David Benfell

Under the terms of the agreement, BP will pay into the escrow account over the next four years, including a payment of $5 billion this year. The fund will be administered by Kenneth Feinberg, the Washington lawyer who oversaw a similar fund for victims of the Sept. 11 terror attacks and who more recently was the Obama administration's special master for executive compensation. 

 "This administration and our company are fully aligned in our interest of closing this well, cleaning the beaches and caring for those affected," Svanberg said. He added, "I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to the American people on behalf of all the employees of BP, many of whom are living on the Gulf coast." 

 The White House and BP had been negotiating over the amount in recent days. Administration officials had not publicly said how much they were seeking, but Senate Democrats on Sunday asked the company to set aside $20 billion to handle economic damages and cleanup costs. 

 Behind the scenes, the company had signaled what it expected from Wednesday's meeting -- and the company appears to have gotten exactly what it wanted.

Adult-learning leaders praise Wal-Mart, the nation's largest private employer, for investing in education. But some of those same experts wonder how low-paid workers will be able to afford the cost of a degree from the private Web-based university the company selected as a partner, and why Wal-Mart chose American Public when community-college options might be cheaper. They also question how easily workers will be able to transfer APU credits to other colleges, given that the university plans to count significant amounts of Wal-Mart job training and experience as academic credit toward its degrees.

For example, cashiers with one year's experience could get six credits for an American Public class called "Customer Relations," provided they received an "on target" or "above target" on their last performance evaluation, said Deisha Galberth, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman. A department manager's training and experience could be worth 24 credit hours toward courses like retail ethics, organizational fundamentals, or human-resource fundamentals, she said.

Altogether, employees could earn up to 45 percent of the credit for an associate or bachelor's degree at APU "based on what they have learned in their career at Wal-Mart," according to the retailer's Web site.

Janet K. Poley, president of the American Distance Education Consortium, points out that this arrangement could saddle Wal-Mart employees with a "nontransferable coupon," as one blogger has described it.

Israel last night flouted pressure for an independent international inquiry into the lethal assault two weeks ago on a flotilla of ships attempting to break the blockade on Gaza, announcing an internal investigation with two foreign observers.

The White House gave its approval for the Israeli formula, which will be confirmed by the Israeli cabinet today.

The inquiry into the raid, in which nine Turkish activists aboard the Mavi Marmara were killed, will be headed by a former Israeli supreme court judge, Yaakov Tirkel. The foreign observers are the former Northern Ireland first minister David Trimble and a Canadian judge, Ken Watkin. They will have no voting rights.

The inquiry falls short of a UN proposal for an international investigation, but was agreed after consultation with the US. The White House said last night that the Israeli inquiry meets the standard of "prompt, impartial, credible and transparent investigation".

Blair, who will brief today's EU meeting, is pressing for Israel to substitute the current allowed list of items permitted to enter Gaza – all items not on the list are forbidden – for a limited list of prohibited items, with everything else permitted. The result would be greater transparency and accountability.

Netanyahu told the cabinet: "The principle guiding our policy is clear: to prevent war material from entering Gaza and to allow the entry of humanitarian aid and non-contraband goods." Despite the pressure to relax the siege, Israel is reluctant to make a dramatic move which would allow Hamas to claim a victory.

Mehserle is the first Bay Area police officer and one of just a few nationwide to be charged with murder for an on-duty action. Prosecutors say he acted with malice when he shot the unarmed Grant once in the back while arresting him. The former officer has yet to give an honest account of the shooting, prosecutors say.

The defense counters that the shooting was an accident, that Mehserle mistakenly squeezed the trigger of his service pistol while intending to shock the Hayward resident with the Taser to subdue him after a fight on a train.

Officials said that a "cap" placed over the leak on the gulf floor collected about 14,800 barrels (or 620,000 gallons) in the 24-hour period ending midnight Monday. But that good news was also bad news. 

 Since oil was still flowing out around the cap, it showed that the government's latest estimate of the leak's total size, 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day, was probably too low. Scientists were told to try again. 

 Also, federal scientists said they had confirmed that there was oil beneath the ocean's surface, 48 miles from the site of the leak. But they still could not 

 say much about the reported "plumes" underwater: where they are, how they move and what they will mean for underwater life.

On Tuesday, the Interior Department took a step designed to allow oil companies to resume drilling offshore, at least in waters shallower than 500 feet. It issued what it called "stronger safety requirements" for those wells, ending a de facto ban on all new drilling. 

 The new rules for these wells would require independent third-party verification that "blowout preventers" -- the fail-safe machinery that failed in this case -- work before they are installed. They would also require top executives of companies to state that any false material in the documents could leave them subject to criminal prosecution. The rules would not affect wells drilled in deeper water: Those are still under a six-month moratorium.