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In a letter to congressional leaders, Obama defended last year’s huge economic stimulus package, saying it helped break the economy’s free fall, but argued that more spending is urgent and unavoidable. “We must take these emergency measures,” he wrote in an appeal aimed primarily at members of his own party.

The letter comes as rising concern about the national debt is undermining congressional support for additional spending to bolster the economy. Many economists say more spending could help bring down persistently high unemployment, but with Republicans making an issue of the record deficits run up during the recession, many Democratic lawmakers are eager to turn off the stimulus tap.

“I think there is spending fatigue,” House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) said recently. “It’s tough in both houses to get votes.”

Workers from the Deepwater Horizon oil rig and the energy company have said that gases were leaking through the casing hours before an explosion caused a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Investigators have said the leaks could have caused the explosion.

The casing pipe that lined the well had cement that, if it did not seal properly, would allow gas to leak to the wellhead, where there was only a single barrier, the Times said.

Using a different type of casing would have created two barriers.

The newspaper said the company decided to use the casing several days before the explosion. It was installed by the contractor Halliburton.

BP said the riskier single barrier option made the best economic case, according to the newspaper.

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.

Witnesses speak of armed Kyrgyz men shooting ethnic Uzbeks and setting property alight.

Thousands of ethnic Uzbeks have been fleeing the city of Osh, where a BBC correspondent reports hearing gunfire.

On Saturday the interim government gave security forces shoot-to-kill powers and urged Russia to send in troops.

Moscow says it has no plans to intervene. Both Russia and the United States have military bases in the country.

Kyrgyzstan’s interim government extended a state of emergency to cover the entire southern Jalalabad region, as ethnic clashes spread there from neighbouring Osh.

President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who was ousted in April and now lives in Belarus, has denied accusations from the government that he is involved in the unrest.

Without international assistance there are fears the interim authorities in Kyrgyzstan will struggle to contain the conflict, the BBC’s Rayhan Demytrie in Osh reports.

The south of Kyrgyzstan, an ex-Soviet Central Asian state of 5.5 million people, is home to an ethnic Uzbek minority of almost one million.

Uzbek eyewitnesses told our correspondent at a border crossing with Uzbekistan that gangs of armed Kyrgyz had been marauding through neighbourhoods, killing residents and burning homes.

One woman pleaded for help: “We need food, we need water, I have got two sons and they are little and I need water and food to survive.”

The International Committee of the Red Cross said it had received reports of tens of thousands people fleeing fighting and looting.

There have also been reports of Kyrgyz casualties.

…

Perhaps some Canadian accidents stick in the mind. There was the 41.8 million gallons that leaked from the American tanker Odyssey off Nova Scotia in 1988, and the 42,000 gallons that gushed from the Petro Canada-owned Terra Nova platform in 2004. That’s about it, though, right?

Based on the massive reaction to the current Gulf of Mexico spill, it might seem like big oil accidents are rare. Actually, our attention spans are short. Oil from Exxon Valdez still lingers in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, 21 years after the tanker spilled 11 million gallons. Now that Deepwater Horizon is partially capped — after releasing roughly one million gallons a day for weeks — it might fade from notice too.

But lots of oil spills happen with scant notice, particularly in the Third World. Cleanup efforts in such cases frequently have been minimal.

“There’s a double standard,” said Richard Steiner, an environmental scientist and frequent critic of the oil industry. “Double Standard” is the title a report he wrote last fall about the neglect that he says has led to one of the world’s worst cases of oil pollution, the fouling of the Niger Delta. The repeated spills and lack of adequate cleanup there have led Amnesty International to single out the Niger Delta as a human rights disaster.

“There’s what we do in the U.S. (the Deepwater Horizon reaction) versus what we’re willing to import from overseas,” says Steiner.

Nigeria may be the worst of humanity’s oil sins, but the number of spills that make only brief headlines then disappear is extensive. Amounts are always in question — there’s no international reporting protocol, so companies, governments and environmentalists proffer wildly different numbers.

The operation highlighted the growing popularity of West Africa for South American drug cartels.

Fifteen people — South Americans, Europeans and Africans — working under cover of a fishing company on a tiny island were arrested following raids at Bonto on the tiny island near the Gambian capital Banjul, police said.

The 2.1 tonnes of cocaine was found in an underground bunker concealed behind a false wall in a warehouse used by the fishing company.

A senior police official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP that four Nigerians, three Ghanaians, two Venezuelans, and three Dutch nationals were arrested on May 12 after residents of Bonto tipped off police.

The 12 suspects appeared in court on three charges of drug trafficking on Wednesday. They pleaded not guilty and were remanded in police custody, an AFP correspondent reported.

Two Gambians and a Nigerian were arrested late Tuesday and a senior police official told AFP more arrests were expected.

“The suspects included the Dutch owner and Venezuelan employees of a Gambia-based fishing company,” Britain’s Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) said.

They “had a number of premises including exclusive use of a small island where they made use of a dilapidated hotel and set up communications and transportation systems.”

Gambia, a sliver of land bordered on three sides by Senegal and the fourth by the Atlantic Ocean, sought the help of British police to examine suspected drugs warehouses.

The underground bunker was found on Friday. Authorities also found 250,000 dollars in cash and a number of loaded firearms.

The cocaine was in “bricks” in 85 sacks, while another 60 empty sacks indicated “the bunker had been used as a distribution centre”.

The cocaine is worth more than 150 million dollars (125 million euros) but “the street value would be many times higher depending on how much the criminals diluted the cocaine with cutting agents,” said SOCA.

A British official speaking to AFP in London said that the street value was as much as one billion dollars.

SOCA said the seizure was a “record for West Africa”, which has become a key transit point for Latin American cartels seeking that take advantage of weak governance and corruption which plague many of the region’s states.

“It has long been feared that cocaine traffickers might seek to exploit the Gambia and other countries in the region as warehousing locations for drugs en route from South America to Europe,” said SOCA deputy director Neil Giles.

“It is highly likely a large proportion of these drugs would have found their way on to the streets of Europe and the UK. Taking this cocaine, and the profits it would have generated, out of the hands of criminals is a major blow to their operations.”

In March, Gambian President Yayha Jammeh said there would be “zero tolerance” for drug-trafficking after 11 senior officials were arrested.

A former police chief and drug chief are alongside senior military and drug enforcement officials on trial for drug trafficking and corruption.