LONDON—Embattled BP officials assured the public Thursday that despite the setbacks of the past month, the company was still "fiercely committed" to remaining an enormously powerful moneymaking industrial conglomerate. "We promise the good people of Louisiana or Texas or wherever that this horrific oil spill will not, even for a moment, stop us from pursuing unspeakably massive profits," BP spokesman Reginald Clacton-Thorpe told reporters. "We are even now working around the clock to make this historic PR disaster as painless for us as possible." Clacton-Thorpe stressed that "neither the terrible errors of our past nor the inevitably worse ones of our future" would affect that ultimate mission.

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