Ask and you shall receive: President Obama has called Shirley Sherrod after she said she’d like to speak to him because “he might need to hear some of what I could say to him [about race].” The White House says Obama conveyed “his regret” to Sherrod and that he told her “this misfortune can present an opportunity for her to continue her hard work on behalf of those in need.” Meanwhile, Sherrod said she is unlikely to accept the job offer that was made to her by the USDA.

Tropical Storm Bonnie is moving in on the Gulf—and bringing with it complications for BP's oil spill clean-up. Crucial ships are being forced to evacuate the site, including the rig that’s responsible for drilling a relief well that the company hopes will ultimately plug the spill for good. "While this is not a hurricane, it's a storm that will have probably some significant impacts, we're taking appropriate precautions," Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, who is coordinating the response, said in Alabama today. Only some of the ships will stay, Allen added, in a development that will likely delay by 12 days the final plugging of the well. While the ships are gone, BP will leave its cap on the well, a confident sign that it is plugging the leak effectively. Vice President Joe Biden, who is visiting the Gulf, kept an optimistic tone: "After the storm's passage we will be right back out there," he said.

This isn’t surprising, but disappointing all the same: Democrats have given up on climate-change legislation. “We don’t have the 60 votes,” said Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid echoed her, saying, “We know we don’t have the votes.” Instead, Democrats will push forward with an energy-only bill that excludes a carbon cap or renewable electricity standard and includes some items about the Gulf oil spill and energy efficiency.

President Obama has signed an extension of jobless benefits into law after the House passed it 272-152 on Thursday. The benefits go to 5 million Americans who have been out of work for more than six month; 2.5 million people have had to forgo these benefits for seven weeks after Senate Republicans filibustered the extension. (Senate Democrats broke the GOP’s filibuster on Wednesday.) Those who went without the aid will be eligible for retroactive payments.

A gift to New York Rep. Charles Rangel’s primary challenger: A House investigative committee has charged Rangel with multiple ethics violations. While the exact nature of the charges is unknown, Rangel was accused of several misdeeds: using official stationary to raise money for the Charles B. Rangel center; using his position as the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee to benefit donors to the Rangel center; keeping four rent-controlled apartments in New York City; taking two Caribbean vacations on corporate dollars; and failing to report hundreds of thousands of dollars, or more, in assets. The case will now go to a House trial and is all but assured to drag on into election season.

Paul Ceglia claims that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave him an 84 percent stake in Facebook. Is he telling the truth? “Of course not,” Zuckerberg tells Fortune. “It was all about his website. I hadn’t even thought of Facebook yet. How could I have given him an ownership interest in it?” Ceglia hired Zuckerberg in April 2003 and claims he lent him $1,000 in exchange for an 84 percent stake in an undertaking Zuckerberg was calling “The Face Book.” Zuckerberg claims he did not get the idea for Facebook until the fall of 2003 and did not begin programming it until January 2004. Ceglia’s case against Zuckerberg is currently before a federal court in Buffalo.

Get another desk ready at the United Nations: A U.N. Court has said that Kosovo’s 2008 secession from Serbia was legal. The non-binding ruling paves the path for more nations to recognize Kosovo’s independence and for the small country’s entry into the U.N. The Times says the ruling could also embolden separatist movements in other countries. Serbian President Boris Tadic, for his part, insisted that Kosovo is still a part of his country.

Where do we sign up? A Scottish brewery called BrewDog has released a 110-proof beer that costs $760 per bottle. The beer, called The End of History, may be worth it just for the taxidermied-rodent koozie. The animals are stuffed so that the neck of the beer comes out of their mouth. Advocates for Animals has called the packaging a “perverse idea.”

Perhaps Sarah Palin is her media coach? The Republican Senate candidate from Nevada, Sharron Angle, ran away on Thursday when reporters tried to ask her questions … at a press event that she herself was hosting. Angle began the event by signing a pledge to repeal the estate tax, then made a few statements. But when the reporters she had invited began asking questions, she just walked away. They pursued her but she simply ignored their inquiries. MyNews4 reports, “She actually ignored the questions, looked straight ahead and kept walking.”

Our bet’s on James Franco: Starting July 23, Art.party.theater.company will put a celebrity in a box in Bryant Square Park in New York City. The identity of the celebrity is currently unknown—“We invite lots of speculation about who the celebrity will be,” says Artistic Director Mary Birnbaum. Visitors will be allowed to peek in at the celebrity in the box, so long as they sign a non-disclosure release.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez severed ties with Colombia on Thursday after his neighboring country accused him of harboring guerrillas. The move came just moments after the Colombian ambassador showed a meeting of the Organization of American states photos, videos, testimony, and maps that he said proved the existence of rebel camps within Venezuela. "We have the right to demand that Venezuela doesn't hide those wanted by Colombia," Ambassador Luis Alfonso Hoyos insisted. Chavez warned that Colombia’s actions could foment war.

Long before the so-called Barefoot Bandit became an Internet sensation, Colton Harris-Moore was hiding in tree houses and swiping frozen pizza and ice cream. One of his first criminal nicknames was “Island Boy,” bestowed upon him by Washington State victims who lost various tasty treats to the thief. Harris-Moore lived in a trailer on a dead-end road, and spent much of his childhood lonely and in hiding, The New York Times reports. His family life was volatile, with child protection services alerted to his home life a dozen times before he was 15. A social worker noted after his first arrest, at age 12, that Harris-Moore wanted his mom to quit drinking, get a job and get food in the house, but “Mom refuses.” Neighbors heard screaming arguments and gunshots at night. Harris-Moore dropped out of school after ninth grade but was deeply interested in technology, stealing laptops, GPS devices and at least five airplanes. He’s due in Washington Court Thursday.

A jellyfish died on Wednesday in New Hampshire, but managed to sting 150 people anyway. According to The Boston Globe, the dead jellyfish, which was the size of a trashcan lid, stung all those people, mostly children, after washing up on the beach at Wallis Sands State Park. Apparently, it was able achieve this feat after state officials tried to remove it, causing it to break into several small parts that then dispersed and went on to sting. Lifeguards treated most of the victims with vinegar and baking soda, although five were taken to the hospital due to allergy concerns.

Can diplomats field their own army? This has been one of many big questions going around Washington lately, and it looks like American politicians, foreign-relations strategists, and others are about to find out. Here’s why: The State Department is currently laying the groundwork to set up an unprecedented army of diplomat contractors in Iraq who will head to the Middle East in just over a year. They’ll have the ability to drive armored trucks and fly Black Hawk helicopters when U.S. troops withdraw from Iraq by 2011. Left behind, however, will be American civilians, including the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad—the largest in the world. And with the country still a war zone, the State Department will be forced to fend for itself. This arrangement is “one more step in the blurring of the lines between military activities and State Department or diplomatic activities,” Richard Fontaine of the Center for a New American Security told McClatchy. “This is no longer the foreign service officer standing in the canape line, and the military out in the field.”

Desmond Tutu, the South African Nobel Peace Prize winner and former Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, will retire. Tutu says, “The time has now come to slow down,” and he’ll work just one day a week in the office after his 79th birthday on October 7 until February 2011. Tutu attended several World Cup events this summer, including the opening ceremony, where he was seen dancing. After winning the Nobel Prize in 1984, Tutu worked hard to get international condemnation of apartheid, working from inside South Africa even as many activists were jailed or forced to leave the country. He headed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which for two years heard the stories of people who were tortured and saw loved ones killed during the brutal regime. Tutu plans to hang out with his wife and watch cricket.

China is reeling from its worst flooding in a decade. At least 700 people have been killed and millions displaced by torrential rains. The rains began in southern China in May after a drought; now more than half of the country is feeling monsoon-like storms. Officials blame La Niña for lower sea temperatures, which lead to the downpours. The Chinese government is reporting some improvement in conditions there, with a Yangtze River tributary near Chongqing, in the southwest, dropping 16 feet. If the Yangtze were to flood, hundreds of villages would be engulfed.

Lobbyists and PR pros are cashing in on the oil spill ravaging the Gulf of Mexico as offshore drilling and environmental groups shell out big bucks to convince lawmakers to push for their favored legislation. Transocean, which owned and operated the Deepwater Horizon, spent nothing on lobbying before the rig’s April 20 explosion. Since then, it’s spent $110,000 to lobby on energy bills, and a seven-figure sum on media consultants and lawyers. The oil industry group American Petroleum Institute has spent $2.3 million since March, almost doubling its lobbying outlays. BP has hired big-name lobbyists with deep ties to government, getting help with veterans of the Clinton and Reagan administrations. The Environmental Defense fund increased its lobbying from $522,000 to $670,000 from the first quarter to the second, and the Wilderness Society boosted its spending from $61,000 to $99,000. A Sierra Club lobbyist said the numbers reflect an “all-hands-on-deck situation.”

Gwyneth Paltrow—who gave birth to her second child, Moses, about four years ago—is admitting her struggle with post-partum depression in her latest GOOP newsletter. “I expected to have another period of euphoria following his birth, much the way I had when my daughter was born two years earlier,” the 37-year-old actress writes. “Instead I was confronted with one of the darkest and most painfully debilitating chapters of my life.” Paltrow adds that, in time, she discovered why she was feeling that way: “For about five months I had what I can see in hindsight as postnatal depression.” Bryce Dallas Howard, the star of New Moon, reveals a similar struggle. “I definitely felt I was a rotten mother—not a bad one, a rotten one,” Howard says in the newsletter. “Because the truth was, every time I looked at my son, I wanted to disappear.”

All that bad press cost Tiger Woods at the bank. The golfer lost $22 million last year in endorsements, according to a new list compiled by Sports Illustrated. But the world-famous philanderer still has some earning power, making $90 million in 2009 and keeping the title of the top-grossing American athlete for the seventh straight year. Major companies like Gatorade and AT&T dropped Woods from their payrolls when news of the golfer's serial affairs became public. America's 50 richest athletes averaged an annual income of $26.2 million.

Mark Zuckerberg sure is popular. Facebook, the online social networking site, has reached 500 million members, making its Web population equal to the size of the world's third largest country. Birthed in a Harvard dorm room in 2004, the site's number of users has accelerated in the past year. In January 2009, Facebook had 150 million members. The company isn't suffering for ambition: last month, Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO, said that the site would hit one billion users. This fall, Aaron Sorkin will release a movie depicting the rise of the company. The tagline? "You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies."

Shirley Sherrod says she will “think about” accepting a new job offered by Agriculture Department head Tom Vilsack after being hastily fired when a conservative website posted a video edited to mischaracterize Sherrod’s views on race. Sherrod is expecting an email offering some sort of civil rights position in the department’s Office of Outreach. "I truly do need time to think about it,” Sherrod said, adding, that she wanted to see how the department handles civil rights issues. But she is “satisfied” with Vilsack’s apology for firing her. In the video in question, Sherrod, who is black, was giving a speech about having held racial prejudices early in her career but learning to let them go to help a white farmer keep his farm. The website Breitbart.com left out the part about overcoming prejudice.

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.

Just weeks before the Deepwater Horizon exploded, Transocean commissioned a survey of workers’ views on the safety of the rig. Many reported that safety procedures weren’t being followed carefully, saw unsafe behaviors on the rig, and were worried about unreliable equipment. “Run it, break it, fix it,” one worker told investigators. “That’s how they work.” Transocean also commissioned a 112-page review of equipment, which in hindsight should have been a major warning sign. Many important components, like the blowout preventer rams and failsafe valves, hadn’t been inspected in 10 years. (They should be inspected every three to five years.) And 26 of the rig’s components were found to be in “bad” or “poor” condition. The reports could spread the blame for the massive environmental disaster, which BP, the face of the oil spill, has been looking to do for some time.

Gen. David Petraeus will intensify the American counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, top military officials tell the Wall Street Journal. These officials are blaming implementation of the strategy, not the strategy itself, for setbacks this year. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, whom Petraeus replaced this month, focused on catching Taliban leaders at the expense of protecting civilians and building up the Afghan government, the officials say. Gen. Petraeus is expected to focus on training Afghan security forces and security for civilians. The general is under great pressure to accomplish a lot quickly, as the July 2011 deadline to begin withdrawing troops looms. So far, he’s managed to get Afghan President Hamid Karzai to endorse a plan to create village defense teams.

Shirley Sherrod says that President Obama “is not someone who has experienced what I have experienced through life, being a person of color. He might need to hear some of what I could say to him.” Sherrod, an Agriculture Department official who was hastily fired when a deceptively edited video seemingly showed her saying racist things was released by the conservative site Biggovernment.com, said on Good Morning America Thursday she would like the chance to talk to Obama about discrimination in the department against black farmers. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack apologized to Sherrod for firing her, and will offer her a new job, though Sherrod says she’ll have to think about it. “I would not want to be the one person in the agency that everyone is looking at to clear up discrimination in the Department of Agriculture,” she said.

The 11,000 professors who work at Harvard Medical School will no longer be allowed to give promotional talks or take gifts or meals paid for by drug makers and medical manufacturers. Docs will also have to report—and publicly post online—any money earned from consulting deals or serving on industry boards if they make more than $5,000. “We’re anxious to be viewed publicly as doing what’s in the best interest of our patients,’’ one official said. Harvard and other leading medical schools have drawn a great deal of attention lately over questions surrounding the relationships between doctors and pharmaceutical companies. Sen. Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, investigated a few Harvard physicians to see if they violated conflict-of-interest rules. Said Grassley, "Greater disclosure is a foundation for more accountability."

Jace Lacob reports: Brad Pitt was a no-show at Comic-Con, where his partner Angelina Jolie was expected to be on hand to promote her new action film, Salt, opening tomorrow. Pitt's co-stars in the 3D animated action-comedy Megamind, Will Ferrell (who appeared in costume and blue facepaint), Tina Fey, and Jonah Hill appeared in the cavernous Hall H to kick off this year's convention, alongside a cardboard cutout of Pitt, who was said to be watching his and Jolie's kids. Before lovingly caressing Pitt's likeness, Fey asked the crowd, "Whoever I 'met' last night at the hotel, you left your Admiral Akbar costume in my room."

Oksana Grigorieva texted Mel Gibson to say she recorded him berating her over the phone “because you broke your agreement with me,” The Hollywood Reporter reports. That text, plus other emails, may be used by attorneys for Gibson to show that his ex-girlfriend tried to extort money from the actor. The website reports that Grigorieva wanted to get back together with Gibson. A judge in the case harshly criticized a lawyer for Grigorieva because he did not disclose that she and Gibson had a $15 million settlement. Grigorieva is being investigated by the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department.

Six people died and many more were injured early Thursday morning when a Greyhound bus crashed on a California state highway just outside of Fresno. The bus, which swerved to avoid an overturned minivan, rammed into a concrete divider and then hit another car and a tree. Five passengers died at the scene; another was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital. It's unclear whether those who died were in the bus or the other two cars. A highway patrol spokesman told MSNBC that four passengers are also being treated for "major injuries." "I had just woke up and I heard a boom once, and a boom again and the next thing I know we were down this embankment," a passenger on the bus told KMPH-TV. "It was horrible."

A post by Sarah Palin denouncing the plans to build a Muslim cultural center in downtown New York mysteriously disappeared from Facebook on Thursday morning. Did Facebook take it down after users flagged it as hate speech? A blogger on Tumblr is claiming credit for its disappearance after he started a campaign to label it hate speech. Facebook is now investigating whether it was taken down by their automated system: "We're investigating this incident to determine whether the content in question was removed by an automated system as a result of user reports that it violated our terms,” the company said in a statement. The post has since been put back online.

Jace Lacob reports: Tron: Legacy's Jeff Bridges took to his soapbox during the Comic-Con panel for the visually inventive sequel to the 1982 original film to speak about the evils of plastic water bottles, which he said weren't really biodegradable. Bridges called the film, which opens December 17, "a modern myth" about "the dark side of technology," much like plastic, as well. One plus of advances in technology: Bridges will appear alongside his 35-year-old self in Joe Kosinski's film, an astonishing and well-crafted digital likeness of the young Bridges, who reprises his role as Kevin Flynn. Attendees, meanwhile, got to participate in the crowd recording for the film's arena scenes... and caught eight minutes of footage from the sequel 27 years after the original. The reaction was anything but lackluster for the Daft Punk-scored IMAX 3D flick. "It blew Avatar away," said one fan.