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“Oil companies basically own the whole gulf region,” Safina writes, viewing American addiction to petroleum, indifference to greenhouse gases and political genuflection to the oil lobby as more disturbing than the failure of supposedly foolproof devices to prevent the blowout.

Lax federal regulation, BP’s obsession with profit over safety, and management arrogance led, Safina writes, to a “chain disaster” in which several problems, none of which alone would have been fatal, amplified one another. In his book “Normal Accidents,” the sociologist Charles Perrow argued that when complex technology meets large corporate and government hierarchies, lack of accountability will lead inexorably to destructive failures of systems that might have been operated safely. The gulf oil spill surely was that.

As “A Sea in Flames” progresses, its author undergoes several conversions. Expecting to find evidence of terrible harm to the gulf biosphere, instead he finds only mild problems. Expecting to discover that the dispersants caused widespread marine death, instead he discovers that by breaking up crude, these chemicals speeded the oil’s natural decomposition. After Allen and Lubchenco grant him an interview, Safina switches ground and decides they are not as bad as he thought.

BP will face a maximum fine of $13.7bn under the Clean Water Act for its Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010, several billion less than feared.

Federal magistrate Carl Barbier ruled on Thursday that the size of the spill from the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, the worst offshore spill in US history, was smaller than the government had claimed.

A simple negligence ruling, which BP sought, caps the maximum fine at $1,100 per barrel.

A massive deepwater oil spill is nearly as likely today as it was in 2010, experts warn, 10 years after the disastrous explosion of BP’s rig in the Gulf of Mexico that caused an environmental catastrophe.

Trump administration’s decision to loosen Obama-era safety rules. Those standards had grown from an independent commission’s damning findings of corporate and regulatory failures leading up to the spill.

“Of course it could happen again, and I think one of the things of most concern is that our ability to control a spill is pretty much the same as it was 10 years prior,” Beinecke said.

Late last year, Christer Stoltz, chief of contingency planning for Gotland, Sweden’s largest island, got an unusual letter from the central government in Stockholm, telling him to get ready for war.

“increase their ability to resist an armed attack against Sweden from a qualified opponent,”

The planning was also intended to respond to natural disasters, oil spills or cyberattacks that could disrupt power and water supplies

One is an egomaniacally unhinged, nuclear-armed neophyte, who scares his allies and enemies alike. So is the other. The extraordinary prospect of direct talks between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un would be a delicious moment of karma among kooky world leaders. If it weren’t for their ability to destroy half the planet.

One thing is already clear about this half-baked idea: Trump is more likely to spill his guts about classified intelligence than he is to get the upper hand with any kind of meaningful deal.

We have some recent history to underscore that point. It was only on Saturday that our dear leader spilled his guts about this North Korean deal at the Gridiron dinner.

Nebraska regulators are expected to decide on Monday whether to approve or deny an in-state route for the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. It’s the last major regulatory hurdle facing project operator TransCanada Corp.

The five-member Nebraska public service commission is forbidden by law from factoring pipeline safety or the risk of spills into its decision, because pipeline safety is a federal responsibility. So, it will not take into account a spill of 210,000 gallons of oil on the existing Keystone pipeline in South Dakota announced on Thursday.

“It’s not as simple as a ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’ verdict,” said Brian Jorde, an attorney for Nebraska landowners who are fighting the project. No matter what the commission decides, any group that presented arguments at an August hearing could appeal the decision to a state district court.

Former President Donald Trump's campaign of lies about a stolen election just delivered a huge victory with a new Georgia law that could suppress the votes of many of the citizens who helped eject him from the White House.

The move confirms the Peach State as the epicenter of the fight for American democracy that raged through Trump's presidency and during the insurrection he incited against the US Capitol -- and now threatens to taint future elections as Republicans in multiple states pursue new laws to limit voting.

"What I'm worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It's sick. It's sick," President Joe Biden said at the first news conference of his presidency that afternoon. The Georgia law raises the question of whether election safeguards that prevented Trump's energetic efforts to rig the 2020 White House race after the fact in the state will stand firm in future elections amid false claims of electoral fraud by a president.

type your name into WikiLeaks to see what damage the day's hacked emails might hold for you.

ype your name into WikiLeaks to see what damage the day's hacked emails might hold for you.

the emails include the private information of a large number of bystanders, ranging from email addresses to financial data.

The Quran, like all foundational religious texts, is a tangle of ambiguities and mysteries, to which endless annotations can be, and are being, written.

So wide was the fame of the 11th-century Baghdad artist Ibn al-Bawwab (“son of the doorman”) that his signature was routinely forged

When a Mongol army laid waste to the city in 1258, his life was spared so that he could work for the new rulers,

The intelligence briefing Senators got back in September was not definitive on this point of intention. But to suggest otherwise is to believe you can intend to knock over the bottle but be agnostic on spilling the milk. Of course, they were trying to elect Trump.

In fact, I'm not sure the two purported aims are even contradictory since, as we have already seen, electing Trump is one of the most disruptive things imaginable a foreign power could do not only to the American domestic political process but to the still largely America dominated global order.

One secondary revelation of the Post story is the apparently considerable role Mitch McConnell played in blocking any effort to make a bipartisan statement about the Russian campaign prior to the election - indeed to threaten the White House that he would attack them as playing partisan politics if they did more to publicize the intelligence assessment of Russia's role in the election.

The partisan furor that broke out with the Justice Department’s acknowledgment of the contacts late Wednesday began to take on a bipartisan sheen as the controversy spilled into Thursday morning.

“There is no longer any question that we need a truly independent commission to investigate this issue,” Mr. Cummings said.

In the telling of some American officials, the C.I.A. drone campaign in Pakistan has been a triumph with few downsides

and the pace of the strikes, which officials frequently describe as “surgical” and “contained,” has dropped sharply over the past year.

Pakistani town that has become a virtual test laboratory for drone warfare,

“Blood has been spilled in Ukraine again,” wrote Mr. Medvedev, once favored in the West for playing good cop to the hard-boiled president, Vladimir V. Putin. “The threat of civil war looms.”

It is an extraordinary propaganda campaign that political analysts say reflects a new brazenness on the part of Russian officials. And in recent days, it has largely succeeded — at least for Russia’s domestic audience — in painting a picture of chaos and danger in eastern Ukraine, although it was pro-Russian forces themselves who created it by seizing public buildings and setting up roadblocks.

In a report released Tuesday, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said that threats to ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, cited repeatedly by Russian officials and in the Russian news media as a potential rationale for Russian military action, were exaggerated and that some participants in the protests in the region came from Russia.

The three largest soda companies — Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and the Dr Pepper Snapple Group — have pledged to cut the number of sugary drink calories that Americans consume by one-fifth in about a decade, through a combination of marketing, distribution and packaging.

was an acknowledgment by the companies of the role their products play in the country’s obesity crisis and the escalating rates of diabetes and heart disease that accompany it.

in low-income communities, sugary sodas may account for a half or more of the calories a child consumes each day. Sugary soft drinks account for about 6 percent of the average consumer’s daily calories.

Increasingly on the Internet, websites are personalizing themselves to suit our interests. We all see this happening at Amazon, where if you order a book, Amazon will send you the next book. We see it happening in Netflix, but it's also happening in a bunch of places where it's much less visible. For example, on Google, most people assume that if you search for BP, you'll get one set of results that are the consensus set of results in Google. Actually, that isn't true anymore. Since Dec. 4, 2009, Google has been personalized for everyone. So when I had two friends this spring Google "BP," one of them got a set of links that was about investment opportunities in BP. The other one got information about the oil spill. Presumably that was based on the kinds of searches that they had done in the past. If you have Google doing that, and you have Yahoo doing that, and you have Facebook doing that, and you have all of the top sites on the Web customizing themselves to you, then your information environment starts to look very different from anyone else's. And that's what I'm calling the "filter bubble": that personal ecosystem of information that's been catered by these algorithms to who they think you are.

What it's looking like increasingly is that the Web is connecting us back to ourselves. There's a looping going on where if you have an interest, you're going to learn a lot about that interest. But you're not going to learn about the very next thing over. And you certainly won't learn about the opposite view. If you have a political position, you're not going to learn about the other one. If you Google some sites about the link between vaccines and autism, you can very quickly find that Google is repeating back to you your view about whether that link exists and not what scientists know, which is that there isn't a link between vaccines and autism. It's a feedback loop that's invisible. You can't witness it happening because it's baked into the fabric of the information environment.

The Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, likes to tell people this statistic: From the beginning of civilization to 2003, if you took all of human intellectual output, every single conversation that ever happened, it's about two exabytes of data, about a billion gigabytes. And now two exabytes of data is created every five days