EDGE on the Net

A newly-released internal report by BP shifts blame over the disastrous oil rig collapse and subsequent spill on subcontractors Halliburton and Transocean. Mark Strassmann reports.

BP’s long-awaited internal report on what it believes went wrong when a rig exploded and started the massive Gulf oil spill never mentions the words blame, regret, apology, mistake or pollution. The word fault shows up 20 times, but only once in the same sentence as the company’s name.

Oil giant BP PLC laid much of the blame for the rig explosion and the massive Gulf of Mexico spill on itself, other companies’ workers and a complex series of failures in an internal report released Wednesday before a key piece of evidence has been analyze

People’s emotional well-being - happiness - increases along with their income up to about $75,000, researchers report in Tuesday’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A combative President Barack Obama rolled out a long-term jobs program Monday that would exceed $50 billion to rebuild roads, railways and runways, and coupled it with a blunt campaign-season assault on Republicans for causing Americans’ hard economic times.

East Asia is the world’s electronics factory, yet unless they are Japanese, producers are largely anonymous. Now HTC Corp., a Taiwanese maker of smart phones, is moving out of the shadows and trying to establish its own brand name as it competes with Apple’s iPhone.

Whenever companies start hiring freely again, job-seekers with specialized skills and education will have plenty of good opportunities. Others will face a choice: Take a job with low pay - or none at all.

Vowing to find new ways to stimulate the sputtering economy, President Barack Obama will call for long-term investments in the nation’s roads, railways and airports that would cost at least $50 billion, administration officials said.

The anemic economy is causing companies to conserve cash and hold back on hiring. While most economists expect the nation to avoid another recession, growth will likely be so weak for the rest of this year that the jobless rate could move back above 10 percent by early next year.

On Wednesday, Apple unveiled a smaller, cheaper version of Apple TV, which connects to a high-definition television and can show rented movies and TV shows from Apple’s own service, plus content from Netflix, photos on Flickr, YouTube clips and more.