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Newsweek on Chilean disaster and most likely ones in the world

Platon Lebedev, who faces theft charges along with jailed Yukos-founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky , will start to give his testimony in court on Monday.

The government vowed on Sunday that operations to completely clean up BP's Gulf of Mexico oil spill and compensate those affected would not slacken off despite the success in halting the leak.

A Canadian company whose pipeline leaked hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil into a Michigan river has experienced leaks, an explosion and dozens of regulatory violations in the past decade throughout the Great Lakes region and elsewhere in the U.S.

The Gulf of Mexico oil disaster reached the 100-day mark Wednesday with hopes high that BP is finally on the verge of permanently sealing its ruptured Macondo well.

The Coast Guard dispatched emergency teams Tuesday after a boat crashed into an oil well off the coast of New Orleans, reportedly sending crude spewing some 20 feet into the air.

Chinese officials said Monday one of the nation's worst oil spills had been cleaned up 10 days after a massive explosion sent an estimated 1,500 tons of crude into the Yellow Sea along the northeastern port city of Dalian.

China's largest reported oil spill has more than doubled in size to 165 square miles on July 21,2010, forcing beaches to close and prompting officials to warn of a "severe threat" to sea life and water quality.

A storm brewing in the Caribbean brought the deep-sea effort to plug the ruptured oil well to a near standstill Wednesday just as BP was getting tantalizingly close to going in for the kill.

BP has successfully placed a new cap over the leaking Gulf of Mexico oil well.

Using underwater robots, BP engineers worked on Sunday to replace a cap over a gushing oil well in the Gulf of Mexico as part of a new attempt to contain the worst environmental disaster in US history.

Russian-built submersibles would be able to cap the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, the captain of one of the vessels has said.

The Obama administration heads to court on Thursday with a single goal -- to reinstate a six-month moratorium on deepwater oil drilling imposed in response to the BP Plc oil spill but blocked by a federal judge.

While federal regulators have ignored abandoned oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico, at least 25 states have been busy sealing their old wells. On land, leaky old wells aren't so easily forgotten.

The cost of the BP oil spill has surpassed the $3 billion mark, the oil giant said in statement today.

A new emergency federal rule could set the stage for the departure of two of the Pacific Northwest's largest oil-spill-response vessels and five Navy skimmers to battle the massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Rough seas generated by Hurricane Alex have pushed more oil from the massive spill on to US Gulf coast beaches as clean-up vessels are sidelined by the storm.

BP says it has reinstalled a containment cap on its blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico after an accident unleashed a torrent of oil.

BP said Monday that it had spent about $2 billion so far in its response to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, including containment efforts, economic and environmental claims and state and federal costs.

BP is trying to raise $US 50 billion to cover the cost of the Gulf of Mexico spill and is preparing to sue its partners in the oil field, British newspapers said overnight.