Stephanie Mueller, a spokeswoman for the Energy Department, said that neither Energy Secretary Steven Chu nor anyone else was thinking about a nuclear blast under the gulf. The nuclear option was not — and never had been — on the table, federal officials said.Government and private nuclear experts agreed that using a nuclear bomb would be not only risky technically, with unknown and possibly disastrous consequences from radiation, but also unwise geopolitically — it would violate arms treaties that the United States has signed and championed over the decades and do so at a time when President Obama is pushing for global nuclear disarmament.The atomic option is perhaps the wildest among a flood of ideas proposed by bloggers, scientists and other creative types who have deluged government agencies and BP, the company that drilled the well, with phone calls and e-mail messages The Unified Command overseeing the Deepwater Horizon disaster features a suggestions button on its official Web site and more than 7,800 people have already responded, according to the site.

Much of the enthusiasm for an atomic approach is based on reports that the Soviet Union succeeded in using nuclear blasts to seal off gas wells. Milo D. Nordyke, in a 2000 technical paper for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., described five Soviet blasts from 1966 to 1981.All but the last blast were successful. The 1966 explosion put out a gas well fire that had raged uncontrolled for three years. But the last blast of the series, Mr. Nordyke wrote, did not seal the well, perhaps because the nuclear engineers had poor geological data on the exact location of the borehole.Robert S Norris, author of Racing for the Bomb and an atomic historian, noted that all the Soviet blasts were on land and never involved oil.

While other indicators support views the labor market recovery is firming, claims for jobless benefits remain above levels usually associated with sustainable employment growth.The number of people still receiving benefits after an initial week of aid unexpectedly rose 31,000 to 4.67 million in the week ended May 22, the highest since early April, the Labor Department said. The level was above market expectations for 4.60 million.In a second report, the Labor Department said US non-farm productivity growth was much slower than initially estimated in the first quarter as businesses started adding workers to maintain output.

The regulator said in January that two firms that it didn’t identify faced a penalty after the FSA started investigations into how they held client money. Those inquiries were started at the same time as a London judge ruled that the FSA’s client- money rules were patently inconsistent and flawed in a case over the administration of Lehman’s European unit.The regulator said at the time that it would consult on changes to parts of its rulebook, specifically over transfer arrangements and on firms keeping buffers that could top up client-money accounts if needed. Proposals are scheduled for later this year.The client-money regime was neglected by the FSA prior to the financial crisis, said Darren Fox, a regulatory lawyer at Simmons & Simmons advising a hedge fund in the Lehman case I wonder whether today’s fine is symptomatic of the FSA’s guilty conscience in relation to the Lehman client-money failings, for which the FSA received a fair bit of flak.

Since most smartphone subscribers have no idea how much data they are using each month, AT&T says it plans to make it easy for customers to know how much data they are consuming. The company plans to send text messages to users as they reach 65 percent, 90 percent, and 100 percent of their monthly cap.By offering its customers more options at different prices, AT&T can attract new customers who are likely more price sensitive than the early adopters who first signed up for the iPhone.The primary motivation for making the switch to tiered pricing is that the one-size-fits-all approach to smartphones doesnt make sense anymore, said Mark Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T We wanted to give people a choice People will use these devices differently, and we needed to give them different options.