U.S. blames BP for Gulf spill

The United States heaped the lion’s share of blame for the country’s biggest ever offshore oil spill on BP on Wednesday as the government issued its final assessment of last year’s Gulf disaster. In a report that may be pivotal in the multibillion-dollar legal battles to come and could set the stage for criminal charges, the Coast Guard and the offshore oil regulator said BP was solely to blame for 21 of 35 contributing causes to the Macondo well blow-out that led to the leak, and shared blame for eight more.