London:
In a meeting at the White House on Tuesday, US President Obama and the visiting British Prime Minister, David Cameron, are expected to discuss the furor over BP's lobbying for a prisoner-transfer agreement between Britain and Libya that led to the release of the convicted Lockerbie bomber from a Scottish prison. The prime minister called the release "profoundly misguided" in a radio interview on Tuesday morning.
But Mr Cameron, who 10 weeks after taking office is making his first visit to the United States as prime minister, also sought to wave away another potentially major source of disagreement: the strikingly different approaches the two men are taking to budget-cutting at a time of a fragile economic recovery.
The fledgling coalition government that Mr Cameron leads has called for budget reductions of 25 percent by every British government department - cuts that, as an NPR interviewer pointed out this morning, some commentators were calling "savage." That approach has also placed the Cameron government at odds with the Obama administration, which fears that deep spending cuts now could knock the underpinnings out from the tentative recovery now under way.
Mr Cameron told the radio interviewer that while it was vital for Britain to act now to maintain investor confidence, his difference with Mr Obama was really one of timing.
"We're not a reserve currency, we're not the United States of America - we can't take our time with this," Mr Cameron said of his country. As for coordinating policy with the United States, he said, "We see it in the same way, which is that every country has to deal with its budget deficit, but the time at which we do it can vary."
Mr Cameron and Mr Obama have a ledger of other issues to discuss, including the Cameron government's decision to set an end date of 2015 for Britain's combat role in Afghanistan, and the controversy that has built around BP, Britain's largest company, since the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Asked whether the Afghanistan end date could be achieved, Mr Cameron replied, "I think it is realistic." He said that the training of Afghan security forces, while "not perfect," was on track. "We're not in Afghanistan to create the perfect democracy or the perfect society, we're there for a very simple national security reason," which was to prevent Afghanistan from being a training ground for extremists. He said that Afghans should know that the coalition countries will support them for the long term.
Mr Cameron's two-day visit will include meetings in New York with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Wall Street executives. But issues involving BP are likely to provide its focal point, and the prime minister and his aides used a series of statements in the days before leaving London to stake out a position intended to limit the damage to BP - and to Britain - from the oil company's troubles, as well as to improve the political climate for the visit.
The latest furor to involve BP has sprung from the decision by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to hold hearings on July 29 on the circumstances surrounding the release last August of Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence agent who had served eight years of a life sentence for his role in the December 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Mr Megrahi was the only person convicted in the bombing, which killed 270 people, including 189 Americans.
Lawmakers who pushed for the Washington hearing - including the senators from New York, New Jersey and California, home states to bombing victims - have demanded that BP explain its role in lobbying for the prisoner-transfer agreement Britain and Libya concluded in December 2007. The senators have said they want to explore possible links between Mr Megrahi's release and BP's eagerness to win Libyan ratification of an offshore oil deal that company officials have said could be worth $20 billion.
In an interview to the BBC on Monday, Mr Cameron said he had strongly opposed the bomber's release at the time. "As leader of the opposition I couldn't have been more clear that I thought the decision to release al-Megrahi was completely and utterly wrong," he said.
As for BP's role, he added, "I have no idea what BP did; I am not responsible for BP."
Also on Monday, the Obama administration asked the governments of Scotland and Britain to review the decision to release Mr Megrahi. In letters to American lawmakers, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the administration was encouraging the Scottish and British authorities to review the circumstances leading to the release.
The oil company has insisted that its lobbying was limited to the transfer agreement, and did not include pressure for Mr Megrahi's release. Mr Cameron's aides supported this on Monday, saying that discussions between BP and the government of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown did not include specific talks about Mr Megrahi.
But Libyan officials, including a son of the Libyan president, have said Libya made clear to Britain that if Mr Megrahi were not included in the transfer agreement, lucrative oil deals for British companies would not be approved.
The issue was resolved when the Scottish government released Mr Megrahi on compassionate grounds, after doctors in Scotland provided affidavits saying he was likely to die of advanced prostate cancer within three months.
Nearly a year later, he remains alive in Tripoli, the Libyan capital.