In response to “a series of serious accidents and near-hits within the global organization,” Transocean, the world’s largest offshore drilling company, commissioned the risk management company Lloyd’s Register to investigate its Houston headquarters and three other gulf rigs besides the Deepwater Horizon to assess its safety culture.

The confidential internal reports, obtained by The New York Times, offer an unusually candid view of safety and maintenance concerns within the world’s largest offshore drilling company, and they indicate that the problems highlighted in earlier reports provided to The Times about the Deepwater Horizon were not limited to that rig, which exploded on April 20, leading to an oil spill that is estimated to have poured at least four million barrels of oil into the gulf.

Transocean has 14 rigs now operating in the Gulf of Mexico, and 139 worldwide, and these documents raise concerns about locations beyond Deepwater Horizon, especially the three additional gulf rigs that were recently investigated. In fact, one of those rigs is being leased by BP to drill one of the two relief wells near the Deepwater Horizon site.

The new documents also shed light on one of the lingering mysteries of the disaster: why the rig sank. They indicate that there were problems with the Deepwater Horizon’s ballast system that was responsible for keeping the rig afloat and stable. If the rig had not sunk, the leak might not have occurred. Federal investigators have questioned whether deferred maintenance and other factors had played a role in the sinking of the rig.

A previous set of worker-safety reports provided to The Times were specific to the Deepwater Horizon. The new documents draw from analyses of three other rigs in the gulf and attempt to provide an overview for the entire North American division of the Transocean fleet.

The safety concerns cited in the company’s assessment of its North American division are supplemented by newly released internal reports concerning the Deepwater Horizon’s equipment. These equipment reports identify dozens of deficiencies, including some relating to the rig’s blowout preventer, and some that are categorized as “critical equipment items that may lead to loss of life, serious injury or environmental damage as a result of inadequate use and/or failure of equipment.”

“Without a doubt, previous incidents and near-hits experienced throughout the organization were as a result of multiple causes and many contributory factors,” said the summary report, which gave an overview of the company’s North American Division and draws from investigations of Transocean’s Marianas, Discoverer Clear Leader, GSF Development Driller II and Deepwater Horizon drilling rigs.

This is not the first report of the Deepwater Horizon experiencing problems with its ballast system. In May 2008, Transocean was forced to evacuate more than 70 workers after problems with the ballast system flooded part of the rig, causing it to list to its side, federal records show.

A lack of hands-on experience for workers and managers has contributed to safety concerns at the company, and a stifling bureaucracy imposed by onshore management has led to widespread resentment among rig workers, the investigators found.

Nearly 40 percent of workers interviewed on the four rigs said that past problems were typically investigated by company officials strictly to attribute blame.

“It ticks me off when someone fails or has an incident; they focus on the paper rather than the process that was gone through,” said a worker from the Discoverer Clear Leader.

Another worker on Transocean’s Marianas rig said that the safety manual seemed to be “written for the courtroom, not the oil field.”

The reports are likely to broaden the discussion of blame for the April 20 explosion, which killed 11 workers. BP, which was leasing the Deepwater Horizon from Transocean at the time of the explosion, has been under the harshest glare for its role, but the Justice Department has said that its criminal investigation of the disaster will look at the role of the many companies involved.

About 43 percent of workers on the four rigs expressed fears of reprisals for reporting problems, the documents said. About 54 percent of Deepwater Horizon workers cited these fears, while about 61 percent of workers on the Marianas did so.

Some workers said the company was systematically deferring maintenance to save money.

“This rig is getting $550,000 per day; unless it’s a sink that needs fixing it isn’t getting fixed,” said a worker from the Marianas about the maintenance concerns. “They won’t send the rig to the shipyard for major refurb that is required in certain areas.”

The investigators who visited the four rigs in March concluded that many crew members and front-line supervisors were too readily promoted without sufficient on-the-job experience to appreciate the hazards. “Front-line crews are potentially working with a mind-set that they believe they are fully aware of all the hazards when it is highly likely that they are not,” the investigators said, adding that the workload, and thus the risks, on the rigs was increasing.

After reviewing the new documents, Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington and the chairwoman of the Subcommittee on Employment and Workplace Safety, voiced concern.

“These documents are more evidence that despite the growing count of worker deaths and safety violations, the oil and gas industry still just doesn’t get it,” she said. “They need to change their worker-safety culture, and I am pretty sure we can’t count on them to do it by themselves.”

She added, “The oil and gas industry is not the same as a mom-and-pop grocery, and they can’t be treated the same.”

Lou Colasuonno, a spokesman for Transocean, wrote in an e-mail that the company was committed to safety and maintenance and that it proactively commissioned independent employee surveys and rig condition assessments.

“Reading the complete reports makes it abundantly clear that that both studies were positive and were designed specifically to identify strengths and weaknesses — a critical step in evaluating performance,” he wrote.

“Overall maintenance on the Deepwater Horizon met or exceeded regulatory and industry standards, and the company’s proactive review process helped the Deepwater Horizon log seven consecutive years without a single lost time incident or major environmental event prior to this incident.”

He declined to specify the series of “serious accidents and near-hits” that motivated the safety investigations.

The safety reports cite a variety of positive findings about Transocean. “Despite several rig management changes on board the rigs visited, rig leadership was generally praised by the work force,” one said.

Almost 87 percent of workers said they believed that there was enough time to do their work according to rules and procedures.

“Rig management and supervisors were generally seen as approachable, set a good example of the company commitment to safety, and were generally highly visible,” the investigators said.

But their praise often came with a certain ambivalence.

“Generally, the work force thought there was a sufficient number of staff to manage safety,” one report concluded before adding, “There were, however, some questions surrounding the retention of skilled personnel, competency levels for some personnel, and of processes in place for competency development and assurance.”

Although high levels of trust were reported at the rig level, “there was a significant level of mistrust between the rigs and the beach,” the report said, referring to onshore management.

Around 46 percent of workers on the four rigs said that some of the work force was uncomfortable with calling a “time out for safety.” Deepwater Horizon workers polled at about the same rate on this issue.

Transocean’s equipment documents reveal for the first time the severity of the maintenance issues that plagued the Deepwater Horizon, and they indicate that the company was aware of the consequences of the problems.

These new documents refer to at least 36 pieces of equipment in ill repair on the Deepwater Horizon that “may lead to loss of life, serious injury or environmental damage as a result of inadequate use and/or failure of equipment.”

The new equipment documents indicate that an inspection of the Deepwater Horizon rig conducted just days before the April 20 accident found various problems with hydraulic relays that controlled the rig’s watertight doors, two of which had to be opened and closed by hand.

Of the four rigs investigated, the Development Driller II is now being used by BP to drill one of the two relief wells near the Deepwater Horizon. The Marianas was the original rig that was drilling BP’s Macondo well before being damaged in a hurricane. Despite having been built in 2009, the Discoverer Clear Leader had “a few notable safety related incidents on the rig during its relatively short operational history.” It is now being used by BP for oil containment at the Deepwater Horizon site.

It was not clear where the other rigs cited in the safety reports are operating now.

(Ian Urbina, New York Times, 4August2010)

Exactly.

The way the Mount Olive school district sees it, its students should not be getting by with D’s on their report cards, either. This fall, there will no longer be any D’s, only A’s, B’s, C’s and F’s.

“D’s are simply not useful in society,” said Larrie Reynolds, the Mount Olive superintendent, who led the campaign against D’s as a way to raise the bar and motivate students to work harder. “It’s a throwaway grade. No one wants to hire a D-anything, so why would we have D-students and give them credit for it?”

The no-D policy, which was adopted by the school board last week, has led to a flurry of Facebook messages from students calling it the worst idea ever, and has been debated on soccer fields and around swimming pools in this suburban township in northwestern New Jersey. Even some teachers have expressed concerns that it may result in more students failing.

“I really don’t like it,” said Chris Radler, 13, who is entering ninth grade; he said it was unfair and would increase the pressure on students. “If you’re a little bit less than a C, but not quite an F, you’re still going to fail. Some kids aren’t at that level yet. They aren’t able to get that upper grade.”

But parents like Christine Priest, a mother of six, applaud the new policy for reinforcing a message that they have long taught at home: D’s are not good enough. “With my kids, we always told them a D is an F,” she said. “D just wasn’t enough of an effort.”

Under the old system, students could pass with a 65 — 389 of the 1,500 students at Mount Olive High had a “D” on their final report cards in June — but now anything lower than a 70 will be considered failure.

While few high schools have banned D’s outright as Mount Olive has, some have sought to tamp down grade inflation by quietly tightening their standards over the years. Several New Jersey high schools, for instance, have raised the minimum for D’s to 70, which is traditionally the C-minus range, with anything below deemed an F.

Mount Olive, an above-average school in a middle-class community, is developing a support system to help students meet the tougher grading standard. When students receive a failing grade on a test, a paper or a homework assignment in the future, they will have three days to repeat the work for a C, and their parents will be notified by phone or e-mail.

Students who continue to fail will be placed on a “watch list” to receive extra-help classes, as well as tutoring from other students. If they need to make up a failed course, they will be given the option of attending an evening school, known as “Sunset Academy,” that will charge a fee of $150 per class.

The total cost of these support efforts to the district is expected to be less than $10,000, school officials said.

Max Werner, 17, an A-student whose father, Mark, is president of the school board, said he and his friends liked the no-D policy because no one should be satisfied with such a low mark. “People are going to have to try harder,” he said. “It’s not like a nice college is going to see all D’s on a report card and want to accept that student.”

Dr. Reynolds said he used a similar grading policy — “A, B, or do it over” — when teaching college classes in Wichita, Kan., in the late 1990s. About half of his students in those classes had to rewrite their initial papers, he recalled, but eventually nearly everyone was turning in work that merited an A or B. “I have never given less than a B,” he said.

In summer school last week, 79 Mount Olive High students were repeating classes they had failed during the year. Mark Fiedorczyk, the summer school principal, said he expected to see an increase next summer because of the no-D policy.

Still, Mr. Fiedorczyk, who teaches seventh-grade science during the year, said the higher standard was just what some students needed. In June, he handed out D’s to a half-dozen students, all of whom, he said, were capable of C’s if they had tried harder. Instead, they had skipped homework and projects, and showed up unprepared for tests.

“I have kids who walk the borderline,” he said. “They know it. They admit it. They calculate what they need to get the D.”

At which, another teacher joked: “Then they’ll turn around and say they can’t do math.”

For Aphrodite Georgakopoulos, 16, the no-D policy means she will have to work a lot harder to avoid summer school again. She is repeating world history and Algebra 2 after getting lazy about assignments or just giving up in frustration, she said.

“It’s not like I can’t do it; it’s just that I won’t push myself,” she said. “I don’t know why. I need someone to be constantly on top of me, making sure I do everything.”

Down the hallway, Sean Robinson, 17, who is retaking Spanish, said he hoped that students would feel better about themselves in a D-free school, and that Mount Olive’s higher standard would raise its profile in the region.

“Normally, I just wouldn’t try, but I feel like if I did badly, I’d bring down my school’s G.P.A.,” he said. “My mom will be happy.”

(Michael Appleton, New York Times, 8August2010)

High levels of toxic pollutants in Alberta’s Athabasca River system are linked to oilsands mining, researchers have found.

The findings counter the reports by a joint industry-government panel that the pollutant levels are due to natural sources rather than human development.

Mercury, thallium and other pollutants accumulated in higher concentrations in snowpacks and waterways near and downstream from oilsands development than in more remote areas, said a study to be published Monday afternoon in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Upstream and undeveloped sites exposed directly to the McMurray Geologic Formation, the natural source of the oilsands, did not show high levels of pollutants.

The study led by Erin Kelly and David Schindler of the University of Alberta also found that levels of the pollutants cadmium, copper, lead, mercury, nickel, silver and zinc exceeded federal and provincial guidelines for the protection of aquatic life in melted snow or water collected near or downstream from oilsands mining.

Researchers at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., and Juneau, Alaska-based Oceana, a non-profit group focused on water quality issues, also contributed to the report. The study was funded by the Tides Foundation and the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation, two non-profit groups with an interest in environmental projects.

Residents downstream from the oilsands have expressed concerns that pollution in the river may be causing increased cancer rates.

However, the Regional Aquatic Monitoring Program, a joint industry-government environmental body that monitors water in the Athabasca River and its tributaries, has reported the pollutant levels occur naturally due to erosion of the natural geologic formation that contains the oilsands and are not caused by human activity.

Goal to test claims of monitoring program

The authors of Monday’s study said they wanted to test those claims.

The Regional Aquatic Monitoring Program’s findings had been questioned in the past, but critics did not have any data from independent studies to compare to the program’s data, the paper said.

The new findings confirm “the serious defects” of the monitoring program, the study concluded. It added that detailed monitoring, including the ability to distinguish the sources of the contaminants, is “essential” to control the potential impact of pollutants on human health.

The researchers collected water from more than 35 sites in February and June 2008 along the Athabasca River, its tributaries, the Athabasca Delta and Lake Athabasca. They accumulated winter snowpack from 31 other sites in the region in March 2008.

The researchers chose sampling sites upstream and downstream from oilsands mining, with both within 50 kilometres of oilsands developments and near undeveloped oilsands sites.

They then tested the samples for levels of 13 elements listed as priority pollutants under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Water Act.

(CBC, 30August2010)

There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.

Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.

All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.

Only the fat cats change — not their methods and not their pet bugaboos (taxes, corporate regulation, organized labor, and government “handouts” to the poor, unemployed, ill and elderly). Even the sources of their fortunes remain fairly constant. Koch Industries began with oil in the 1930s and now also spews an array of industrial products, from Dixie cups to Lycra, not unlike DuPont’s portfolio of paint and plastics. Sometimes the biological DNA persists as well. The Koch brothers’ father, Fred, was among the select group chosen to serve on the Birch Society’s top governing body. In a recorded 1963 speech that survives in a University of Michigan archive, he can be heard warning of “a takeover” of America in which Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the president is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.” That rant could be delivered as is at any Tea Party rally today.

Last week the Kochs were shoved unwillingly into the spotlight by the most comprehensive journalistic portrait of them yet, written by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. Her article caused a stir among those in Manhattan’s liberal elite who didn’t know that David Koch, widely celebrated for his cultural philanthropy, is not merely another rich conservative Republican but the founder of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which, as Mayer writes with some understatement, “has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement’s inception.” To New Yorkers who associate the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center with the New York City Ballet, it’s startling to learn that the Texas branch of that foundation’s political arm, known simply as Americans for Prosperity, gave its Blogger of the Year Award to an activist who had called President Obama “cokehead in chief.”

The other major sponsor of the Tea Party movement is Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, which, like Americans for Prosperity, is promoting events in Washington this weekend. Under its original name, Citizens for a Sound Economy, FreedomWorks received $12 million of its own from Koch family foundations. Using tax records, Mayer found that Koch-controlled foundations gave out $196 million from 1998 to 2008, much of it to conservative causes and institutions. That figure doesn’t include $50 million in Koch Industries lobbying and $4.8 million in campaign contributions by its political action committee, putting it first among energy company peers like Exxon Mobil and Chevron. Since tax law permits anonymous personal donations to nonprofit political groups, these figures may understate the case. The Kochs surely match the in-kind donations the Tea Party receives in free promotion 24/7 from Murdoch’s Fox News, where both Beck and Palin are on the payroll.

The New Yorker article stirred up the right, too. Some of Mayer’s blogging detractors unwittingly upheld the premise of her article (titled “Covert Operations”) by conceding that they have been Koch grantees. None of them found any factual errors in her 10,000 words. Many of them tried to change the subject to George Soros, the billionaire backer of liberal causes. But Soros is a publicity hound who is transparent about where he shovels his money. And like many liberals — selflessly or foolishly, depending on your point of view — he supports causes that are unrelated to his business interests and that, if anything, raise his taxes.

This is hardly true of the Kochs. When David Koch ran to the right of Reagan as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket (it polled 1 percent), his campaign called for the abolition not just of Social Security, federal regulatory agencies and welfare but also of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and public schools — in other words, any government enterprise that would either inhibit his business profits or increase his taxes. He hasn’t changed. As Mayer details, Koch-supported lobbyists, foundations and political operatives are at the center of climate-science denial — a cause that forestalls threats to Koch Industries’ vast fossil fuel business. While Koch foundations donate to cancer hospitals like Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, Koch Industries has been lobbying to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from classifying another product important to its bottom line, formaldehyde, as a “known carcinogen” in humans (which it is).

Tea Partiers may share the Kochs’ detestation of taxes, big government and Obama. But there’s a difference between mainstream conservatism and a fringe agenda that tilts completely toward big business, whether on Wall Street or in the Gulf of Mexico, while dismantling fundamental government safety nets designed to protect the unemployed, public health, workplace safety and the subsistence of the elderly.

Yet inexorably the Koch agenda is morphing into the G.O.P. agenda, as articulated by current Republican members of Congress, including the putative next speaker of the House, John Boehner, and Tea Party Senate candidates like Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and the new kid on the block, Alaska’s anti-Medicaid, anti-unemployment insurance Palin protégé, Joe Miller. Their program opposes a federal deficit, but has no objection to running up trillions in red ink in tax cuts to corporations and the superrich; apologizes to corporate malefactors like BP and derides money put in escrow for oil spill victims as a “slush fund”; opposes the extension of unemployment benefits; and calls for a freeze on federal regulations in an era when abuses in the oil, financial, mining, pharmaceutical and even egg industries (among others) have been outrageous.

The Koch brothers must be laughing all the way to the bank knowing that working Americans are aiding and abetting their selfish interests. And surely Murdoch is snickering at those protesting the “ground zero mosque.” Last week on “Fox and Friends,” the Bush administration flacks Dan Senor and Dana Perino attacked a supposedly terrorism-tainted Saudi prince whose foundation might contribute to the Islamic center. But as “The Daily Show” keeps pointing out, these Fox bloviators never acknowledge that the evil prince they’re bashing, Walid bin Talal, is not only the biggest non-Murdoch shareholder in Fox News’s parent company (he owns 7 percent of News Corporation) and the recipient of Murdoch mammoth investments in Saudi Arabia but also the subject of lionization elsewhere on Fox.

No less a Murdoch factotum than Neil Cavuto slobbered over bin Talal in a Fox Business Channel interview as recently as January, with nary a question about his supposed terrorist ties. Instead, bin Talal praised Obama’s stance on terrorism and even endorsed the Democrats’ goal of universal health insurance. Do any of the Fox-watching protestors at the “ground zero mosque” know that Fox’s profits are flowing to a Obama-sympathizing Saudi billionaire in bed with Murdoch? As Jon Stewart summed it up, the protestors who want “to cut off funding to the ‘terror mosque’ ” are aiding that funding by watching Fox and enhancing bin Talal’s News Corp. holdings.

When wolves of Murdoch’s ingenuity and the Kochs’ stealth have been at the door of our democracy in the past, Democrats have fought back fiercely. Franklin Roosevelt’s triumphant 1936 re-election campaign pummeled the Liberty League as a Republican ally eager to “squeeze the worker dry in his old age and cast him like an orange rind into the refuse pail.” When John Kennedy’s patriotism was assailed by Birchers calling for impeachment, he gave a major speech denouncing their “crusades of suspicion.”

And Obama? So far, sadly, this question answers itself.

(Frank Rich, New York Times, 28August2010)

BP, qui a déjà dépensé 2,49 milliards d’euros pour la marée noire, était l’actionnaire principal de Deepwater Horizon (65 %) aux côtés de la compagnie pétrolière américaine Anadarko (25 %) et du conglomérat japonais Mitsui (10 %). Société américaine basée en Suisse, Transocean était propriétaire, opérateur et responsable de la sécurité de la structure métallique. Le groupe américain de services Halliburton avait cimenté les appareils de sondages, la petite société texane Cameron International avait fourni les obturateurs anti-éruptions destinés à protéger les équipements contre l’énorme pression à grandes profondeurs.

Le cours en Bourse de ces entités a d’abord souffert de l’inquiétude des marchés face aux poursuites éventuelles de BP contre ses partenaires. En effet, dans la semaine ayant suivi la destruction de la plate-forme, le 20 avril, le groupe britannique avait affirmé que Transocean serait obligée de prendre en charge l’essentiel de la facture, avant de faire marche arrière.

Les milieux financiers se sont rangés aux arguments des partenaires de BP. Pour Transocean, “la production de gaz et de pétrole commence et finit avec l’opérateur ultime, BP”. Anadarko et Mitsui ont eu beau jeu de souligner que leur rôle se limitait à l’apport de fonds. Pour sa part, Halliburton a souligné qu’il avait suivi à la lettre le cahier des charges fixé par BP. Enfin, plus que centenaire, Cameron a mis en avant sa longue expérience et son bilan irréprochable en matière de sécurité.

Casting d’enfer

Le recul de ces groupes à la corbeille n’est pas dû à leurs rapports avec BP, mais à la défiance envers l’ensemble du secteur pétrolier (baisse attendue des commandes, hausse du coût des mesures de sécurité et de protection de l’environnement à venir…). Pour le reste, si BP a été contraint de renoncer au versement d’un dividende, Transocean a choyé ses actionnaires en leur distribuant 1 milliard de dollars ! A l’inverse de BP, entité britannique mais de facto américaine, ses associés ont bénéficié du réseau d’influence politique au casting d’enfer bâti par les pétroliers américain. L’administration Obama a concentré ses attaques sur BP, épargnant les autres entreprises.

Pour les deux partenaires du britannique, l’essentiel est de se dégager de toute responsabilité. Ils ont certes participé à l’élaboration du budget, du design du puit et de l’échéancier, et ils ont été informés des progrès de l’exploration. En vertu de l’accord d’association, Anadarko et Mitsui sont responsables à hauteur de leur participation, sauf à démontrer l’acte de négligence de la part du chef de file. Pour n’avoir rien à payer, ces dernières ont délibérément chargé BP. Par ailleurs, les obligations contractuelles des autres sous-traitants, juridiquement bien définies, diffèrent selon les projets et la culture d’entreprise du client.

En attendant le colmatage de la fuite, les concurrents de BP profitent de ses déboires. Ainsi, dans le grand projet d’exploration de la mer de Chine méridionale, la société britannique a dû accepter de laisser à son associé Chevron la direction des opérations.

(Marc Roche, Le Monde, 5July2010)

Towering 15 stories above the water’s surface, Thunder Horse was meant to be the company’s crowning glory, the embodiment of its bold gamble to outpace its competitors in finding and exploiting the vast reserves of oil beneath the waters of the gulf.

Instead, the rig, which was supposed to produce about 20 percent of the gulf’s oil output, became a symbol of BP’s hubris. A valve installed backward had caused the vessel to flood during the hurricane, jeopardizing the project before any oil had even been pumped. Other problems, discovered later, included a welding job so shoddy that it left underwater pipelines brittle and full of cracks.

“It could have been catastrophic,” said Gordon A. Aaker Jr., a senior engineering consultant on the project. “You would have lost a lot of oil a mile down before you would have even known. It could have been a helluva spill — much like the Deepwater Horizon.”

The problems at Thunder Horse were not an anomaly, but a warning that BP was taking too many risks and cutting corners in pursuit of growth and profits, according to analysts, competitors and former employees. Despite a catalog of crises and near misses in recent years, BP has been chronically unable or unwilling to learn from its mistakes, an examination of its record shows.

“They were very arrogant and proud and in denial,” said Steve Arendt, a safety specialist who assisted the panel appointed by BP to investigate the company’s refineries after a deadly 2005 explosion at its Texas City, Tex., facility. “It is possible they were fooled by their success.”

Indeed, there was a great deal of success to admire. In little more than a decade, BP grew from a middleweight into the industry’s second-largest company, behind only Exxon Mobil, with soaring profits, fat dividends and a share price to match.

From its base in London, the company struck bold deals in politically volatile areas like Angola and Azerbaijan and pushed technology to the limit in the remotest reaches of Alaska and the deepest waters of the Gulf of Mexico — “the tough stuff that others cannot or choose not to do,” as its chief executive, Tony Hayward, once put it.

The company also led an industry wave of cost-cutting and consolidation. It took over American competitors like Amoco and Atlantic Richfield and eliminated tens of thousands of jobs in several rounds, streamlining management but forcing the company to rely more heavily on outside contractors.

For a long time, BP’s strategy seemed to pay off. But on April 20, the nightmare situation occurred: the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded, killing 11 workers and sending millions of gallons of oil gushing from BP’s Macondo well like so much black poison.

Although the accident is still under investigation, preliminary findings by Congressional investigators indicate that BP made a series of decisions that compounded the chances of disaster.

BP declined to make Mr. Hayward or other executives available for this article. But in an interview last month, Robert Dudley, the BP board member now in charge of the gulf spill response, denied that the accident reflected a corporate disregard for safety.

“I think we will find that this was an incredibly complicated set of events with individual decisions and equipment failures that led to a very complicated industrial accident,” he said.

BP is hardly the only oil company that has taken on difficult projects with a shaky safety net. But the company’s attitude toward risk stands in contrast to that of its competitors, most notably Exxon Mobil, whose searing experience with the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 spurred a wholesale change in its approach to safety.

“You can have the best intentions in the world, you can have the best equipment in the world, but it’s a combination of intentions, equipment and judgment that keeps accidents out of the workplace,” said Joseph H. Bryant, who ran BP’s operations in Angola from 2000 to 2004 and who is now chief executive of Cobalt International Energy. “If you are going to ask people to innovate, you’d better make sure that they know that any risks they take are manageable.”

A Focus on the Basics

When Tony Hayward became BP’s chief executive in May 2007, he promised to get the company back to basics.

One of his first moves was to remove the modern art adorning the company’s swanky London headquarters, including an endless video of gently waving corn projected onto one wall. In its place went prosaic photographs of BP service stations, platforms and pipelines.

A plain-spoken geologist and longtime company man, Mr. Hayward dispensed with the limousine used by his socially prominent predecessor, John Browne, and closed the concierge desk in the lobby that had helped employees with dry cleaning and theater tickets.

“BP makes its money by someone, somewhere, every day putting on boots, coveralls, a hard hat and glasses, and going out and turning valves,” Mr. Hayward said in a speech at Stanford Business School last year. “And we’d sort of lost track of that.”

Mr. Hayward also pledged to fix the safety problems that contributed to the downfall of his predecessor. Though the company would continue doing the “tough stuff,” he declared, it would make safety its “No. 1 priority.”

In the realm of personal safety, Mr. Hayward expanded on Mr. Browne’s initiatives. Visitors today see signs at company offices exhorting workers not to walk and carry hot coffee at the same time, to stick to marked walkways in parking lots and to grasp banisters while climbing the stairs. Employees with company cars must take defensive driving courses.

Mr. Hayward also set up a new companywide management system to evaluate risks, standardize safety practices and improve decision-making.

In a memorandum to employees on Friday, he noted that before Deepwater Horizon, the company’s safety record had been improving. “This accident has been a terrible exception to that trend and we must learn the lessons from it,” he wrote. “But at the same time, it does not invalidate all the hard work you have put in to improve our safety standards around the world. Safety is our first priority. It will remain so.”

But American regulators and some members of Congress say that despite such talk, the company continues its risky behavior.

“The way safety is measured is generally around worker injuries and days away from work, and that measure of safety is irrelevant when you are looking at the likelihood that a facility like an oil refinery could explode,” said David Michaels, assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health. “This is comparable to saying that an airline is safe because the pilots and mechanics haven’t been injured.”

A Story Begun in Persia

BP was born in 1908 when a rich Englishman named William Knox D’Arcy struck oil in Iran and formed the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Treating the locals as little more than imperial subjects, the company, partly owned by the British government, expanded across the region, its fortunes intertwined with those of the British Empire.

But as oil-rich countries around the world began nationalizing their oil fields, British Petroleum, as it later became known, was forced to retreat and find new strategies along with the rest of the industry.

In 1995, the British government sold the last of its stake in the company and the charismatic Mr. Browne took over.

A highly visible supporter of the Royal Opera House, the National Gallery and Prime Minister Tony Blair, Mr. Browne transformed the company into a global behemoth, boldly acquiring properties around the world and rechristening it BP.

Unlike some of his more cautious competitors, Mr. Browne ignored small projects and went after the riskiest, most expensive and potentially most lucrative ventures — “elephants,” in industry jargon. Under him, BP’s share price more than doubled and its cash dividend tripled, making it a darling of investors.

But even as he became the toast of Britain’s business world and was made a knight and member of the House of Lords, Mr. Browne was ruthlessly slashing costs. He outsourced many operations and fired tens of thousands of employees, including many engineers.

Tom Kirchmaier, a lecturer in strategy at the Manchester Business School, said that Mr. Browne tried to run BP like a financial company, rotating managers into new jobs with tough profit targets and then moving them before they had to deal with the consequences. The troubled Texas City refinery, for example, had five managers in six years.

Mr. Browne, now advising Britain’s coalition government on its cost-cutting campaign, declined to comment for this article. In his new autobiography, “Beyond Business,” he said, “I transformed a company, challenged a sector, and prompted political and business leaders to change.”

Mr. Browne resigned under pressure in 2007, his reputation tarnished by a lie he told in court papers about his relationship with a male companion.

However, Mr. Browne’s fall from grace really began on March 23, 2005, when 15 people died and more than 170 were injured in America’s worst industrial accident in a generation: a huge fire and explosion at Texas City.

A Troubled Workplace

Acquired by BP in the Amoco purchase, the Texas City plant was America’s second-largest refinery, turning 460,000 barrels of crude oil a day into gasoline. But the facility, built in 1934, was poorly maintained and long starved of capital investment.

“We have never seen a site where the notion ‘I could die today’ was so real,” the Telos Group, a consulting firm hired to examine conditions at the plant, said in a report two months before the accident.

The explosion occurred when a 170-foot tower was being filled with liquid hydrocarbons. Because of poor communication among several workers who had been on 12-hour shifts for more than a month straight, no one noticed that the tower was filled too high.

A 20-foot geyser of unstable chemicals shot into the sky, and the vapor ignited when a contractor, trying to get away, repeatedly tried to start the engine on his stalling pickup truck.

The subsequent investigations were scathing. The explosion was “caused by organizational and safety deficiencies at all levels of BP,” the United States Chemical Safety Board concluded in one report.

The government ultimately found more than 300 safety violations, and BP agreed to pay a then record $21 million in fines.

A year later, there was a new calamity: 267,000 gallons of oil leaked from BP’s network of pipelines in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska.

It was the worst spill ever on the North Slope, and once again, the cause was preventable. Investigators found widespread corrosion in several miles of under-maintained and poorly inspected pipes. BP eventually paid more than $20 million in fines and restitution.

While these two accidents drew most public attention, serious problems were also brewing offshore, at BP’s Thunder Horse platform.

Mr. Aaker, the engineering consultant who worked on it, said BP’s bosses rushed construction of the intricately designed vessel, moving it to the gulf before it was ready to “demonstrate to their shareholders that the project was on time and on schedule.”

Once the rig was at sea, several hundred people at a time frantically worked to complete it, sleeping in cramped, chaotic conditions on board a temporary encampment of ships.

“It was like having the plumbers, the electricians and the bricklayers come to a construction site at the same time as they are laying the concrete,” said Mr. Aaker, who is now assisting the House Energy and Commerce Committee in its investigation of Deepwater Horizon. “This was not methodical.”

Nor was it safe.

The near sinking of Thunder Horse in 2005 was caused by a shockingly simple mistake: a check valve had been installed backward, and that caused water to flood into, rather than out of, the rig when it heated up during the hurricane.

After costly repairs to fix that damage, BP discovered a more significant problem: rudimentary mistakes in the welding of pipes in the underwater manifold, which connects dozens of wells and helps carry the oil back to the platform, had caused dangerous cracks and breaks.

Had the well been active, the damaged pipes would have caused a major oil spill. As it was, the company had to remotely rip out, retrieve and fix dozens of complex and heavy pieces of equipment lying on the sea floor, some weighing more than 400 tons.

Altogether, the blunders cost BP and its minority partner, Exxon Mobil, hundreds of millions of dollars in repairs and set back production, today at 300,000 barrels of oil and oil equivalents a day, by three years.

Although the Deepwater Horizon accident involved an exploration rig, not a production platform, a similar carelessness and disregard for safety was evident in BP’s decisions there, according to preliminary findings by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “In effect, it appears that BP repeatedly chose risky procedures in order to reduce costs and save time and made minimal efforts to contain the added risk,” wrote Henry A. Waxman, the committee chairman, and Bart Stupak, chairman of its subcommittee on oversight and investigations.

BP took a different sort of risk in Russia, forming a 50-50 joint venture in 2003 with that nation’s unpredictable oligarchs to gain access to the vast resources beneath the Siberian taiga.

The deal, which accounted for about one-quarter of BP’s global oil reserves, nearly collapsed in 2008, when the Russian government sought tighter control over its energy sector. After a nasty public fight, BP was forced to hand over operational control of the venture to its Russian partners, although it continues to reap vast profits from it.

BP stepped into another tricky political situation last year, when Iraq offered foreign companies $2 a barrel to help it increase production from its oil fields, which had suffered from years of war and neglect. BP’s competitors blanched at the low price, but Mr. Hayward teamed up with a Chinese state-owned company and accepted the deal.

The chairman of a rival company was so enraged that he called Mr. Hayward and demanded: “Tony, have you gone mad?” BP’s move forced other companies to agree to similar terms. As one analyst noted, it was “disastrous to profitability” for the industry.

Old Habits Die Hard

Time and again, BP has insisted that it has learned how to balance risk and safety, efficiency and profit. Yet the evidence suggests that fundamental change has been elusive.

Revisiting Texas City in 2009, inspectors from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration found more than 700 safety violations and proposed a record fine of $87.4 million — topping the earlier record set by BP in the 2005 accident. Most of the penalties, the agency said, were because BP had failed to live up to the previous settlement fully.

In March of this year, OSHA found 62 violations at BP’s Ohio refinery, proposing $3 million more in penalties.

“Senior management told us they are very serious about safety, but we observed that they haven’t translated their words into safe working procedures and practices, and they have difficulty applying the lessons learned from refinery to refinery or even from within refineries,” said Mr. Michaels, the OSHA administrator.

BP is contesting OSHA’s allegations, saying it has made substantial improvements at both facilities.

Accidents have also continued to plague BP’s pipelines in Alaska. Most recently, on May 25, a power failure led to a leak that overwhelmed a storage tank and spilled about 200,000 gallons of oil — the third-largest spill on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System.

Mr. Dudley, the BP executive overseeing the gulf response, said it was unfair to blame cultural failings at BP for the string of accidents.

“Everyone realized we had to operate safely and reliably, particularly in the U.S., to restore a reputation that was damaged by the accident at Texas City,” he said. “So I don’t accept, and have not witnessed, this cutting of corners and the sacrifice of safety to drive results.”

Mr. Waxman, whose committee is investigating the Deepwater Horizon accident, has a very different view. When Mr. Hayward testified a month ago, the representative upbraided him: “There is a complete contradiction between BP’s words and deeds. You were brought in to make safety the top priority of BP. But under your leadership, BP has taken the most extreme risks.”

“BP cut corner after corner to save a million dollars here and a few hours there,” Mr. Waxman said. “And now the whole Gulf Coast is paying the price.”

(reported by Sarah Lyall, Clifford Krauss and Jad Mouawad and written by Sarah Lyall, New York Times, 12July2010)

The results were in stark contrast to successes that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had heralded in recent years. When he ran for re-election in 2009, he boasted of state test scores that showed two-thirds of city students were passing English and 82 percent were passing math.

But state education officials said that performance was misleading because those scores were inflated by tests that had become easier to pass. The scores released on Wednesday were the first attempt to establish what the officials considered a more trustworthy measure of students’ abilities.

Merryl H. Tisch, the chancellor of the State Board of Regents, said she had encouraged teachers and parents to greet the news “not with disappointment and not with anger.”

“Now that we are facing the hard truth that not all of the gains were as advertised, we have to take a look at what we can do differently,” she said. “These results will finally provide real, unimpeachable evidence to be used for accountability.”

The falloff in passing rates occurred statewide. This year, 61 percent of state students were deemed passing, or at grade level, in math, compared with 86 percent last year. Students also performed dismally on the English tests, with 53 percent passing, down from 77 percent.

The scoring adjustment could raise questions about the precision of educational testing, even as policy makers across the country, including President Obama, are relying on tests to determine teachers’ pay and whether a school should be shut. In New York City, scores on state tests have been used to assign grades A through F to each school, as well as to determine principal and teacher bonuses.

And the results could cast doubts on the city’s improvements over the past several years; both the mayor and the schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, have used increases in state test scores as evidence that schools have improved.

“It certainly complicates the Bloomberg administration message, because the state test is completely unreliable,” said Michael J. Petrilli, a researcher with the Fordham Institute, a Washington-based research group.

New York State said the tests had become too easy, with some questions varying little from year to year, making it simple for teachers to prepare students because each test is made publicly available after it is given. So this year, the state made the questions less predictable and raised the number of correct answers needed to pass the tests, which are given to every student from the third through the eighth grades.

Last year, for example, a fourth grader had to get 37 out of 70 possible points on the math test to reach Level 3 (out of 4), or grade level. This year, a fourth grader needed to earn 51 out of 70 points to reach that level.

New York City officials said that if previous scores were adjusted to the new standards, the city would still show substantial progress over the past decade, and they noted that students had improved somewhat on federal tests in recent years.

“This doesn’t mean the kids did any worse — quite the contrary,” Mr. Bloomberg said at a news conference Wednesday afternoon. “What this is simply saying is that we’ve redefined what our objectives are for the kids.”

“Whether the new expectations will instigate all of us to try harder,” he added, “one can only hope.”

By last year’s standard of proficiency, students in New York City did improve slightly in math this year, but dropped a bit in English.

The mayor’s explanation is likely to offer little consolation to teachers and parents of students who once were considered proficient and now are deemed behind. Scores for districts and schools were released on Wednesday, with student scores available for parents next month.

The Bloomberg administration has relied on the exams to carry out one of its most contentious policies: requiring every student who scores at Level 1, the lowest, to attend summer school and pass a retest or repeat the grade.

This year, anticipating a drop in passing rates, the city sent more struggling students, about 27,000, to summer school. But the test results indicated that about 8,500 more should have been enrolled, the mayor said.

Mr. Bloomberg said that next year, education officials will tell principals to “keep an eye on these kids” to provide extra help. He dismissed a question about whether students in the past few years had been promoted before they were prepared for the next grade.

“You can make the case that we should have held back everybody,” he said. “I don’t know that there’s a standard where you should say, ‘We’re satisfied.’ ”

The city has made plans to assign grades to schools on a curve this year. But the grades are likely to fluctuate wildly — in many schools the percentage of students passing dropped by more than 50 percentage points.

At Public School 179 in the Bronx, for example, the percentage of third graders proficient in math plummeted to 21 percent, from 91 percent last year.

“We had to take several deep breaths,” said Sherry Font Williams, the principal.

Under the federal No Child Left Behind law, schools are required to show “adequate yearly progress” on tests or face being shut down. Testing experts say that has led many states to progressively make their tests easier.

Because of the drop-off, New York State is in danger of having far more schools labeled as failing, but has asked the federal Department of Education for an exception this year.

The drop-offs were most drastic for black and Latino students, as well as those with disabilities and those still learning English, primarily because many of the students had been just above the minimum proficiency rates under the old standards.

While the test scores paint a bleak portrait in New York City, urban districts upstate fared worse. In Rochester, just 25 percent of all students were at grade level in reading, compared with 56 percent last year. In Buffalo, 26 percent of eighth-grade students met the state’s standards in math, although 58 percent did so last year.

“It’s devastating how they presented it and how they are doing it,” said James A. Williams, the Buffalo superintendent. “This is moving the goal line. While we were running for a touchdown and we were at the 10-yard line, they moved the goal post 20 yards forward.”

(Jennifer Medina, New York Times, 28July2010)

The six-member panel of Coast Guard and Minerals Management Service officials pressed for answers about what occurred on the rig on April 20 before it exploded. They wanted to know who was in charge, and heard conflicting answers.

They pushed for more insight into an argument on the rig that day between a manager for BP, the well’s owner, and one for Transocean, the rig’s owner, and asked Curt R. Kuchta, the rig’s captain, how the crew knew who was in charge.

“It’s pretty well understood amongst the crew who’s in charge,” he said.

“How do they know that?” a Coast Guard investigator asked.

“I guess, I don’t know,” Captain Kuchta said. “But it’s pretty well — everyone knows.”

Looking annoyed, Capt. Hung Nguyen of the Coast Guard, one of the chief federal investigators, shook his head. The exchange confirmed an observation he had made earlier in the day at the hearing.

“A lot of activities seem not very tightly coordinated in the way that would make me comfortable,” he said. “Maybe that’s just the way of business out there.”

Investigators have focused on the minute-to-minute decisions and breakdowns to understand what led to the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, killing 11 people and setting off the largest oil spill in United States history and an environmental disaster. But the lack of coordination was not limited to the day of the explosion.

New government and BP documents, interviews with experts and testimony by witnesses provide the clearest indication to date that a hodgepodge of oversight agencies granted exceptions to rules, allowed risks to accumulate and made a disaster more likely on the rig, particularly with a mix of different companies operating on the Deepwater whose interests were not always in sync.

And in the aftermath, arguments about who is in charge of the cleanup — often a signal that no one is in charge — have led to delays, distractions and disagreements over how to cap the well and defend the coastline. As a result, with oil continuing to gush a mile below the surface in the Gulf of Mexico, the laws of physics are largely in control, creating the daunting challenge of trying to plug a hole at depths where equipment is straining under more than a ton of pressure per square inch.

Tad W. Patzek, chairman of the Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering Department at the University of Texas, Austin, has analyzed reports of what led to the explosion. “It’s a very complex operation in which the human element has not been aligned with the complexity of the system,” he said in an interview last week.

His conclusion could also apply to what occurred long before the disaster.

Exceptions Are the Rule

Deepwater oil production in the gulf, which started in 1979 but expanded much faster in the mid-1990s with new technology and federal incentives, is governed as much by exceptions to rules as by the rules themselves.

Under a process called “alternative compliance,” much of the technology used on deepwater rigs has been approved piecemeal, with regulators cooperating with industry groups to make small adjustments to guidelines that were drawn up decades ago for shallow-water drilling.

Of roughly 3,500 drilling rigs and production platforms in the gulf, fewer than 50 are in waters deeper than 1,000 feet. But the risks and challenges associated with this deeper water are much greater.

“The pace of technology has definitely outrun the regulations,” Lt. Cmdr. Michael Odom of the Coast Guard, who inspects the rigs, said last month at a hearing.

As a result, deepwater rigs operate under an ad hoc system of exceptions. The deeper the water, the further the exceptions stretch, not just from federal guidelines but also often from company policy.

So, for example, when BP officials first set their sights on extracting the oily riches under what is known as Mississippi Canyon Block 252 in the Gulf of Mexico, they asked for and received permission from federal regulators to exempt the drilling project from federal law that requires a rigorous type of environmental review, internal documents and federal records indicate.

As BP engineers planned to set certain pipes and casings for lining the well in place in the ocean floor, they had to get permission from company managers to use riskier equipment because that equipment deviated from the company’s own design and safety policies, according to internal BP documents obtained by The New York Times.

And when company officials wanted to test the blowout preventer, a crucial fail-safe mechanism on the pipe near the ocean floor, at a lower pressure than was federally required, regulators granted an exception, documents released last week show.

Regulators granted yet another exception when BP sought to delay mandatory testing of that blowout preventer because they had lost “well control,” weeks before the rig exploded, BP e-mail messages show.

The Minerals Management Service, which regulates offshore drilling, went along with these requests partly because the agency has for years had a dual role of both fostering and policing the industry — collecting royalty payments from the drilling companies while also levying fines on them for violations of law.

Its safety inspections usually consist of helicopter visits to offshore rigs to sift through company reports of self-administered tests.

Even Ken Salazar, the interior secretary, who oversees the minerals agency, has said that oil companies have a history of “running the show” at the agency, a problem he has vowed to correct.

The minerals agency shares responsibility for oversight of drilling in the gulf with many others. The Environmental Protection Agency and others review offshore drilling for potential damage to wildlife and the environment. The Coast Guard inspects vessels for seaworthiness and licenses crew members to work on the rigs. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration monitors dangerous weather conditions over deep seas.

And regulatory duties extend even past the federal government. Foreign countries, or “flag states,” where many oil rigs are registered, have their own sets of safety requirements and inspections.

Regulations have not kept up with the risks that deepwater drilling poses.

On the Deepwater Horizon, for example, the minerals agency approved a drilling plan for BP that cited the “worst case” for a blowout as one that might produce 250,000 barrels of oil per day, federal records show. But the agency did not require the rig to create a response plan for such a situation.

If a blowout were to occur, BP said in its plan, the first choice would be to use a containment dome to capture the leaking oil. But regulators did not require that a containment dome be kept on the rig to speed the response to a spill. After the rig explosion, BP took two weeks to build one on shore and three days to ship it out to sea before it was lowered over the gushing pipe on May 7. It did not work.

(The rig’s “spill response plan,” provided to The Times, includes a Web link for a contractor that goes to an Asian shopping Web site and also mentions the importance of protecting walruses, seals and sea lions, none of which inhabit the area of drilling. The agency approved the plan.)

More broadly, regulators have not required technology and strategies for dealing with deepwater spills to be improved.

Engineers trying to control the blowout are using the same tactics they used in 1979 when the Ixtoc I well blew up in the Bay of Campeche off the coast of Mexico. In the earlier blowout, they first tried lowering a containment dome over the leak. When that failed, they unsuccessfully tried to inject golf balls and other material in a move called a junk shot, which was also tried and abandoned for the Deepwater Horizon.

Questions of oversight also came up in the New Orleans hearings last month. For example, Michael J. Saucier, an official with the Minerals Management Service, said that his agency “highly encouraged” — but did not require — companies to have backup systems to trigger blowout preventers in case of an emergency.

“Highly encourage?” Captain Nguyen of the Coast Guard asked. “How does that translate to enforcement?”

“There is no enforcement,” Mr. Saucier answered.

Problems Early On

In some ways it was jinxed from the start.

As early as June 2009, BP engineers had expressed concerns in internal documents about using certain casings for the well because they violated the company’s safety and design guidelines. But they proceeded with those casings.

More than five weeks before disaster, the rig was hit by several sudden pulsations of gas called “kicks” and a pipe had become stuck in the well. The blowout preventer, designed to seal the well in an emergency, had been discovered to be leaking fluids at least three times.

Dealing with these problems required teamwork, a challenge to the throng of different companies with responsibilities on the rig. Of the 126 people present on the day of the explosion, only eight were employees of BP. The interests of the workers did not always align.

In testimony to government investigators, rig workers repeatedly described a “natural conflict” between BP, which can make more money by completing drilling jobs quickly, and Transocean, which receives a leasing fee from BP every day that it continues drilling.

Halliburton was also on hand to provide cementing services, while a subsidiary monitored various drilling fluids. A different company provided drilling fluid systems, another provided technicians to operate the remote-control vehicles that are they eyes of the rig crew deep underwater, and yet another provided the well casing.

Amid this tangle of overlapping authority and competing interests, no one was solely responsible for ensuring the rig’s safety, and communication was a constant challenge.

“I don’t have a feeling that there is somebody who has a handle on the coordination of all the activities on this vessel, going from routine to crisis,” Captain Nguyen said during one hearing. “BP is in charge of certain things, Transocean is in charge of certain things.”

Financial concerns added pressures on the rig.

BP had fallen behind schedule and over budget, paying roughly $500,000 a day to lease the rig from Transocean. The rig was 43 days late for starting a new drilling job for BP by the day of the explosion, a delay that had already cost the company more than $21 million.

With the clock ticking, bad decisions went unchecked, warning signs went unheeded and small lapses compounded.

On April 1, a job log written by a Halliburton employee, Marvin Volek, warns that BP’s use of cement “was against our best practices.”

An April 18 internal Halliburton memorandum indicates that Halliburton again warned BP about its practices, this time saying that a “severe” gas flow problem would occur if the casings were not centered more carefully.

Around that same time, a BP document shows, company officials chose a type of casing with a greater risk of collapsing.

Despite noticing cementing problems, BP skipped a quality test of the cement around the pipe. Federal regulators also gave the rig a pass at several critical moments. After the rig encountered several problems, including the gas kicks and the pipe stuck in the well, the regulators did not demand a halt to the operation. Instead, they gave permission for a delay in a safety test of the blowout preventer.

An initial investigation by BP points to a range of missteps.

Tests shortly before the well blew out found a buildup of pressure that was an “indicator of a very large abnormality,” BP concluded and disclosed to Congress in a preliminary report last month. Yet, the rig team was satisfied after another test was deemed successful, and it proceeded.

About 10 hours before the explosion, the challenges of trying to keep the pressure in the well under control led to an argument among the workers about how best to finish the well and move the rig to the next site.

Douglas Brown, a Transocean mechanic on the rig, told investigators that an unnamed BP official whom he called “the company man” had instructed rig workers to execute a new plan for removing the riser and sealing the well. Mr. Brown testified that workers thought the plan was too risky. But he could not hear details of the argument that ensued.

“The company man was basically saying, ‘Well, this is how it’s going to be,’ ” Mr. Brown told investigators at a hearing on May 26 near New Orleans, adding that the Transocean rig workers “reluctantly agreed.”

When the explosion occurred around 9:50 p.m. on April 20, there was pandemonium on the rig. Most workers headed for lifeboats. Others rescued shipmates trapped under equipment. On the bridge, Captain Kuchta gathered with at least eight other managers and crew members to decide on an emergency plan.

Steve Bertone, the chief engineer for Transocean, wrote in his witness statement that he ran up to the bridge where he heard Captain Kuchta screaming at a worker, Andrea Fleytas, because she had pressed the distress button without authorization.

Mr. Bertone turned to another worker and asked him if he had called to shore for help but was told he did not have permission to do so. Another manager tried to give the go-ahead, the testimony said, but someone else said the order needed to come from the rig’s offshore installation manager.

A Strained Partnership

After the spill, the government and BP were supposed to cooperate, partly a consequence of laws written after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill that were intended to make polluters more accountable for cleaning up their own messes.

One example of what was supposed to be a unified front was the Joint Information Center. Housed in a Shell-owned training and conference center in Robert, La., the center includes roughly 65 employees, 10 of whom work for BP. Together, they write and issue news releases and coordinate posts on a Web site, Facebook and Twitter.

But the partnership between BP and the government has strained along with the failure of efforts to plug the well. Mr. Salazar, for example, assured the public on May 2 that the administration was keeping its “boot on the neck” of BP. Next he was being publicly chastised by President Obama for using antagonistic language.

BP’s chief executive, Tony Hayward, told reporters at one point that the spill was “relatively tiny.” Federal officials soon released estimates indicating that the spill had far outpaced the Exxon Valdez disaster.

Under intense media scrutiny, at least a dozen federal agencies have taken part in the spill response, making decision-making slow, conflicted and confused, as they sought to apply numerous federal statutes.

In one stark example of government disputes, internal e-mail messages from the minerals agency obtained by The Times reveal a heated debate over whether to ignore some federal environmental laws about gas emissions in an effort to speed the drilling of relief wells.

One agency official, Michael Tolbert, warned colleagues on April 24 that emissions of nitrous oxide from the well were “pretty far over the exemption level,” an issue that his colleague Tommy Broussard said could result in “BP wasting time” on environmental safeguards in a way that would be “completely stupid.”

But a third colleague, Elizabeth Peuler, intervened to demand that the agency take “no shortcuts.”

“Not even for this one,” she said. “Perhaps even especially for this one.”

Debates over the speed — or lack thereof — of the government response have also played out in Louisiana, where state officials spent much of May repeatedly seeking permission from the federal government to construct up to 90 miles of sand barriers to prevent oil from reaching the wetlands.

For three weeks, as the giant slick crept closer to shore, officials from the White House, Coast Guard, Army Corps of Engineers, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Environmental Protection Agency debated the best approach.

They ultimately approved the use of only one barrier, called a berm, to be paid for by BP.

Comparing the federal government’s response to “telling a drowning man to wait,” Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana asked: If one berm is safe, then why not the 23 others that he had requested? Slowly, the federal government approved more berms.

From the start, BP had played down the extent of the problem in miscalculating the rate of the leak and in denying the existence of underwater oil plumes. By deferring to the company, federal officials underestimated the problem they were facing and thus what was needed to respond to it.

It took more than a week after the explosion for the homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, to declare, on April 29, “a spill of national significance” a legal categorization that was needed before certain federal assistance could be authorized.

Because of such delays, critics have charged, more coastline will be hit, more animals will die, more habitats will be ruined and more money will be lost in tourism, fishing and real estate.

And yet, the administration is limited in its ability to divorce itself from BP, because federal officials rely on the company for technology, personnel and financing for the cleanup. The relationship reached a turning point last week when the administration said the national incident commander, Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard, would start giving solo briefings. He will no longer share a podium with BP, which will offer its own briefings.

That move, however, does not resolve the matter of who is actually in charge in the gulf — of ensuring safety and regulating the dangerous extraction of vast riches under the deepest waters there, as well as of handling the continuing emergency.

The question is proving equally vexing as investigators try to place blame for events on the rig the day of the explosion— as was clear on Tuesday when Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced that he had begun a criminal investigation.

Citing “a wide range of possible violations,” Mr. Holder declined to specify the target of the investigation, because, he said, the authorities were still not clear on “who should ultimately be held liable.”

(Ian Urbina, New York Times, 5June2010)

The response from a BP contractor who answered the phone late last month at the command center was swift and absolute: Permission denied.

“We were questioned extensively. Who was on the aircraft? Who did they work for?” recalled Rhonda Panepinto, who owns Southern Seaplane with her husband, Lyle. “The minute we mentioned media, the answer was: ‘Not allowed.’”

Journalists struggling to document the impact of the oil rig explosion have repeatedly found themselves turned away from public areas affected by the spill, and not only by BP and its contractors, but by local law enforcement, the Coast Guard and government officials.

To some critics of the response effort by BP and the government, instances of news media being kept at bay are just another example of a broader problem of officials’ filtering what images of the spill the public sees.

Scientists, too, have complained about the trickle of information that has emerged from BP and government sources. Three weeks passed, for instance, from the time the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20 and the first images of oil gushing from an underwater pipe were released by BP.

“I think they’ve been trying to limit access,” said Representative Edward J. Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts who fought BP to release more video from the underwater rovers that have been filming the oil-spewing pipe. “It is a company that was not used to transparency. It was not used to having public scrutiny of what it did.”

Officials at BP and the government entities coordinating the response said instances of denying news media access have been anomalies, and they pointed out that the company and the government have gone to great lengths to accommodate the hundreds of journalists who have traveled to the gulf to cover the story. The F.A.A., responding to criticism following the incident with Southern Seaplane, has revised its flight restrictions over the gulf to allow for news media flights on a case-by-case basis.

“Our general approach throughout this response, which is controlled by the Unified Command and is the largest ever to an oil spill,” said David H. Nicholas, a BP spokesman, “has been to allow as much access as possible to media and other parties without compromising the work we are engaged on or the safety of those to whom we give access.”

Anomalies or not, reporters and photographers continue to be blocked from covering aspects of the spill.

Last week, Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, tried to bring a small group of journalists with him on a trip he was taking through the gulf on a Coast Guard vessel. Mr. Nelson’s office said the Coast Guard agreed to accommodate the reporters and camera operators. But at about 10 p.m. on the evening before the trip, someone from the Department of Homeland Security’s legislative affairs office called the senator’s office to tell them that no journalists would be allowed.

“They said it was the Department of Homeland Security’s response-wide policy not to allow elected officials and media on the same ‘federal asset,’ ” said Bryan Gulley, a spokesman for the senator. “No further elaboration” was given, Mr. Gulley added.

Mr. Nelson has asked the Homeland Security secretary, Janet Napolitano, for an official explanation, the senator’s office said.

Capt. Ron LaBrec, a Coast Guard spokesman, said that about a week into the cleanup response, the Coast Guard started enforcing a policy that prohibits news media from accompanying candidates for public office on visits to government facilities, “to help manage the large number of requests for media embeds and visits by elected officials.”

In a separate incident last week, a reporter and photographer from The Daily News of New York were told by a BP contractor they could not access a public beach on Grand Isle, La., one of the areas most heavily affected by the oil spill. The contractor summoned a local sheriff, who then told the reporter, Matthew Lysiak, that news media had to fill out paperwork and then be escorted by a BP official to get access to the beach.

BP did not respond to requests for comment about the incident.

“For the police to tell me I needed to sign paperwork with BP to go to a public beach?” Mr. Lysiak said. “It’s just irrational.”

In the first few weeks after the oil rig explosion, BP kept a tight lid on images of the oil leaking into the gulf. Even when it released the first video of the spewing oil on May 12, it provided only a 30-second clip. The most detailed images did not become public until two weeks ago when BP gave members of Congress access to internal video feeds from its underwater rovers. Without BP’s permission, some members of Congress displayed the video for news networks like CNN, which carried them live.

For journalists on the ground, particularly photographers who hire their own planes, one of the major sources of frustration has been the flight restrictions over the water, where access is off limits in a vast area from the Louisiana bayous to Pensacola, Fla. Each time they fly in the area, they have to be granted permission from the F.A.A.

“Although there’s a tremendous amount of oil, finding out exactly where it’s washing ashore or where booming is going on is very difficult,” said John McCusker, a photographer with The Times-Picayune. “At 3,000 feet you’re shooting through clouds, and it’s difficult to tell the difference between an oil slick and a shadow from a cloud.”

A spokeswoman for the agency, Laura J. Brown, said the flight restrictions are necessary to prevent civilian air traffic from interfering with aircraft assisting the response effort.

Ms. Brown also said the Coast Guard-F.A.A. command center that turned away Southern Seaplane was enforcing the essential-flights-only policy in place at the time; and she said the BP contractor who answered the phone was there because the F.A.A. operations center is in one of BP’s buildings.

“That person was not making decisions about whether aircraft are allowed to enter the airspace,” Ms. Brown said.

But the incident with Southern Seaplane is not the only example of journalists being told they cannot go somewhere simply because they are journalists. CBS News reported last month that one of its news crews was threatened with arrest for trying to film a public beach where oil had washed ashore. The Coast Guard said later that it was disappointed to learn of the incident.

Media access in disaster situations is always an issue. But the situation in the gulf is especially nettlesome because journalists have to depend on the government and BP to gain access to so much of the affected area.

Michael Oreskes, senior managing editor at the Associated Press, likened the situation to reporters being embedded with the military in Afghanistan. “There is a continued effort to keep control over the access,” Mr. Oreskes said. “And even in places where the government is cooperating with us to provide access, it’s still a problem because it’s still access obtained through the government.”

(Jeremy W. Peters, New York Times, 9June2010)

The undercover investigation found officials from six countries were willing to consider selling their votes on the International Whaling Commission (IWC).

The revelations come as Japan seeks to break the 24-year moratorium on commercial whaling. An IWC meeting that will decide the fate of thousands of whales, including endangered species, begins this month in Morocco.

Japan denies buying the votes of IWC members. However, The Sunday Times filmed officials from pro-whaling governments admitting:

- They voted with the whalers because of the large amounts of aid from Japan. One said he was not sure if his country had any whales in its territorial waters. Others are landlocked.

— They receive cash payments in envelopes at IWC meetings from Japanese officials who pay their travel and hotel bills.

- One disclosed that call girls were offered when fisheries ministers and civil servants visited Japan for meetings.

Barry Gardiner, an MP and former Labour biodiversity minister, said the investigation revealed “disgraceful, shady practice”, which is “effectively buying votes”.

The reporters, posing as representatives of a billionaire conservationist, approached officials from pro-whaling countries and offered them an aid package to change their vote.

The governments of St Kitts and Nevis, the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Grenada, Republic of Guinea and Ivory Coast all entered negotiations to sell their votes in return for aid.

The top fisheries official for Guinea said Japan usually gave his minister a “minimum” of $1,000 a day spending money in cash during IWC and other fisheries meetings.

He said three Japanese organisations were used to channel the payments to his country: the fisheries agency, the aid agency and the Overseas Fisheries Co-operation Foundation.

Japan has recruited some of the world’s smallest countries on to the IWC to bolster its support. A senior fisheries official for the Marshall Islands said: “We support Japan because of what they give us.”

A Kiribati fisheries official said his country’s vote was determined by the “benefit” it received in aid. He, too, said Japan gave delegates expenses and spending money.

The IWC commissioner for Tanzania said “good girls” were made available at the hotels for ministers and senior fisheries civil servants during all-expenses paid trips to Japan.

(The Sunday Times, 13June2010)

The motive seems clear. The words signal sympathy for the people of the Gulf Coast, an acknowledgment of the magnitude of their struggle. And if this is really the worst environmental disaster, the wording seems to suggest, maybe people need to cut the government some slack for failing to get it under control right away.

But is the description accurate?

Scholars of environmental history, while expressing sympathy for the people of the gulf, say the assertion is debatable. They offer an intimidating list of disasters to consider: floods caused by human negligence, the destruction of forests across the entire continent and the near-extermination of the American bison.

“The White House is ignoring all the shades and complexities here to make a dramatic point,” said Donald E. Worster, an environmental historian at the University of Kansas and a visiting scholar at Yale.

The professors also note the impossibility of ranking such a varied list of catastrophes. Perhaps the worst disaster, they say, is always the one people are living through now.

Still, for sheer disruption to human lives, several of them could think of no environmental problem in American history quite equaling the calamity known as the Dust Bowl.

“The Dust Bowl is arguably one of the worst ecological blunders in world history,” said Ted Steinberg, a historian at Case Western Reserve University.

Across the High Plains, stretching from the Texas Panhandle to the Dakotas, poor farming practices in the early part of the 20th century stripped away the native grasses that held moisture and soil in place. A drought that began in 1930 exposed the folly.

Boiling clouds of dust whipped up by harsh winds buried homes and cars, destroyed crops, choked farm animals to death and sent children to the hospital with pneumonia. At first the crisis was ignored in Washington, but then the apocalyptic clouds began to blow all the way to New York, Buffalo and Chicago. A hearing in Congress on the disaster was interrupted by the arrival of a dust storm.

By the mid-1930s, people started to give up on the region in droves. The Dust Bowl refugees joined a larger stream of migrants displaced by agricultural mechanization, and by 1940 more than two million people had left the Great Plains States.

However, the Dust Bowl lasted a decade, and that raises an issue. What exactly should be defined as an environmental disaster? How long should an event take to play out, and how many people have to be harmed before it deserves that epithet?

Among sudden events, the Johnstown Flood might be a candidate for worst environmental disaster. On May 31, 1889, heavy rains caused a poorly maintained dam to burst in southwestern Pennsylvania, sending a wall of water 14 miles downriver to the town of Johnstown. About 2,200 people were killed in one of the worst tolls in the nation’s history.

At the time it happened, that event was understood as a failure of engineering and maintenance, and that is how it has come down in history. Perhaps a one-day flood is simply too short-term to count as an environmental disaster.

On the other hand, if events that played out over many decades are included, the field of candidates expands sharply.

Perhaps the destruction of the native forests of North America, which took hundreds of years, should be counted as the nation’s largest environmental calamity. The slaughtering of millions of bison on the Great Plains might qualify.

Craig E. Colten, a geographer at Louisiana State University, nominates “the human overhaul of the Mississippi River Valley,” which destroyed many thousands of acres of wetlands and made the region more vulnerable to later events like Hurricane Katrina.

However, those activities were not seen as disasters at the time, at least by the people who carried them out. They were viewed as desirable alterations of the landscape. It is only in retrospect that people have come to understand what was lost, so maybe those do not belong on a disaster list.

Oil spills, too, seem to be judged more by their effect on people than on the environment. Consider the Lakeview Gusher, which was almost certainly a worse oil spill, by volume, than the one continuing in the gulf.

In the southern end of California’s San Joaquin Valley, an oil rush was on in the early decades of the 20th century. On March 14, 1910, a well halfway between the towns of Taft and Maricopa, in Kern County, blew out with a mighty roar.

It continued spewing huge quantities of oil for 18 months. The version of events accepted by the State of California puts the flow rate near 100,000 barrels a day at times. “It’s the granddaddy of all gushers,” said Pete Gianopulos, an amateur historian in the area.

The ultimate volume spilled was calculated at 9 million barrels, or 378 million gallons. According to the highest government estimates, the Deepwater Horizon spill is not yet half that size.

The Lakeview oil was penned in immense pools by sandbags and earthen berms, and nearly half was recovered and refined by the Union Oil Company. The rest soaked into the ground or evaporated. Today, little evidence of the spill remains, and outside Kern County, it has been largely forgotten. That is surely because the area is desert scrubland, and few people were inconvenienced by the spill.

That sets it apart from the Deepwater Horizon leak. The environmental effects of the gulf spill remain largely unknown. But the number of lives disrupted is certainly in the thousands, if not the tens of thousands; the paychecks lost in industries like fishing add up to millions; and the ultimate cost will be counted in billions.

Even with all that pain, can it yet be called the nation’s worst environmental disaster?

“My take,” said William W. Savage Jr., a professor of history at the University of Oklahoma, “is that we’re not going to be able to tell until it’s over.”

(Justin Gillis, New York Times, 18June2010)

Greece may be Ground Zero of the eurozone crisis, but Spain, with an economy four times the size, matters far more. The real fear that drove Germany to pull together a €750 billion bailout last month was that Spain would default on its debt. That could bring down banks across Europe — in Britain, too — and cause the euro currency to unravel. That prospect prompted President Obama to add his personal exhortations to the German-led efforts, and China’s leaders to put off an interest rate rise.

Spain is also the best test of whether, despite the bailout, Europe will be hit by a second crisis. The drama has paused, as Greece and others have vowed to reform. But as scepticism about Hungary showed this month, many fear governments have promised cuts they cannot deliver.

Zapatero has promised a lot. He has taken a tilt at laws that have given gold-plated security to those in long-term work and in the public sector. No easy task: those laws, embedded in the 1978 Constitution, codify some of the most far-reaching social rights in Europe. They represent a rejection of the dictatorship of General Franco, who banned unions and strikes, and reflect the strength of the Communist Party during the transition to democracy. They have been one of Spain’s proudest possessions, but now they are strangling its growth.

Those rules have cut the country in half, creating a parallel economy of temporary, low-paid jobs with few rights. In the past decade, as Spain revelled in a property boom, construction created millions of contract jobs. Those have vanished; the white concrete skeletons of half-finished coastal apartment blocks are testimony to the sudden collapse. A fifth of the workforce is unemployed.

The new rules would allow a struggling company to negotiate down wages and conditions below the level set by unions in collective bargaining pacts that stretch across industries. At the moment, they can do so only if unions agree, which they rarely do. The reforms would cut the cost of firing permanent workers from severance pay of 45 days per year worked, one of the highest rates in Europe, to 33 days. They would make it harder for employers to roll over short contracts repeatedly to avoid hiring workers permanently.

Zapatero has already cut public sector pay and frozen pensions, getting that Bill through parliament by just one vote. His Socialist party is in a minority, and he might have to make more concessions to the regions to succeed. But even though his new laws potentially represent some the most profound cultural changes since the aftermath of Franco, if there is any sign that he cannot deliver, the euro, with reason, is likely to suffer further.

(Bronwen Maddox, The Times, 17June2010)

This is the worst case scenario that BP said it could contain but which it patently cannot. It is a gigantic rebuke to what President Bush called America’s addiction to oil, emulsifying into huge dark clouds beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, where its full effect on fish, birds and marine mammals will not be known for generations. And it is a personal rebuke to President Obama — a year ago a beacon of hope to environmentalists the world over — whose blithe assurance last month that modern oilrigs “don’t cause spills” will haunt him for years.

Allen Welch knows better. “We always in the back of our mind knew it could happen,” he said on Sunday on the dockside at Venice Marina, a sport-fishing mecca so far out in the Mississippi delta that the only road to it slips under water at high tide. “Now it has happened, the only thing we can do is wait and see.”

Step on to a charter boat like Mr Welch’s, head into the great aquatic prairie that begins where the road ends, and you see immediately why he has chosen to live here and why he lives in fear. Apart from the marina human civilisation in Venice does our species little credit. It consists of a long row of fenced-in industrial estates and oil installations and a giant heap of landfill. Where the road finally peters out nature takes over with epic forbearance. In the archipelago of reedbeds and quiet creeks of the Pass-a-Loutre Wildlife Management Area it is possible to forget for hours at a time that 40 per cent of American’s domestically-produced oil is being pumped to the surface within a half-hour’s flight by helicopter.

Sandwich terns and seaside sparrows nest in their thousands in ten-foot grasses that no pedestrian can disturb because there is no land to walk on. We saw scores of jumping mullet and what looked to the untrained eye like a squadron of flamingos taking off in the general direction of Cancún.

At the outer edge of the reserve reality intrudes again. Rigs loom out of the haze along the southern skyline. The site of the Deepwater Horizon disaster is further out still. There, BP and its subcontractors are trying to staunch the flow of one of nature’s most addictive yet destructive substances in conditions that none of them has faced before, out of sight of the media. The company has refused to say how many barrels lie still untapped below the well though sources say it is in the tens of millions. No journalists have been taken to the site and requests by The Times have been politely declined.

Back in Venice BP staff in company T-shirts and baseball caps are facing the music — and the locals — offering hazardous-material training courses and contracts for clean-up work. There will be substantial compensation payments, too.

Some staff, sotto voce, say they are bending over backwards to help the people of the delta region because they are still recovering from Hurricane Katrina rather than because of the risks posed by the slick. They point out that it is not yet on the scale of the Exxon Valdez disaster. Louisiana’s “sweet, light” crude can be dispersed more easily by chemicals and waves than the heavy black oil that wrecked Prince William Sound, and the 74-tonne steel and concrete boxes being built to cover the leaks on the sea bed may yet buy time for a relief well to be drilled to fill the gusher with cement.

Here’s hoping. In the meantime the past two weeks have made a mockery of BP’s long and costly public relations drive to move “beyond petroleum”. It has also, by cruel irony, pulled the rug from under a White House energy policy that was bold, hard-headed and progressive. Few in the environmental movement care to admit it but Mr Obama’s plan to expand drilling off Florida and Virginia was part of a good-faith effort to push through legislation that would, for the first time, have forced the US to cut its net carbon footprint. As Mr Obama often observes, American democracy is messy and the promise of new drilling leases was the only way to win the Republican support without which no energy Bill has a hope of passing into law.

Since the Transocean rig blew up Sarah Palin has pledged her continued allegiance to the “Drill baby, drill!” mantra of her 2008 campaign. She has that luxury, the White House does not. All the evidence suggests that it is serious about attempting a transition to a clean energy economy but in the short term the political deal-making required for that transition looks harder than ever.

In the longer term there may just be a silver lining to the clouds of oil spreading towards the marshlands of Louisiana. Unlike the Exxon Valdez disaster this one is agonisingly close to home for four states, 30 million Americans and fishing and tourism industries worth $6 billion (£4 billion) a year in Louisiana alone. It may not be enough to wean an entire culture off oil but its message has already been heard across the divide between business and the environmental movement; oil alone cannot be the answer.

On Sunday Professor Willard Kempton of the University of Delaware went on national public radio to promote a radical plan for a string of thousands of interlinked offshore wind turbines stretching the length of the US eastern seaboard and meeting most of its demand for power. Unrealistic? Quite possibly. Delusional? Not any more.

(Giles Whittell, The Times, 4May2010)

Les dirigeants de la zone euro n’auraient pas pu empêcher la crise grecque. Mais leurs efforts obstinés pour l’aggraver ont été couronnés d’un succès éclatant. Le processus de décision – ou plutôt d’indécision – européen, combiné à l’absence de leadership politique en Allemagne, a étiré le drame grec sur six mois de déclarations contradictoires alternant avec de molles protestations de solidarité.

Les dirigeants européens affirment désormais, main sur le coeur, qu’ils vont tirer les leçons de ce désastre auto-administré. Mais il y a peu de chances qu’ils se mettent d’accord sur le type de réformes qui pourrait les aider à mieux affronter les prochaines crises. Et même dans le meilleur des cas, les réformes institutionnelles ne pourront jamais pallier l’absence de détermination politique.

La crise a mis à nu deux des défauts majeurs de l’euro-système : l’absence d’un mécanisme de résolution des crises, et la faiblesse des disciplines qui pourraient les empêcher. Tout le monde semble accepter l’idée que le pacte de stabilité doit être l’objet de sérieuses réformes, à commencer par la mise en place de sanctions automatiques qui pourraient frapper les pays aux comportements irresponsables – quitte à courir le risque d’enlever aux politiques budgétaires la flexibilité nécessaire en période de récession.

Mais aucun des pays membres n’est prêt à accepter les conséquences de ces vertueuses intentions. La France veut garder la liberté de dépenser avec insouciance pour calmer ici ou là les prurits corporatistes. L’Allemagne est vent debout contre tout projet qui soumettrait les budgets nationaux à l’approbation de l’Union européenne. Les pays du “Sud” n’ont pas envie de passer, en matière budgétaire, sous influence allemande. Et les petits pays de l’Union craignent que Paris et Berlin ne trouvent toujours un moyen de s’affranchir des règles qu’ils imposent aux autres. Autant dire que l’idée de se lancer dans une renégociation du traité créant l’euro est mort-née.

Quant à la question de la gestion des crises, les membres de la zone euro doivent répondre à une question simple : que faire quand l’un d’entre eux est en défaut, ou déclenche la panique en menaçant de le faire ? Il serait calamiteux que le cas grec crée un précédent. Les Européens ne doivent plus faire semblant de croire que le pire ne peut pas arriver. Les idées avancées, sur la création d’un fonds monétaire européen, ou sur la mise au point d’un système de faillite souveraine organisée, devraient faire l’objet d’études sérieuses. Même si l’on sait que les meilleures réformes du monde resteront lettre morte si le courage politique fait défaut.

(Le Monde – Comment, 7May2010)

When Angela Merkel, Germany’s Chancellor, said that what was at stake was “the future of Europe”, she understated the drama. It certainly is about the future of Europe, but it has become a global issue, as fears about contagion and a European leadership vacuum shook world stock markets and threatened to make it harder for any indebted country to raise money.

The bailout package is vast — five times the EU’s annual budget of €135 billion (£116 billion). The 16 members of the eurozone will together put up €440 billion in government-backed loan guarantees for any eurozone member facing trouble. The International Monetary Fund will supply up to €250 billion, and a further €60 billion will come from EU members, with Britain contributing 12 per cent of it.

Ministers were calling this wall of money the only tool to hold at bay the “wolf pack” of the markets. That is right in one sense only: that the markets rose yesterday, certain for now of eurozone countries’ ability to pay their debts. But otherwise the claim is wrong. It seeks to blame the markets for duff policy decisions in poorer EU countries — and does not admit to the failure of the EU and the eurozone to deal with these mistakes.

Without the euro, the EU could have ignored evidence that reform had not quite happened along the Mediterranean. The EU had failed to insist that these countries modernise their economies. The euro has exposed that failure, and now prevents these struggling countries from letting their currencies fall and increasing their economic competitiveness.

The EU still hasn’t found the answer to how it can force members, or would-be members, to change. Should it pay them to become part of modern Europe, or somehow force them to reform? The bailout leaves these questions and many others unanswered. This crisis may have halted EU expansion.

As for the euro, small countries such as Iceland may still be keen to join, but larger, rich ones, such as Britain, will have found new reasons to stay out.

(Bronwen Maddox, The Times, 11May2010)

The genes appear to protect people against the effects of smoking and bad diet and can also delay the onset of age-related illnesses such as cancer and heart disease by up to three decades.

No single gene is a guaranteed fountain of youth. Instead, the secret of longevity probably lies in having the right “suite” of genes, according to new studies of centenarians and their families. Such combinations are extremely rare — only one person in 10,000 reaches the age of 100.

The genes found so far each appear to give a little extra protection against the diseases of old age. Centenarians appear to have a high chance of having several such genes embedded in their DNA.

“Long-lived people do not have fewer disease genes or ageing genes,” said Eline Slagboom of Leiden University, who is leading a study into 3,500 Dutch nonagenarians. “Instead they have other genes that stop those disease genes from being switched on. Longevity is strongly genetic and inherited.”

Slagboom and her colleagues recently published studies showing how the physiology of people in long-lived families differs from normal people. Other studies, showing the genetic causes of those differences, are due for publication soon.

“People who live to a great age metabolise fats and glucose differently, their skin ages more slowly and they have lower prevalence of heart disease, diabetes and hypertension,” she said.

“These factors are all under strong genetic control, so we see the same features in the children of very old people.”

The so-called Methuselah genes — named after the biblical patriarch who lived to 969 — are thought to include ADIPOQ, which is found in about 10% of young people but in nearly 30% of people living past 100. The CETP gene and the ApoC3 gene are found in 10% of young people, but in about 20% of centenarians.

The studies show that tiny mutations in the make-up of particular genes can sharply increase a person’s lifespan. Nonetheless, environmental factors such as the decline in infectious diseases are an important factor in the steady rise in the number of centenarians. The human genome contains about 28,000 genes, but they are controlled by a tiny number of so-called regulator genes.

Dr David Gems, a longevity researcher at University College London, believes that treatments to slow ageing will become widespread.

“If we know which genes control longevity then we can find out what proteins they make and then target them with drugs. That makes it possible to slow down ageing. We need to reclassify it as a disease rather than as a benign, natural process,” he said.

“Much of the pain and suffering in the world are caused by ageing. If we can find a way to reduce that, then we are morally obliged to take it.”

An anti-ageing drug which might be taken by millions of people, perhaps from middle age onwards, could be the ultimate blockbuster for the pharmaceutical industry.

Michelle Mitchell of Age UK said: “Ageing is a natural part of life. The key is to ensure that we do not simply extend life but extend the years of healthy life so that people can enjoy, not endure, their later years.”

(Jonathan Leake, The Sunday Times, 16May2010)

In other words, the infighting over homosexuality means that for the 77 million Anglicans worldwide, more important than the Resurrection, the Crucifixion, the Virgin Birth and the Trinity is what one person does in bed with another.

The lines of Christian belief, in the Anglican world at least, have been redrawn around a battle over gay rights that, in the secular world, ended years ago.

Sexuality figures nowhere in the creeds. It is not mentioned in the church’s liturgies. When godparents witness to a baby’s baptism they do not swear to help to raise the infant as straight.

Many of the thousands of young people who never go to church in the UK but who are nominally baptised Anglicans cannot remember a time when sodomy was a criminal offence.

These are the people that Church leaders should be trying to attract. In a world facing the well-documented consequences of consumer and materialist greed the Church’s spiritual message is potentially of benefit to millions. If the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives can do it in Britain, surely the liberals and conservatives in the Christian world can form some sort of coalition to bring new leadership to the Anglican morass. They must put their differences behind them, for the sake of God, themselves and the common good.

(Ruth Gledhill, Times Online, 16May2010)

The economists’ official answer, conveyed after another six months of deep cogitation in a three-page letter to Buckingham Palace, was that the economics profession did, of course, see it coming and had warned all along about global imbalances, excessive borrowing and so on. The problem was that politicians, bankers and overpaid financiers did not pay enough attention to the professional economists’ warnings.

The reason I have disinterred this episode is that the learned professors were wrong in their diagnosis of the disaster. The Queen’s question, taken in the context, was not about long-term issues such as mortgage debts and risk-management models. It was about the failure of politicians and economists to foresee the catastrophic consequences of allowing the failure of this one middle-sized bank.

The question of how the failure of Lehman turned a more-or-less normal boom-bust cycle into the greatest financial crisis of all has still not been satisfactorily answered by politicians, establishment economists and central bankers. And now, almost unbelievably, there is a serious risk that the world’s failure to understand the true lessons of Lehman will precipitate another financial disaster.

The key lesson from the failure of Lehman was that, in the midst of a systemic financial crisis, no significant bank should ever be allowed to fail. When an entire financial system is in peril, the cost of offering unlimited government guarantees and taxpayer bailouts will always be much smaller than the losses from allowing any significant bank to collapse. Such bailouts and guarantees may, in the long run, encourage excessive lending and other irresponsible behaviour, but that is an issue to be addressed by regulation after the crisis is over. In dealing with systemic financial crises, the risks of increasing moral hazard are irrelevant in comparison with the certainty of disaster triggered by the failure of any significant bank.

Today exactly the same analysis has to be applied to the risk of Greece or any other European government defaulting on its debts or dropping out of the eurozone. If any such default were to occur, it could trigger a global financial catastrophe even larger than Lehman. Yet the possibility of a Greek debt default or restructuring is being positively promoted by many of the world’s most respected economic and financial commentators. The German Finance Minister has repeatedly suggested temporary suspension from the eurozone as a punishment for the Greek Government’s transgressions. The German representative on the European Central Bank has stated publicly that he voted against the bank buying Greek government bonds. And the leader column of the Financial Times demanded yesterday that Greece must be made “safe to fail”, by preparing the ground for orderly restructuring. Such a restructuring, the FT went on to argue, would punish the German and French banks that were imprudent enough to lend Greece too much money and “whose governments inexcusably prefer to bail them out on the sly via Greece”.

These were exactly the sort of veiled threats, in some cases from the same authorities, heard before Lehman was allowed to collapse. It is hardly surprising that investors are starting to question the solidity of the guarantees against any kind of default that were supposedly provided two weeks ago by eurozone governments and the European Central Bank.

What is truly alarming about the present situation is that the world has so recently seen the catastrophic consequences of using debt defaults in the midst of a financial crisis to punish imprudent lenders. Yet some of the key policymakers and opinion formers seem, like the Bourbons, to have learnt nothing from the Lehman experience and to have forgotten none of their prejudices.

The fact is that if Greece were allowed to renege on its debts, the foreign banks that held €338 billion of Greek debt at the end of 2009 would immediately move to dump their additional €333 billion of Portuguese debt and probably their €1,500 billion of Spanish debt. And who knows how well over two trillion euros of Italian debt would be treated? The plunging value of Greek and Iberian bonds would immediately threaten several of the main French and German banks with insolvency, requiring government guarantees that would run into trillions of euros.

If Greece or any other member of the eurozone were temporarily suspended, as suggested by the German Finance Minister, the consequences would probably be even more catastrophic. The euro would immediately be revealed not as a genuine single currency but merely as a foreign exchange arrangement of the kind that has frequently collapsed under market pressures, for example in Argentina, Thailand and, not least, in the British experience of the ERM.

The citizens of Southern European countries would quickly understand this and would transfer their savings to banks in Germany and the Netherlands, leading to a collapse of the euro project within weeks and the probable failure of every Southern European bank.

Any such upheavals would dash hopes of global recovery from the 2008 crisis and would cause irreparable damage to public finances already on the brink of catastrophe. It is obvious that such calamities must be avoided, almost regardless of cost or whether it sets a bad example to improvident governments or bankers.

Astonishingly, however, the Greek tragedy in Europe is looking more and more like a revival of the Lehman drama. The €750 billion bailout package announced two weeks ago by EU governments is being hedged about with so many conditions and qualifications that it resembles the original $700 billion Bush bailout plan. The 16 bickering leaders of the eurozone seem to be emulating the confusion of the US political establishment and multiplying it by 16. And the starring role of the ideologically blinkered and incompetent President Bush, out of his depth and flailing helplessly in matters of high finance, is played by Angela Merkel.

Even as a long-time sceptic about the euro project, I find it almost impossible to believe that, just two years after Lehman, Europe would make the same blunders as the Bush Administration. But, as we have learnt again and again in this long period of turmoil, the impossible can become inevitable without even passing through improbable.

(Anatole Kaletsky, The Times Online, 26May2010)

Among the red flags, the panel said, were several equipment readings suggesting that gas was bubbling into the well, a potential sign of an impending blowout. Investigators also noted “other events in the 24 hours before the explosion that require further inquiry,” including a critical decision to replace heavy mud in the pipe rising from the seabed with seawater, possibly increasing the risk of an explosion.

The new information, released Tuesday night in a memorandum addressed to members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, confirmed many of the committee’s own findings from a review of documents and from statements and testimony given at Congressional hearings over the last two weeks.

The memorandum provides the most detailed accounting of the events and decisions made aboard the Deepwater Horizon before the accident on April 20 that took 11 lives and caused a so-far unchecked torrent of oil to pour into the gulf, and comes as BP prepared an ambitious “top kill” procedure in a new effort to stop the leak.

The findings are preliminary, and most come from BP, which owns the lease on the well and has at hearings pointed fingers at other companies for the problems on the rig, including Transocean, the rig’s owner. In a statement late Monday, Tony Hayward, BP’s chief executive, said, “A number of companies are involved, including BP, and it is simply too early — and not up to us — to say who is at fault.”

Although one-sided, the account of procedural and equipment failures offers one road map for federal investigators as they try to determine who is ultimately responsible for the accident. As part of the investigation, they are also looking at the role of regulatory agencies.

Some of those who survived the explosion, including managers from BP and Transocean, are expected to testify at hearings in Louisiana to be held by the Coast Guard and the federal Minerals Management Service, beginning Wednesday.

The testimony may help clear up some of the uncertainties about the day of the accident, including who was making the decisions. But the new information from BP — combined with past testimony by executives, analysis of documents by The New York Times and interviews with independent drilling experts — is beginning to paint a picture of a complex operation that went awry just as it was drawing to a close.

Drilling logs from the Deepwater Horizon suggest that shortly after midnight on the morning of the explosion, attention had turned to temporarily plugging and capping the well so the rig could disconnect and move to another job. Halliburton, the contractor hired by BP to provide cementing services, had spent the past several weeks cementing each new segment of the well into place. Halliburton was also responsible for plugging it.

BP and Congressional investigators have raised questions about the cementing, suggesting that the seal might have been faulty and failed to keep gas from rising up in the well. According to BP, the cement work took longer than normal, and there were concerns that the quality of the cement might have been compromised by contamination with mud.

However, in testimony before Congressional hearings, Halliburton executives have said that the company adhered strictly to the specifications provided by BP for the cementing of the well.

BP’s investigation, the memorandum said, also indicated that there might have been problems with the blowout preventer — the stack of valves and rams on the seafloor designed to seal off the well in the event of an emergency — at least five hours before the explosion. A sharp fall in fluid levels in the riser pipe that connects the well to the rig suggested that one of the seals in the preventer was leaking.

The memo from the House committee, which is led by Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, also shed more light on a series of important tests conducted that day to determine whether the cement was holding. Two hours before the explosion, an early pressure test was performed incorrectly and produced unacceptable results. The test was repeated and there was an “indicator of a very large abnormality,” BP’s investigator told the committee, adding that workers might have made a “fundamental mistake” in ignoring it. Shortly before 8 p.m., two hours before the explosion, workers were “satisfied” that the test was successful, according to BP’s investigation.

The decision was then made to begin withdrawing the drilling mud, a cocktail of clay, water and minerals used to keep downward pressure on the powerful fountain of oil and gas trying to push its way up out of the tapped reservoir.

Philip W. Johnson, an engineering professor at the University of Alabama and a specialist in petroleum engineering, said in an e-mail message that with normal pressure test readings indicating a good seal on the casing and the temporary cement plug, it is not unusual to displace the mud with seawater before the cement job is finished to get a cleaner surface for the cement to adhere to. “But without a good pressure test, it would be reckless to displace,” he said.

Congressional investigators and news accounts have suggested that the decision to begin removing drilling mud was a subject of intense discussion — and perhaps even disagreement — among engineers working on the rig that day.

Executives from both Transocean and BP have said in testimony before Congress that they were unfamiliar with the details of that debate. But the hearings this week in Louisiana — which will include testimony from the top managers on the rig from BP and Transocean — may provide a clearer picture of the day’s deliberations.

In the final hour before the explosion, after the crew had begun withdrawing the mud, there were more signs that the well was going out of control, the memo said. They included a sharp increase in fluid coming from the well, even when the pumps were shut down — an indication, drilling experts say, of a “kick,” a surge in pressure from oil and gas deep down in the well. If not controlled, such a kick can lead to a full-scale blowout, and that is exactly what happened at roughly 9:49 p.m.

(Henry Fountain and Tom Zeller Jr., NY Times, 25May2010)

But she had a mammogram, ultrasound and biopsy within hours of getting off the plane. The news was not good: she had cancer.

Then the complications began. Dr. Griffith, director of the Center for Gynepathology Research at M.I.T., had a test to see whether her tumor had extra copies of a protein, HER2. If it did, it would respond to a drug, Herceptin, which blocks the protein and stymies the tumor’s growth.

Drugs aimed at disabling proteins that spur cancer are, many oncologists say, the future of cancer therapies. Only a few are available now but almost every new drug under study is designed to disable cancer-fueling proteins.

But these so-called targeted therapies are only as good as tests to find their protein targets. And while most patients do not yet know it, those tests can be surprisingly unreliable.

Acknowledging the problem, cancer specialists on Monday announced new testing guidelines for one protein target, but as new targets are identified, the problem continues to grow.

The test on Dr. Griffith’s tumor was negative. Or was it? One small area of her tumor stained chocolate brown, indicating lots of HER2. The rest was a cream color, indicating no extra HER2 protein.

Yet her treatment hinged on this result. A HER2 positive tumor has a bad prognosis. Herceptin can make that prognosis good, reducing the chances that the cancer will come back by 50 percent and reducing a woman’s risk of dying by 40 percent.

But Herceptin, costing $42,000 a year wholesale, causes flulike symptoms and also has a rare, serious side effect, severe heart damage that can even be fatal.

And if a tumor does not have high levels of HER2, Herceptin would be, as Dr. Antonio Wolff, a breast cancer specialist at Johns Hopkins put it, “a toxic and expensive placebo.”

Dr. Griffith had come face to face with an emerging, but rarely acknowledged, problem in today’s era of new cancer tests and therapies.

HER2 tests, for instance, can give false-positives up to 20 percent of the time, wrongly telling women they need the drug when they do not. Five percent to 10 percent of the time the tests can falsely tell a woman that she should not take the drug, when she should. And Herceptin testing for breast cancer is easy compared with what is coming next.

Genentech, Herceptin’s maker, is about to apply to the Food and Drug Administration to sell the drug to treat stomach cancer. But it is much more difficult to tell whether a stomach tumor has high levels of HER2, said Krysta Pellegrino, a company spokeswoman. Breast cancers usually are all positive or all negative. Not stomach cancers, which almost always have sections that are positive for HER2 and sections that are negative. The HER2 tests are the same, but “the interpretation and scoring are different,” Ms. Pellegrino said.

That sort of mosaic pattern is typical of cancers other than breast cancer, says Dr. Jeffrey Bloss, vice president, North America Medical Affairs at GlaxoSmithKline. And it raises questions of what a test result means.

“The science is still evolving,” Dr. Bloss said. “What was true last year may not be true this year.”

Like the HER2 tests, other molecular tests for breast cancer also have problems. Those tests, for estrogen receptors on breast cancer cells, determine whether cancer will be thwarted by drugs that deprive tumors of estrogen. They can be wrong at least 10 percent of the time. Some estrogen-depleting drugs, while generally safe, increase the risk of osteoporosis and, depending on the drug, can also cause joint pain and increase risks of stroke and cancer of the uterine lining.

Estrogen receptor tests are a muddle, noted Dr. Edith Perez, a breast cancer specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla. Quite a few tests are being used, but Dr. Perez could not ascertain exactly how many or how good they were in predicting whether a tumor would respond to estrogen-depleting drugs.

And different labs may do tests in different ways; some even invent their own.

“How do you know they are the same?” Dr. Perez asked. “If you do the test in two different labs, you can get two different answers.”

Error rates for newer tests have not even been established.

“This is an issue that transcends breast cancer,” Dr. Wolff said. “A poorly developed test is potentially as dangerous as a poorly developed drug.”

The Food and Drug Administration says it is concerned about the quality of tests developed by clinical laboratories for their own use, said Alberto Gutierrez, who oversees diagnostic products for the agency. Some of the tests are increasingly complex, Mr. Gutierrez said, adding that there is a proliferation of laboratories offering tests without F.D.A. oversight. But, for now, the agency has no specific plan to regulate the tests, in part because of lack of money.

Meanwhile, Dr. Griffith’s doctor, Eric Winer at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, had a gradual awakening.

“In my naïve view, which wasn’t so many years ago,” Dr. Winer said, “I thought HER2 was a switch that turns on or off and it was pretty easy to tell when it’s on or off. It turns out that it is not nearly as straightforward for a large number of tumors.”

Now, recognizing the problem, Dr. Winer had Dr. Griffith’s tumor retested with a different method, hoping the result would help him and Dr. Griffith figure out whether she could benefit from Herceptin.

And Dr. Griffith was left facing the uncertainties of cancer medicine.

“Me as a scientist says it’s very interesting,” she said.

But, she said, as a patient she sees it differently.

“It’s really hard to know what to do,” Dr. Griffith said.

The two large national studies of Herceptin for women with HER2 positive early-stage breast cancer were just starting in 2001 when Dr. Perez, of the Mayo Clinic, a principal investigator, had a moment of truth. Women were having HER2 tests at a variety of places — community hospitals, major medical centers, national labs. Dr. Perez decided to retest tumors in a central lab to confirm the results.

The outcome stunned her and her colleagues. Twenty percent of the first 119 women whose initial tests indicated their tumors had excess HER2 turned out not to have it on retesting.

“We all felt, ‘Oh boy, we have a problem,’ ” said Dr. Wolff, a study investigator. “This was huge.”

So the studies were modified to require central labs to retest all the tumors.

Yet the discordance remained — one-sixth of women told by local labs that they were HER2 positive were not on retesting.

“We were all horrified,” said Dr. Elizabeth Hammond, a pathologist at Intermountain HealthCare in Utah.

The result of that moment of horror was HER2 testing guidelines by the College of American Pathology and the American Society of Clinical Oncology, dictating criteria for declaring a test positive or negative and requiring proficiency testing, among other things.

In a way, the effort was a huge success. About 900 of the nation’s estimated 1,500 labs agreed to follow the guidelines.

But even so, said Dr. Bloss of GlaxoSmithKline, there seemed to be approximately a 20 percent discordance between labs. GlaxoSmithKline makes Tykerb, which also focuses on HER2.

There are all sorts of reasons why different labs can get different results, said Dr. Mitch Dowsett of the Royal Marsden Hospital in London and a member of the United States committee that formulated HER2 testing guidelines.

In borderline cases, pathologists can disagree. Or stain can pool in areas where a tumor was crushed or damaged, making it look, to inexperienced eyes, like a positive stain.

Twelve years after Herceptin was approved for women with advanced breast cancer, “we’re still trying to refine the testing,” said Ms. Pellegrino of Genentech.

Then there is Dr. Griffith’s problem: what to do when part of a tumor is positive and the rest is negative.

The College of American Pathologists wants to develop testing guidelines for every molecular target for cancer drugs. On Monday, for example, ASCO and CAP released new guidelines for estrogen receptor testing.

And Dr. Hammond has become driven to make sure pathologists know about and follow the HER2 guidelines.

At pathology meetings, she asks her audience how many know about the guidelines and are following them.

“Almost everyone raises their hand,” Dr. Hammond said. “I am preaching to the choir. They chose to come to the meeting. It’s the ones who did not choose to come that I am worried about.”

But even the best labs can differ, as some women learned.

When Sheila Maloney had breast cancer surgery in October, her doctor wanted to test her tumor for HER2.

“I had never heard of it,” said Mrs. Maloney, a 64-year-old hostess at an Olive Garden restaurant in Lady Lake, Fla.

She is now seeing Dr. Perez, and ended up having her tumor tested four times with four different commonly used HER2 tests. The first test was positive, the second negative, the third positive, the fourth negative.

Dr. Perez recommended that Mrs. Maloney take Herceptin.

As for Dr. Griffith, the two tests for HER2 turned out to agree, but with that mixed result, it was hard to know what to do. Her tumor was on the fence — part negative, part weakly positive.

Medical experts say there are no easy answers. For now, their best advice is for women to ask that their breast cancer tissue be sent to experienced labs that follow accreditation procedures like those recommended by the College of American Pathologists.

But Dr. Griffith did all that. And Dr. Griffith, a scientist whose own research involves the HER2 protein, also read and examined the literature on HER2 to prepare for a discussion with Dr. Winer.

“Here I sit as a patient. My situation is ambiguous,” Dr. Griffith said.

In the end, the studies, along with Dr. Winer’s clinical perspective, did not convince her that the drug would help. The risk of serious heart damage and other side effects was scary. And, she said, she cannot ignore the drug’s price, even though her insurer would pay.

Dr. Griffith decided not to take Herceptin, but she is having standard chemotherapy.

“I am very comfortable with my decision,” she said.

(Gina Kolata, New York Times, 19April2010)

Massimo Osanna, head of archaeology at Basilica University, said that the team working at Torre Satriano near Potenza in what was once Magna Graecia had unearthed a sloping roof with red and black decorations, with “masculine” and “feminine” components inscribed with detailed directions on how they slotted together.

Professor Christopher Smith, director of the British School at Rome, said that the discovery was “the clearest example yet found of mason’s marks of the time. It looks as if someone was instructing others how to mass-produce components and put them together in this way”” he told The Times.

Professor Osanna suggested that a “fashion for all things Greek” among the indigenous population had led an enterprising builder to produce “affordable DIY structures” modelled on classical Greek buildings. The terracotta roof filtered rainwater down the decorative panels, known as cymatiums, with projections to protect the wall below.

“All the cymatiums and several sections of frieze also have inscriptions relating to the roof assembly system,” Professor Osanna told Storica, the Italian magazine of the National Geographic Society.

He added: “So far around a hundred inscribed fragments have been recovered, with masculine ordinal numbers on the cymatiums and feminine ones on the friezes”. He said the result was “a kind of instruction booklet”.

“The characteristics of these inscriptions indicate they date back to around the 6th century BC, which tallies with the architectural evidence suggested by the decoration,” Professor Osanna said.

He said that the decorative features were remarkably similar to those on another structure unearthed at Braida di Vaglio nearby: “The similarity in the use of these decorations indicates the same origin” he said. “Possibly the same mould was used”.

Magna Graecia — Latin for “Greater Greece” — was a coastal area colonised by Greek settlers who traded with enclaves such as Lucania, of which modern Potenza was part.

Greek colonisation left much of southern Italy with an Hellenic inheritance, including architecture and culture and even language. A minority in Calabria and Apulia still speaks a dialect known as Griko.

(Richard Owen, The Times, 22April2010)

Change is indeed in the air: the sudden rise without trace of Clegg, the emergence of a viable third party and the prospect of a hung parliament are all important. But the truth is that politicians are deluding themselves when they try to peddle this or that change and we are deluding ourselves if we believe them. Change will certainly come, both fast and hard, but it won’t necessarily have anything to do with the promises politicians make.

Tony Blair and Brown have discovered this the hard way (and at our expense). They promised enormous change in education, the National Health Service, employment and social equality. And they failed to deliver, despite 13 years of massive expenditure. Unemployment is up, social inequality hasn’t narrowed, education is worse and one hospital even turned away a woman in labour.

More important, the supposedly brilliant Brown failed in his unsophisticated promise to put an end to boom and bust: instead we have truly frightening debt, thanks to his splurge. He, of course, would blame every economic ill on a “global” crisis. But in so doing he only supports my point. Politicians may propose, but something entirely different usually disposes.

One of the biggest changes that has taken place is a sudden realisation of how little anyone knows about most things. The plume of volcanic ash that wafted above us was a perfect metaphor for our cloud of unknowing. We couldn’t predict it, we don’t understand the risks and we don’t know whether it will return. No one predicted the eruption of Clegg or knows whether he’ll just blow over like a puff of hot air. Few people saw the banking crisis coming. Now we are beginning to realise how difficult it is to understand complex economies and societies or to foresee the consequences of political intervention.

Many of Labour’s new social policies turned out to be just experimentation. Sure Start, for instance, was meant to offer directly to the poorest children some of what was lacking in their deprived backgrounds. Instead it developed into a system of pleasant nurseries for the better off, while independent academic research into its results showed that it was achieving almost nothing for the children it was designed for.

Other problems, such as the misery of children in care or the national illiteracy scandal, have defeated this government for reasons it cannot explain and despite all the early promises of change. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan also turned out to be an ill-considered mess, bedevilled by constant mission creep and doubt. What we’ve seen on every front is a mass failure of knowledge, understanding and anticipation and a disastrous, destructive lack of modesty in the face of life’s complexities and uncertainties.

What has been particularly shocking about the banking crisis is that most governments did not know about the risks the money men were taking; nor, apparently, did some of the money men themselves. Earlier this month it emerged that Fabrice “Fabulous Fab” Tourre, a Goldman Sachs banker and collateralised debt obligation expert, did not understand the highly risky debt packages he himself was creating: he confessed as much in a terrifying email of 2007 to his girlfriend about the imminent collapse of the “system”, describing himself as the “only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab Tourre … standing in the middle of all those complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstruosities (sic)!!!”.

In the painful aftermath, the most brilliant and respectable economists are genuinely divided about whether to deal with debt now or later, how best to regulate banking, or what is the least worst trade-off between tax and public spending cuts — and this, of course, without necessarily allowing for the brute force of vested interests, human error and plain incompetence. The only point on which well informed people seem to agree is that huge numbers of people will probably lose their jobs as neither state sector nor private sector can afford to employ them any longer. The only certainty in public affairs seems to be uncertainty.

In these particularly uncertain times, it is character that matters. It’s impossible to say what will be thrown at the next government, so manifestos hardly matter, except insofar as they show any caution about excessive promises and excessive government. The voter can only really choose the man who seems most likely to show judgment, restraint and courage. So political beauty parades, normally something I hate, do for once have a certain value in this election. Three sessions of 90 minutes’ staring at Clegg and Cameron strutting their stuff — I exclude Brown as someone whose character defects are already as well known as his disastrous debts — do at least give some impression of what they are made of.

Clegg is tall, handsome and agreeable. Standing beside Vince Cable, he has sometimes looked ineffectual and lost, but on his own he has displayed a confident, boyish candour, with a beguiling optimism, possibly due to inexperience. Instinctively I remain unconvinced. Cameron has easy charm too, but he has chosen not to show it in the TV debates: he stands and speaks like a sadder, steelier person, prepared for difficulties. All this is in effect show business, but there’s some truth to be discovered in it. To judge purely from their manner, Clegg is the more appealing. To judge from their attitudes, Cameron seems to understand far more clearly the limitations of what the state can or should do. And that really is the big change we need in politics.

(by Minette Marrin, The Sunday Times, 25April2010)

It turns out that some of the highest-paid financial executives in America work far from the canyons of Lower Manhattan, at companies that have largely avoided the outcry over the return of hefty paydays on Wall Street.

Topping the list is John G. Stumpf, head of Wells Fargo, the bank based in San Francisco, according to an analysis of 2009 compensation in the industry. Mr. Stumpf was paid a personal best of $18.7 million in cash and stock for 2009 — up 64 percent from 2007, just before the financial crisis struck.

Mr. Stumpf is making twice as much as Lloyd C. Blankfein, his counterpart at Goldman Sachs. Mr. Blankfein — who for many Americans has come to symbolize this new period of Wall Street riches — was paid $9.7 million for 2009, less than some expected.

It is a stunning reversal in the old pecking order of pay. Big names on Wall Street like Mr. Blankfein usually take home far more than staid bankers like Mr. Stumpf, whose bank’s biggest business is making home mortgages and loans to corporations.

But since the bailout, the rules of banker pay are bending. Some of the industry’s biggest names are being paid less than relative unknowns. Chief executives, who are usually at the top of the pay heap, are taking home roughly the same amounts as executives who work for them — and sometimes less.

Mr. Stumpf and other executives have moved up the pay ladder partly because the likes of Mr. Blankfein have moved down. And for all the focus on what top executives earn, what is most startling is how many six-, seven- and eight-figure sums are being awarded to Wall Street bankers and traders whose pay often is unnoticed — if it is disclosed at all.

How much senior executives earn, in cash and stock, is made public in corporate filings. This year, the results are surprising, according to an analysis by Equilar, an executive compensation research firm.

Leaders in the pay sweepstakes include the heads of the credit card giants Visa, Mastercard Worldwide, Capital One Financial and American Express. Joseph W. Saunders, who runs Visa, was paid about $15.5 million, a figure that vastly eclipses the compensation for top executives at Bank of America and Citigroup.

Ajay Banga, the president of MasterCard Worldwide; Laurence D. Fink, the chairman and chief executive of the giant money management company BlackRock; and Richard B. Handler, the boss at the Jefferies Group, a midsize investment bank that is virtually unknown outside financial circles, were each paid about $13 million. Executives at certain discount brokerages, insurance companies and regional banks were close behind.

The big money, as ever, is in Wall Street trading. But pay for employees with few executive responsibilities is typically exempted from disclosure requirements. Brokers and asset managers also land windfalls that are often undisclosed.

“There are probably thousands of people that are in the Millionaire Club — or even the Ten Millionaire Club — that have gotten no heat,” said Alan Johnson, a longtime Wall Street compensation consultant.

To be sure, a handful of prominent companies dominate the well-paid list. Senior managers from JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs occupy many of the top spots. Few of those executives are boldface names, however.

While Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s chairman and chief executive, appears to be the second-highest-paid banker, at $17.6 million, one of his subordinates collected nearly as much: Ina R. Drew, JPMorgan’s chief investment officer.

Ms. Drew, whose correct calls on interest rates helped the bank earn several billion dollars of profit, was paid about $13 million.

Despite the spotlight on Mr. Blankfein’s pay at Goldman, little was said about how much Gordon Nixon of Royal Bank of Canada received. His paycheck was roughly the same amount as Mr. Blankfein’s, $9.7 million, though he is hardly a household name.

The Equilar analysis provides an early peek at 2009 pay and is not a comprehensive review. For consistency, any stock or options that were subject to performance hurdles were valued at the target levels; in practice, many executives receive larger payouts for surpassing the company’s financial goals.

Wells Fargo posted strong results, even as it struggled to contend with rising mortgage and commercial real estate losses and accepted a bailout from the government in 2008.

As it rebounded last year, the bank dribbled out the details of its large stock grants for Mr. Stumpf. In August, Wells announced that he would receive $900,000 in salary and about $6.5 million in various types of restricted stock. On New Year’s Eve, Wells issued a statement saying that Mr. Stumpf would receive another allotment of so-called performance shares — worth up to $15.4 million.

That means his pay package could easily top $24 million in a year in which Wells was among the last of the big banks to repay the bailout money.

“We believe we have the very best leadership team in financial services today, and a key to retaining that talent for the long term is to compensate our senior leaders competitively and to align their interests with those of our shareholders,” Stephen W. Sanger, who leads Wells Fargo’s compensation committee, said in a statement last December.

On pay, Wall Street seems to have reverted to its old ways. James P. Gorman, Morgan Stanley’s new chief executive, could receive $11 million to $13 million, even though the company posted an annual loss.

Mark Lake, a Morgan Stanley spokesman, said that Mr. Gorman received that compensation because, as president, he was responsible for integrating the vast Smith Barney brokerage unit and was the prospective chief executive.

Bank of America’s highest-paid executive was the chief architect of its ill-fated acquisition of Merrill Lynch, Gregory L. Curl. He was awarded more than $9.2 million in stock, most of which will be paid out monthly over the next three years.

Brian T. Moynihan, Bank of America’s new chief executive, will be paid about $6.1 million, thanks to a similar large stock grant.

Jefferies Group, a midsize investment bank that had a strong year, rewarded its top executives handsomely. And more pay is coming down the pike. In mid-January, Mr. Handler received a $39 million stock grant and another executive received about $29 million. The stock award, subject to certain performance goals, is payable over the next three years and will come on top of any salary and bonuses the executives get.

One of the highest-compensated financial executives for 2009 was paid well when he was employed — and then even more when he quit. After leaving Visa in July, Hans Morris, the company’s president, collected an exit package valued at $24 million.

“The ride is essentially over, and he is still getting grants,” said Brian Foley, an independent compensation consultant.

(eric dash, New York Times, 10February2010)

Chen-Bo Zhong, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, and his colleagues in the U.S. have conducted a series of small experiments designed to test how changes in an environment — differences in lighting or smell — can affect human behaviour.

In one experiment, participants were given $10 in change and 20 mathematical problems, and sent into either a room brightly lit with florescent lights or one with a third as many lights on.

The subjects were asked to complete as many of the problems as they could in five minutes and to keep 50 cents for each problem they solved. They were asked to put the rest of the change in an envelope when they were done.

Typically, the participants were able to complete seven problems in the time allowed, but since the test was anonymous, they could keep as much of the money as they wanted without getting caught.

While the tests had no names or numbers on them, the problems themselves revealed whether the participant had been in a brightly lit room or a dim one.

“What we found was that participants randomly assigned to the dimmer room … were more likely to lie or cheat compared with participants in the well-lit room,” Zhong said.

Zhong said that the rooms with the dim lighting created a sense of anonymity, what he calls illusory anonymity.

“The idea is that when we experience darkness, we disregard what other people may still be able to see or hear or observe,” he said. “The illusory sense of anonymity can license unethical behaviour.”

In interviews with the participants after the experiments about what happened and what determined their behaviour, few of the participants even noticed the difference in lighting.

In a similar study, participants were asked to wear either a pair of sunglasses or a pair of glasses with clear lenses.

“What we found was that wearing a pair of sunglasses led to greater self-interested behaviour,” said Zhong.

Zhong said the sunglasses didn’t make the participants anonymous or less visible, of course, but still had an effect on their behaviour, making them less likely to see themselves from another person’s perspective.

“We perceive ourselves to be anonymous even if the darkness only applies to ourselves, as in the case where we wear a pair of sunglasses or are in a room that is dim but not exactly dark,” Zhong said.

Zhong likened the sunglasses experiment to toddlers playing peek-a-boo.

“This is almost like kids playing a hide-and-seek game who will close their eyes and think that other people won’t be able to see them,” he said.

The subconscious changes in behaviour weren’t limited to visual changes. Zhong conducted similar experiments that used the sense of smell.

Participants were randomly assigned to rooms, some sprayed with citrus-scented window cleaner. In some of the experiments, the participants played a game of trust with an anonymous partner, again involving money.

The way the game typically works is that one partner is given a sum of money and told to put some or all of the money in an envelope. He is told his anonymous partner will receive triple that amount and will give some of the money back. Of course, the second partner could just keep all the money.

In Zhong’s experiment, the participants played the role of the second partner and were all told their partner had given them the full mount, $4, which was then tripled to $12.

The participants were free to anonymously return some or none of the money.

“What we found was that in the citrus-scented room, people were more likely to engage in good behaviours,” Zhong said. “They were more likely to honour the trust that other people displayed.”

Zhong said that it would be interesting to see how the findings would translate to real-world situations.

“Based on the experiments we have conducted and the findings we’ve found, I think it’s reasonable to speculate that people in a real environment, where they can smell these scents that are associated with purity and cleanliness, also may tend to be behave more ethically or socially,” he said.

In another paper published prior to Zhong’s, researchers found people eating cookies in a citrus scented room were less likely to leave crumbs behind than those in an unscented room.

Zhong said he wanted to take that finding to the next level, to explore the “metaphorical and psychological connections between physical cleanliness and moral purity.”

English is full of metaphors relating cleanliness to moral behaviour, from “clean conscience” to “money laundering” to “dirty jokes.”

In previous research, Zhong and his colleagues explored the connection between unethical behaviour and physical cleanliness, something Zhong called the Lady Macbeth effect, after the Shakespeare character who obsessively washed her hands because of her role in the murder of the king (”Out, damn spot. Out, I say!”).

“We asked people to recall unethical behaviours they have done, like lying to parents or betraying their friends,” Zhong said. Another group was asked about their prior ethical acts.

The participants were then asked to rate items on a list of products by how much they wanted them. The participants who were asked about their unethical behaviour were more likely than the other group to rate cleaning products higher than household products that have nothing to do with cleaning, such as CDs.

Zhong said these findings suggest that abstract concepts, such as morality, or even time, are connected to physical experience. We think “back” to the past and look “forward” to the future, for example.

“Human perception or cognition are not as abstract as we typically assume,” Zhong said. “We don’t simply store information in our brain. Instead, our cognition is much richer than that. For every abstract construct we associate physiological experience.”

The metaphorical connections could even transcend language barriers, although Zhong said there hasn’t been research to see if the behaviour is consistent across cultures.

“In Chinese, we refer to a pair of dirty hands, for example, to refer to someone who steals.”

(john bowman, CBC News, 15February2010)

There is the widespread view that Greece will be supported if default looks likely. After all, Joaquín Almunia, the former Monetary Affairs Commissioner, said as much at Davos. But the outlook became muddied at last week’s meeting of the Council of the European Union. There was clearly friction between Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, mindful of taxpayers’ resistance to bailing out Greece in the name of EU solidarity, and President Sarkozy of France, who not only supported a bailout but, taking the opportunity afforded by crisis to further political union, also pushed for a centralised “economic government”.

For seasoned euro-watchers the current crisis comes as no surprise. The obsessive determination with which Europe’s politicians drove the euro project forward in the 1990s was, I remember, quite alarming. As the 1980s had been the decade of the single market, the 1990s would be the decade of the single currency. End of story. The European project must proceed irrespective of economic or popular considerations. A united European Union was Europe’s destiny.

The 1992 crisis in the exchange- rate mechanism culminating in Britain’s eviction, provided a thousand warnings. Without true structural economic convergence and/or a centralised economic government, some would struggle with a regime of a single interest rate and a common exchange rate, being deprived of key economic weapons, including devaluation.

True, there were the “eligibility criteria” concerning convergence on debt, deficits, inflation and interest rates. But they were flawed. The eurozone’s economies began to diverge almost from its very launch in 1999. In the early 2000s German economic growth was weak and the European Central Bank kept rates low to accommodate Germany’s circumstances. But these rates were significantly too low for the peripheral countries of Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland (sometimes known as the “Club Med”) and helped to fuel spending and property booms. Wage inflation was also a feature of the boom times, undermining competitiveness. The accession of the low-cost Eastern European countries exacerbated their plight. Meanwhile Germany, with Lutheran discipline, went on a cost-cutting spree, sharpening its international competitiveness and boosting its trade surpluses.

The Club Med’s public deficits, reflecting the recession, have exploded. And they are now being exhorted, in accordance with the rules of the eurozone, to cut their borrowing sharply. Even though still in recession they are facing tough fiscal retrenchment, which can only delay recovery further.

Economic salvation could come if Germany changed the habit of a lifetime and stimulated rapid domestic demand-led growth, but this is highly unlikely. Alternatively a huge extension of transfers from the richer EU countries to the poorer may be a way out but whether this would be acceptable to the taxpayers of Germany, the UK or the Netherlands is doubtful.

Then there is the special problem of Greece, which must be held responsible for much of its unique plight. It falsified vital data in order to join the euro, its public sector is bloated, tax evasion is a way of life and it has made little attempt to sharpen up its economy in order to thrive within the eurozone. Greece has, moreover, been generously subsidised by the EU. In 2008 it received net receipts from the EU budget of €6.2 billion, the most for any EU member state, €550 for each of its 11.3 million citizens.

The Greek Government said last October that public borrowing as a share of GDP was heading for 13 per cent in 2009 and, under pressure from Brussels, announced a stability plan to get borrowing down to 3 per cent of GDP by 2012. If a bailout is agreed, Brussels will insist that this fiscal consolidation goes ahead, as a minimum. Moreover, the Commission will strictly monitor and drive the programme, crippling Greece’s fiscal autonomy in the process. These developments will be politically unpalatable and probably trigger further industrial and social unrest. Unsurprisingly, the Greek Government is already resisting pressure for new austerity measures.

The eurozone is at a crossroads and, while the time is not ripe to address the fundamental problems of the euro, decisions over the Greek predicament are urgent. The EU broadly has two choices. It can guarantee a bailout for Greece, if needed, imposing tough conditions on the country. And it can hope that this will solve the current euro crisis. But this risks, as a minimum, demands from Spain, Portugal and Ireland for similar treatment.

Or, alternatively, it could bite on a very hard bullet and ask Greece to leave the eurozone, not least “pour encourager les autres”. (I am aware that there are apparently no formal procedures for this.) The financial repercussions would be tremendous, but financial crises eventually resolve themselves and if this boil has to burst, it’s better to do it sooner rather than later. The political fallout would, however, be shattering. The eviction of Greece would be the first serious retreat of the European project and would represent a terrific loss of political face for the believers in European integration and solidarity.

The EU, with Germany playing a pivotal role, can therefore be expected to support Greece this time. But, for the sake of the long-term viability of the eurozone, it would be far better to evict Greece now and direct the beleaguered country to the IMF for some long overdue economic discipline.

(ruth lea, The Times, 16February2010)