The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From AP:

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A day of reckoning arrived for BP on Thursday as the oil giant agreed to plead guilty to a raft of charges in the deadly Gulf of Mexico spill and pay a record $4.5 billion, including the biggest criminal fine in U.S. history. Three BP employees were also charged, two of them with manslaughter.

The settlement with the federal government came 2½ years after the fiery drilling-rig explosion that killed 11 workers and set off the nation’s largest offshore oil spill.

In announcing the deal, Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer said the tragedy “resulted from BP’s culture of privileging profit over prudence.”

BP will plead guilty to charges involving the 11 deaths and lying to Congress about how much oil was spewing from the blown-out well.

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Two years after a blowout on BP’s Macondo well killed 11 men and triggered the largest oil spill in U.S. history, oil companies are again plying the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

Forty-one deep-water rigs are in the gulf. The vast majority of them are drilling new holes or working over old ones, while the other behemoths are idle as they await work or repairs. A brand new rig — the South Korean-built Pacific Santa Ana, capable of drilling to a depth of 7.5 miles — is on its way to a Chevron well.

But three recent incidents in other parts of the world show just how risky and sensitive offshore drilling remains.

In the North Sea, French oil giant Total is still battling to regain control of a natural gas well that has been leaking for nearly four weeks. Meanwhile, Brazil has confiscated the passports of 11 Chevron employees and five employees of drilling contractor Transocean as they await trial on criminal charges related to an offshore oil spill there. And in December, about 40,000 barrels of crude oil leaked out of a five-year-old loading line between a floating storage vessel and an oil tanker in a Royal Dutch Shell field off the coast of Nigeria.

Many experts say that even with tougher regulations here in the United States, such incidents are inevitable.

Read more at the Washington Post…

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