

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Carbon trading used as money-laundering front: experts

The experts who attended a meeting of the Asia Pacific Money Laundering Group (APG) said crime syndicates are resorting to new methods to hide their illegal proceeds.

One "issue that we've looked at closely is money laundering associated with carbon emissions trading schemes", APG executive secretary Gordon Hook told a news conference after the five-day meeting.

Hook did not elaborate on how crime syndicates were using carbon emissions trading schemes to launder money.

Emissions trading schemes place a limit on the amount of greenhouse gas pollution which companies can produce, forcing heavy polluters to buy credits from companies that pollute less -- thereby creating financial incentives to fight global warming. 

John Harrison, a security analyst at Singapore's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, told AFP that the carbon emissions trading market is relatively new and crime gangs are taking advantage of loopholes in regulation. "They will use new markets to try and launder their money, and particularly if these new markets are not well regulated yet," he said. "It's not surprising."

APG is an international organisation that is closely affiliated with the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF).

Hook said the region's money-laundering activities had wider, international connections.

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DC’s spy establishment in panic mode over Washington Post expose

Washington's intelligence establishment appears to be in panic mode over an upcoming Washington Post series about runaway growth in defense and intelligence spending.

A State Department email has accused the Post of planning to make public "top secret" information about defense and intelligence contractors working for the US, despite an admission in the same email that the Post's information came from "open sources."

The series, by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Dana Priest, will include a TV partnership with PBS's Frontline and is expected to consist of three articles and an online database of military and intelligence contractors and their projects.

It's that database of contractors that seems to be worrying Washington the most. Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy reports that the State Department sent out an email Thursday warning all 14,574 Washington-area employees of the upcoming reports.

"On Monday July 19, the Washington Post plans to publish a website listing all agencies and contractors believed to conduct Top Secret work on behalf of the US Government," the email stated. "The website provides a graphic representation pinpointing the location of firms conducting Top Secret work, describing the type of work they perform, and identifying many facilities where such work is done."

However, the extent to which the Post's information will be "top secret" is debatable. The State Department email goes on to say that the information the Post has gathered came from "open sources," suggesting the information published in the Post's database is already publicly available.

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The Fall of Obama

The man who seized the White House by fomenting a mood of irrational expectation is now facing the bitter price exacted by reality. The reality is that there can be no “good” American president. It’s an impossible hand to play. Obama is close to being finished.

The nation’s first black president promised change at the precise moment when no single man, even if endowed with the communicative powers of Franklin Roosevelt, the politic mastery of Lyndon Johnson, the brazen agility of Bill Clinton, could turn the tide that has been carrying America to disaster for 30 years.

This summer many Americans are frightened. Over 100,000 of them file for bankruptcy every month. Three million homeowners face foreclosure this year. Add them to the 2.8 million who were foreclosed in 2009, Obama’s first year in office. Nearly seven million have been without jobs in the last year for six months or longer. By the time you tot up the people who have given up looking for work and the people on part-time, the total is heading toward 20 million.

Fearful people are irrational. So are racists. Obama is the target of insane charges. A hefty percentage of Americans believe that he is a socialist – a charge as ludicrous as accusing the Archbishop of Canterbury of being a closet Druid. Obama reveres the capitalist system. He admires the apex predators of Wall Street who showered his campaign treasury with millions of dollars. The frightful catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico stemmed directly from the green light he and his Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, gave to BP.

It is not Obama’s fault that for 30 years America’s policy – under Reagan, both Bushes and Bill Clinton – has been to export jobs permanently to the Third World. The jobs that Americans now desperately seek are no longer here, in the homeland, and never will be. They’re in China, Taiwan, Vietnam, India, Indonesia.

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Cap and Blow?

What the hell are they thinking in Washington, and down at the “Unified Command” in New Orleans, letting BP try to close off the oil volcano spewing out the top of the damaged Blowout Preventer (BOP) stack?

And what the hell is the mainstream press doing not asking about the clear evidence of oil or gas spewing out under pressure from cracks in the seafloor around the base of the BOP? (See the image of oil spewing from the sea floor.)

Sure the initial partial closing of the valves is working, but they haven’t built up much pressure yet--just to 6000 lbs/square inch, which isn’t much above the 5000 lbs/square inch at that depth of the ocean--and a lot could go wrong. seriously wrong, and good reason to think it will.

I made a call to the media office of the Unified Command, the office set up to respond to public and media inquiries about the disaster, which is supposedly composed of people from the US Coast Guard, other federal agencies, and BP. When I mentioned the videos taken by BP’s own remote operating vehicles (ROVs) of the oil and/or gas spewing from cracks in the sea floor, I was told I had to call the press office in Houston, “because you’re asking us a question about the sub-surface well.”

But here’s the thing. The press office in Houston is not run by the Unified Command. The people at the office there answer the phone with the phrase: “BP Press.” They do this because they are BP employees, and the office is in BP headquarters.

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MSNBC Alludes To Second Hole Spewing Oil

How could 300-400 million gallons flow into the GOM through a 6 inch wide pipe?

The lies will continue until the truth becomes obvious to everyone.

How does Dylan get this info onto the MSM?

Iran accuses US and UK of supporting group behind mosque attacks

Iran is vowing to hunt down a Sunni separatist group which claimed responsibility for a double suicide bombing that killed 28 people at a mosque in the south-eastern city of Zahedan.

Jundullah – Arabic for "the soldiers of God" – said it carried out the twin attacks yesterday at Zahedan's grand mosque in retaliation for the execution of the group's captured leader. Provincial officials said a further 167 people were injured, some of them critically. Three days of mourning were declared. General Hossein Salami, deputy commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, claimed in Tehran today that the victims "were martyred by the hands of mercenaries of the US and UK". Ali Mohammad Azad, governor of Sistan-Baluchestan province, blamed "the intelligence services of arrogant powers."

The US and Britain – which are at odds with Iran over its controversial nuclear programme – issued statements condemning the attacks.

Shia worshippers were celebrating the birthday of the prophet Muhammad's grandson Hussein when the first bomb detonated, according to reports from the scene. A second explosion took place 15 minutes later as people rushed to help – a technique used by Sunni groups in Iraq to maximise casualties. The dead reportedly included several Revolutionary Guards.

Iranian media said the aim was to sow discord between Shias and Sunnis in the Sunni majority area, which borders on Pakistan. Zahedan, the capital of Sistan-Baluchestan, has seen several mass casualty attacks in recent years.

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Fed Gets More Power, Responsibility

WSJ

After fending off most challenges to its independence and winning new powers to oversee big financial firms, the Federal Reserve has emerged from a bruising debate on the overhaul of U.S. financial rules as perhaps the pre-eminent regulator in the sector. But that could only bring it added blame if things go wrong again.

 Just a few months ago, amid populist anger at the Fed for failing to prevent the financial crisis of 2008 and bailing out Wall Street, Congress was talking of stripping the central bank of its supervisory oversight of banks or forcing it to submit to congressional audit of its interest-rate decisions.

Instead, the new law gives the Fed more power and a better tool box to help prevent financial crises. It will become the primary regulator for large, complex financial firms of all kinds, such as American International Group, the insurer which built a massive derivatives portfolio that regulators didn't see until it was too late.

This isn't the first time Congress has expanded the Fed's role. After the Great Depression, it passed the Employment Act in 1946, charging the Fed with averting the huge unemployment seen in the 1930s. After the double-digit inflation of the 1970s, the Fed was formally given a dual mandate of promoting both price stability and maximum sustainable employment. In the wake of the latest financial crisis, the Fed is effectively being told to add the maintenance of financial stability to its responsibilities.

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NSA Falsified Intercepted Communications in the Gulf of Tonkin Incident

NY TIMES

WASHINGTON — In an echo of the debates over the discredited intelligence that helped make the case for the war in Iraq, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday released more than 1,100 pages of previously classified Vietnam-era transcripts that show senators of the time sharply questioning whether they had been deceived by the White House and the Pentagon over the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident.

“If this country has been misled, if this committee, this Congress, has been misled by pretext into a war in which thousands of young men have died, and many more thousands have been crippled for life, and out of which their country has lost prestige, moral position in the world, the consequences are very great,” Senator Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee, the father of the future vice president, said in March 1968 in a closed session of the Foreign Relations Committee.

The documents are Volume 20 in a regular series of releases of historical transcripts from the committee, which conducted most of its business in executive session during the 1960s, before the Senate required committee meetings to be public. The documents were edited by Donald Ritchie, the Senate historian, and cover 1968, when members of the committee were anguished over Vietnam and in a deteriorating relationship with the Johnson White House over the war.

Historians said the transcripts, which are filled with venting by the senators about the Johnson administration and frustrations over their own ineffectiveness, added little new to the historical record. Even at the time, there was widespread skepticism about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which the North Vietnamese were said to have attacked American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964, two days after an earlier clash.

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Gulf Oil Spill Altering Food Web Scientists Say

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- Scientists are reporting early signs that the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is altering the marine food web by killing or tainting some creatures and spurring the growth of others more suited to a fouled environment.

Near the spill site, researchers have documented a massive die-off of pyrosomes - cucumber-shaped, gelatinous organisms fed on by endangered sea turtles.

Along the coast, droplets of oil are being found inside the shells of young crabs that are a mainstay in the diet of fish, turtles and shorebirds.

And at the base of the food web, tiny organisms that consume oil and gas are proliferating.

If such impacts continue, the scientists warn of a grim reshuffling of sealife that could over time cascade through the ecosystem and imperil the region's multibillion-dollar fishing industry.

Federal wildlife officials say the impacts are not irreversible, and no tainted seafood has yet been found. But Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., who chairs a House committee investigating the spill, warned Tuesday that the problem is just unfolding and toxic oil could be entering seafood stocks as predators eat contaminated marine life.

"You change the base of the food web, it's going to ripple through the entire food web," said marine scientist Rob Condon, who found oil-loving bacteria off the Alabama coastline, more than 90 miles from BP's collapsed Deepwater Horizon drill rig. "Ultimately it's going to impact fishing and introduce a lot of contaminants into the food web."

Simmons' Take on the Oil Spill in the Gulf

7-15-10 -- BP intentionally misled the public and the U.S. government about the extent of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to save their company and avoid criminal liability, said Matthew Simmons, an oil industry insider who has analyzed the industry for the past 40 years. They continue to do so, he said, risking not just the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem and economy, but threatening the health of those who will be exposed to the highly toxic oil in the coming months.

"There is no way BP would not know they were misleading everyone," said Simmons. "They would have to be deaf, dumb, and blind and they're not. These are smart guys."

Simmons presented a daunting analysis of the BP blowout, why it happened, how it happened, and how BP knowingly failed to respond appropriately. He gave the talk to 150 attendees at the request of local people, but he has been speaking about the spill and what he says is BP's malfeasance publicly - including on MSNBC and other national outlets - for months. Fortune magazine's headline to its June 9 interview with Simmons read, "The Gulf Coast Oil Spill's Dr. Doom."

At Tuesday night's talk in Camden, Simmons said BP has misled the public and the government into focusing on a smaller spill at the site of the oil riser that viewers can see on television. It looks big on cameras, said Simmons, but the plume of oil is only six feet high. The oil riser is attached to the sunken oil rig, not to the oil well itself, said Simmons.

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Risk Of Global Climate Change By BP Oil Spill

Gianluigi Zangari

Frascati National Laboratories (LNF) - National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN)

Frascati 00044, Via E. Fermi, 40, ITALY

Correspondence to: Gianluigi Zangari Email: gianluigi.zangari@lnf.infn.it

Abstract: BP Oil Spill may cause an irreparable damage to the Gulf

Stream global climate thermoregulation activity.

The Gulf Stream importance in the global climate thermoregulation processes is well assessed. The latest real time satellite (Jason, Topex/Poseidon, Geosat Follow-On, ERS-2, Envisat) data maps of May-June 2010 processed by CCAR(Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research), checked at Frascati Laboratories by the means of the SHT congruent calculus past years data, show for the first time a direct evidence of the rapid breaking of the Loop Current, a warm ocean current, crucial part of the Gulf Stream. As displayed both by the sea surface velocity maps and the sea surface height maps, the Loop Current broke down for the first time around May 18 generated a clock wise eddy, which is still active (see Fig. 1).

Real time sea surface heights maps and sea surface velocity maps (below) starting from april 22 until June 9 processed by CCAR and checked at LNF (Frascati) by SHT calculus “Deepwater Horizon”. The yellow arrow indicates the breaking of the Loop Stream.

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The Fed is Steering U.S. Economy into Deflation

The Fed is steering the economy into deflation. It's a political calculation that will keep unemployment high, increase excess capacity, and deepen the recession. C.P.I. continues to fall, bank lending is down 4 percent year-over-year, housing prices are slipping, business investment is off, and consumer credit continues to shrink.  On Wednesday, the Commerce Dept reported that retail sales fell 0.5 percent, more than analysts expected. This is the second drop in retail purchases in the last two months signaling weakness in consumer demand.

The slowdown hit nearly every sector including auto sales, furniture, computers, building materials, clothing and sporting goods. There was also bad news on housing on Wednesday. The Mortgage Brokers' Association reported that loans purchase applications fell to a 13-year low last week, and refinancing contracts continued to slide despite record-low mortgage rates. The housing depression is ongoing and is adding to deflationary pressures in the broader economy.

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke claims the recovery is still "on track", but more than 60% of last quarter's GDP can be attributed to fiscal stimulus and inventory adjustments. That means demand will drop as the stimulus runs out and restocking ends. Then the economy will have to stand on its own.  Expect negative growth by the forth quarter 2010 or first quarter 2011.

There are things the Fed can do to fight deflation.  Bernanke can resume his bond purchasing program (quantitative easing), this time buying US Treasuries to increase inflation expectations and add to the money supply. Or the Fed can purchase corporate bonds to increase business investment and hiring.

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The Fed's broken crystal ball

CNNMoney.com

How nervous should investors be about the Federal Reserve being more nervous?

The latest forecasts from the Fed released Wednesday cut estimates for economic growth, predicted that high unemployment will be more persistent than previously thought and raised the risk of a fall in prices, or deflation, which in itself can cause businesses to cut output and staffing.

Still, investors seemed to shrug off the outlook. Stocks drifted lower immediately after the Fed forecasts were released at 2 p.m. Wednesday, then rallied in the last 90 minutes of trading to end little changed from the previous session.

That may be because growing concerns about U.S. economic recovery possibly stalling out were already priced into the market. But it could be partly because the Fed hasn't had the best track record at predicting these numbers.

In its forecasts of June 2008, seven months after the recession is now known to have begun, the Fed's forecast still projected the economy would avoid a recession, and that the annual unemployment rate would show little change, remaining in the 5% range over the following three years. Instead, it shot up like a rocket, topping out at 10.1% in late 2009 and averaging 9.7% so far this year.

And the Fed hasn't always been so sunny. It has also been too pessimistic at times, which has also drawn criticism.

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Banks Gain in Rules Debate

WSJ

The world's banks appear to be winning a reprieve from tough new capital requirements and curbs on risk-taking, as regulators and central bankers are moving toward less stringent rules than initially proposed.

Bowing in part to fears that tougher requirements would diminish the credit needed to revive a sluggish global economy, officials gathered in Basel, Switzerland, are trying to strike a compromise over a set of new international banking standards initially proposed in December. The final accord will have a more global reach, and thus in some respects a more potent impact, on banks and borrowers than the financial regulatory bill likely to pass the U.S. Congress Thursday.

The new Basel rules, as they are called, would still be stiffer than existing standards. Industry officials fear the changes could shrink bank profit margins and make credit tighter and more costly for consumers and businesses. Alterations under discussion this week would ease key requirements that have been under discussion for months. Advocates for a tougher line have argued that excessive concessions could leave the financial system vulnerable to problems the entire process is intended to address.

"I think there's a growing feeling among finance ministers that... growth is anemic. Do you really want to threaten a fragile recovery?" Stephen Green, chairman of Britain's HSBC Holdings PLC, said in an interview. "I think this will end up in a sensible way."

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Bank-reform bill a convoluted mess

By Red Jahncke

GREENWICH, CONN. -- The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 is over 2,300 pages long.

The Glass-Steagall Act, the landmark bank-reform bill of 1933, was about 100 pages long.

Less is more.

Glass-Steagall gained strength from its simplicity. The 1933 Congress concluded that the combination of investment banking and commercial banking (and other businesses) had led to the stock-market crash and the failure of thousands of banks. Therefore, it separated the two forms of banking. It severely restricted the activities of commercial bank-holding companies by banning any cross-ownership with any other industry, financial or otherwise.

To re-establish public confidence in banks, it created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to insure bank deposits, and said that only commercial banks, with their less-risky activities, could hold such deposits.

Finally, it limited the size of banks by mandating that national banks operate within state limits on branching in their headquarters state. That’s the whole Glass-Steagall Act.

Simple, straightforward and powerful: It broke up the House of Morgan, the banking combine founded by the early 20th Century’s most powerful banker, John Pierpont Morgan

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