Federal Bureau of Investigation

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is an agency of the United States Department of Justice that serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and an internal intelligence agency. The FBI has investigative jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crime. Its motto is "Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity", corresponding to the FBI initials.

The FBI's headquarters, the J. Edgar Hoover Building, is located in Washington, D.C.. Fifty-six field offices are located in major cities throughout the United States as well as over 400 resident agencies in smaller cities and towns across the country. More than 50 international offices called "legal attachés" are in U.S. embassies worldwide.

Mission and priorities

In the fiscal year 2008, the FBI's total budget was approximately $6.8 billion, including $410 million in program increases to counter-terrorism, counter-intelligence, cybercrime, information technology, security, forensics, training, and criminal programs.

The FBI was established in 1908 as the Bureau of Investigation (BOI). Its name was changed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1935.

The FBI's main goal is to protect and defend the United States against terrorist and foreign intelligence threats, to uphold and enforce the criminal laws of the United States, and to provide leadership and criminal justice services to federal, state, municipal, and international agencies and partners.

Currently, the FBI's top investigative priorities are:

Protect the United States from terrorist attack (see counter-terrorism);

Protect the United States against foreign intelligence operations and espionage (see counter-intelligence);

Protect the United States against cyber-based attacks and high-technology crimes (see cyber-warfare);

Combat public corruption at all levels;

Protect civil rights;

Combat transnational/national criminal organizations and enterprises (see organized crime);

Combat major white-collar crime;

Combat significant violent crime;

Support federal, state, local and international partners;

Upgrade technology for successful performance of the FBI's mission.

In August 2007, the top categories of lead criminal charges resulting from FBI investigations were:

Bank robbery and incidental crimes (107 charges)

Drugs (104 charges)

Attempt and conspiracy (81 charges)

Material involving sexual exploitation of minors (53 charges)

Mail fraud – frauds and swindles (51 charges)

Bank fraud (31 charges)

Prohibition of illegal gambling businesses (22 charges)

Fraud by wire, radio, or television (20 charges)

Hobbs Act (Robbery and extortion affecting interstate commerce) (17 charges)

Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO)-prohibited activities (17 charges)

Legal authority

An FBI Agent tags the cockpit voice recorder from EgyptAir Flight 990 on the deck of the USS Grapple (ARS 53) at the crash site on November 13, 1999.

The FBI's mandate is established in Title 28 of the United States Code (U.S. Code), Section 533, which authorizes the Attorney General to "appoint officials to detect... crimes against the United States."  Other federal statutes give the FBI the authority and responsibility to investigate specific crimes.

J. Edgar Hoover began using wiretapping in the 1920s during Prohibition to arrest bootleggers. A 1927 case in which a bootlegger was caught through telephone tapping went to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled that the FBI could use wiretaps in its investigations and did not violate the Fourth Amendment as unlawful search and seizure as long as the FBI did not break in to a person's home to complete the tapping. After Prohibition's repeal, Congress passed the 1934 Communications Act, which outlawed non-consensual phone tapping, but allowed bugging. In another Supreme Court case, the court ruled in 1939 that due to the 1934 law, evidence the FBI obtained by phone tapping was inadmissible in court. A 1967 Supreme Court decision overturned the 1927 case allowing bugging, after which Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, allowing public authorities to tap telephones during investigations, as long as they obtain a warrant beforehand.

The FBI's chief tool against organized crime is the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. The FBI is also charged with the responsibility of enforcing compliance of the United States Civil Rights Act of 1964 and investigating violations of the act in addition to prosecuting such violations with the United States Department of Justice (DOJ). The FBI also shares concurrent jurisdiction with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in the enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970.

The USA PATRIOT Act increased the powers allotted to the FBI, especially in wiretapping and monitoring of Internet activity. One of the most controversial provisions of the act is the so-called sneak and peek provision, granting the FBI powers to search a house while the residents are away, and not requiring them to notify the residents for several weeks afterwards. Under the PATRIOT Act's provisions the FBI also resumed inquiring into the library records[8] of those who are suspected of terrorism (something it had supposedly not done since the 1970s).

Information obtained through an FBI investigation is presented to the appropriate U.S. Attorney or Department of Justice official, who decides if prosecution or other action is warranted.

History

Beginnings: The Bureau of Investigation

In 1886, the Supreme Court, in Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific Railway Company v. Illinois, found that the states had no power to regulate interstate commerce. The resulting Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 created a Federal responsibility for interstate law enforcement. The Justice Department, which was founded by John Verbruggen, made little effort to relieve its staff shortage until the turn of the century, when Attorney General Charles Joseph Bonaparte reached out to other agencies, including the Secret Service, for investigators. But the Congress forbade this use of Treasury employees by Justice, passing a law to that effect in 1908. So the Attorney General moved to organize a formal Bureau of Investigation (BOI or BI), complete with its own staff of special agents. The Secret Service provided the Department of Justice 12 Special Agents and these agents became the first Agents in the new BOI. Thus, the first FBI agents, including John Verbruggen, were actually Secret Service agents. Its jurisdiction derived from the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887.The FBI grew out of this force of special agents created on July 26, 1908 during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. Its first official task was visiting and making surveys of the houses of prostitution in preparation for enforcing the "White Slave Traffic Act," or Mann Act, passed on June 25, 1910. In 1932, it was renamed the United States Bureau of Investigation. The following year it was linked to the Bureau of Prohibition and rechristened the Division of Investigation (DOI) before finally becoming an independent service within the Department of Justice in 1935.In the same year, its name was officially changed from the Division of Investigation to the present-day Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI.

[edit]The J. Edgar Hoover Directorship

The Director of the BOI, J. Edgar Hoover, became the first FBI Director and served for 48 years combined with the BOI, DOI, and FBI. After Hoover's death, legislation was passed limiting the tenure of future FBI Directors to a maximum of ten years. The Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory, or the FBI Laboratory, officially opened in 1932, largely as a result of Hoover's efforts. Hoover had substantial involvement in most cases and projects the FBI handled during his tenure.

During the "War on Crime" of the 1930s, FBI agents apprehended or killed a number of notorious criminals who carried out kidnappings, robberies, and murders throughout the nation, including John Dillinger, "Baby Face" Nelson, Kate "Ma" Barker, Alvin "Creepy" Karpis, and George "Machine Gun" Kelly.

Other activities of its early decades included a decisive role in reducing the scope and influence of the Ku Klux Klan. Additionally, through the work of Edwin Atherton, the FBI claimed success in apprehending an entire army of Mexican neo-revolutionaries along the California border in the 1920s.

Lester J. Gillis, also known as "Baby Face" Nelson.

The FBI and national security

Beginning in the 1940s and continuing into the 1970s, the Bureau investigated cases of espionage against the United States and its allies. Eight Nazi agents who had planned sabotage operations against American targets were arrested, six of whom were executed (Ex parte Quirin). Also during this time, a joint US/UK code breaking effort (Venona)—-with which the FBI was heavily involved—-broke Soviet diplomatic and intelligence communications codes, allowing the US and British governments to read Soviet communications. This effort confirmed the existence of Americans working in the United States for Soviet intelligence.Hoover was administering this project but failed to notify the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) until 1952. Another notable case is the arrest of Soviet spy Rudolf Abel in 1957. The discovery of Soviet spies operating in the US allowed Hoover to pursue his longstanding obsession with the threat he perceived from the American left, ranging from Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) union organizers to American liberals with no revolutionary aspirations whatsoever.

The FBI and the civil-rights movement

During the 1950s and 1960s, FBI officials became increasingly concerned about the influence of civil rights leaders. In 1956, for example, Hoover took the rare step of sending an open letter denouncing Dr. T.R.M. Howard, a civil rights leader, surgeon, and wealthy entrepreneur in Mississippi who had criticized FBI inaction in solving recent murders of George W. Lee, Emmett Till, and other blacks in the South. The FBI carried out controversial domestic surveillance in an operation it called the COINTELPRO, which was short for "COunter-INTELligence PROgram."It aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the United States, including both militant and non-violent organizations, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a leading civil rights organization.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a frequent target of investigation. The FBI found no evidence of any crime, but attempted to use tapes of King involved in sexual activity for blackmail. In his 1991 memoirs, Washington Post journalist Carl Rowan asserted that the FBI had sent at least one anonymous letter to King encouraging him to commit suicide.

The FBI and Kennedy's assassination

When President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed, the jurisdiction fell to the local police departments until President Lyndon B. Johnson directed the FBI to take over the investigation. To ensure that there would never be any more confusion over who would handle homicides at the federal level, Congress passed a law that put investigations of deaths of federal officials within FBI jurisdiction.

The FBI and organized crime

In response to organized crime, on August 25, 1953, the Top Hoodlum Program was created. It asked all field offices to gather information on mobsters in their territories and to report it regularly to Washington for a centralized collection of intelligence on racketeers.After the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO Act, took effect, the FBI began investigating the former Prohibition-organized groups, which had become fronts for crime in major cities and even small towns. All of the FBI work was done undercover and from within these organizations using the provisions provided in the RICO Act and these groups were dismantled. Although Hoover initially denied the existence[citation needed] of a close-knit organized crime network in the United States because he then had limited resources to deploy against organized crime,[citation needed] the Bureau later conducted operations against known organized crime syndicates and families, including those headed by Sam Giancana and John Gotti. The RICO Act is still used today for all organized crime and any individuals that might fall under the Act.

J. Edgar Hoover, FBI Director from 1924 to 1972.

Notable post-Hoover reorganizations

Special FBI teams

In 1984, the FBI formed an elite unit  to help with problems that might arise at the 1984 Summer Olympics, particularly terrorism and major-crime. The formation of the team arose from the 1972 Summer Olympics at Munich, Germany when terrorists murdered Israeli Athletes. The team was named Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) and acts as the FBI lead for a national SWAT team in related procedures and all counter terrorism cases. Also formed in 1984 was the Computer Analysis and Response Team (CART).The end of the 1980s and the early part of the 1990s saw the reassignment of over 300 agents from foreign counter intelligence duties to violent crime and the designation of violent crime as the sixth national priority. But with reduced cuts to other well-established departments, and because terrorism was not longer considered a threat after the end of the Cold War, the FBI became a tool of local police forces for tracking fugitives who had crossed state lines, which was a felony. The FBI Laboratory also helped develop DNA testing, continuing the pioneering role in identification that began with its fingerprinting system in 1924.

Notable efforts in the 1990s

Between 1993 and 1996, the FBI increased its counter-terrorism role in the wake of the first 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York, New York and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, and the arrest of the Unabomber in 1996. Technological innovation and the skills of FBI Laboratory analysts helped ensure that all three of these cases were successfully prosecuted, but the FBI was also confronted by a public outcry in this period, which still haunts it today.After Congress passed the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA, 1994), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA, 1996), and the Economic Espionage Act (EEA, 1996), the FBI followed suit and underwent a technological upgrade in 1998, just as it did with its CART team in 1991. Computer Investigations and Infrastructure Threat Assessment Center (CITAC) and the National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) were created to deal with the increase in Internet-related problems, such as computer viruses, worms, and other malicious programs that might unleash havoc in the US. With these developments, the FBI increased its electronic surveillance in public safety and national security investigations, adapting to how telecommunications advancements changed the nature of such problems.

BP plc (British global energy company)

BP plc is a British global energy company which is the third largest global energy company and the fourth largest company in the world. As a multinational oil company ("oil major") BP is the UK's largest corporation, with its headquarters in St James's, City of Westminster, London. BP America's headquarters is in the Two Westlake Park in the Energy Corridor area of Houston, Texas. The company is among the largest private sector energy corporations in the world, and one of the six "supermajors" (vertically integrated private sector oil exploration, natural gas, and petroleum product marketing companies). The company is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.

History

Further information: Anglo-Iranian Oil Company

Activity in 1909–1979

In May 1901, William Knox D'Arcy was granted a concession by the Shah of Iran to search for oil which he discovered in May 1908. This was the first commercially significant find in the Middle East. On 14 April 1909, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) was incorporated to exploit this. In 1923, the company secretly gave £5,000 to future Prime Minister Winston Churchill to lobby the British government to allow them to monopolise Persian oil resources. In 1935, it became the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC).

After World War II, AIOC and the Iranian government initially resisted nationalist pressure to revise AIOC's concession terms still further in Iran's favour. But in March 1951, the pro-western Prime Minister Ali Razmara was assassinated. The Majlis of Iran (parliament) elected a nationalist, Mohammed Mossadeq, as prime minister. In April, the Majlis nationalised the oil industry by unanimous vote. The National Iranian Oil Company was formed as a result, displacing the AIOC. The AIOC withdrew its management from Iran, and organised an effective boycott of Iranian oil. The British government - which owned the AIOC - contested the nationalisation at the International Court of Justice at The Hague, but its complaint was dismissed.

By spring of 1953, incoming U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorised the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to organise a coup against the Mossadeq government with support from the British government. On 19 August 1953, Mossadeq was forced from office by the CIA conspiracy, involving the Shah and the Iranian military, and known by its codename, Operation Ajax.

Classic shield logo, designed by Raymond Loewy, used from 1979 to 2000 and still in use in a small number of petrol stations.

Mossadeq, prince (Shahzadeh) of Qajar Dynasty, was replaced by pro-Western general Fazlollah Zahedi, and the Shah, who returned to Iran after having left the country briefly to await the outcome of the coup. He[who?] abolished the democratic Constitution and assumed autocratic powers.

After the coup, Mossadeq's National Iranian Oil Company became an international consortium, and AIOC resumed operations in Iran as a member of it. The consortium agreed to share profits on a 50–50 basis with Iran, "but not to open its books to Iranian auditors or to allow Iranians onto its board of directors." AIOC, as a part of the Anglo-American coup d'état deal, was not allowed to monopolise Iranian oil as before. It was limited to a 40% share in a new international consortium. For the rest, 40% went to the five major American companies and 20% went to Royal Dutch Shell and Compagnie Française des Pétroles, now Total S.A..

The AIOC became the British Petroleum Company in 1954. In 1959 the company expanded beyond the Middle East to Alaska and in 1965 it was the first company to strike oil in the North Sea. In 1978 BP acquired a controlling interest in Standard Oil of Ohio or Sohio, a breakoff of the former Standard Oil that had been broken up after anti-trust litigation.

BP continued to operate in Iran until the Islamic Revolution in 1979. After 1979, during the Iran-Iraq war, the oil refineries were destroyed and Iran became a raw supplier of oil. The new regime of Ayatollah Khomeini broke all prior oil contracts and signed new contracts with British Petroleum with 90% to BP and 10% to Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers.

1980s and 1990s

Sir Peter Walters was BP's chairman from 1981 to 1990. This was the era of the Thatcher government's privatisation strategy. The British government sold its entire holding in BP in several tranches between 1979 and 1987. The sale process was marked by an attempt by the Kuwait Investment Office, the investment arm of the Kuwait government, to acquire control of BP. This was ultimately blocked by the strong opposition of the British government. In 1987, British Petroleum negotiated the acquisition of Britoil and the remaining publicly traded shares of Standard Oil of Ohio.

A British BP Shop Petrol Station.

Walters was replaced by Robert Horton in 1989. Horton carried out a major corporate down-sizing exercise removing various tiers of management within the BP Head Office.

Standard Oil of California and Gulf Oil merged in 1984, the largest merger in history at that time. Under the antitrust regulation, SoCal divested many of Gulf's operating subsidiaries, and sold some Gulf stations and a refinery in the eastern United States. BP bought many of the stations in the Southeastern United States.

Lord Browne of Madingley, who had been on the board as managing director since 1991, was appointed group chief executive in 1995. Browne was responsible for three major acquisitions; Amoco, ARCO and Burmah-Castrol (see below).

Recent years

The examples and perspective in this section deal primarily with the United States and do not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Please improve this article and discuss the issue on the talk page.

British Petroleum merged with Amoco (formerly Standard Oil of Indiana) in December 1998, becoming BP Amoco plc. In 2000, BP Amoco acquired Arco (Atlantic Richfield Co.)[29] and Burmah Castrol plc. In 2001 the company formally renamed itself as BP plc and adopted the tagline "Beyond Petroleum," which remains in use today. It states that BP was never meant to be an abbreviation of its tagline. Most Amoco stations in the United States were converted to BP's brand and corporate identity. In many states, however, BP continued to sell Amoco branded gasoline even in service stations with the BP identity as Amoco was rated the best petroleum brand by consumers for 16 consecutive years and also enjoyed one of the three highest brand loyalty reputations for gasoline in the US, comparable only to Chevron and Shell. In May 2008, when the Amoco name was mostly phased out in favour of "BP Gasoline with Invigorate", promoting BP's new additive, the highest grade of BP gasoline available in the United States was still called Amoco Ultimate.

Chief scientist, Steven Koonin (top right, with laptop), speaks about the energy scene in the boardroom in 2005.

In April 2004, BP decided to move most of its petrochemical businesses into a separate entity called Innovene within the BP Group. BP sought to sell the new company possibly via an initial public offering (IPO) in the US, and filed IPO plans for Innovene with the New York Stock Exchange on 12 September 2005. On 7 October 2005, however, BP announced that it had agreed to sell Innovene to INEOS, a privately held UK chemical company for $9 billion, thereby scrapping its plans for the IPO.In 2005, BP announced that it would be leaving the Colorado market. Many locations were re-branded as Conoco.

BP Americas headquarters in the Energy Corridor area of Houston

On 19 July 2006, BP announced that it would close the last 12 out of 57 oil wells in Alaska, mostly in Prudhoe Bay, that had been leaking. The wells were leaking insulating agent called Arctic pack, consisting of crude oil and diesel fuel, between the wells and ice.

BP has recently looked to grow its oil exploration activities in frontier areas such as the former Soviet Union for its future reserves. In Russia, BP owns 50% of TNK-BP with the other half owned by three Russian billionaires. TNK-BP accounts for a fifth of BP's global reserves, a quarter of BP's production, and nearly a tenth of its global profits.

In 2007, according to some private BP-branded gasoline center operators in the Metro Atlanta area, BP planned to leave the Southern market in the next few years. All corporate-owned BP stations, typically known as "BP Connect", were to be sold to local jobbers.

On 12 January 2007, it was announced that Lord Browne would retire at the end of July 2007. The new Chief Executive will be the current head of exploration and production, Tony Hayward. It had been expected that Lord Browne would retire in February 2008 when he reached the age of 60, the standard retirement age at BP. Browne resigned abruptly from BP on 1 May 2007, following the lifting of a legal injunction preventing Associated Newspapers from publishing details about his private life. Hayward succeeded Browne with immediate effect.

Governance

BP head office in St. James's, City of Westminster

The Board Members are:

Carl-Henric Svanberg – Chairman

Sir Ian Prosser – Non-executive director

Byron Grote – Chief Financial Officer

Andy Inglis – Chief executive, Exploration and Production

Antony Burgmans – Non-executive director, board of Mauritshuis, AEGON, Unilever

Cynthia Carroll – Non-executive director, CEO of Anglo American, also board of De Beers

Sir William Castell – Non-executive director chairman of The Prince’s Trust

George David – Non-executive director

Tony Hayward – CEO/MD BP Worldwide

Ian Conn

George David vice-chairman of the Peterson Institute for International Economics

Erroll Davis, board of General Motors and Union Pacific.

Douglas J Flint, CBE director HSBC

Dr DeAnne Julius, director of Chatham House

Financial data

Chart of the major energy companies dubbed "Big Oil" sorted by latest published revenue

Financial data in millions of US$

Year 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006

Sales 180,186 236,045 294,849 249,465 265,906

EBITDA 22,941 28,200 37,825 41,453 44,835

Net Results 6,845 10,267 15,961 22,341 22,000

Net Debt 20,273 20,193 21,607 16,202 16,202

Source :OpesC

Incidents

In the United States, BP or its subsidiaries have been convicted of environmental crimes on three occasions, one of which resulted from the Texas City Refinery Disaster where BP was fined $50,000,000 and given 3 years probation. Separate to that conviction, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration issued its largest fine of $87,000,000 to BP for 270 safety violations. BP is appealing the fine.

Doyon Drilling, a BP contractor working in North Slope Alaska in 2000, pleaded guilty to dumping hazardous materials down oil well shafts. BP was fined $500,000 for failing to report the dumping when it became aware of it. In addition to the fine, BP was placed on probation and ordered to create a nationwide environmental management program.

Texas City Refinery explosion

Main article: Texas City Refinery explosion

One of BP's largest refineries in the US exploded in March 2005 causing 15 deaths, injuring 180 people and forcing thousands of nearby residents to remain sheltered in their homes. A large column filled with hydrocarbon overflowed to form a vapour cloud, which ignited. The explosion caused all the casualties and substantial damage to the rest of the plant. The incident came as the culmination of a series of less serious accidents at the refinery, and the engineering problems were not addressed by the management. Maintenance and safety at the plant had been cut as a cost-saving measure, the responsibility ultimately resting with executives in London.

The fall-out from the accident continues to cloud BP's corporate image because of the mismanagement at the plant. There have been several investigations of the disaster, the most recent being that from the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board which "offered a scathing assessment of the company." OSHA found "organizational and safety deficiencies at all levels of the BP Corporation" and said management failures could be traced from Texas to London.

The company pleaded guilty to a felony violation of the Clean Air Act, was fined $50 million, and sentenced to three years probation.

On October 30, 2009, the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fined BP an additional $87 million — the largest fine in OSHA history — for failing to correct safety hazards revealed in the 2005 explosion. Inspectors found 270 safety violations that had been previously cited but not fixed and 439 new violations. BP is appealing that fine.

Prudhoe Bay

Main article: Prudhoe Bay oil spill

In August, 2006, BP shut down oil operations in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, due to corrosion in pipelines leading up to the Alaska Pipeline. BP had spilled over one million litres of oil in Alaska's North Slope. This corrosion is caused by sediment collecting in the bottom of the pipe, protecting corrosive bacteria from chemicals sent through the pipeline to fight this bacteria. There are estimates that about 5,000 barrels (790 m3) of oil were released from the pipeline. To date 1,513 barrels (240.5 m3) of liquids, about 5,200 cubic yards (4,000 m3) of soiled snow and 328 cubic yards (251 m3) of soiled gravel have been recovered. After approval from the DOT, only the eastern portion of the field was shut down, resulting in a reduction of 200,000 barrels per day (32,000 m3/d) until work began to bring the eastern field to full production on 2 October 2006.

In May 2007, the company announced another partial field shutdown owing to leaks of water at a separation plant. Their action was interpreted as another example of fallout from a decision to cut maintenance of the pipeline and associated facilities.

On 16 October 2007 Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation officials reported a toxic spill of methanol (methyl alcohol) at the Prudhoe Bay oil field managed by BP PLC. Nearly 2,000 gallons of mostly methanol, mixed with some crude oil and water, spilled onto a frozen tundra pond as well as a gravel pad from a pipeline. Methanol, which is poisonous to plants and animals, is used to clear ice from the insides of the Arctic-based pipelines.

Deepwater Horizon oil spill

Main article: Deepwater Horizon oil spill

On April 20, 2010, a semi-submersible exploratory offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded after a blowout and sank two days later, killing eleven people and causing a massive oil spill threatening the coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, and Florida. The rig is owned and operated by Transocean Ltd[50] on behalf of BP, which is the majority owner of the oil field. The company originally estimated the size of the leak at about 1,000 barrels a day but later accepted government estimates of a leak of at least 5,000 barrels per day (790 m3/d). On April 30, BP stated that it would harness all of its resources to battle the oil spill, spending $7 million a day with its partners to try to contain the disaster. In comparison BP's 1st quarter profits for 2010 were roughly $61M daily  BP was running the well without a remote control shut-off switch used in two other major oil-producing nations, Brazil and Norway, as a last resort protection against underwater spills. The use of such devices is not mandated by U.S. regulators. The U.S. Government gave the responsibility of the incident to BP and will hold it accountable for costs incurred in containing the situation. On May 11, 2010, Congress called the executives of BP, Transocean, and Halliburton to a hearing regarding the oil spill. When probed for answers regarding the events leading up to the explosion, each company blamed the other. BP blamed Transocean who owned the rig, who then blamed the operators of the rig, BP. They also blamed Halliburton, who built the well casing.Scientists have been requesting the right to monitor the amount of oil that is actually being released per day, but "'The answer is no to that,' a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday, May 15. 'We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.' Steven Wereley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, analyzed videotape of the leak using particle image velocimetry and estimated oil flow rates at between 56,000 to 84,000 barrels per day (8,900 to 13,400 m3/d), or equivalent to one Exxon Valdez spill every 3.5 to 2.4 days. A second, smaller leak has been estimated to be releasing 25,000 barrels per day (4,000 m3/d) by itself , suggesting that the total size of the leak may well be in excess of 100,000 barrels per day and could possibly be one of the largest oil spills in history and the worst man-made disaster recorded.

Controversy

Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline

BP has been criticised for its involvement with Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, due to human rights, environmental and safety concerns.

Colombian pipeline

In July 2006, a group of Colombian farmers won a multi million pound settlement from BP after the British oil and gas company was accused of benefiting from a regime of terror carried out by Colombian government paramilitaries to protect a 450-mile (720 km) pipeline.

Mist mountain project

There have been some calls[who?] for BP to halt its "Mist Mountain" Coalbed Methane Project in the Southern Rocky Mountains of British Columbia. The proposed 500 km² project is directly adjacent to the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park.

Canadian oil sands

BP is one of numerous firms who are extracting oil from Canadian oil sands, a process that produces four times as much CO2 as conventional drilling. The Cree aboriginal group describe BP as being complicit in 'the biggest environmental crime on the planet'. The Cree aboriginal group also describe the oil sands projects some of the great economic influences of the area.

Environmental and safety record

BP was named by Mother Jones Magazine as one of the "ten worst corporations" in both 2001 and 2005 based on its environmental and human rights records. In 1991 BP was cited as the most polluting company in the US based on EPA toxic release data. BP has been charged with burning polluted gases at its Ohio refinery (for which it was fined $1.7 million), and in July 2000 BP paid a $10 million fine to the EPA for its management of its US refineries. According to PIRG research, between January 1997 and March 1998, BP was responsible for 104 oil spills. BP patented the Dracone Barge to aid in oil spill clean-ups across the world.

A Gulf gasoline station in Louisville, KY using the previous BP prototype. BP purchased all Gulf stations in the southeastern United States in the 1980's after Chevron, Inc. was forced to divest the stations by the United States Justice Department.

BP Amoco was a member of the Global Climate Coalition an industry organization established to promote global warming scepticism but withdrew in 1997, saying "the time to consider the policy dimensions of climate change is not when the link between greenhouse gases and climate change is conclusively proven, but when the possibility cannot be discounted and is taken seriously by the society of which we are part. We in BP have reached that point.".

In March 2002 Lord Browne of Madingley declared in a speech that global warming was real and that urgent action was needed, saying that "Companies composed of highly skilled and trained people can't live in denial of mounting evidence gathered by hundreds of the most reputable scientists in the world."

BP Amoco changed its name to BP in 2000, and introduced a new corporate slogan: “Beyond Petroleum.” It replaced its “Green Shield” logo with the helios symbol, a green and yellow sunflower pattern similar to the emblem of the Green Party of Canada. These changes were intended to highlight the company’s interest in alternative and environmentally friendly fuels. When, in July 2006, BP admitted, only after journalists became aware of the spill, that it was facing criminal charges for allowing 270,000 gallons of crude oil to spread into the Alaskan tundra, critics pointed to the relative lack of press coverage about the spill as evidence that BP had successfully greenwashed its image while maintaining environmentally unsound practices.

BP was one nominee for the 2009 Greenwash Awards, on companies trying to look green and failing.

As of 11 February 2007 BP announced that they would spend $8 billion over ten years to research alternative methods of fuel, including natural gas, hydrogen, solar, and wind. A $500 million grant to the University of California, Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to create an Energy Biosciences Institute[74] has recently come under attack, over concerns about the global impacts of the research and privatisation of public universities.

Solar panel made by BP Solar

BP's investment in green technologies peaked at 4% of its exploratory budget, but they have since closed their alternative energy headquarters in London. As such they invest more than other oil companies, but it has been called greenwashing due to the small proportion of the overall budget.

In 2004, BP began marketing low-sulphur diesel fuel for industrial use.

BP Solar is a leading producer of solar panels since its purchase of Lucas Energy Systems in 1980 and Solarex (as part of its acquisition of Amoco) in 2000. BP Solar had a 20% world market share in photovoltaic panels in 2004 when it had a capacity to produce 90 MW/year of panels. It has over 30 years experience operating in over 160 countries with manufacturing facilities in the U.S., Spain, India and Australia and has more than 2000 employees worldwide. Through a series of acquisitions in the solar power industry BP Solar became the third largest producer of solar panels in the world. It was recently announced that BP has obtained a contract for a pilot project to provide on-site solar power to Wal-mart stores. In the 2006 annual report Lord Browne noted that BP now has a total wind generation capacity of nearly 15,000 megawatts. 15,000 megawatts would be sufficient to provide power to approximately 15,000,000 typical American households simultaneously. This makes BP one of the largest generators of wind power in the world.

Contributions to political campaigns

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, BP is the United States' hundredth largest donor to political campaigns, having contributed more than US$5 million since 1990, 72% and 28% of which went to Republican and Democratic recipients, respectively. BP has lobbied to gain exemptions from U.S. corporate law reforms. Additionally, BP paid the Podesta Group, a Washington, D.C.-based lobbying firm, $160,000 in the first half of 2007 to manage its congressional and government relations.

In February 2002 BP's chief executive, Lord Browne of Madingley, renounced the practice of corporate campaign contributions, noting: "That's why we've decided, as a global policy, that from now on we will make no political contributions from corporate funds anywhere in the world."

Despite this, in 2009 BP used nearly US$16 million to lobby US Congress, breaking the company's previous record (from 2008) of US$10,4 million.[

BP retail brands

BP gasoline station in Zanesville, Ohio using previous BP prototype.

BP

BP is one of the world's shortest and most valuable brands. The Helios logo (Helios is the name of the Greek sun god), represents energy in its many forms. The company owns the two letter internet domain bp.com, which the company registered November 10, 1989. BP is among the earliest Brands to own such a short Domain name. BP's tagline is "Beyond Petroleum"; according to the company this represents their focus on meeting the growing demand for fossil fuels, manufacturing and delivering more advanced products, and enabling the material transition to a lower carbon future.

ampm

ampm is a convenience store chain with branches located in several U.S. states including Arizona, California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, recently in Illinois, Indiana, Georgia and Florida, and in several countries worldwide such as Japan. In the western US, the stores are usually attached to an ARCO gas station; elsewhere, the stores are attached to BP gas stations. BP Connect stations in the US are transitioning to the ampm brand.

ARCO

ARCO is BP's retail brand on the US West Coast in the seven Western States of California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, and Utah. BP acquired ARCO (formerly the AtlanticRichfieldCompany) in 2000. ARCO is a popular "cash only" retailer, selling products refined from Alaska North Slope crude at plants at Cherry Point (WA), Los Angeles (CA) and at other contract locations on the West Coast.

BP Travel Centre

BP Travel Centres are large scale destination sites located in Australia which on top of offering the same features of a BP Connect site with fuel and a Wild Bean Cafe, also feature major food-retail tenants such as McDonalds, KFC, Nando's and recently Krispy Kreme, with a large seating capacity food court. There are also facilities for long-haul truck drivers including lounge, showers and washing machines all in the same building. There are 4 travel centers located in South East Queensland, Australia. Two on the Pacific Highway (Coomera and Stapylton) and two on the Bruce Highway (Caboolture). A fifth travel centre was opened in 2007 at Chinderah in northern New South Wales.

BP Connect

BP Connect is BP's flagship retail brand name with BP Connect Service stations being operated around the UK, Europe, USA, Australia, New Zealand, Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and other parts of the world. BP Connect sites feature the Wild Bean Cafe which offers cafe style coffee made by the staff and a selection of hot food as well as freshly baked muffins and sandwiches. The food offered in Wild Bean Cafe varies from each site. BP Connect sites usually offer table and chair seating and often an Internet kiosk. In the US, the BP Connect concept is gradually being transitioned to the ampm brand and concept. Some BP Connect sites around the UK ran in partnership with Marks & Spencer with the on-site shop being an M&S Simply Food instead of a BP Shop.

BP Express

BP Express was the flagship BP brand prior to the introduction of BP Connect in 2000. There are still some BP Express sites operating around the world but most have been either upgraded to Connect or changed to an alternative brand. BP Express offers a bakery service but doesn't have the selection of food offered in the Wild Bean Cafe and usually coffee is only available through a self service machine.

In the Netherlands BP is opening unmanned stations with no shops or employees. these stations are called BP Express. Some of these stations used to be 'ordinary' BP stations, some are new to the BP network. Apart from these stations BP Express shopping does also exist in the Netherlands.

BP Shop

A BP petrol prices sign outside a BP Shop garage in the United Kingdom (prices in UK pence per litre)

BP Shop is commonly used on smaller, mainly independently owned sites. Products vary in each BP Shop but consist usually of a selection of convenience store-style food and automotive products.

BP 2go branded petrol station in Australia

BP 2go

BP 2go is a franchise brand used for independently operated sites in New Zealand and is currently being rolled out throughout Australia (Although not all BP 2go stores are franchises in Australia). BP 2go sites mainly operate in towns and outer suburbs in New Zealand. BP 2go offers similar bakery food to BP Connect but in a pre-packaged form. Some BP Express sites around New Zealand and Australia that were considered too small to be upgraded to BP Connect were given the option to change to BP 2go others were downgraded to BP Shop. Staff at some BP 2go sites wear a different style of uniform to the rest of the BP branded sites, however in company owned and operated 2go sites in Australia the same uniform is worn across all sites.

Castrol

Castrol is a brand of motor oil and other lubricants which is entirely a BP brand but tends to retain its separate identity.

Air BP and BP Shipping

Air BP is the aviation fuel arm, BP Marine the marine fuels and lubricants arm and BP Shipping is the Shipping arm within the BP group

BP Shipping provides the logistics to move BP’s oil and gas cargoes to market as well as marine assurance on everything that floats in the BP group It manages a large fleet of vessels most of which are held on long term operating leases. BP Shipping’s Chartering Teams based in London, Singapore and Chicago also charter third party vessels on both time charter and voyage charter basis. BP-managed fleet consists of Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCCs), one North Sea shuttle tanker, medium size crude and product carriers, liquefied natural gas (LNG) carriers, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) carriers and coasters. All of these ships are double-hulled.

Advertisement

BP was also recently awarded a satirical prize, the "Emerald Paintbrush" award, by Greenpeace UK. The "Emerald Paintbrush" award was given to BP in order to highlight its alleged greenwashing campaign. Critics point out that while BP advertises its relatively minimal investment in alternative energy sources, the majority of its investments continue to go into fossil fuels.

BP is a sponsor of the Scripps Institution CO2 program to measure carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

Bibliography

The history of the British Petroleum Company

Vol. I:R.W.Ferrier, The Developing Years 1901-1932, Cambridge University Press, 1982

Vol. II: James H. Bamberg, The Anglo-Iranian Years, 1928-1954, Cambridge University Press, 1994

Vol. III: James H. Bamberg, British Petroleum and Global Oil, 1951-1975: The Challenge of Nationalism, Cambridge University Press, 2000

For the early history of BP in Iran and Iraq see

Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Brysac. Kingmakers: the Invention of the Modern Middle East. W.W. Norton (2008)ISBN 978-0-393-06199-4

Mariah Carey

Mariah Carey (born March 27, 1969) is an American singer, songwriter, record producer and actress. She made her recording debut in 1990 under the guidance of Columbia Records executive Tommy Mottola, and became the first recording artist to have her first five singles top the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart. Following her marriage to Mottola in 1993, a series of hit records established her position as Columbia's highest-selling act. According to Billboard magazine, she was the most successful artist of the 1990s in the United States. and is considered to be one of the most influential female vocalists in contemporary music.
Following her separation from Mottola in 1997, Carey introduced elements of hip hop into her album work, to much initial success, but her popularity was in decline when she left Columbia in 2001. She signed to Virgin Records but was dropped from the label and bought out of her contract the following year after a highly publicized physical and emotional breakdown, as well as the poor reception given to Glitter, her film and soundtrack project. In 2002, Carey signed with Island Records, and after a relatively unsuccessful period, she returned to the top of pop music in 2005.
Carey has sold more than 175 million albums, singles and videos worldwide. She was named the best-selling female pop artist of the millennium at the 2000 World Music Awards. Carey is also the recipient of the Chopard Diamond Award at the 2003 World Music Awards, recognizing sales of over 100 million albums worldwide. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, she is the third best-selling female artist and sixteenth overall recording artist with shipments of over 63 million albums in the US.She is also ranked as the best-selling female artist of the U.S. Nielsen SoundScan era (third best-selling artist overall).
In 2008, Carey passed Elvis Presley for the most number-one singles for a solo artist in the United States with eighteen, only behind The Beatles. She also has three songs debut at number one on the Billboard Hot 100; Fantasy, One Sweet Day and Honey, making her the artist with the most number one debuts in the charts 52 year history. In addition to her commercial accomplishments, Carey has earned five Grammy Awards, and is well-known for her five-octave vocal range, power, melismatic style, and use of the whistle register.


Childhood and youth
Carey was born in Huntington, Long Island, New York. She is the third and youngest child of Patricia Carey (née Hickey), a former opera singer and vocal coach, and Alfred Roy Carey, an aeronautical engineer. Her mother was Irish American and her father was of Afro-Venezuelan and African American descent; her paternal grandfather, Roberto Nuñez, changed his surname to Carey to better assimilate upon moving to the United States from Venezuela. Carey was named after the song "They Call the Wind Mariah". Carey's parents divorced when she was three years old. While living in Huntington, racist neighbors allegedly poisoned the family dog and set fire to her family's car. After her parents' divorce, Carey had little contact with her father, and her mother worked several jobs to support the family. Carey spent much of her time at home alone and turned to music to occupy herself. She began singing at around the age of three, when her mother began to teach her after Carey imitated her mother practicing Verdi's opera Rigoletto in Italian.
Carey graduated from Harborfields High School in Greenlawn, New York. She was frequently absent because of her work as a demo singer for local recording studios; her classmates consequently gave her the nickname "Mirage". Her work in the Long Island music scene gave her opportunities to work with musicians such as Gavin Christopher and Ben Margulies, with whom she co-wrote material for her demo tape. After moving to New York City, Carey worked part-time jobs to pay the rent, and she completed 500 hours of beauty school. Eventually, she became a backup singer for Puerto Rican freestyle singer Brenda K. Starr.
In 1988, Carey met Columbia Records executive Tommy Mottola at a party, where Starr gave him Carey's demo tape. Mottola played the tape when leaving the party and was impressed. He returned to find Carey, but she had left. Nevertheless, Mottola tracked her down and signed her to a recording contract. This Cinderella-like story became part of the standard publicity surrounding Carey's entrance into the industry.




Early commercial success (1989–1992)
Carey co-wrote the tracks on her 1990 debut album Mariah Carey, and she has co-written most of her material since. During the recording, she expressed dissatisfaction with the contributions of producers such as Ric Wake and Rhett Lawrence, whom the executives at Columbia had enlisted to help make the album more commercially viable. Backed by a substantial promotional budget, the album reached number one on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart, where it remained for several weeks. It yielded four number-one singles and made Carey a star in the United States, but it was less successful in other countries. Critics rated the album highly, and Carey won Grammys for Best New Artist, and—for her debut single, "Vision of Love"—Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.
Carey conceived Emotions, her second album, as an homage to Motown soul music (see Motown Sound), and she worked with Walter Afanasieff and Clivillés & Cole (from the dance group C+C Music Factory) on the record. It was released soon after her debut album—in late 1991—but was neither as critically or commercially successful; Rolling Stone described it as "more of the same, with less interesting material [...] pop-psych love songs played with airless, intimidating expertise." The title track "Emotions" made Carey the only recording act whose first five singles have reached number one on the U.S. Hot 100 chart, although the album's follow-up singles failed to match this feat. Carey had been lobbying to produce her own songs, and beginning with Emotions, she has co-produced most of her material. "I didn't want [Emotions] to be somebody else's vision of me," she said. "There's more of me on this album."
Although Carey performed live occasionally, stage fright prevented her from embarking on a major tour.Her first widely seen appearance was featured on the television show MTV Unplugged in 1992, and she remarked that she felt her performance that night proved her vocal abilities were not, as some had previously speculated, simulated with studio equipment.Alongside acoustic versions of some of her earlier songs, Carey premiered a cover of The Jackson 5's "I'll Be There" with her back-up singer Trey Lorenz. The duet was released as a single, reached number one in the U.S., and led to a record deal for Lorenz,[34] whose debut album Carey later co-produced. Because of high ratings for the Unplugged television special, the concert's set list was released on the EP MTV Unplugged, which Entertainment Weekly called "the strongest, most genuinely musical record she has ever made [...] Did this live performance help her take her first steps toward growing up?."



International success (1993–1996)
Carey and Tommy Mottola had become involved romantically during the making of her debut album, and in June 1993, they were married.
Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds consulted on the album Music Box, which was released later that year and became Carey's most successful worldwide. The album maintained a presence on the Billboard 200 for a staggering 128 weeks. It yielded her first UK Singles Chart number-one, a cover of Badfinger's "Without You", and the U.S. number-ones "Dreamlover" and "Hero". Billboard magazine proclaimed it "heart-piercing [...] easily the most elemental of Carey's releases, her vocal eurythmics in natural sync with the songs", but TIME magazine lamented Carey's attempt at a mellower work, "[Music Box] seems perfunctory and almost passionless [...] Carey could be a pop-soul great; instead she has once again settled for Salieri-like mediocrity." In response to such comments, Carey said, "As soon as you have a big success, a lot of people don't like that. There's nothing I can do about it. All I can do is make music I believe in." Most critics slighted the opening of her subsequent U.S. Music Box Tour.

"One Sweet Day" (1995)

Carey's collaboration with Boyz II Men is one of her biggest singles in the U.S.
Problems listening to this file? See media help.
In late 1994, after her duet with Luther Vandross on a cover of Lionel Richie and Diana Ross's "Endless Love" became a hit, Carey released the holiday album Merry Christmas. It contained cover material and original compositions such as "All I Want for Christmas Is You", which became Carey's biggest single in Japan[47] and, in subsequent years, emerged as one of her most perennially popular songs on U.S. radio. Critical reception of Merry Christmas was mixed, with Allmusic calling it an "otherwise vanilla set [...] pretensions to high opera on 'O Holy Night' and a horrid danceclub take on 'Joy to the World'." It became one of the most successful Christmas albums of all time.
In 1995, Columbia released Carey's fourth studio album, Daydream, which combined the pop sensibilities of Music Box with downbeat R&B and hip hop influences. A remix of "Fantasy", its first single, featured rapper Ol' Dirty Bastard. Carey said that Columbia reacted negatively to her intentions for the album: "Everybody was like 'What, are you crazy?'. They're very nervous about breaking the formula."The New Yorker noted that "It became standard for R&B stars, like Missy Eliott and Beyonce, to combine melodies with rapped verses." John Norris of MTV News has stated that the remix was "responsible for, I would argue, an entire wave of music that we've seen since, and that is the pop-hip-hop collaboration. You could argue that the 'Fantasy' remix was the single most important recording she's ever made." Norris echoed the sentiments of TLC's Lisa Lopes, who told MTV that it's because of Mariah that we have "hip-pop." . Daydream became her biggest-selling album in the U.S., and its singles achieved similar success—"Fantasy" became the second single to debut at number one in the U.S. and topped the Canadian Singles Chart for twelve weeks; "One Sweet Day" (a duet with Boyz II Men) spent a record-holding sixteen weeks at number one in the U.S.; and "Always Be My Baby" (co-produced by Jermaine Dupri) was the most successful record on U.S. radio in 1996, according to Billboard magazine. The album also generated career-best reviews for Carey, and publications such as The New York Times named it one of 1995's best albums; the Times wrote that its "best cuts bring pop candy-making to a new peak of textural refinement [...] Carey's songwriting has taken a leap forward, becoming more relaxed, sexier and less reliant on thudding clichés." The short but profitable Daydream World Tour augmented sales of the album, which received six Grammy Award nominations.




New image and independence (1997–2000)

Carey at Edwards Air Force Base during the making
of "I Still Believe" video in 1998.

Carey and Mottola officially separated in 1997. Although the public image of the marriage was a happy one, she said that in reality she had felt trapped by her relationship with Mottola, whom she often described as controlling. They officially announced their separation in 1997, and their divorce became final the following year. Soon after the separation, Carey hired an independent publicist and a new attorney and manager. She continued to write and produce for other artists during this period, contributing to the debut albums of Allure and 7 Mile through her short-lived imprint Crave Records.
Carey's next album, Butterfly (1997), yielded the number-one single "Honey", the lyrics and music video for which presented a more overtly sexual image of her than had been previously seen. She stated that Butterfly marked the point when she attained full creative control over her music.However, she added, "I don't think it's that much of a departure from what I've done in the past [...] It's not like I went psycho and thought I was going to be a rapper. Personally, this album is about doing whatever the hell I wanted to do." Reviews were generally positive: LAUNCHcast said Butterfly "pushes the envelope," a move its critic thought "may prove disconcerting to more conservative fans" but praised as "a welcome change."The Los Angeles Times wrote, "[Butterfly] is easily the most personal, confessional-sounding record she's ever done [...] Carey-bashing just might become a thing of the past." The album was a commercial success—although not to the degree of her previous three albums—and "My All" (her thirteenth Hot 100 number-one) gave her the record for the most U.S. number-ones by a female artist.
Toward the turn of the millennium, Carey was developing the film project Glitter and wrote songs for the films Men in Black (1997) and How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000). During the production of Butterfly, Carey became romantically involved with New York Yankees baseball star Derek Jeter. Their relationship ended in 1998, with both parties citing media interference as the main reason for the split. The same year, Columbia released the album #1's, a collection of Carey's U.S. number-one singles alongside new material, which she said was a way of rewarding her fans. The song "When You Believe", a duet with Whitney Houston, was recorded for the soundtrack of The Prince of Egypt (1998) and won an Academy Award. #1's sold above expectations, but a review in NME labeled Carey "a purveyor of saccharine bilge like 'Hero', whose message seems wholesome enough: that if you vacate your mind of all intelligent thought, flutter your eyelashes and wish hard, sweet babies and honey will follow." Also that year, she appeared on the first televised VH1 Divas benefit concert program, although her alleged prima donna behavior had already led many to consider her a diva. By the following year, she had entered a relationship with singer Luis Miguel.
Rainbow, Carey's sixth studio album, was released in 1999 and comprised more R&B/hip hop–oriented songs, many of them co-created with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. "Heartbreaker" and "Thank God I Found You" (the former featuring Jay-Z, the latter featuring Joe and boy band 98 Degrees) reached number one in the U.S. and the success of the former made Carey the only act to have a number-one single in each year of the 1990s. A cover of Phil Collins's "Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)" went to number one in the UK after Carey re-recorded it with boy band Westlife. Media reception of Rainbow was generally enthusiastic, with the Sunday Herald saying the album "sees her impressively tottering between soul ballads and collaborations with R&B heavyweights like Snoop Doggy Dogg, Usher [...] It's a polished collection of pop-soul." VIBE magazine expressed similar sentiments, writing, "She pulls out all stops [...] Rainbow will garner even more adoration" but it became Carey's lowest-selling album up to that point, and there was a recurring criticism that the tracks were too alike. When the double A-side "Crybaby" (featuring Snoop Dogg)/"Can't Take That Away (Mariah's Theme)" became her first single to peak outside the U.S. top twenty, Carey accused Sony of underpromoting it: "The political situation in my professional career is not positive [...] I'm getting a lot of negative feedback from certain corporate people," she wrote on her official website.



Personal and professional struggles (2001–2004)
After receiving Billboard's Artist of the Decade Award and the World Music Award for Best-Selling Female Artist of the Millennium, Carey parted from Columbia and signed a contract with EMI's Virgin Records worth a reported US$80 million. She often stated that Columbia had regarded her as a commodity, with her separation from Mottola exacerbating her relations with label executives. Just a few months later, in July 2001, it was widely reported that Carey had suffered a physical and emotional breakdown. She had left messages on her website complaining of being overworked, and her relationship with Luis Miguel was ending.In an interview the following year, she said, "I was with people who didn't really know me, and I had no personal assistant. I'd be doing interviews all day long, getting two hours of sleep a night, if that."During an appearance on MTV's Total Request Live, Carey handed out popsicles to the audience and began what was later described as a "striptease". By the month's end, she had checked into a hospital, and her publicist announced that Carey was taking a break from public appearances.
Critics panned Glitter, Carey's much delayed semi-autobiographical film, and it was a box office failure.The accompanying soundtrack album, Glitter, was inspired by the music of the 1980s and featured collaborations with Rick James and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis; it generated Carey's worst showing on the U.S. chart. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch dismissed it as "an absolute mess that'll go down as an annoying blemish on a career that, while not always critically heralded, was at least nearly consistently successful",[while Blender magazine opined, "After years of trading her signature flourishes for a radio-ready purr, Carey's left with almost no presence at all."The lead single, "Loverboy" (featuring Cameo), reached number two on the Hot 100 due to the release of the physical single, but the album's follow-up singles failed to chart; however, a live rendition/medley of the single, "Never Too Far" made its way to #81.
Later in the year, Columbia released the low-charting compilation album Greatest Hits shortly after the failure of Glitter, and in early 2002, Virgin bought out Carey's contract for $28 million, creating further negative publicity. Carey later said her time at Virgin was "a complete and total stress-fest [...] I made a total snap decision which was based on money, and I never make decisions based on money. I learned a big lesson from that."Later that year, she signed a contract with Island Records, valued at more than $22.5 million. and launched the record label MonarC. To add further to Carey's emotional burdens, her father, with whom she had little contact since childhood, died of cancer that year.
In 2002, she performed the American national anthem in front of an audience at the Super Bowl XXXVI at the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans, Louisiana. Following a well-received supporting role in the 2002 film WiseGirls, Carey released the album Charmbracelet, which she said marked "a new lease on life" for her. Sales of Charmbracelet were moderate, and the quality of Carey's vocals came under severe criticism. The Boston Globe declared the album "the worst of her career, revealing a voice no longer capable of either gravity-defying gymnastics or soft coos", and Rolling Stone commented, "Carey needs bold songs that help her use the power and range for which she is famous. Charmbracelet is like a stream of watercolors that bleed into a puddle of brown. The album's only charting single in America, "Through the Rain", was a failure on pop radio, which had become less open to maturing "diva" stylists such as Celine Dion, or Carey herself in favor of younger singers such as Christina Aguilera, who had vocal styles very similar to Carey's.
"I Know What You Want", a 2003 Busta Rhymes single on which Carey guest starred, fared considerably better and reached the U.S. top five; it was also included on Columbia's release of The Remixes, a compilation of Carey's best remixes and some new tracks. That year, she embarked on the Charmbracelet World Tour and was awarded the Chopard Diamond award for selling more than 100 million albums worldwide. She was featured on rapper Jadakiss's 2004 single "U Make Me Wanna", which reached the top ten on Billboard's R&B/Hip-Hop chart.
Carey has made a legal threat against porn star Mary Carey, who believes the names are too similar.




Return to prominence (2005–2008)

Carey performing on her Adventures of Mimi Tour,
 in Florida August 7, 2006.

Carey's tenth studio album, The Emancipation of Mimi (2005), contained contributions from producers such as The Neptunes, Kanye West and Carey's longtime collaborator, Jermaine Dupri. Carey said it was "very much like a party record [...] the process of putting on makeup and getting ready to go out [...] I wanted to make a record that was reflective of that." The Emancipation of Mimi became 2005's best-selling album in the U.S., and The Guardian reviewer defined it as "cool, focused and urban [... some of] the first Mariah Carey tunes in years I wouldn't have to be paid to listen to again". The album earned Carey a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary R&B Album, and the single "We Belong Together" won Best Female R&B Vocal Performance and Best R&B Song. "We Belong Together" held the Hot 100's number-one position for fourteen weeks, her longest run at the top as a solo lead artist. Subsequently, the single "Shake It Off" reached number two for a week, making Carey the first female lead vocalist to have simultaneously held the Hot 100's top two positions. (While topping the charts in 2002, Ashanti was the "featured" singer on the #2 single.)
In mid-2006, Carey began The Adventures of Mimi Tour, which was the most successful of her career, although some dates had to be canceled. She appeared on the cover of the March 2007 edition of Playboy magazine in a non-nude photo session. In early 2007, she was featured with Bow Wow on the Bone Thugs-n-Harmony single "Lil' L.O.V.E.".


Carey performing "Touch My Body" on Good Morning America
on stage with her dancers in summer 2008.

By spring 2007, she had begun working on her eleventh studio album, E=MC². Asked about the album title's meaning, Carey said "Einstein's theory? Physics? Me? Hello! ...Of course I'm poking fun." She characterized the project as "Emancipation of Mimi to the second power", saying she was "freer" on this album than any other. Like her previous one, this album mainly concentrates on pop and R&B, but also borrows hip hop, gospel and even reggae ("Cruise Control") elements. Although E=MC² was well received by most critics, some of them criticized it for being "a clone of The Emancipation of Mimi".Bleu Magazine's critic said that the "facsimiles aren't terrible, they're just boring and forgettable at this point." Two weeks before the album's release, on April 2, 2008, "Touch My Body", her first single from the album, became Carey's eighteenth number-one single on the Hot 100, pushing her past Elvis Presley into second place for the most number-one singles among all artists in the rock era, according to Billboard magazine's revised methodology. Carey is now second only to The Beatles, who have twenty number-one singles. The album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with 463,000 copies sold, making it the biggest opening week sales of her career.
Carey's singles have collectively topped the charts for seventy-nine weeks, which places her just behind Presley, who topped the charts for a combined eighty weeks. In 2008, Billboard magazine ranked her at number six on the "Billboard Hot 100 All-Time Top Artists", making Carey the second most successful female artist, behind Madonna, in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Carey has also had notable success on international charts, though not to the same degree as in the United States. Thus far, she has had two number-one singles in Britain, two in Australia, and six in Canada. Her highest-charting single in Japan peaked at number two.
Carey and actor/comedian/rapper Nick Cannon met while they shot Carey's music video for her second single "Bye Bye" on a private island of the coast of Antigua. On April 30, 2008, Carey married Nick Cannon, at Carey's private estate on Windermere Island in The Bahamas. In October 2008, Carey was inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame.




Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel (2009–2010)


Carey at the 82nd Academy Awards on
March 7, 2010

Carey performed "Hero" at the Neighborhood Inaugural Ball after Barack Obama was sworn in as America's first African-American president on January 20, 2009. On July 7, 2009, Carey – alongside Trey Lorenz – performed her version of the Jackson 5 hit "I'll Be There" at the memorial service for Michael Jackson in the Los Angeles Staples Center. Carey was featured on "My Love", the second single from singer-songwriter The-Dream's album Love vs. Money.
Carey's twelfth studio album, Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel was released on September 25, 2009. The album received generally favorable reviews from music critics. John Bush of Allmusic called it "her most interesting album in a decade", while Jon Caramanica from The New York Times criticized Carey's vocal performances, decrying her overuse of her softer vocal registers at the expense of her more powerful lower and mid registers. Commercially, the album debuted at number three on the Billboard 200 and became the lowest-selling studio album of her career. The album's lead single, "Obsessed", became her 40th entry on the Billboard Hot 100 and her highest debut on the chart since "My All" in 1998. The song debuted at number eleven and peaked at number seven on the chart and became Carey 27th US top-ten hit, tying her with Elton John and Janet Jackson as the fifth most top-ten hits. Within hours after the song's release, various outlets speculated that its target was rapper Eminem, in response to his song "Bagpipes from Baghdad," in which he taunted Carey's husband, Nick Cannon by telling him to back off and that Carey is his. According to MTV, Carey alludes to drug problems in "Obsessed," which Eminem opened up about on his sixth studio album, Relapse. The album's follow-up singles failed to achieve commercial success. The second single, a cover of Foreigner's ""I Want to Know What Love Is", peaked at number 60 and the third single, "H.A.T.E.U.," failed to crack the Billboard Hot 100.
On December 31, 2009, Carey embarked her seventh concert tour, Angels Advocate Tour, in the United States and Canada. Following the announcement of the "Angels Advocate Tour", it was announced that Carey will release a remix album titled Angels Advocate, containing remixes for the songs of Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel and a few new tracks. The purpose of the album was about ensuring that Memoirs appealed to more people by putting guests on 90% of the songs. In January 2010, "Up Out My Face" featuring Nicki Minaj and "Angels Cry" featuring Ne-Yo served as the lead singles from the album. The album was slated for a March 30, 2010 release in the United States. Later, due to the under-performance of the both singles on the charts, Carey's manager Chris Lighty announced that the album's release was canceled. In an interview with Ronan of the Jump Smokers, it was revealved that Island Def Jam is still planning to release the "MC vs JS" remix album on June 29, 2010. It will feature twelve new dance remixes of songs from Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel.
In February 2010, The song, "100%", which was originally written and recorded for the film, Precious, was used as one of the theme songs for the 2010 Winter Olympics, with all money proceeds going to Team USA.



New album (2010–present)
Following the cancellation of the Angels Advocate remix album, it was announced that Carey will go back to the studio to start work on new material for her 13th studio album and work on her second Christmas album. It has been confirmed that Carey is working on her second Christmas album due out in late 2010. It was confirmed that fashion photographer, David LaChapelle shot the album's artwork in which he told The Times on April 24, 2010. Carey is also currently working on her 13th studio album which is due for release in early 2011. Long time collaborators for the project include Jermaine Dupri, Bryan-Michael Cox and Teddy Riley. The album is being monitored by Dupri's "Living The Life" video blog. Dupri also stated that a single will be released by the end of the year for the new studio album. It has also just been revealed that Johnta Austin and Randy Jackson are also contributing to the project.
A guest at Carey and Cannon's re-commitment ceremony told the Chicago Sun-Times that Carey spoke at length about wanting to start a family. Without citing sources, the newspaper claimed she has "reportedly" undergone fertility treatments and is considering adoption.




Acting career

Carey and Robert De Niro at the premiere of Tennessee at the Tribeca
Film Festival on April 26, 2008. Photograph
by David Shankbone.

Carey began to take professional acting lessons in 1997, and in the coming year, she was auditioning for film roles. She made her debut as an opera singer in the romantic comedy The Bachelor (1999), starring Chris O'Donnell and Renée Zellweger. CNN referred derisively to her casting as a talentless diva as "letter-perfect [...] the "can't act" part informs Carey's entire performance".
Carey's first starring role was in Glitter (2001), in which she played a struggling musician in the 1980s who breaks into the music industry after meeting a disc jockey (Max Beesley). Though Roger Ebert said "[Carey]'s acting ranges from dutiful flirtatiousness to intense sincerity", most critics panned it: Halliwell's Film Guide called it a "vapid star vehicle for a pop singer with no visible acting ability", and The Village Voice observed: "When [Carey] tries for an emotion — any emotion — she looks as if she's lost her car keys." Glitter was a box office failure, and Carey earned a Razzie Award for her role. She later said that the film "started out as a concept with substance, but it ended up being geared to 10-year-olds. It lost a lot of grit [...] I kind of got in over my head."
Carey, Mira Sorvino and Melora Walters co-starred as waitresses at a mobster-operated restaurant in the independent film WiseGirls (2002), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival but went straight to cable in the U.S. Critics commended Carey for her efforts — The Hollywood Reporter predicted, "Those scathing notices for Glitter will be a forgotten memory for the singer once people warm up to Raychel", and Roger Friedman, referring to her as "a Thelma Ritter for the new millennium", said, "Her line delivery is sharp and she manages to get the right laughs". WiseGirls producer Anthony Esposito cast Carey in The Sweet Science (2006), a film about an unknown female boxer recruited by a boxing manager, but it never entered production.
Carey was one of several musicians who appeared in the independently produced Damon Dash films Death of a Dynasty (2003) and State Property 2 (2005). Her television work has been limited to a January 2002 episode of Ally McBeal. Carey had a cameo appearance in Adam Sandler's 2008 film You Don't Mess with the Zohan, playing herself.
In 2006, Carey joined the cast of the indie film Tennessee (2008), taking the role of an aspiring singer who flees her controlling husband and joins two brothers on a journey to find their long-lost father. The movie received mixed reviews, but most of them raved about Carey's performance and praised it as "understated and very effective." In 2009, she appeared as a social worker in Precious, the movie adaptation of the 1996 novel Push by Sapphire. The film has garnered mostly positive reviews from critics, as has Carey's performance. Variety described her acting as "pitch-perfect". So far Precious has won awards at both the Sundance Film Festival and the Toronto Film Festival, receiving top awards there. In January 2010, Carey won the Breakthrough Actress Performance award for her role in Precious at the Palm Springs International Film Festival.
In May 2010, Carey, citing medical reasons, dropped out of her planned appearance in the film adaptation of the play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf.





Artistry

Carey has said that from childhood she was influenced by R&B and soul musicians such as Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Gladys Knight and Aretha Franklin. Her music contains strong influences of gospel music, and her favorite gospel singers include The Clark Sisters, Shirley Caesar and Edwin Hawkins. When Carey incorporated hip hop into her sound, speculation arose that she was making an attempt to take advantage of the genre's popularity, but she told Newsweek, "People just don't understand. I grew up with this music". She has expressed appreciation for rappers such as The Sugarhill Gang, Eric B. & Rakim, the Wu-Tang Clan, The Notorious B.I.G. and Mobb Deep,with whom she collaborated on the single "The Roof (Back in Time)" (1998).
During Carey's career, her vocal and musical style, along with her level of success, has been compared to Whitney Houston and Celine Dion. Carey and her peers, according to Garry Mulholland, are "the princesses of wails [...] virtuoso vocalists who blend chart-oriented pop with mature MOR torch song". In She Bop II: The Definitive History of Women in Rock, Pop and Soul (2002), writer Lucy O'Brien attributed the comeback of Barbra Streisand's "old-fashioned showgirl" to Carey and Dion, and described them and Houston as "groomed, airbrushed and overblown to perfection". Carey's musical transition and use of more revealing clothing during the late 1990s were, in part, initiated to distance herself from this image, and she subsequently said that most of her early work was "schmaltzy MOR". Some have noted that unlike Houston and Dion, Carey co-writes her own songs, and the Guinness Rockopedia (1998) classified her as the "songbird supreme". Despite the fact that Carey is often credited with co-writing her material, she has also been accused of plagiarism on several occasions. Many of these cases were eventually settled out of court.




Voice
According to Billboard and AllMusic, Mariah Carey possesses a five-octave vocal range. In 2003, her voice was ranked first in MTV and Blender magazine's countdown of the 22 Greatest Voices in Music, as voted by fans and readers in an online poll. Carey said of the poll, "What it really means is voice of the MTV generation. Of course, it's an enormous compliment, but I don't feel that way about myself."She was also placed second in Cove magazine's list of "The 100 Outstanding Pop Vocalists".According to experts, Carey can sing in the alto range as well as soprano range, and possesses "the agility to move between those roles with swiftness and aplomb". Carey's vocal trademark is her ability to sing in the whistle register. Carey has cited Minnie Riperton as the widest influence on her singing technique.
Describing Carey's voice, French-American baritone and professor in the Conservatoire de Paris Malcolm Walker said, "[Her] voice is tired, but it's very well led, especially in the piano register. There are a lot of air passing [...] She passes easily in head voice. It's her true voice. Light lyric soprano, the upper register is much more healthy than the low register. Then, there is the belting voice. It works very well. […] It’s the top of her voice, the diamond. But in the low register, it's tired, it's a worn instrument. […] The muscles were so drawn that it's distended." To describes Carey's vocal style, Sasha Frere-Jones writes, "The brutish purity of her voice places her in pop’s theatrical lineage, in the company of singers like Barbra Streisand, but Carey’s aesthetic is not Broadway, or even particularly white. She is essentially an R&B singer, steeped in gospel, soul, and, especially, hip-hop, and she is a master practitioner of melisma [...] Vision of Love is the Magna Carta of melisma. Whitney Houston popularized it, but Carey made melisma a required move for both R&B singers and contestants on American Idol. [...] [Vision of Love] begins with several bars of lovely, wordless melisma, as if Carey were warming up, and it ends with two very loud passages of melisma, one of them an a-cappella expansion on the word « all » [..] Calisthenics are only one aspect of Vision of Love, however. The chord changes, which are played on electric piano, are reminiscent of early Billy Joel—obvious, consonant, and rich. Carey’s sound changes with nearly every line, mutating from a steely tone to a vibrating growl and then to a humid, breathy coo.




Themes and musical style

"We Belong Together" (2005)

One of Carey's many love songs, and a Grammy Award winner for "Best Female R&B Vocal Performance" and "Best R&B Song".
"Vanishing" (1990)

The first song that Carey was allowed to co-produce demonstrates the piano influence that permeates much of her music.
"My All" (1998): Classic Club mix

Remixes of Carey's singles by producers such as David Morales established her presence on the U.S. club scene.
Problems listening to these files? See media help.
Love is the subject of the majority of Carey's lyrics, although she has written about themes such as racism, social alienation, death, world hunger, and spirituality. She has said that much of her work is partly autobiographical, but TIME magazine wrote: "If only Mariah Carey's music had the drama of her life. Her songs are often sugary and artificial—NutraSweet soul. But her life has passion and conflict." The Village Voice wrote in 2001 that, in that respect, Carey compared unfavorably with singers such as Mary J. Blige, saying "Carey's Strawberry Shortcake soul still provides the template with which teen-pop cuties draw curlicues around those centerless [Diane] Warren ballads [...] it's largely because of [Blige] that the new R&B demands a greater range of emotional expression, smarter poetry, more from-the-gut testifying, and less unnecessary notes than the squeaky-clean and just plain squeaky Mariah era. Nowadays it's the Christina Aguileras and Jessica Simpsons who awkwardly oversing, while the women with roof-raising lung power keep it in check when tune or lyric demands."
Carey's output makes use of electronic instruments such as drum machines, keyboards and synthesizers. Many of her songs contain piano music, and she was given piano lessons when she was six years old. Carey said that she cannot read sheet music and prefers to collaborate with a pianist when composing her material, but feels that it is easier to experiment with faster and less conventional melodies and chord progressions using this technique. Some of her arrangements have been inspired by the work of musicians such as Stevie Wonder, a soul pianist to whom Carey once referred as "the genius of the [twentieth] century", but she has said, "My voice is my instrument; it always has been."
Carey began commissioning remixes of her material early in her career and helped to spearhead the practice of recording entirely new vocals for remixes. Disc jockey David Morales has collaborated with Carey several times, starting with "Dreamlover" (1993), which popularized the tradition of remixing pop songs into house records, and which Slant magazine named one of the greatest dance songs of all time. From "Fantasy" (1995) onward, Carey enlisted both hip hop and house producers to re-imagine her album compositions. Entertainment Weekly included two remixes of "Fantasy" on a list of Carey's greatest recordings compiled in 2005: a National Dance Music Award-winning remix produced by Morales, and a Sean Combs production featuring rapper Ol' Dirty Bastard. The latter has been credited with popularizing the pop/hip hop collaboration trend that has continued into the 2000s through artists such as Ashanti and Beyoncé. Combs said that Carey "knows the importance of mixes, so you feel like you're with an artist who appreciates your work—an artist who wants to come up with something with you". She continues to consult on remixes by producers such as Morales, Jermaine Dupri, Junior Vasquez and DJ Clue, and guest performers contribute frequently to them. The popularity in U.S. nightclubs of the dance remixes, which often sound radically different from their album counterparts, has been known to eclipse the mainstream chart success of the original songs.




Philanthropy and other activities

Carey is a philanthropist who has donated time and money to organizations such as the Fresh Air Fund. She became associated with the Fund in the early 1990s, and is the co-founder of a camp located in Fishkill, New York, that enables inner-city youth to embrace the arts and introduces them to career opportunities. The camp was called Camp Mariah "for her generous support and dedication to Fresh Air children", and she received a Congressional Horizon Award for her youth-related charity work. She is well-known nationally for her work with the Make-a-Wish Foundation in granting the wishes of children with life-threatening illnesses, and in November 2006 she was awarded the Foundation's Wish Idol for her "extraordinary generosity and her many wish granting achievements". Carey has volunteered for the New York City Police Athletic League and contributed to the obstetrics department of New York Presbyterian Hospital Cornell Medical Center. A percentage of the sales of MTV Unplugged was donated to various other charities. In 2008, Carey was named Hunger Ambassador of the World Hunger Relief Movement. She is giving a free download of her song, "Love Story", to customers who donate to the organization at participating restaurants.
One of Carey's most high-profile benefit concert appearances was on VH1's 1998 Divas Live special, during which she performed alongside other female singers in support of the Save the Music Foundation. The concert was a ratings success, and Carey participated in the Divas 2000 special. In 2007, the Save the Music Foundation honored Carey at their tenth gala event for her support towards the foundation since its inception. She appeared at the America: A Tribute to Heroes nationally televised fundraiser in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, and in December 2001, she performed before peacekeeping troops in Kosovo. Carey hosted the CBS television special At Home for the Holidays, which documented real-life stories of adopted children and foster families, and she has worked with the New York City Administration for Children's Services. In 2005, Carey performed for Live 8 in London and at the Hurricane Katrina relief telethon "Shelter from the Storm". In August 2008, Carey and other singers recorded the charity single, "Just Stand Up" produced by Babyface and L. A. Reid, to support "Stand Up to Cancer". On September 5, the singers performed it live on TV.
Declining offers to appear in commercials in the United States during her early career, Carey was not involved in brand marketing initiatives until 2006, when she participated in endorsements for Intel Centrino personal computers and launched a jewelry and accessories line for teenagers, Glamorized, in American Claire's and Icing stores. During this period, as part of a partnership with Pepsi and Motorola, Carey recorded and promoted a series of exclusive ringtones, including "Time of Your Life". She signed a licensing deal with the cosmetics company Elizabeth Arden, and in 2007, she released her own fragrance, "M". According to Forbes, Carey was the sixth richest woman in entertainment as of January 2007, with an estimated net worth of US $225 million. Carey directed or co-directed several of the music videos for her singles during the 1990s. Slant magazine named the video for "The Roof (Back in Time)", which Carey co-directed with Diane Martel, one of the twenty greatest music videos of all time. In 2008, Carey made Time's annual list of 100 most Influential people. In January 2010, Carey announced via Twitter that she is launching a new rosé champagne brand called Angel Champagne.