Barack Obama flies in to meet BP chief over Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

(From Guardian Unlimited)

Barack Obama will fly to Louisiana today to assess the threat to large stretches of the Gulf of Mexico from millions of gallons of crude oil that has spilled from the remains of a sunken offshore rig. One expert said that the slick had tripled in size in a day.

Satellite images found the surface area of the spill from the Deepwater Horizon rig, which exploded on 20 April with the loss of 11 lives, had increased from about 1,150 sq miles on Thursday to around 3,850 sq miles by the end of Friday.

"The spill and the spreading is getting so much faster and expanding much quicker than estimated," said Hans Graber from Miami …