BP is claiming success at its latest attempt to ameliorate the oil spill:

After two false starts, engineers successfully inserted a narrow tube into the damaged pipe from which most of the oil is leaking.

“It’s working as planned,” Kent Wells, a senior executive vice president of BP, said at a briefing in Houston on Sunday afternoon. “So we do have oil and gas coming to the ship now, we do have a flare burning off the gas, and we have the oil that’s coming to the ship going to our surge tank.”

I’ll wait for independent verification, thank you very much, and BP is not in the least interested in independent verification:

BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.

So I doubt that a meaningful amount of oil is coming up to the boat.

“The answer is no to that,” a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. “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.”