Bp

President Obama made it clear Tuesday night that he expects BP to fully compensate the Gulf Coast for its losses from a massive oil spill. "Tomorrow, I will meet with the chairman of BP and inform him that he is to set aside whatever resources are required to compensate the workers and business owners who have been harmed as a result of his company's recklessness," he said. It was a message that all Americans needed to hear. The president provided needed reassurance that missteps prior to and following the April 20 tragedy would not be repeated.

The Greatest Show in Baseball - Mark McGwire's power display in batting practice - may not be coming to a stadium near you. McGwire, who is growing weary of the pregame circus, said he might cut back on taking BP in the future. "It's totally out of hand," he said before the St. Louis Cardinals played Houston last night. "I feel like a caged animal. " McGwire leads the major leagues with 33 home runs, putting him on a pace to shatter Roger Maris' record of 61 homers in 1961.

WASHINGTON - A BP internal investigation released Wednesday concludes that eight key factors contributed to the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, including a poor cement job by Halliburton and the failure by Transocean workers to notice for 40 minutes that oil and gas were gushing into the well. BP's probe acknowledges that a key BP official aboard the rig misinterpreted a critical pressure test and then mistakenly authorized the removal of heavy drilling mud - the only impediment to gas and crude oil surging up the well's drill pipe - before the well's integrity was confirmed.

MIAMI - After being hammered for a year over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, BP is going on the offensive with multibillion-dollar lawsuits seeking to shift at least part of the blame to those who owned the ill-fated rig or designed a failed safety device or supplied cement that did not hold. Those companies - Transocean, Cameron International, and Halliburton - each filed lawsuits of their own, and it will be up to the courts to divvy up fault. As of Thursday, BP had already paid out more than $3.9 billion to people and businesses through a separate, $20 billion claims process administered by lawyer Kenneth Feinberg.

WASHINGTON - Plans to burn hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil from BP's blown-out well are raising new questions about the health and safety of the thousands of workers on rigs and vessels near the spill site. BP and the federal government are in new territory once again in dealing with the nation's worst environmental disaster: There has never been such a huge flaring of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, or possibly anywhere. The incineration of such huge amounts of oil combined with the black clouds of smoke already wafting over the gulf waters from controlled burns of surface oil create pollution hazards for the estimated 2,000 people working in the area.

NEW ORLEANS - BP and a committee representing plaintiffs suing over the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill have reached an agreement, a federal judge said late Friday night. As a result of the agreement that will be filed with the court for approval, the trial that was scheduled to begin Monday has been postponed a second time, Judge Carl Barbier said. No new date was immediately set. The settlement will likely result in a realignment of the parties in this litigation and require substantial changes to the current trial plan, Barbier said.

NEW ORLEANS - A BP employee lost a laptop containing personal data belonging to thousands of Louisiana residents who filed claims for compensation after last year's gulf oil spill, a spokesman for the oil giant said Tuesday. Spokesman Curtis Thomas said BP mailed out letters Monday to roughly 13,000 people whose data were stored on the computer, notifying them about the potential security breach and offering to pay for monitoring their credit. The company also reported the missing laptop to law enforcement, he said.

IKNOW I'm not the only one frustrated each morning over coffee and the newspaper, so frustrated in fact, that today I went to Thesaurus.com and typed in the word "spill. " I just had no idea the company I was keeping. Night after day, day after night, as I read the paper or watch the news, I strain my brain for a better word. Spill is just too kind, too gentle. A baby spills a cup of juice on her high chair tray, a drunk his beer on the bar. Either can be cleaned up quickly with paper towels and a spritz - both can be attributed to inexperience or mishap.

As the strike at British Petroleum Co.'s refinery entered its fourth month last week, a new issue surfaced in negotiations - one that could either impede talks or blast them loose, according to union members: the layoff of 10 striking workers. BP announced the layoffs on May 27 in a letter to Local 8-234 of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union. BP refinery manager E.S. Kulinski wrote that "our experience during the strike has indicated that we can operate the Refinery safely and efficiently with a smaller maintenance workforce.

BP bears ultimate responsibility for the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history, a key government panel said Wednesday in a report that assigns more blame to the company than other investigations and could hurt its effort to fend off criminal charges and billions of dollars in penalties. The report concluded that BP violated federal regulations, ignored crucial warnings, was inattentive to safety and made bad decisions during the cementing of the well a mile beneath the Gulf of Mexico.

NEW ORLEANS - A federal judge in New Orleans said Wednesday that he is leaning in favor of granting preliminary approval to a proposed class-action settlement that would resolve billions of dollars in claims against BP over the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. After hearing BP and a team of plaintiffs' attorneys outline the proposed deal, U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier said he plans to rule within a week. Barbier would hold a "fairness hearing" later this year, possibly in November, before deciding whether to give his final approval.

NEW ORLEANS - A BP engineer intentionally deleted more than 300 text messages that said the company's efforts to control the Gulf of Mexico oil spill were failing and that the amount of oil leaking was far more than what the company reported, the Justice Department said Tuesday. In the first criminal charges related to the deadly explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig in April 2010, the Justice Department arrested Kurt Mix and charged him with two counts of obstruction of justice for allegedly destroying evidence sought by federal authorities, officials announced in a statement.

RONNIE SCULL now has two stories to tell for a lifetime. Though right now he suspects No. 1 will remain most prominent in his memory bank, something tells us No. 2 will eventually win out. You be the judge . . . While Scull, a senior righthander, was throwing a pitch for Monsignor Bonner High in the seventh inning of a Catholic Red game vs. visiting La Salle, his elastic belt snapped in half and he had to switch to another. OK, not bad. Four innings later, the game was suspended because of the sun. Awesome!

RONNIE SCULL now has two stories to tell for a lifetime. Though right now he suspects No. 1 will remain most prominent in his memory bank, something tells us No. 2 will eventually win out. You be the judge . . .  While Scull, a senior righthander, was throwing a pitch for Monsignor Bonner High in the seventh inning of a Catholic Red game vs. visiting La Salle, his elastic belt snapped in half and he had to switch to another. OK, not bad. Four innings later, the game was suspended because of the SUN. Awesome!

IN THE REGION Judge OKs Risperdal settlement A Texas judge on Tuesday approved the first agreement in which Johnson & Johnson will pay to settle allegations that it illegally promoted its antipsychotic drug Risperdal through a state Medicaid program. The $158 million will be shared by the state of Texas (40 percent), the federal government (31 percent), whistleblower Allen Jones and his attorneys (13 and 16 percent, respectively). Jones, who uncovered the issue while working for the State of Pennsylvania, said he was pleased with the resolution.

NEW ORLEANS - BP P.L.C.'s settlement with plaintiffs suing the company over the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico may address harm to individuals and businesses, but there is nothing in it that compensates the public for damage to its natural resources and environment, the Justice Department said Saturday. That is a potentially critical issue because a separate victims' claims fund that was set up months after the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion was also meant to cover environmental damages, but it is now expected to be used to cover the BP settlement with plaintiffs.

NEW ORLEANS - BP and a committee representing plaintiffs suing over the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill have reached an agreement, a federal judge said late Friday night. As a result of the agreement that will be filed with the court for approval, the trial that was scheduled to begin Monday has been postponed a second time, Judge Carl Barbier said. No new date was immediately set. The settlement will likely result in a realignment of the parties in this litigation and require substantial changes to the current trial plan, Barbier said.

ON JANUARY 19th my grandson Shahid was shot and left to die. There was an officer or officers in the area who responded to the shots and without hesitation or waiting for an ambulance rushed Shahid to Temple Hospital. To the officer or officers and citizen who assisted in getting Shahid to the hospital, our gratitude and heartfelt thanks to you. We do not know who the officer(s) were, nor the citizen who helped, but just knowing that he was treated with care makes it a little easier to bear, knowing that someone who valued his life tried to save him. And to the surgeon and the surgical team, we thank you for your diligent effort in trying to save him and not giving up - our most respectful and humble thanks to all of you, and may God bless everyone of you. Thank you, The Family of Shahid Davis TO THE MURDERER OF MY GRANDSON, I'm sorry you did not know Shahid.

BP Plc, operator of the Macondo well that caused the worst oil spill in the United States, may reach a settlement for the disaster this week after a partner agreed on fines, an Oppenheimer & Co. analyst said. Mitsui & Co.'s MOEX Offshore 2007 L.L.C. will pay $90 million to the United States and five states to settle pollution violations related to 2010 spill. While BP will probably have to accept different terms as the operator, the settlement suggests that BP would pay $585 million for violations, less than 20 percent of what the company has provisioned, said Fadel Gheit, an analyst at Oppenheimer in New York.

NEW ORLEANS - A government plan that ends most of BP's responsibility for cleaning up oil washing onto the Gulf Coast marks a shift toward restoration efforts by the company, but many in the region are worried about who will handle the monitoring of long-term effects from the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history. Under the agreement approved last week by the Coast Guard, BP P.L.C. won't be required to clean up oil unless officials can prove it came from the blown-out well that caused the 2010 catastrophe - a link that the company concedes will be harder to establish as time passes and the oil degrades.