Friday, Jul 18th
Last update07:37:31 AM GMT
Internal documents from BP show that there were serious problems and safety concerns with the Deepwater Horizon rig far earlier than those the company described to Congress last week.
The problems involved the well casing and the blowout preventer, which are considered critical pieces in the chain of events that led to the disaster on the rig.
In fact, more oil is spilled from the delta's network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a major ecological catastrophe caused by oil that has poured from a leak triggered by the explosion that wrecked BP's Deepwater Horizon rig last month.
That disaster, which claimed the lives of 11 rig workers, has made headlines round the world. By contrast, little information has emerged about the damage inflicted on the Niger delta. Yet the destruction there provides us with a far more accurate picture of the price we have to pay for drilling oil today.
As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heads to Washington in a much-feted effort to restore damaged ties with the United States, new tensions in East Jerusalem threaten to rekindle a diplomatic row over Jewish building beyond the Green Line in the city.
On Saturday lawyers served eviction notices to two Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, a focus of clashes between Arab residents and settlers.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is gaining a reputation for funding technologies designed to roll out mass sterilization and vaccination programs around the world. One of the programs recently funded by the foundation is a sterilization program that would use sharp blasts of ultrasound directed against a man's scrotum to render him infertile for six months. It might accurately be called a "temporary castration" technology. Read more about it here: LINK...
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An officer of the U.S. Capitol Police has leaked reports of UFO and hyperdimensional extraterrestrial spacecraft flyovers over the U.S. Capitol, using her active email account as a U.S. Capitol Police officer on the staff of the U.S. Senate Sergeant-at-Arms. The U.S. Capitol Police officer, who has requested anonymity, made available the leaked reports, written by a former U.S. Capitol employee, in 2008 and 2009 to researcher and author Robert M. Stanley after Mr. Stanley made research inquiries of the U.S. Capitol Police regarding Wilbur “Will” Allen’s documentation of 2002 UFO/ET flyovers over the U.S. Capitol.
As America's War On Terror morphs into an endless assault on civil and human rights, the technophilic fantasies of our masters, and the corporations whom they lovingly serve, even amidst the doom and gloom of capitalism's global economic collapse, have taken extraordinary steps to ensure that the "state of exception" spawned by the 9/11 provocation remains a permanent feature of daily life here in the heimat.
Senior British officials supported the controversial decision to disband the Iraqi army following the occupation of Baghdad, the US head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) has told the Chilcot inquiry.
In a detailed written submission, ambassador Paul Bremer dismissed claims that Saddam Hussein's forces could have been used to hold the disintegrating administration together.
About 10 percent of the 240 detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, when President Obama took office were "leaders, operatives and facilitators involved in plots against the United States," but the majority were low-level fighters, according to a previously undisclosed government report. About 5 percent of the detainees could not be categorized at all.
The Transocean manager of the doomed Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig told a board of inquiry on Thursday that BP officials aboard the rig wanted to skip required pressure tests and tried to impose a drilling plan sent from BP's Houston headquarters that had not been approved by the federal government's Minerals Management Service.
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