A leading Appalachian coal company is asking its counterparts to pool their money for a political offensive against Democrats in Kentucky and West Virginia.

International Coal Group is calling on other mining companies to join an initiative that would take advantage of a U.S. Supreme Court decision loosening restrictions on corporate contributions to political causes.

ICG Vice President Roger Nicholson said in an e-mail that he wants to target Democratic U.S. Reps. Ben Chandler of Kentucky and Nick Rahall of West Virginia, and Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Jack Conway in Kentucky. The e-mail, first reported by the Lexington Herald-Leader, was obtained by The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Nicholson said the Obama administration and the Democratic-controlled Congress are "fiercely anti-coal."

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said Tuesday its second-quarter net income dropped 83 percent to $453 million as its trading revenue fell and it booked a charge for its settlement of civil fraud charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The company's revenue fell short of expectations and helped send the stock market falling. Goldman followed IBM Corp. and Texas Instruments Inc., which late Monday reported revenue that disappointed investors.

Goldman's stock dropped $1.89 to $143.79 in morning trading.

Goldman took a $550 million charge to cover the cost of the settlement with the SEC that was announced last week. Earnings were also reduced by a one-time, $600 million charge tied to a new tax on bonuses in Britain.

Excluding the one-time costs, net income after payment of dividends on preferred stock came to $2.75 per share, easily topping the $2.08 analysts forecast. Analysts typically exclude one-time charges from their estimates.

Revenue fell 36 percent to $8.84 billion, short of the $8.94 billion predicted by analysts.

The drop in revenue that a number of companies have reported is unnerving investors, who see it as a sign that the economic recovery is stalling. Banks, however, have their own revenue issues. Goldman's trading revenue fell along with that of competitors including JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp. that were hit hard by the spring plunge in the stock market. The drop in their revenue is adding to investors' concerns about how new federal regulations will affect banks' ability to profit from trading operations.

BP Plc was sued by members of its employee savings plan over losses tied to the company’s plunging stock price amid the oil leak disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

BP has lost more than half of its market value since the April 20 explosion that caused the largest oil spill in U.S. history. The fire and blast aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that was working on a well for London-based BP killed 11 members of its crew.

The lawsuit, for which the workers are seeking class- action, or group, status was filed yesterday in federal court in Chicago.

“Defendants knew or should have known that investment in BP Plc equity was -- and continues to be -- an imprudent investment of the ESP’s assets due to serious mismanagement and improper business practices that resulted in catastrophic incidents of international significance, including, among others, the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico,” the plaintiffs claimed.

Full-time, part-time, occasional and temporary employees are eligible to invest in the employee savings plan, or ESP, according to the lawsuit. Regulatory filings show that the plan held $2.45 billion worth of BP American depositary shares, or 29 percent its $8.27 billion of assets, at the end of 2009, according to the complaint.

Chastened by heavy criticism from lawmakers, a grim-faced BP chief executive Tony Hayward said Thursday he was "deeply sorry" for his company's catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

"I understand the seriousness of the situation, the frustrations and fears that continue to be voiced," he told a House investigations subcommittee.

But before testifying, Hayward had to endure more than an hour of mostly unrelenting criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike.

"We are not small people, but we wish to get our lives back," Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., the panel's chairman, told Hayward, throwing back at the oil giant comments made the day before by BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg — about how BP sympathized with the "small people" of the Gulf — and Hayward's earlier remark that he wanted his "life back."

In a sharp exchange, Stupak noted that over the past five years, 26 had died and 700 were injured in BP accidents — including the Gulf spill, a pipeline spill in Alaska and a refinery explosion in Texas. He asked Hayward whether the government should ban drilling by companies with such "poor safety records?"

Hayward insisted that safety had always been his top priority and "that is why I am so devastated with this accident." When he became CEO, Hayward said he would focus "like a laser" on safety, a phrase he repeated on Thursday.

Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s ex- Chief Executive Officer Richard Fuld asked a judge to dismiss a lawsuit accusing him and his colleagues of failing to disclose Repo 105, a financing method allegedly used to conceal billions of dollars of debt, according to court records.

Separately, Ernst & Young LLP, the Lehman auditor, also asked the judge to dismiss the lawsuit in a court filing June 4, saying its work met all applicable professional standards.

The class-action lawsuit, based on a 2,200-page report by Lehman bankruptcy examiner Anton Valukas, was filed April 23 on behalf of retirement funds including the Alameda County Employees’ Retirement Association in Oakland, California, and the Government of Guam Retirement Fund.

The Lehman executives denied in court papers that the investors had lost money on Lehman securities because of misstatements and omissions in offering documents. Lehman’s accounting for Repo 105 transactions conformed to generally accepted accounting principles and was approved by Ernst & Young, they said.

“Plaintiffs’ effort to turn the report into a basis for securities law violations fails,” they said in a filing in federal court in Manhattan.

BP shareholders are fleeing the company’s stock amid growing uncertainty about the ultimate bill for cleanup costs, lawsuits, fines and damage to the oil giant’s reputation.

BP’s shares fell an additional 15 percent on Tuesday, as investors reacted to news that the latest effort to stem the gushing oil in the Gulf of Mexico failed over the weekend. It is the steepest drop in shares in about two decades.

Also on Tuesday, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said that federal authorities had opened criminal and civil investigations into the Deepwater Horizon explosion.

Since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded April 20, the company has lost a third of its market value, or about $75 billion.

The company said Tuesday that it had spent almost $1 billion on cleanup efforts. But that bill is likely to rise as oil continues to spill into the gulf, with no guarantees that any of the new plans to contain the spill will work.

Investors are also grappling with potential damage to the company’s reputation.

“Financially they can survive this crisis, but politically they will be punished for a very long time,” said Fadel Gheit, an oil analyst at Oppenheimer & Company.

The prospect of billions of dollars more in legal payouts and fines is also weighing on the company.

BP officials say they have already paid $36 million to settle claims of economic loss and damage under the Oil Pollution Act, a 1990 law passed in the wake of the Exxon Valdez disaster, and that more than 26,000 claims have been submitted.