News Headline

online.wsj.com — A year ago the U.S. auto-supplier industry was all but left for dead. Companies such as Lear Corp. were filing for bankruptcy, demand for parts was plummeting and investors were abandoning the sector as General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group LLC grappled with Chapter 11 reorganizations.

Now, the U.S.-based automotive suppliers are not only doing better, but they are profitable, their stocks are surging, they are hiring and they're putting the finishing touches on restructurings.

Read Full Article »

informationweek.com — Despite President Obama's pledge to retain more hi-tech jobs in the U.S., a federal agency run by a hand-picked Obama appointee has launched a $22 million program to train workers, including 3,000 specialists in IT and related functions, in South Asia. Following their training, the tech workers will be placed with outsourcing vendors in the region that provide offshore IT and business services to American companies looking to take advantage of the Asian subcontinent's low labor costs.

Read Full Article »

washingtonpost.com — President Obama and congressional Democrats -- out of options for another quick shot of stimulus spending to revive the sluggish economy -- are shifting toward a longer-term strategy that promises to tackle persistently high unemployment by engineering a renaissance in American manufacturing.

Read Full Article »

washingtonpost.com — Days after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig sank in the Gulf of Mexico, a conservative nonprofit group called the Institute for Energy Research asked BP to contribute $100,000 for a media campaign it was launching in defense of the oil industry.

Read Full Article »

nytimes.com — A government report finds that about 26 percent of the oil released from BP’s runaway well is still in the water or onshore in a form that could, in principle, cause new problems. But most is light sheen at the ocean surface or in a dispersed form below the surface, and federal scientists believe that it is breaking down rapidly in both places.

Read Full Article »

washingtonpost.com — Michael Bromwich, who heads the agency that has replaced the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service, will hold a series of public forums starting Wednesday in New Orleans. The meetings will explore the current system for drilling and workplace safety, oil and gas containment, and spill response. The eight hearings on the Gulf Coast and in Anchorage, he said, will determine "whether we can develop a level of comfort on all three issues that would enable the [interior] secretary to lift the moratorium in a principled way" before Nov. 30.

Read Full Article »

thehill.com — Oil-state and centrist Democrats have competing ideas for addressing the thorny issue of raising liability caps for oil and gas producers, but the discussions also may signal the greatest hope for finding enough consensus toward getting Senate approval this year of a response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) has floated the industry-supported idea of setting up a mutual insurance fund allowing all oil and gas producers to share the cost of future spills, while lifting the liability cap entirely for BP in the Gulf spill.

Read Full Article »

mcclatchydc.com — BP's Deepwater Horizon well, which for 87 days spewed millions of barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico in the worst accidental oil spill the world has ever seen, has been successfully killed by thousands of tons of heavy drilling mud.

BP announced early Wednesday that a so-called "static kill" had succeeded in forcing the Macondo well's oil back into rock formations 18,000 feet below the sea's surface.

Read Full Article »

wonkroom.thinkprogress.org — In response to one of the greatest oil disasters in history, the U.S. Senate will do nothing. Republican opposition to the limited oil industry reform package assembled by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (S. 3663) has led him to pull the bill — and the BP-friendly Republican alternative (S. 3643) — from the floor. Pressed for time, Reid chose not to force his opponents to cast a vote on behalf of their oil sponsors. Reid’s package is almost exclusively made of bipartisan pieces of legislation:

Read Full Article »

rttnews.com — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., revealed Tuesday that a vote on the energy bill will be delayed until after the month-long August recess after Democrats were unable to get Republicans to support the scaled-back bill.

"It's a sad day when not even a single Republican will support a bill that would create up to 700,000 clean energy jobs, and hold BP accountable for the cost of its disaster," Reid said at a press conference.

Read Full Article »