The Oil Drum

A new Round-Up has been posted at TOD:Canada.

With arctic sovereignty increasingly in dispute due to potential oil and gas discoveries in a warmer world, the various interested parties seem almost desperate to stake their claim (and some are apparently more desperate than others). Meanwhile sovereignty debates continue further south at the Montebello SPP summit.

Danny Williams (one scary poker player), finally suceeds in securing a deal on the Hebron field after calling the oil companies' bluff. They said they had plenty of other opportunities if Newfoundland wouldn't play ball, but in a peak oil world Williams said they'd come back to the table, and they did.

As for the developing credit crunch, risk appears less and less contained over time, as international concern grows over the highy-rated 'assets' derived from the American mortgage market. Even money market funds are beginning to experience a flight to quality.

Russian arctic images 'from Titanic'

Russia faces embarrassment over its flag planting expedition to the North Pole after claims that state broadcasters borrowed scenes from the movie Titanic to "beef-up" footage. Television company Rossiya sent images of mini submarines descending to the ocean floor around the world in its report about the mission.

But a 13-year-old boy from Finland spotted the scenes in the national daily newspaper Ilta-Sanomat, and realised that they resembled images on his Titanic DVD.

He told the newspaper: "I checked it with my DVD and there it was right there in the beginning of the movie: exactly the same image of the submersibles approaching the ship."

Titanic, made by James Cameron and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, opens with pictures of divers inspecting the 1912 shipwreck. The news programme is accused of merging real footage with the movie shots under the caption "northern Arctic Ocean", according to the Guardian.

It reported that Rossiya had refused to comment on the footage but said its Vesti news programme had originally been filmed using scale models in a studio.