by Daniela Perdomo

How the owner of the exploded oil rig has made $270 million off the disaster, and nine other shocking, depressing facts about the oil spill.

It’s been 37 days since BP’s offshore oil rig, Deepwater Horizon, exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. Since then, crude oil has been hemorrhaging into ocean waters and wreaking unknown havoc on our ecosystem — unknown because there is no accurate estimate of how many barrels of oil are contaminating the Gulf.

by Eric Walberg

The new coalition in Westminster is parsing all the words about Afghanistan and coming up with a very different interpretation

The movement to “get the troops out now!” has found unlikely converts in the form of the Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition in Britain . The election campaign suggested nothing new could be expected from any of the parties on Afghanistan , despite the fact that over 70 per cent of Britons want the troops home.

The US Patriot air defence batteries and around 100 American troops have arrived in the town of Morag, northern Poland, 60 kilometers from the Russian Kaliningrad border.

Since early morning soldiers of the US 5th Battalion and 7th Air Defence Artillery have been unloading the missiles from 37 train carriages.

“It’s an important day for Poland and the United States, for our common goals and interests,” said U.S. ambassador to Poland Lee Feinstein.

The first Patriots arrived in Poland after the SOFA agreement (Supplemental Status of Forces Agreement) at the beginning of this year.

by Mike Whitney

Angela Merkel has let a minor brush-fire on the periphery turn into a raging inferno that’s sweeping across the continent. Absent Berlin’s fumbling diplomatic effort and its ferocious attachment to Hooverian economics, the Greek matter would have been over by now. Instead, the fire continues to burn while the German Chancellor pushes the eurozone closer and closer to the cliff. And what for; to prove that prodigal spending by the member states (Greece) mustn’t go unpunished? Is that what this is all about? Is Merkel really willing to break up the EU just to prove her point and to accommodate her towering sense of self righteousness?

by Patrick Martin

The US Senate’s passage of the Obama administration’s financial reform bill Thursday was hailed in the media and by official Washington as a landmark effort to curb the power of the big banks. But on Wall Street itself, the news was greeted with a mixture of dismissal and applause.

Bank stocks soared on Friday, with the share price of JP Morgan Chase, one of the biggest finance houses, surging 5.9 percent and helping drive the Dow Jones Industrial Average up 125 points. Other bank stocks rose sharply: Bank of America up 4.7 percent, Goldman Sachs up 3.3 percent, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Citigroup. The S&P financial sector index was up 3.6 percent overall.

by Richard C. Cook

While skeptics mockingly point out that the “end of the world” has been prophesized over and over again for centuries with nothing happening—the latest being Y2K, they say, and another likely bust coming up when the calendar hits 2012—it’s obvious that mankind faces an increasingly unsustainable future.

The world’s economic, technological, agricultural, and political systems are breaking down. While the causes are debated, it’s certain that the human assault on the natural world has wiped out vast numbers of species and polluted the land, the air, and the oceans. After the past 100 years of history, with two world wars and low-grade but vicious warfare going on almost continuously somewhere in the world since World War II ended, it seems impossible for human beings to live together in a state of harmony either among ourselves or with the planet we call home.

by Dahr Jamail

The tar sands mining project in Alberta, Canada, is possibly the largest industrial project in human history and critics claim it could also be the most destructive. The mining procedure for extracting oil from a region referred to as the “tar sands,” located north of Edmonton, releases at least three times the CO2 emissions as regular oil production procedures and will likely become North America’s single largest industrial contributor to climate change.

Most of the oil produced by the project will likely be consumed by the United States, a country that, along with Canada, is already heavily invested, on many levels, in the project.

by Wayne Madsen

In an exclusive for Oilprice.com, the Wayne Madsen Report (WMR) has learned from Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers sources that U.S. Navy submarines deployed to the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean off the Florida coast have detected what amounts to a frozen oil blob from the oil geyser at the destroyed Deep Horizon off-shore oil rig south of Louisiana. The Navy submarines have trained video cameras on the moving blob, which remains frozen at depths of between 3,000 to 4,000 feet. Because the oil blob is heavier than water, it remains frozen at current depths.

by Danny Schechter

We live in a three card monte world. Follow the money as it moves from one shell to another. Now guess where it is. Most of us don’t know the hand can be quicker than the eye. That’s why mostly everyone who has ever been suckered into playing ends up losing except those who are allowed to win to keep the hustle going. We miss the tricks of the trade even as we swear we know where the winning card or money or ball is.

Phase one: (http://www.goodtricks.net/three-card-monte.html)

by Olivier Besancenot and Pierre-François Grond

What is happening in Greece concerns all of us. The people are paying for a crisis and a debt that are not their own. Today it is the Greeks, tomorrow it will be others, for the same causes will produce the same effects if we allow it.