It was too good to last: Oil is leaking into the Gulf of Mexico once again, as White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said on Monday that BP’s well is leaking at the top, in addition to the seepage that was discovered two miles away. Nevertheless, BP was allowed to keep the well shut, despite the government’s wishes that the company pump the oil to ships on the ocean’s surface. Should the seepage in the sea floor grow, BP may have to open up the cap in order to relieve pressure and prevent the leaks in the sea floor from worsening.

After a long day trading barbs with the GOP over extending unemployment benefits, Senate Democrats will finally be able to pass the measure tomorrow with the addition of a new Democratic Senator, West Virginia's Carte Goodwin.Goodwin, a substitute for recently deceased Robert C. Byrd, will be the crucial 60th vote, breaking a GOP filibuster. Earlier on Monday, President Obama attacked the filibuster, lamenting that “a partisan minority has used parliamentary maneuvers to block a vote.” He accused Republicans, who argue that jobless benefits encourage laziness, of a “lack of faith in the American people,” and said, “There are times when you put elections aside. This is one of those times.” House Minority Leader John Boehner took issue with Obama's speech in a statement, calling it a "disingenuous attack," and criticizing the president for calling for more spending without corresponding budget cuts.

The law may be nearly signed, but debate about financial regulatory reform is far from over. An battle is emerging over who will lead the newly mandated Consumer Protection Bureau, with early favorite Elizabeth Warren gaining support from consumer groups. The Harvard Law professor and head of the bank bailout oversight panel received a big boost Monday, as Americans for Financial Reform, an alliance of more than 250 organizations that had pushed for the financial reform legislation, endorsed her to lead the new bureau. Despite the show of support, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner suggested last week that he would oppose Warren’s nomination—and Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), a main architect of the financial reform law, said he had doubts that she could be confirmed by the Senate.

The Washington Post's massive probe of America's counterterrorism efforts and intelligence networks is so in-depth that one government official called it a “ roadmap to our enemies.” Post editor Marcus Brauchli has swept to the story's defense, telling Yahoo that the paper's staffers took great care to address the national-security issues: “Whenever we believe our reporting may imperil national security or public safety, we seek input from the government or other industries that may be affected, so we can make sound judgments about what to publish." According to Brauchli, in recent months high-ranking government officials previewed the story, pointing out red flags and even removing “certain data points.” The story was kept under considerable wraps, but is now being trumpeted by TV appearances and social-media promotion. Brauchli staunchly defended the Post's right to publish the piece: "It's an important piece of journalism, and I think it goes to an issue that is of great importance to the country."

A group of U.S. senators lobbied to meet with U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron during his upcoming U.S. trip to discuss BP's involvement in the early release of the Lockerbie bomber, but to no avail. According to the British Embassy, Cameron's busy schedule during the trip will not permit time for such a meeting, and the senators are welcome to meet with the British ambassador instead. The group of lawmakers is investigating whether British Petroleum negotiated a deal with Libya for the early release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi in exchange for a $900 million offshore drilling deal with his native country. Cameron’s Conservative U.K. government has already admitted that al-Megrahi's release was a "mistake." Al-Megrahi was convicted of killing 270 people—including 189 Americans—in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

This jailbird has flown the coop—at least for now. A three-judge panel in a federal appeals court has granted bail to Canadian newspaper owner Conrad Black, who was convicted in 2007 on three counts of mail and wire fraud, honest-services fraud, and one count of obstruction of justice. Black, who previously owned the U.K.’s Daily Telegraph and the Chicago Sun-Times, had been in a federal prison in Florida serving his 78-month sentence. This is his second time seeking bail before the same court. Details have not yet been released on when Black will be freed.

Get ready for the official House Tea Party Caucus: Conservative firecracker Michele Bachmann, a Republican representative from Minnesota, announced via Twitter on Monday that the Committee on House Administration has approved her proposal to create a caucus for the right-wing movement. “This caucus will espouse the timeless principles of our founding, principles that all members of Congress have sworn to uphold,” Bachmann wrote in a statement. “The American people are doing their part and making their voices heard and this caucus will prove that there are some here in Washington willing to listen.” Other caucuses already in the House range from the Congressional Black Caucus to the Wine Caucus. While not all GOP members will be eager to join the Tea Party Caucus, Indiana Rep. Mike Pence has already committed. When asked if he’d join up with the new group, Pence told CBS, “You betcha.”

As poor cities continue to struggle with AIDS, good news is afoot on the drug-research front: A new vaginal gel containing the antiretroviral drug tenofovir can cut the risk of acquiring the virus for women. In a study of 900 South African women, the gel cut the rate of infection by 39 percent; if used consistently, the result jumped to 54 percent. “We have never had any kind of tool that has effectively allowed women to protect themselves,” Bruce Walker, an AIDS researcher at Harvard Medical School, told The Washington Post. “This is really a game changer.” Worldwide, 16 million women are infected with AIDS, and 60 percent of those infected in Africa are female. In the 15-year search to find a protection method, six other microbicides were tested in 11 clinical trials, but nothing proved to work. This gel marks the first method of female-controlled HIV protection.

Points for creativity? A Mexican man has been arrested after authorities at Mexico City's international airport discovered 18 titi monkeys stuffed into socks and tied around his waist. Roberto Sol Cabrera was returning from Lima, Peru, and had been trying to smuggle in the tiny primates by wearing them slung on a belt under his clothing—“to protect them from X-rays." Two of the monkeys were dead when they were confiscated. Many species of titi monkeys are on the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora's endangered list, and can be sold for around $1,550 in Mexico.

Ninety-three year-old socialite and former actress Zsa Zsa Gabor is hanging in there: On Sunday, she fell in her home and broke her hip. She was rushed to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. According to her publicist, Gabor underwent successful hip replacement surgery early Monday morning: "It looks like it was a successful operation. She will be held at the hospital for four-to-five days minimum while she recuperates."

Mad Men’s resident funny girl Crista Flanagan, who plays switchboard operator Lois Sadler, is switching things up from the constricting 1960s-style attire to become the barely clothed centerfold in Playboy’s August 2010 issue. In honor of the period-piece show, the magazine chose to recreate two of its own covers published in the 1960s. Flanagan replicated Sharon Kristie’s April 1969 cover and Toni Lacey’s November 1960 cover in her eight-page spread. Any of the actress’ nerves about the shoot dissipated once she saw the wardrobe, surprisingly. "I felt OK when I walked in and saw all the beautiful shoes," she told Access Hollywood.

It's every Luddite's biggest nightmare: For the first time, electronic versions of hardcover books have out-performed Amazon's physical versions, the company announced on Monday. Amazon’s chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, said it's "astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months." Users at the site, which represents a significant portion of U.S. book sales, purchased 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books in the last quarter—including hardcover books for which there is no counterpart edition—and in the last month that number swelled to 180 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books. Sales figures don't include free Kindle books, and though paperback purchases weren’t disclosed, it’s likely that they continue to outnumber e-books.

This is either awesome or terrifying, depending on your perspective: Raytheon Missile Systems has developed a laser that is capable of shooting down aircraft. The company mounted the 32-kilowatt infrared laser on a warship’s gun turret and then used it to shoot down a drone that was more than two miles away and traveling at 300 miles per hour. The Telegraph says that such lasers “will be deployed on warships as part of their short-range defense,” though the New Scientist says that they require so much energy on top of the ships already-taxed power systems that some are advocating powering ships with nuclear reactors.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker was maybe the key adviser to President Obama on financial reform; so how does he grade the final product? “We could have done better,” Volcker tells The New Yorker. He seems most disappointed—no surprise here—by the watering down of the “Volcker Rule,” which would have banned banks from speculating in the markets (known as proprietary trading) and investing in hedge funds and private-equity firms. At the last minute, industry lobbyists convinced the bill’s main sponsors, Rep. Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd, to drop a dollar-limit on hedge fund investments by banks and other restrictions that would have prevented banks from investing more money in risky investments. “The ban on proprietary trading is still there,” Volcker says said. “But I’m sorry we lost the tighter limitations on hedge funds and private equity. I’m a little pained that it doesn’t have the purity I was searching for.”

Earlier in July, Elle Macpherson said she eats powdered rhinoceros horn as a beauty treatment. We hope someone shows her this story: The last female rhinoceros in South Africa’s Krugersdorp National Park bled to death last week after poachers sawed off her horn. Wildlife officials in South Africa say poaching in the country is at an all-time high: Already 136 rhinos have died this year, after 129 died in all of 2009. Officials say the rise in poaching is due to increased demand from China, where the horns are popular as medicinal ingredients. They are also used to make daggers in the Middle East.

Scary stuff from an investigative report in The Washington Post: America’s intelligence and counterterror bureaucracy is so large and unwieldy that the Post says, “No one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.” Among the Post’s findings: 1,271 government organizations work on counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence around the U.S.; 854,000 people have security clearances—more than the entire population of D.C. One of the Defense Department’s “Super Users”—what they call people who have the clearance to know about all of the department’s activities—tells the Post, "Because it lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably results in message dissonance, reduced effectiveness, and waste. We consequently can't effectively assess whether it is making us more safe."

More than 1.1 million people in the U.S. are infected with HIV, according to a new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The study, which was presented at the International AIDS Conference in Vienna on Monday, also showed that poverty is the most important factor linked to HIV infection among inner-city heterosexuals. "In this country, HIV clearly strikes the economically disadvantaged in a devastating way," said CDC HIV/AIDS expert Kevin Fenton. The U.N. Joint Program on HIV/AIDS, also known as UNAIDS, defines epidemic as a prevalence in the general population of more than 1 percent. In poor American urban areas, 2.1 percent of heterosexuals are infected with AIDS, with approximately 56,000 new infections every year. These numbers do not include gay or bisexual people, sex workers, or IV drug users.

Mel Gibson apparently has a thing for Eastern Europeans: A Polish porn filmmaker named Violet Kowal says she had a three-month affair with Gibson and that he screamed threats at her when the media caught wind of it. "He was very abusive," she told Geraldo Rivera. "He called me up screaming at me and said he would make me suffer. I was so scared of him. It was a huge emotional experience for me. I was close to going to the police." She says they were together from about July to Thanksgiving 2009; Gibson’s child with ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva was born in October of that year.

Steve Carell and Paul Rudd’s new comedy, Dinner with the Schmucks, figures to be a hit when it opens on July 30, but will it be any good? Newsweek has run an early review of the film and says that “it’s a glimpse into how truly conservative our comedy has become.” That figures, since it’s adapted from a much more off-color French film. The premise of both films is the same—a group of businessmen routinely host dinners in which they compete to bring the most ridiculous guest. In the French version, the main character Pierre (who is played by Rudd in the American version) enjoys the dinners, and the film ends before any dinner actually takes place. However, the American version packages it so every character can be as likeable as possible—Rudd only goes to the dinner so he can get a raise, so he can marry his girlfriend. “Though the premise of Dinner for Schmucks is deeply cruel, we are supposed to laugh, because we trust that by the closing credits the characters will have matured into upstanding men. Too bad Hollywood doesn’t give the audience credit for being mature, too,” Jennie Yabroff writes.

Anna Chapman, the “hottie spy" recently sent back to Russia, is working with a new kind of agent: According to the New York Post, she’s been not-so-secretly shopping around her story rights. In her plea bargain with the U.s., Chapman agreed to transfer any money she received for her story to the federal government, but now that she’s back in Russia, she’s trying to find a way around the deal. "She hopes this translates into a book deal and movie rights, but how she is paid will have to be carefully controlled. The money cannot come directly to her, so she has suggested it goes to a friend's Swiss account,” a source tells the New York Post. Her lawyer, Robert Baum, told Newsweek that Chapman feels a media deal is her only source of income. She’s no longer on the payroll of the Russian government, and she had to leave her real-estate business behind in the States. Naturally, it’s already been suggested that she might pose for Playboy, according to the Post.

Well this doesn’t sound so bad: The wife of jailed Ponzi-schemer Bernie Madoff’s been spending her South Florida exile between the $4.5 million Palm Beach mansion owned by her brother-in-law, Peter Madoff, and her sister’s condo in a comparatively modest gated community, the New York Post reports. Her remaning $2.5 million fortune allows her to live a work-free, snowbird lifestyle, an acquaintance tells the Post, and she fills her time driving around a 1996 Infiniti to deliver meals to the homebound. She also frequently makes the trip from Florida to Manhattan, stopping on the way to visit her husband in his prison at Butner, North Carolina.

Politicos have long believed that the GOP stands a good chance at taking over the House in November, but could it take the Senate too? Unexpectedly competitive races in blue states Wisconsin, California, and Washington mean that Republicans could capture the needed 10 seats to take a majority in the Senate, just two years after the Democrats had a 60-seat majority. The Wall Street Journal says that in the 12 closest races, the Republicans have claimed 58 percent of contributions.

Don’t expect the war in Afghanistan to end in July 2011: “It could be as few as a couple thousand troops,” Vice President Joe Biden said on Sunday of the troop drawdown scheduled to begin then. Biden acknowledged that it’s been difficult to train the Afghan army that is supposed to take over security in the country, saying "We are in the process, which is painfully slow and difficult, of training up Afghani forces in order to put them in a position they can deal with their own insurgents.”

Spy swaps are all the rage these days: Shahram Amiri, the Iranian scientist who returned to Iran from the United States last week, has said in an interview with Tehran television that the U.S. tried to pressure him into admitting he was a spy so that he could be swapped for the three American hikers who were captured in Iran near the Iraqi border. “They told me that if I confess to being an Iranian intelligence agent, they could trade me with the three spies who were caught near the Iraqi border,” Amiri said. The U.S. disputes Amiri’s account, saying that he was a long-time informant about Iran’s nuclear program.

Hang in there, little guy: Scientists in Sri Lanka recently photographed the Horton Plains Loris—an animal so rare that they thought it was extinct for much of the past 60 years. The small tree-dwelling primate has only been seen four times since 1937 and was last spotted in 2002, when scientists identified the reflection of a light shown in its distinctive round eyes. The picture shows a male loris clutching a tree branch, and it didn’t come easily: Researchers carried out more than 1,000 nighttime surveys before snapping the photo.

Dr. Drew is back with a fourth season of Celebrity Rehab to help another batch of D-listers sober up, including Tiger Woods’ reported No. 1 mistress Rachel Uchitel. Joining the tabloid cover girl are The Hills’ Jason Wahler, supermodel Janice Dickinson, alleged kidnapping victim Jeremy London, socialite Jason Davis, and teen idol Leif Garrett. On-air doctor extraordinaire, Dr. Drew Pinsky, who is an M.D. at Huntington Hospital, says his approach is to use his own celebrity to “humanize the process” of recovery. The fourth season of Celebrity Rehab is expected to air by the end of 2010. Uchitel’s place on Celebrity Rehab means she’s out of the running for  Celebrity Apprentice. Though she was being considered for the next round of the show, Donald Trump has put rumors to rest: “We no longer have interest in Rachel,” he said in a statement on Monday.

The government of Scotland has proclaimed itself ready to assist in the upcoming U.S. investigation into the release of the Lockerbie bomber—which BP lobbied for, so that it could secure an oil deal with Libya. "We would always look to assist any properly constituted inquiry," the Scottish government said in a statement.  The U.S. Senate has scheduled hearings for July 29, but the Scottish government says it has not yet received any requests for information from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Both the Scottish and U.K. governments have said that BP did not influence the decision by Scotland, which had sole authority over the matter, to grant Abdel Baset al Megrahi compassionate release.

As the Gulf enters its fourth day with the leaking oil well capped, BP and its government overseers are struggling to agree on a long-term plan to keep the crude away. BP’s chief operating officer said on Sunday that he’d like to keep the cap closed for good, but news of a possible seep near the wellhead may prompt a different plan. Admiral Thad Allen, the administration’s response chief, said that the government is sticking to its original plan of eventually opening the well to siphon oil up to the surface, which is a more cautious route, but BP is getting another 24 hours to continue the cap test. In either scenario, the ultimate goal is to permanently fix the leak by drilling a relief well and pumping it with mud and cement. Allen was measured in his comments, expressing relief that the spill was plugged but pledging to "take all appropriate action to keep it that way."

Somehow, we think “peace-seeking Muslims” aren’t too tuned into Sarah Palin’s Twitter feed: Palin fired off a shot Sunday in the ongoing battle over the planned mosque near Gound Zero when she tweeted, "Peace-seeking Muslims, pls understand, Ground Zero mosque is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts. Pls reject it in interest of healing.” (The mosque is just part of a larger religious community center, which includes a pool, a gym, and an arts center.) In another Tweet, which she later deleted, she asked Muslims to "refudiate" the plans. After several bloggers pointed out her error, she made light of the situation, tweeting, "'Refudiate,' 'misunderestimate,' 'wee-wee'd up.' English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!"