Followups

* Oil BP’s ex-bff, Anadarko Petroleum, which owns a quarter of the ruptured Deepwater Horizon well, refused to accept any blame for the explosion that killed 11 workers and led to the US’s worst environmental disaster. The company’s chairman and chief executive, Jim Hackett, said in a statement BP’s actions probably amounted to “gross negligence or wilful misconduct”. We guess that kills Jim’s chances of sailing on Tony’s yacht. The NYer has a fine cartoon of life on the current Gulf foodchain, boingboing links to a brilliant fridge poster of killer oil that should be on every fridge in North America, and Big Picture has another series on the spreading oil, after two months of gush.

* World Cup A fascinating Wikipedia story explains why this week’s world cup has the two final group games played simultaneously. It’s all because of a non-aggression pact between Germany and Austria in 1982. “[German] Commentator Eberhard Stanjek at one point refused to comment on the game any longer. Austrian commentator Robert Seeger bemoaned the spectacle and actually requested that the viewers should switch off their television sets.” And CounterPunch lives up to its name and fights for the French soccer team in “Workers and Players” For one there’s the creepily medieval evocation of ‘dishonor’. There’s the hysterical nationalism implicit and explicit in the outcry, with politicians from Sarkozy on (further) down getting involved. And finally there is the nature of the sin that brought the French debacle to its ignominious conclusion: not so much poor performances, as the fact that players stood up to management and showed solidarity and collective purpose when a comrade was victimized by that management.