Monday Business Edition

“The cost of the response to date amounts to approximately 6.1 billion dollars (4.6 billion euros),” BP said in an official statement.

The costs include spill response, relief well drilling, the “static kill” and cementing of the ruptured well, grants to Gulf states, claims paid and federal costs.

With the ruptured Macondo well all but dead on the ocean floor as engineers shut the well for good, BP is shifting towards recovery operations including cleaning hundreds of miles of shoreline and restoring the economic health of the region.

Carol Browner, director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, stressed that the British energy giant was on the hook for billions of dollars in penalties for the largest unintentional oil spill in petroleum industry history.

“I think what we need to understand is there’s a lot of oil that’s been taken care of. There’s a lot of oil that’s still out there,” said Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen on CNN.

“You need to keep a steady hand at the tiller here, keep this cleanup going,” he said, describing it as a “catastrophe for the people of the Gulf” and calling for a close study of the damage done to the environment.

BP is on the hook for tens of billions of dollars in fines and clean-up and compensation costs, so tapping into the rich field deep under the seabed might well be worth it.

“Clearly there’s lots of oil and gas there and we’ll have to think about what to do with that at some point,” Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer, told reporters.

The telecoms watchdog had postponed a ban due to come into force on Friday, allowing time until Monday evening to test suggested technical solutions that would give authorities access to BlackBerry’s encrypted data.

More 700,000 people subscribe to BlackBerry in the kingdom, most reportedly purchasing the device for personal use. But the birthplace of Al-Qaeda chief, Osama bin Laden, fears the smartphone could jeopardise its security.

The Communications and Information Technology Commission said the 48-hour grace period, ending on Monday evening, was given “to test the suggested solutions,” a statement carried by SPA state news agency late on Saturday said.

The CITC decision was also based on the “ongoing efforts by the providers of mobile services to meet the requirements of the commission’s regulations.”

The 10-member body is expected to keep interest rates at historic lows, but Fed watchers will be looking for any hint of a return to stimulus spending.

After planing to reel in crisis measures, the Labor Department reported US economy shed 131,000 jobs in July, thrusting the Fed’s policies back into the spotlight.

Top wheat exporter Russia, Putin said, would from August 15 ban the export of grain until December 31 to keep prices down at home amid the worst drought to hit the country in decades.

The announcement catapulted wheat futures in Chicago and Europe up 10 percent to new two-year highs and prompted a warning from the UN food agency of a “serious” situation on world food markets.

“Chief Executive Officer and President Mark Hurd has decided with the board of directors to resign his positions effective immediately,” the company said in a statement.

HP had brought in outside counsel to investigate allegations that Hurd had violated HP’s sexual harassment policy in his dealings with a former marketing contractor.

Obama, who has been hurt by the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, has been scrambling to highlight his economic management in helping lift the US economy out of its worst slump in decades.

But the latest data released Friday showed the recovery is sputtering: A Labor Department report showed 131,000 jobs were lost in July and the unemployment rate remained stuck at 9.5 percent, which is better than the worst levels this year but still painfully high.

In research published by the Bank for International Settlements on the “myth and reality” of China’s savings rate, Ma Guonan and Wang Yi found that the Asian giant needs its population to spend more in order to sustain rapid economic growth in coming years.

The researchers, who were writing in their personal capacity, also reject claims that Chinese state firms have been benefiting from high savings thanks to exchange rate distortions and subsidies designed to drive economic growth.

Georgia’s parliament last month approved the lifting of a legal ban on the privatisation of the North-South pipeline which runs from Russia to Armenia and was previously listed as a “strategic asset” that could not be sold.

Georgian officials insist that only a minority stake could be sold.

Heavily dependent on exporting quality German-made products, the economy, Europe’s biggest, was hit harder than most by the global crisis but now appears to be recovering faster as demand across the globe picks up.

Foreign orders are booming, the country’s low unemployment has been hailed as a “jobs miracle,” top firms are reporting strong profits and consumer and business confidence levels are soaring.

Banks essentially loaning money to themselves used the cash for all sorts of alleged shady deals, including buying private jets or manipulating stock prices — and that was only part of the problem.

“The banks did not fail,” Central Bank Governor Lamido Sanusi said in a strikingly blunt speech earlier this year. “They were destroyed and brought to their knees by acts committed by identifiable people.”

“We’re taking this to the bitter end,” said a hunger striker in the tent city that sprung up overnight in Potosi’s main square.

The hunger strike includes regional officials, union and farm leaders, as well as Potosi Governor Felix Gonzalez, a former ally of leftist President Evo Morales, whom many critics charge is ignoring the plight of Bolivia’s poor who voted him to power six year ago.

Some 131,000 jobs were lost and the unemployment rate remained stuck at 9.5 percent last month, officials said, as federal and local governments slashed jobs.

The private sector was unable to offset a massive government layoff of 143,000 census-takers, with firms creating only a modest 71,000 jobs.

After a dismal July payrolls report, options investors are busy buying protective puts on a popular exchange-traded fund that tracks the S&P 500 index (.SPX), but the CBOE Volatility Index (.VIX) suggests there is no need to be too concerned.

Protective put options in the SPDR S&P 500 fund (SPY.P), also known as the SPYders, were a favorite among traders after a larger-than-expected drop in July U.S. non-farm payrolls fueled worries that the economic recovery was faltering.

Russia banned grain exports on Thursday last week as the worst drought on record ravaged crops across the Black Sea region, boosting the Chicago Board of Trade front-month wheat contract up 66 percent from a low of $4.25- in June.

Chicago wheat futures fell nearly 3 percent on Monday, extending their losses to around 10 percent in two sessions, but traders say the impact of the Russian ban has not been fully felt and the market faces wide swings in prices.

The problem is that despite the most aggressive rate-cutting campaign in the central bank’s history and Fed purchases of nearly $1.5 trillion in mortgage and Treasury bonds, U.S. growth prospects still look shaky.

In particular, the latest employment numbers confirmed that the outlook is souring as the year progresses, raising the possibility that things might get worse rather than better and potentially raising the risk of another recession.

The world’s No. 1 computer maker stunned Wall Street and Silicon Valley on Friday by announcing Hurd’s resignation, accusing him of falsifying expense reports to conceal a “close personal relationship” with a female contractor.

The unidentified woman told HP’s board in June that Hurd had sexually harassed her, but an investigation found no violation of the company’s sexual harassment policy, HP said.

The dismal news on jobs poses a challenge to officials at the Federal Reserve who are debating whether more needs to be done to foster growth, as well as to Democrats hoping to retain their congressional majorities in November elections.

The Fed’s policy-setting committee meets on Tuesday.

Operating profit nevertheless soared 73 percent, helped by the February takeover of railroad operator Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp, improved insurance underwriting including a tripling of pretax profit at the Geico Corp auto insurer, and a turnaround at the NetJets corporate plane unit.

Net income fell to $1.97 billion, or $1,195 per Class A share, from $3.3 billion, or $2,123, a year earlier.

As long as the yen’s climb is spread over several weeks or months, the central bank is expected to stand pat on policy with solid exports to Asia underpinning Japan’s export-driven growth.

But the BOJ is ready to act if expectations of further monetary easing by the Federal Reserve drive down the dollar/yen rate fast enough to damage Japanese business sentiment. For example, a single day drop of 2-3 yen in the dollar/yen exchange rate could make the central bank nervous, traders said.

BP and the government have said for months that intersecting the blown-out well and shoving more mud and cement into it is the ultimate solution to making sure it never spews crude into the ocean again.

The oil is already back at its source, thanks to the “static kill,” which involved thousands of gallons of mud and cement being poured last week through a cap that had been keeping the crude out of the water since July 15. The cement cap poured on top of the oil hardened enough over the weekend so engineers could begin digging the final 100 feet of the well again, according to a news release from the company.

The extra step is supposed to make it easier for the government to get reimbursed if a hurricane slings oil from the Gulf of Mexico into backyards, neighborhoods and wetlands.

But it also could cause frustrating additional delays and prevent residents from returning to their homes while the government figures out who pays the bill.

Weeks ago, before engineers pumped in mud and cement to plug the gusher, scientists began finding specks of oil in crab larvae plucked from waters across the Gulf coast.

The government said last week that three-quarters of the spilled oil has been removed or naturally dissipated from the water. But the crab larvae discovery was an ominous sign that crude had already infiltrated the Gulf’s vast food web – and could affect it for years to come.

Jodie Fisher, 50, an actress and businesswoman, knew Hurd through her contract jobs with HP’s marketing department from 2007 to 2009. HP paid her up to $5,000 per event to greet people and make introductions among executives attending HP events that she helped organize.

Fisher echoed Hurd’s statement that the two never had a sexual relationship, but neither she nor her lawyer, celebrity attorney Gloria Allred, would discuss details of the harassment claim.

His comments come as device maker Research in Motion Ltd. is facing opposition by a number of countries around the world, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in the Gulf, to the way its encrypted e-mail and messenger services are managed.

Bahrain’s Sheik Khaled bin Ahmed Al Khalifa told The Associated Press the handheld devices raise legitimate concerns, but that his nation has decided that banning some of the phones’ features is “not a way of dealing with it.”

The race to open new casinos is most frenzied in the Northeast, which has 41 casinos and 20 more planned.

Atlantic City, N.J., which for decades held a gambling monopoly outside Nevada, was already reeling from a beatdown inflicted by neighboring competitors. Now New York, which has casinos run by Indian tribes, just approved slot machines for its Aqueduct racetrack. Pennsylvania has added table games like poker and blackjack to its nine slot-machine casinos – and five new casinos are planned.

It will spend at least $10 million over the next five years to fund research and development at Maui cane fields for crops capable of fueling Navy fighter jets and ships. The project also may provide farmers in other warm climates with a model for harvesting their biofuel crops.

Hawaii has become a key federal laboratory for biofuels because of its dependence on imported oil as well as its great weather for growing crops. Factor in the heavy military presence at places such as Pearl Harbor, and the islands become an ideal site for the government to test biofuel ideas on a commercial scale.

So far, only a trickle of Northwest wines make it to Asian countries outside of Japan. But experts say as affluence grows in China’s booming economy, so will the demand for the finer things in life.

The recession hurt U.S. wine sales to most of the world last year, but not to Hong Kong, where the value of American wine imports jumped 138 percent to $40 million.

According to congressional investigators, the exact average was 178 days. By that time, many cases go cold, making it difficult to catch perpetrators, much less recover money for taxpayers.

A recent inspector general report also raised questions about the contractors, who play an important role in Medicare’s overall effort to combat fraud.