So that's what happened to all the oil? Despite an order issued by the Obama administration to curb the use of dispersants, which work like soap on kitchen grease to break up oil in the water and make it easier for microbes to digest, the Coast Guard approved every request BP made to use them. According to a report issued by the office of Representative Edward Markey of Massachusetts, the Coast Guard granted BP's requests 74 times over 59 days. Markey said that the order "has become more of a meaningless paperwork exercise." Though an investigation into the environmental effects of dispersants was begun after they were used to clean up the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, it faltered as the spill was forgotten, and the environmental impact of the chemicals is still unknown. Carys Mitchelmore, a professor at the University of Maryland said that by using dispersants "you're just going to be killing more things in the water column." Retired Admiral Thad Allen, who's heading the government response to the spill, defended the approval of dispersants, saying their total use declined after the administration's May 26 order,  and that the decision to use them was a "tactical" one, made by people on the scene.

On the heels of posting a massive Afghan war log, the secret-sharing site WikiLeaks has yet again posted a file to its site—an encrypted file that is larger than all its other files combined, and one that is simply labeled "insurance." Wired magazine speculates that the file may act as insurance in case the site goes down, or something happens to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The file may be a separate Iraq war log cache that U.S. Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning—who is suspected to have leaked the Afghan war log to Assange—claims to have also handed over to WikiLeaks. The Iraq log purportedly contains information on 500,000 events from the Iraq war between 2004 and 2009. As Pentagon officials condemn the Afghan war log file-dump, it remains to be seen if, or when, the new insurance file will be made public, and what other damaging information the cache actually contains.

On Friday night’s CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) found a new critic: President Obama. Obama said he finds the ethics charges against Rangel “very troubling” and added that he hopes the 20-term lawmaker will step down from office with his dignity intact. “He’s somebody who’s at the end of his career,” said Obama. “I’m sure that what he wants is to be able to end his career with dignity. And my hope is that it happens.” While Obama praised Rangel for serving his Harlem district well, the president remains concerned about the alleged violations against him. And with good reason: Republicans plan to paint Rangel as representative of corrupt Washington, while some Democrats deny Rangel’s wrongdoing. “There’s no criminality here,” Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-NY) told reporters.

Over 800 people have died in a week due to floods in Pakistan resulting from record-breaking rainfall—and more are missing, according to Pakistani government officials. The northwest province of the nation bore the brunt of the deluges. On Saturday, the United Nations announced that one million people have been affected by the disaster, but offered no details. The rains destroyed thousands of homes and 45 bridges across the country. Rescuers are scrambling to reach trapped victims in remote areas, and those who have been evacuated have been afflicted with waterborne diseases. "Due to the floodwater, they now have pain in their bodies and they are suffering from fever and cough," said a doctor treating some of the victims.

The machines are getting smarter: a Wall Street Journal investigation peels back the curtain on a booming invasive online business in which tracking technology on popular websites access users’ information and compiles profiles—that are then bought and sold in bulk, or individually by data exchange companies. According to the study, the country's top 50 websites installed an average of 64 tracking technologies onto users' computers unknown to those clicking around on Wikipedia or Dictionary.com. New technologies can track people's web activity in real time and even ascertain a user's income level, location and medical conditions. This info has become a cash cow for companies who sell to advertisers who want to target and follow specific users across the Internet, tailoring messages specifically to them. "It is a sea change in the way the industry works," said a CEO of a data exchange company. "Advertisers want to buy access to people, not Web pages."

We're not out of the woods yet: Economists say the latest numbers from the Commerce Department spell bad news for the rest of this year, despite the fact that businesses are posting better profits. Figures released Friday show that the U.S. economic recovery has slowed in the second quarter. The national gross domestic product grew at a 2.4 percent annual rate in the second quarter, down from an upwardly revised 3.7 percent in the first quarter and 5 percent in the last quarter of 2009. According to other recent reports, consumer spending is still at a low level as people remain skeptical on the economy's growth, and consumers have yet to see their earnings rise.

Foreign correspondent Christiane Amanpour is about to join one of the most insular genres of television: the Sunday morning political talk show. Amanpour takes over ABC's This Week from George Stephanopoulos this Sunday. Amanpour's extensive experience handling foreign conflicts represents a break with the pundits and Washington insiders who traditionally populate shows like Meet the Press and Face the Nation, This Week's two biggest rivals. This Week's executive producer, Ian Cameron, said Amanpour's version will be more internationally focused than the previous one, having at least one international guest per show. Cameron also said that Amanpour wants to deal more with how policy affects people than with how it gets made.

Try to keep up. After the National Enquirer reported that Levi Johnston got his ex, Lanesia Garcia, pregnant, Lanesia caught up with Us Weekly and denied the claim. It turns out it was a different ex of hers that got her pregnant. But according to E! Online, Levi and Bristol's engagement has been called off anyway. Why? Because of something another of Levi's exes, Briana Plum, said in an interview? Or, a source tells E!,  because of "some picture on Facebook"?  No one knows. Obviously, there's talk of a reality-TV show.

After seeing a news report about babies given to the wrong parents, Dimas Aliprandi wondered whether that explained why he, unlike his entire family, had blond hair and blue eyes. When DNA tests confirmed that he wasn't related to his father or mother, he began searching for his biological parents. He found them, the Plasters, and the son of the couple he had thought were his biological parents for 24 years, on a farm in southeastern Brazil 30 miles away. The final twist in an already improbable story is that the two families hit it off and decided to move in together. A year ago the Aliprandis moved onto the Plasters' farm. "Elton and I wanted to remain with those who raised us and with our birth parents. We wanted to expand our families," Dimas said. "This is the way it should be," Adelson Plaster recently told Globo TV.

Stay classy, Jersey Shore: At 3:25 p.m. Friday, Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi was arrested in Seaside Heights, where the MTV reality show is filmed, and then released with a summons. Earlier in the day, she’d been seen partying at the beach with a beer bong, which she apparently filled up with Coca-Cola. She was arrested for disorderly conduct, as fellow beach-goers had insisted she was bothering them. The arrest comes a day after the Jersey Shore’s second season premiere.

We could be just days away from sealing the Gulf well with cement. Or we could still be weeks away. The New York Times reports that BP engineers are preparing to inject mud and cement into the well at the beginning of next week. It's the first half of a two-pronged attempt to seal the well permanently. The procedure, called a static kill, is like the top kill attempted over Memorial Day weekend except that the well is now capped and therefore will be easier to fill with cement. Static kill will seal only the well's center pipe, while the cement pumped in through the relief well, which is about a week away from intersecting the pipe, will seal the inner pipe as well as the outer casing. If only the central pipe is leaking, static kill could seal the well; if there's a leak further down in the well, we'll have to wait for the relief well to arrive. Donald Van Nieuwenhuise, the director of petroleum geoscience programs at the University of Houston, compared the two-pronged approach to killing a vampire: “Do I use a wooden stake or a silver bullet? Either will work."

This October, Tina Fey will hark back to her days on Saturday Night Live: NBC’s hit show 30 Rock will air two live episodes—one for the East Coast, one for the West Coast. Fey and Lorne Michaels, the show’s executive producers, were approached by NBC about a live episode and were up for the challenge, according to the Television Critics Association. Other live episodes of NBC shows have aired before, but this is the first time that the Emmy-winning 30 Rock will make the attempt.

The planned mosque and Islamic community center two blocks from where the World Trace Center attacks took place on September 11, 2001, continues to get flak from protesters—this time, the Anti-Defamation League, the nation’s top Jewish civil rights group. The project, the ADL says, is “counterproductive to the healing process.” The ADL’s main concerns are where the project’s funding is coming from and whether the organization behind the plan, the Cordoba Initiative, is associated with “groups whose ideologies stand in contradiction to our shared values.” The plan’s other opponents include Sarah Palin and former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich. There are also supporters, though, like New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “We believe it will be a place where the counter-momentum against extremism will begin,” Daisy Khan, wife of Cordoba’s director, told The New York Times. “We are committed to peace.” A city community board voted largely in favor of the project last spring.

American Apparel, to put it nicely, is screwed. The company has seen falling sales since February 2009, when records were first made available. Even its 2010 first quarter report looked bleak: There was a 10-percent decline in same-store sales and an operations loss of $17.6 million. The company is struggling to manage the pile of debt it took on during its greatest years of expansion, too. And—to top it all off—American Apparel’s auditing firm, Deloitte & Touche, quit on Thursday after it “identified material weaknesses in [American Apparel’s] internal control over financial reporting ... and advised that the Company has not maintained effective internal control over financial reporting.” The reason for all this is, as Jezebel writer Jenna Sauers puts it, is because American Apparel “expanded beyond the point of rationality or even sanity.” To the formerly booming and trendy T-shirt maker, we say good luck.

The Thrilla from Wasilla's appeal just refuses to die. Even though it's been two years since Sarah Palin's fame reached a fever pitch during the 2008 election, fans and devotees still trek up to the city she ran as mayor, hoping to see her in the flesh or visit her home. Tourists pose with cardboard cutouts of Mrs. Palin and try to walk in her shoes for a day. Said Lyn Carden, the head of the Chamber of Commerce in Wasilla: "Of course, every single question is about her and where she is and where she gets her hair done and what she eats and what she's doing."

After two decades on the air, the original show in the Law & Order franchise is officially no more. Creator Dick Wolf had originally hoped to move it to a new network once it was cancelled earlier this year by NBC. But he announced Friday that he had failed to arouse interest from any other network. "I can confirm that it has moved into the history books,” Wolf said. "That's business. That's life. Every show is born under a death sentence, they just don't tell you the date of execution.” The series aired its final episode on NBC in May, marking the end of a slow decline in ratings—its audience had dwindled by 50 percent since 2002. But all is not lost for the franchise, which still has spin-offs like Criminal Intent and Special Victims Unit. This fall, it will launch, Law & Order: Los Angeles, starring Alfred Molina.

When it rains, it pours. After suffering the embarrassment of Charlie Rangel this week, the Democratic Party now has another similar affair to look forward to with longtime California representative Maxine Waters. Like Rangel, she has chosen to submit herself to an ethics trial, rather than simply accepting the charges made by a House ethics subcommittee. She stands accused of improperly involving herself with federal regulators to help a bank that her husband had a significant stake in—he once owned about $500,000 worth of stock and served on its board. Along with Rangel, she will also be the second member of the Congressional Black Caucus to undergo the House’s ethics proceedings in the coming months, leading the Caucus to complain that it has been unfairly targeted.

More than three months after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig first exploded, the spill is no longer being treated like an emergency. Officials have spent the last couple of days explaining that many of the immediate concerns around the spill and the Gulf Coast are now under control and that they can shift their focus to more long-term recovery. Late this week, some Gulf waters were reopened to commercial fishing, Alabama lifted its swimming advisories, and the Food and Drug Administration found no risks with consuming Gulf seafood. Still, Thad Allen, who is coordinating the spill response, insisted that the crisis is not over. “We should not be writing an obituary for this event until the well is completely sealed, until we have no more oil on the surface of the water, until we understand where all the oil has gone to, until the beaches are cleaned, until the local—federal, state and local—officials agree that the beaches are clean,” he said.

A second woman has come forward to accuse actor/filmmaker Casey Affleck of sexual harassment. Magdalena Gorka, a cinematographer for Affleck's upcoming Joaquin Phoenix documentary, alleges that Affleck refused to pay her for work after she pushed back against his on-set sexual advances and derisive comments. The lawsuit reads, in part, "During the middle of the night, [Gorka] awoke to find Affleck lying in the bed next to her...Unbeknownst to [Gorka], Affleck had entered the bedroom while she was asleep and crawled into the bed. When she woke up, Affleck was curled up next to her in the bed wearing only his underwear and a T-shirt. He had his arm around her, was caressing her back, his face was within inches of hers and his breath reeked of alcohol." After departing the project, Affleck allegedly refused to pay her for her work and took away her "director of photography" credit.

The "wedding of the century" is finally here, and for all the brouhaha over who's attending the nuptials of Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky, one thing is sure: no one will know for sure who is actually attending until they roll in. The guest list consists of, as one uninvited CEO puts it, "The Triple-A list." Those in attendance will not be the usual suspects such as donors, politicos and famous friends of one of the most famous families in America, but those close to the bride. An anonymous attendee told The Washington Post that Bill and Hillary "respect her and what she thinks...They want what she wants," adding, "They raised her to be her own person —independent in thought." Those rumored to attend have been extremely tight-lipped, evading interview requests and issuing statements that they will not be addressing the wedding.