The Senate voted 59-39 to approve unemployment-benefits extensions for millions of people who have been out of work for more than six months. The House is expected to pass the bill Thursday, and President Obama is expected to quickly sign it. It will allow states to retroactively give unemployment benefits to 2.5 million people who have been cut off since the original bill expired June 2, and will allow jobless people to receive up to 99 weeks of income aid until November. The bill had been tied up in a partisan battle, with Republicans claiming the bill's $34 billion price tag would only add to the debt burden.

On the heels of the Obama administration 'fessing up to making a mistake in the firing of Shirley Sherrod after Andrew Breitbart posted a selectively edited video that made her appear racist, the USDA has offered Sherrod her job back. Will Breitbart follow suit in an apology? “A disservice was done, an apology is owed,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said on Wednesday. Gibbs said that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack would apologize and "talk about their next steps.” Reached for comment before the USDA offered to re-hire her, Sherrod said she was unsure if she would want her job back. 

The Federal Reserve will not provide any additional support to boost the economy, despite recent calls by economists and historians for more government action to revive the economy, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress Wednesday. Bernanke also warned that unemployment was likely to remain at 7 percent until 2012—which could be damaging to politicians up for reelection—and said that it would be a “significant amount of time” until the 8.5 million jobs lost in the U.S. in 2008-2009 were restored. “The economic outlook remains unusually uncertain,” he said. Bernanke’s dire outlook also caused a drop in Wall Street: The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 109.43 points on the heels of his semiannual monetary-policy report. Bernanke’s statements before Congress came on the same day the Senate approved extending jobless benefits and President Barack Obama signed a sweeping financial overhaul into law.

Four major oil companies—Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell, and ConocoPhillips—are working together to build a strike force to deal with future oil spills on the scale of the one in the Gulf of Mexico. The rapid-fire response system will be aimed at capturing 100,000 barrels of oil 10,000 feet below the surface of the sea, and will resemble the trial-by-fire system BP had to create following the April 20 Deepwater Horizon oil-rig explosion that led to 60,000 barrels of oil per day leaking into the Gulf. The companies want to rebuild their relationship with the White House, which has twice tried to impose a deepwater-drilling moratorium in response to the oil spill.

The Department of Justice ruled Wednesday that the Bush administration’s firing of nine attorneys was inappropriately political, but not a crime. Investigators looked into whether the 2006 firings—particularly that of New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias—had been part of the administration’s efforts to have a hand in criminal cases. The ensuing scandal led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and in 2008, the DOJ began to investigate. The DOJ’s ruling ends one of the major disputes of the Bush administration, in which Democrats had long claimed the firings were evidence of GOP wrongdoings while Republicans said the Democrats were creating the controversy. Prosecutors also said there was insufficient evidence to charge anyone with lying to Congress, another charge levied against the Bush administration in the case.

Michael Steele probably has a bright career ahead of him on Wall Street once he’s done at the Republican National Committee: RNC Treasurer Randy Pullen has accused Steele of intentionally hiding a $7 million debt from the FEC in order to make the RNC’s finances look better headed into November. Pullen says he discovered a $3.3 million debt from April and a $3.8 million debt from May and had to amend the RNC’s FEC filing. RNC officials deny any wrongdoing on the part of Steele or his chief of Staff Michael Leavitt.

This is inauspicious: Bristol Palin tells Us Weekly that Sarah Palin “doesn’t really approve” of her surprise engagement to Levi Johnston, the father of her child. “She’s apprehensive and concerned about this. She doesn’t want to see me get hurt again,” Bristol says. She adds, “My dad is on the same page as my mom.” When Bristol and Levi announced their engagement, Palin issued a highly passive-aggressive statement praising Bristol’s capacity to believe in “redemption and forgiveness.”

Here's something not to cheer about: A federal judge in Connecticut ruled that competitive cheerleading is not a sport that colleges and universities can use to satisfy Title IX equal opportunity requirements for male and female athletics. Quinnipiac University's women's volleyball team had sued the institution for announcing plans last year to replace it with a competitive cheerleading squad. U.S. District Judge Stefan Underhill, however, has ordered the school to reinstate its volleyball team, contending that cheerleading "is still too underdeveloped and disorganized to be treated as offering genuine varsity athletic participation opportunities for students." Rather than reinstate its volleyball team, the school will introduce a women's rugby team instead. Quinnipiac had also been found to be manipulating its rosters by overreporting competitive sports for women and underreporting it for men.

Brittany Murphy and her husband, Simon Monjack, died from eerily similar causes—acute pneumonia and severe anemia—according to the Monjack’s autopsy results released Wednesday. There were also several prescription drugs found in his system. "Just like Brittany," Assistant Chief Coroner Ed Winter said. "It is with great relief that Simon's preliminary autopsy findings have been released, so the media speculations can stop," Murphy’s mom Sharon said in a statement. "As I was sure of, just like my daughter Brittany, there was no kind of drug overdose." Monjack, 39 years old, was found dead in the couple's Hollywood home less than six months after his wife of three years, who also died in their house. According to her autopsy report, Murphy, 32, died from a combination of pneumonia, an iron deficiency and multiple drug intoxication—all of which were legal and prescribed.

In what's sure to be an epic tale: A 40-ton, 30-foot long whale crashed into a yacht in South Africa Sunday—and both sailors and the whale survived. What would cause a whale to throw itself onto a yacht? Officials are investigating whether Paloma Werner and her boyfriend, Ralph Mothes, possibly harassed the endangered whale before it breached onto their steel yacht. Laws require sailors to stay at least 1,000 feet away from whales, and a marine activist said he constantly has to warn people to stay away. But Werner said the whale was "just having fun," and “did not intend to attack us.”

Are you sure about that Mr. President? “There will be no more taxpayer-funded bailouts, period,” President Obama announced on Wednesday as he signed financial reform into law. He hailed the reforms as “the strongest consumer financial protections in history.” The bill, he said, ensures that “the American people will never again be asked to foot the bill for Wall Street’s mistake.”

New York magazine reports that executives at CBS have been reconsidering Katie Couric's future as the anchor of Evening News. Her $15 million annual contract expires next June, but sources say the network has mulled buying out the rest of Couric's contract come September and replacing her in the fall. Sources close to Couric say that she too is considering a departure from CBS, and has contemplated returning to NBC—which would likely welcome her back. New York speculates that Couric's future will involve her reaching beyond television, and may see her move into production and other larger business pursuits.

On Wednesday, a federal judge ordered Canadian newspaper owner Conrad Black free on a $2 million bond secured by his friend Roger Hertog. In 2007, Black was convicted 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 Coleman, Florida serving his 78-month sentence. While he has been ordered free, he must appear before a Chicago court before he can be released from custody.

Inception’s leading man Leonardo DiCaprio may be the biggest star in Hollywood at the moment, but he still sweats the small stuff, as he tells the current issue of Rolling Stone. The actor gets anxious about “really stupid stuff,” he explains to the magazine. “Things that shouldn't make you anxious whatsoever. It's crazy how your mind will become this database to make you worry about things that are so arbitrary." But DiCaprio is thankful that his past indiscretions are something he does not have to worry about. "I got to be wild and nuts, and I didn't suffer as much as people do now, where they have to play it so safe that they ruin their credibility,” he says. The Titanic heartthrob—who has dated models from Gisele Bündchen to Bar Refaeli—adds that it used to be easier to date before he made it big. "I had better success meeting girls before Titanic. It was like there was a separate entity out there," DiCaprio says. "Not to use a James Cameron reference, but it was like being in a little bit of an avatar."

Police are investigating claims made by two more women that former Vice President Al Gore sexually abused them, the National Enquirer reports. The allegations come after massage therapist Molly Hagerty accused Gore of sexual assault during a massage in 2006 in Portland (she did not cooperate with police until recently). The new claims also come from massage therapists. One incident allegedly occurred in Beverly Hills in 2007, the other in 2008 in Tokyo. The National Enquirer’s source says that Gore stood naked in front of the therapist, then he “pointed at his erect penis and ordered her, 'Take care of this.'"

A real treat for bibliophiles: An Israeli judge has rejected a request for a gag order on a box of manuscripts by Franz Kafka, which is said to include a handwritten short story that has never been published. The documents are owned by Eva Hoffe, an Israeli woman who is the daughter of Esther Hoffe, who served as the secretary to Kafka’s close friend Max Brod. Everything in the box will be published except Esther Hoffe's personal items. Academics are particularly interested in the handwritten manuscript since Brod edited Kafka’s other publications.

An Israeli court has sentenced Sabbar Kashur, a 30-year-old Arab man, to 18 months in prison for rape by deception after he told a woman he was Jewish and then had consensual sex with her. Kashur, who is married with children, says he met the woman as he exited a grocery store. An Israeli justice says rape should be imposed whenever a “person does not tell the truth regarding critical matters to a reasonable woman, and as a result of misrepresentation she has sexual relations with him” However, men who have misrepresented themselves have typically been convicted of fraud.

Guess you can't put it past a company that Photoshops a picture to make its employees look busy. Now Mother Jones' Josh Harkinson has discovered that the beleaguered oil company, until last week, was operating a secret phone line for California politicians to use when requesting box seats to concerts, NBA and hockey games, and any event happening at the Arco Arena in Sacramento. The company responsible for the biggest oil disaster in history gave away more than 1,200 free tickets to lawmakers in the past five years and close to $300,000 worth of tickets in the last decade. The message, which can be heard online, gave clear instructions for how to secure the tickets without running afoul of limits on political gifts. The line went silent only in the past week, after Mother Jones began reporting the story.

Scientists have discovered the most massive star yet, and its mass is 265 times that of our Sun, and may have been born at 320 times bigger. It’s known as R136a1. It would outshine the Sun as much as the Sun outshines our Moon. Up close, it would look fuzzy, instead of the clear disc in our sky. That’s because the star’s winds are so powerful they lose a lot of material. R136a1 is in a young cluster of close-together giants. Earlier, the largest bodies ever observed were just 150 times the size of the Sun. Now scientists wonder what the upper limits on size could be.

Fifty years after it was first commissioned, Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka’s controversial play, A Dance of the Forests, is finally being performed for its original purpose: to celebrate Nigeria’s independence. The play was initially shunned because its message of warning was considered inappropriate for a national celebration of liberation. Soyinka writes in The Root that he believes it is important have both the celebration and the recognition. “I experienced no contradiction in all this—to participate in the insertion of a landmark event in national consciousness, yet exhume a shameful, glossed-over history as a warning for the future. That history was that of African's culpability in the enslavement of her own kind.”

Al Bundy would be so proud. Christina Applegate, his daughter in the show Married… With Children, is pregnant. People magazine reports that the Samantha Who? star and her fiancé, Dutch musician Martyn LeNoble, are expecting their first child. LeNoble stood by Applegate when she underwent a double mastectomy. "I'm very grateful to Martyn for coming along at a time that he did because he's been my rock through all of this," Applegate said last year.

The U.S. is imposing new sanctions on North Korea—including restrictions on its trade in arms, counterfeit cash and luxury goods—as punishment for sinking a South Korean ship in March. Starting Sunday, the U.S. and South Korea will hold joint military exercises on a larger scale (about 8,000 forces, 200 aircraft, and 18 ships) to deter the unpredictable North. Other exercises will follow over coming months. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates traveled to the Demilitarized Zone Wednesday to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the start of the Korean War; they said they wanted to send a clear message to the North. During his confirmation hearing to become director of national intelligence, retired Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper Jr. called this a “dangerous new period” in relations between Washington and Pyongyang.

Police think they’ve caught the serial killer who killed two mothers and daughters in Maryland and attempted to conceal his crimes by studying forensic science books. He intentionally killed the women in ways to confuse investigators, police say, fooling them into thinking the deaths were unrelated. The man, 27, holds two master’s degrees and is being held on federal weapons and sex charges—and hasn’t been charged with the killings. Police haven’t released his name, but predicted an indictment by the end of July. He is suspected in the deaths of Dolores and Ebony Dewitt, 42 and 20 years old, in March 2009, and of Karen and Karissa Lofton, 45 and 16, in January 2009. The Dewitts were found in a burning stolen car; the Loftons were shot in their home. Investigators are also looking into whether the man was involved in the 2008 death of a woman who was shot and whose home was torched—as well as other crimes around Washington and in Texas and Florida.

A blonde-haired, blue-eyed baby was born Sunday in Britain to a black couple with no known white ancestry. Doctors said the baby, named Nmachi Ihegboro, is not an albino, though the BBC reports that the hospital has not ruled this out. Both mother and father are from Nigerian ancestry and have black skin. Father Ben Ihegboro said after the birth, “What the flip?” before adding “Is she mine?” Despite his jokes, Angela Ihegboro said their daughter is a “miracle baby.” The couple has two other children, both of whom have black skin. A genetics professor said the birth is “truly extraordinary” and said “the rules of genetics are complex, and we still don’t understand what happens in many cases.”

Sources close to BP’s president, Tony Hayward, who was lambasted for his poor handling of the Gulf oil spill, told The Times of London that he will resign in either late August or early September, the paper reports Wednesday. BP strongly denied the report, saying “there is no truth in this article.” But one source told the Times "you would be hard-pushed to find anyone within the company who does not think he is irreparably damaged—both by his own performance and by the event itself.” The rumors of Hayward’s departure came on the same day BP announced it will sell off $7 billion of oil and gas assets to meet the growing cost of the oil spill.

Who should be more ashamed of himself here: Andrew Breitbart, for falsely accusing a woman of racism, or Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, for handing him her scalp? On Tuesday, Breitbart posted a video of what he called a "racist tale" on his Big Government website in which USDA employee Shirley Sherrod, an African American woman, said she didn’t give a white farmer “the full force of what I could do” 24 years ago because of his race. However, Breitbart’s video was only a snippet of her speech—the full speech shows that she told this story as part of a larger narrative about how she came to help this family and learn that “race is not the issue, it's about the people who have and the people who don't.” In fact, the wife of the white farmer at the center of her tale says Sherrod is a “friend for life” and that Sherrod’s help “kept us out of bankruptcy.” Breitbart, who likes to scold journalists on his website Big Journalism, is now saying that he never saw the full video and that he simply posted the edited clips as they were sent to him, without investigating the story. Vilsack fired Sherrod on Tuesday, but said early on Wednesday that he's willing to reconsider his decision.

Every party has a pooper: House Minority Leader John Boehner has told members of his caucus caught partying with lobbyists to “knock it off,” according to the New York Post. Who, particularly is he targeting? Maybe Rep. Lee Terry of Nebraska, whom a Post reporter overheard asking a female lobbyist “Why did you get me so drunk?” at the Capital Hill Club, until he realized the reporter was nearby and changed the subject to her family. Or Missouri Rep. Sam Graves, who was recently photographed with a blonde lobbyist at a restaurant in DC. Or Duncan Hunter and Bill Shuster, who, along with Terry, are said to party at the house of lobbyist Glenn LeMunyon. Meanwhile, Politico throws cold water on the idea that Republicans could soon take over the Senate.

Well this could get interesting: Lawyers for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg say they're "unsure" whether their client signed a contract in April 2003 giving a man named Paul Ceglia 84 percent of the company. "Whether he signed this piece of paper, we're unsure at this moment," Facebook lawyer Lisa Simpson told a U.S. District Court judge on Tuesday. Simpson said that "Mr. Zuckerberg did have a contract with Mr. Ceglia," but that there are also "serious questions" about the authenticity of Ceglia's document, which refers to "The Face Book" and was signed nine months before Zuckerberg launched the social network. Facebook is estimated to be worth about $25 billion.

The last resort is almost done: A relief tunnel is expected to hit BP’s busted Gulf oil well this weekend, which means the massive leak could be permanently shut within two weeks. After testing the stability of the well and the strength of its cap, scientists think there’s little risk of a blowout. Crews will drill sideways into the well and stop the flow of oil by pumping in heavy drilling mud. That procedure will take between five days and two weeks.

British Prime Minister David Cameron met on Tuesday night with the four U.S. senators leading an investigation into BP’s role in the release of the Lockerbie bomber last year.  While Cameron is cool on the idea of the inquiry— he said at a press conference earlier on Tuesday that “I don't currently think that another government inquiry is the right way to go, frankly”—Senator Chuck Schumer said after the meeting that “Our request for an independent investigation is still on the table. He said that it’s not case closed.” Scottish President Alex Salmond, meanwhile, is defending his country’s decision to release Al-Megrahi: “If you take a decision in good faith you don’t regret it.”

Turbulence shook a United Airlines flight so hard on Tuesday that at least 25 people were injured and the plane was diverted to Denver. United Flight 967 was headed from Washington, D.C.'s Dulles airport to Los Angeles when it flew into the turbulence over Kansas, where there were storms. There were 265 people onboard, including the 10 crew members. One person was seriously injured and 25 were taken to the hospital. The plane itself suffered no damage.

One reality show apparently isn’t enough for some attention-seekers: The Hollywood Reporter says that Donald Trump “has quietly lobbied” for the judging vacancy left by Simon Cowell on American Idol. Thankfully, Fox appears likely to go another route. THR says the network has met twice with singer Chris Isaak about the job and Harry Connick Jr. is also under consideration. Even Brett Michaels was considered at one point, though he is now out of the running.

It’s not too often that Glenn Beck and the NAACP agree, but both are calling for the Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to reinstate Shirley Sherrod, the employee who was fired after Andrew Breitbart released selectively edited videos of her that made her appear racist. “Here's my take on Shirley Sherrod: She should not have been fired or forced to resign,” Beck said. The NAACP is also encouraging Vilsack to reinstate Sherrod after originally condemning Breitbart’s videos. Vilsack said on Wednesday that he is “of course willing and will conduct a through review and consider additional facts.”

David Frum makes a smart observation: When Dan Rather fell for a hoax about Bush’s war record in 2004, CBS kicked him to the curb. Now that Andrew Breitbart has published doctored videos that make a Department of Agriculture employee appear racist—and cost her her job—will he have to do the same? “Breitbart is the conservative Dan Rather,” Frum writes, “but there will be no discredit, no resignation for him.” Indeed, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and other conservatives are actually blaming President Obama and the NAACP for the whole brouhaha while neglecting to mention that Breitbart is the one who disseminated the video in the first place. Frum draws a connection to the right’s fury over leaked emails from Journolist, an email list-serve for several liberal journalists, that showed a few journalists expressing a wish to quash stories about Jeremiah Wright during the 2008 election. “Only, of course, the Wright story was not quashed—unlike the story of Breitbart's role in Sherrod's firing, which has been, at least among conservatives.”