National News

Significant progress has been made on putting a new cap on the hemorrhaging oil well in Gulf of Mexico, according to US Coast Guard Commander Thad Allen.

Adm Allen is in charge of overseeing the response to the spill. He said, "This could lead to the shutting of the well."

He added that later today, BP hopes to close the cap and run a pressure test.

The cap is the newest of several devices that BP has deployed as it grinds away on a permanent solution, which should come by mid-August.

The progress comes just before a planned visit to the Gulf by First Lady Michelle Obama, who is expected to be briefed by officials and local government leaders and speak to the local community.

Monday saw the presidential commission to research the oil spill's beginning.

President Barack Obama, after visiting the area several times, has donned the spill the nation's worst-ever environmental disaster.

The coastal towns and areas from Florida to Alabama rely heavily, almost exclusively, on fishing and tourism, and many people think that the oil spill will completely eliminate that livelihood.

Work on the new cap, which BP hopes will eventually help capture all of the leaking oil, was begun Saturday.

"The hope is that we can slowly turn off the valves, close the capping completely and then test pressure to see how the well is performing," Adm Allen told CBS News on Monday.

The White House says that containment is at a “critical point”.

"The new containment procedure will more than triple our containment capacity when it's all said and done," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told NBC television.

BP claims to have spent $3.5 billion on the response so far.

The firm has also set up an additional $20bn fund to finance the clean-up operations and other costs.

BP shares have almost halved since the disaster, but early trading shoed its price riding a rally, climing 5.5% to 384.7p.

BP said in a statement that the sealing cap was "proceeding as planned".

The oil giant's vice president, Kent Wells, said he was pleased with operation's progress.

"We have carefully planned and practiced this whole procedure. We've tried to work out as many of the bugs as we can," he said.

He then warned that "something unexpected" was bound to show up to challenge to undersea robots while installing the cap.

The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig in April killed 11 people right off the bat. Since the explosion, thousands of barrels of oil have been spilling into the sea every day.

BP's current permanent solution to fixing the leak is to drill two relief wells, which they hope and expect to be completed by mid-August.

The first of the relief wells got as deep as 17,810ft on Sunday, and the tenth randing tun, a test to help hone in the casing of the leaking well, was done.