For the last few weeks, BP has been offering signing bonuses and lucrative pay to prominent scientists from public universities around the Gulf Coast to aid its defense against spill litigation. BP PLC attempted to hire the entire marine sciences department at one Alabama university, according to scientists involved in discussions with the company's lawyers. The university declined because of confidentiality restrictions that the company sought on any research.

A recently-revealed tape has shown Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, discussing ways to undermine the Oslo Accords and calling the United States "easy" to manipulate. The video was filmed in 2001, apparently without Netanyahu's knowledge, during a meeting with Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank. It aired on Friday night on Israel's Channel 10, and several translations have been posted online. At one point on the tape, Netanyahu threatens a "broad attack" against the Palestinian Authority. "The main thing, first of all, is to hit them. Not just one blow, but blows that are so painful that the price will be too heavy to be borne," Netanyahu said. "A broad attack on the Palestinian Authority." The tape was shot during the early stages of the second intifada, when violence between Israelis and Palestinians was escalating. Netanyahu was speaking with settlers who lost family members to Palestinian attacks. Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister at the time, had recently deployed additional Israeli troops in the West Bank. Netanyahu - who did not hold political office when the recording was made - was dismissive of the United States, calling it easily manipulated.

"I know what America is," Netanyahu said. "America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won't get in the way."

AWIP/Xymphora: 4 Netanyahu quotes. The National: Netanyahu admits on video he deceived US to destroy Oslo accord.

As the founder of Wikileaks – a website that publishes millions of documents, from military intelligence to internal company memos and has, in four years, exposed more secrets than many newspapers have in a century – Assange has become the pin-up of web-age investigative journalists. The US has wanted him for questioning since March, after he posed a video showing an American helicopter attack that left several Iraqi civilians and two Reuters journalists dead.

Understandably, he now avoids the US, and keeps his movements secret, though it's thought he operates out of Sweden and is spending time in Iceland, where a change in the law is creating a libel-free haven for journalists. But if the CIA spooks wanted him that badly, couldn't they have turned up, as a hundred adoring student journalists did, to hear him talk at the Centre for Investigative Journalism 10 days ago?

Perhaps it's just as well they didn't, as Assange is not a natural public speaker. He is more at home trawling data or decrypting the codes that mask it. His philosophy is that the more a government wants to keep something secret, the more reason to expose it. No journalist could argue with his essential belief in shining a light on malpractice, but shouldn't governments be entitled to keep some secrets? "Sure," he says when we speak after his talk, "That doesn't mean we and other press organisations should suffer under coercion." Twitter: Real change begins Monday in the WashPost. By the years end, a reformation. Lights on. Rats out. CNN: WikiLeaks founder: Site getting tons of 'high caliber' disclosures.

GULISTAN, Uzbekistan -- Saodat Rakhimbayeva says she wishes she had died with her newborn baby. The 24-year-old housewife had a cesarean section in March and gave birth to Ibrohim, a premature boy who died three days later. Then came a further devastating blow: She learned that the surgeon had removed part of her uterus during the operation, making her sterile. The doctor told her the hysterectomy was necessary to remove a potentially cancerous cyst, while she believes he sterilized her as part of a state campaign to reduce birthrates.

"He never asked for my approval, never ran any checks, just mutilated me as if I were a mute animal," the pale and fragile Rakhimbayeva said through tears while sitting at a fly-infested cafe in this central Uzbek city. "I should have just died with Ibrohim."

Details of the techniques used in a secret manual governing the use of physical restraint in private child prisons were revealed today. Some of the measures employed in the secure training centres, detailed in the "instructor's manual", include ramming knuckles into ribs and raking shoes down the shins, the Observer reported. The contents of the manual were revealed after The Youth Justice Board (YJB) agreed to hand over the document earlier this month. The document includes descriptions of "distraction" techniques, which deliberately inflict pain. The Observer detailed some of the techniques such as placing an "inverted knuckle into the trainee's sternum and drive inward and upward." Another practice reads: "Continue to carry alternate elbow strikes to the young person's ribs until a release is achieved."

Corexit is a product line of solvents primarily used as a dispersant for breaking up oil slicks. It is produced by Nalco Holding Company which is associated with BP . Corexit 9500, four times more toxic than crude oil, is one of the most poisonous dispersants ever developed, and is up to 20 times more toxic than other dispersants, and only half as effective.

When Corexit 9500, with its 2.61 ppm toxicity level, is combined with the warm waters of the Gulf much of it will transition into a gaseous state that will be absorbed into clouds, to be released as toxic rain upon all of the Eastern United States

Argentina is suffering from some unusually cold weather. In fact, snow fell in over half the provinces on Friday. Snow in July? Well, that's the case for Argentina this week. It is winter in the southern hemisphere. An arctic air mass is hovering over the middle of the country, bringing frigid temperatures and leaving snow on the ground. In Cordoba, north and east of the capital, roads and homes were blanketed in white, making driving conditions trecherous, but exciting children with the rare snowfall. Local newspapers reported that the temperature plunged to -1.5°C in Buenos Aires, on Friday -- making it the coolest day in a decade for the capital. Even the beaches saw white powder. The coastal resort city Mar del Plata was blanketed by snow for two days straight.

An Iranian scientist who says he was abducted a year ago by US agents has said that the United States wanted him to confess to being a spy as part of a plan to get three Americans released by Iran. Shahram Amiri said on Saturday that he was also pressured to lie about Iran's nuclear programme. In an interview with Iran's state television, Amiri said he was presented with fake nuclear documents by US officials who asked him to publicly claim that he had brought them to the US from Iran. "They said 'if you say that you are an agent of the Iranian intelligence services, the US can swap you as a spy who has been arrested in a foreign country with the three [American] spies who were arrested near the Iraqi border inside Iran." "I totally trusted the Islamic Republic and the Republic was confident that I was not defecting to the US," he said during the interview. Amiri, who claims he was abducted in Saudi Arabia by the CIA 14 months ago, returned to Tehran, the capital of Iran, on Wednesday. But US officials deny kidnapping Amiri and insist he was living freely in the United States.

Carlos Latuff visits Amman and explains his solidarity.

Hamburg, the port city that sends 1 million tons of goods to foreign markets each week, has a reply to those who say Germany’s economy is too reliant on exports. “Nonsense,” said Frank Horch, the city’s Chamber of Commerce president, in a June 24 interview in the offices of the 345-year-old trade group. “You cannot say Germany has to stop exports, it makes no sense. Germany was born out of this.” Hamburg, Germany’s largest port and a crossroads in European trade since at least the 13th century, is the city with the most to lose from U.S.-led calls on Chancellor Angela Merkel to reduce the trade surplus in Europe’s biggest economy.

This Envisat image shows the Straits of Florida, the area where the Loop Current flows eastward out of the Gulf of Mexico before joining the Gulf Stream and flowing along the eastern coastlines of the US and Newfoundland (not visible).

Scientists are monitoring this area closely as concerns emerge that winds could blow the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico (visible west of Florida) south toward the Loop Current or that the current could expand north towards the spill. If oil from the spill were to enter the Loop Current, it could be carried to the Florida Keys (the curved archipelago of islands and associated coral reefs off the tip of Florida) and continue east into the Gulf Stream.

By combining surface roughness and current flow information with Envisat Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) data of the oil spill, analysts are able to detect the direction in which the spill boundaries can drift. The Bahamas (bottom right) consist of a chain of islands and shallow water banks extending 1400 km from Florida to the island of Hispaniola. All of the islands are surrounded by coral reefs – 5% of all the world\'s coral reefs are concentrated here. Other visible US states are Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. This image was acquired by Envisat’s Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer on 1 April 2010 at a resolution of 300 m.

See Max Blumenthal's shocking footage of the reaction by some Israelis and American Jews in Jerusalem to Obama's speech to the Muslim world. Co-produced by Joseph Dana, aka Ibn Ezra: ibnezra.wordpress.com and Mondoweiss, a blog that covers the Israel-Palestine conflict and the Middle East from a progressive Jewish perspective.

HEBRON, Palestinian Territories — Two Palestinian news photographers were hospitalised on Saturday after being attacked by Israeli troops during a weekly protest in the occupied West Bank, one of them said. An AFP photographer said a soldier hit him in the face and leg with a baton and that another photographer lost his hearing after a stun grenade exploded near his head. The two were covering a weekly demonstration against Israel's controversial separation barrier attended by dozens of Palestinian, foreign and Israeli activists near the southern West Bank town of Beit Umar, outside of Hebron.