A US judge approved Thursday a $400 million settlement in criminal penalties against the rig operator involved in the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the worst environmental disaster in American history.

The punishment was part of a plea bargain agreement reached last month by rig owner Transocean and the US Justice Department.

The penalty was approved Thursday by Judge Jane Triche Milazzo of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, in New Orleans.

Suspected Jewish extremists scrawled anti-Arab graffiti on the headstones in an ancient Muslim cemetery in west Jerusalem, police and witnesses told AFP on Thursday.

"The words 'price tag' and Stars of David were scrawled on around a dozen tombs in the Muslim cemetery in Mamilla in central Jerusalem," a police spokeswoman told AFP, saying an inquiry had been opened.

An AFP correspondent at the scene said the vandals had also written "Mohammed is dead" and "Maale Rehavam" on the tombs some of which date back to the 12th century.

The Pentagon unveiled a new medal on Wednesday to honor "extraordinary" troops who launch cyber attacks or drone strikes from their consoles, even if they do not risk their lives in combat.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, announcing the new "Distinguished Warfare Medal," said it was time to recognize those who play a crucial role in modern warfare with hi-tech weapons far from the frontline.

"Our military reserves its highest decorations obviously for those who display gallantry and valor in actions where their lives are on the line, and we will continue to do so," Panetta told a Pentagon news conference.

"But we should also have the ability to honor the extraordinary actions that make a true difference in combat operations."

He said operators of unmanned, robotic aircraft and cyber weapons "contribute to the success of combat operations, particularly when they remove the enemy from the field of battle, even if those actions are physically removed from the fight."

The medal reflects a new age of warfare that emerged over the past decade featuring robotic weapons and digital combat.

Former Sgt. Kimberly Munley, who helped stop the deadly shooting at Fort Hood in 2009, claims that the US government has neglected the surviving victims of the attack, leaving them without proper medical care in the aftermath of the shooting.

When 39-year-old US Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan opened fire at the Texas military base Fort Hood, he left 13 people dead and 32 wounded. Most of the wounded were service members, some of which were preparing to go to Afghanistan. But the gunshot wounds served as a setback for many, inflicting crippling disabilities that in some cases require years of treatment.

And the US government has largely abandoned the wounded soldiers, Sgt. Munley said in an interview with ABC News, which will be broadcast Wednesday night.

"Betrayed is a good word," Munley said. "Not to the least little bit have the victims been taken care of. In fact they've been neglected."
Including Munley herself.

An official briefed on the investigation tells The Associated Press that a wallet with a California driver's license with the name Christopher Dorner has been found in the rubble of a cabin. A charred body was also found inside after a shootout and fire.

Authorities believe the remains are those of the former Los Angeles police officer, but they have not been formally identified.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation and says the charred body and personal items were found in the basement of the burned cabin. The area is in the San Bernardino Mountains east of Los Angeles.

Two sheriff's deputies were also shot, one fatally. Dorner is also suspected of earlier killing a young couple and a police officer, and wounding two other officers.

Fake emergency alert warned of dead bodies walking the streets and attacking the living.

Zombies weren't walking the streets here Monday, but a false alert that aired on two local TV stations went through the same channels on which true emergencies are aired, raising questions and concerns of how the hoax occurred.

The hoax reached around 10 stations in Montana, Michigan, California, Utah and New Mexico, said Greg MacDonald, the CEO of Montana Broadcasters Association.

The alert featured a scrolling warning for various Montana counties and a voice-over claimed there were "dead bodies rising from the grave and attacking the living" and urged people to use caution.

"Do not attempt to approach or apprehend these bodies as they are extremely dangerous," it said.

Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper has made no secret of his support for hydraulic fracturing, but on Tuesday he went one big step further and testified that he actually drank fracking fluid.

"You can drink it. We did drink it around the table, almost ritual-like, in a funny way," Hickenlooper said before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

From The Washington Times:

Sen. Al Franken, Minnesota Democrat, found humor in the governor's admission and asked if the experience was part of some bizarre occult practice.

"No, there were no religious overtures," Mr. Hickenlooper responded.

The governor testified that it wasn't "tasty" but added, "I'm still alive."

Hyrdaulic fracturing is a controversial process of injecting water, sand, and chemicals underground at very high pressures to release natural gas. Most companies however have declined to reveal what components make up their fracking fluids, calling them "trade secrets."

Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citibank and JP Morgan Chase are reportedly sitting on $130 million in insurance checks for thousands of victims of Hurricane Sandy, and are simply refusing to issue them, and no one knows exactly why. (A total of $208 million in insurance checks are still outstanding.)

At this point it's really difficult to say what the banks have to do to get into enough trouble that someone finally holds them accountable for their actions.

The recent Libor fines are a start, but between the banks fleecing unemployed Americans, gaming the tax system (after being saved by those very taxes), and singlehandedly creating the economic crisis, it's hard to argue with Matt Taibbi when he says the banks aren't just too big to fail, they're "too crooked to fail."

As if all of the above weren't bad enough, now the banks are holding on to $208 million that is supposed to help people rebuild after the devastation of Hurricane Sandy.

If the murder of Oscar Grant on an Oakland transit platform marked the dawn of the Obama era, the cold-blooded murder of former Naval reservist and Los Angeles Police officer Christopher Dorner might just mark the end of whatever optimistic hope people can muster in his administration. Whether an innocent young man just trying to get home, shot in the back after being racially profiled and slurred, or a man driven to his breaking point after being fired from a similar police force that operates according to its own warped morality and overarching objectives, the state of the union is a powder keg whose wick has gotten shorter due to decades of looking the other way.

Just minutes before Barack Obama began his state of the union address, San Bernardino County Sheriffs, knowing full well what they were doing, burned Christopher Dorner to death. From police brutality and racism to political unaccountability, from lack of economic opportunities to the extrajudicial murder of anyone deemed an enemy of the state, Dorner's life and death offers us a much clearer picture of the state of this union than last night's speech or media commentary.

In the years between the murder of Oscar Grant and Dorner's last stand, March of 2009 to be specific, we were among those observing the case of Lovelle Mixon in Oakland, a parolee who decided he was not going to return to prison, opening fire on police at a traffic stop, killing two. Police went in to execute Mixon, not expecting that he would be holding an SKS. Two more cops died as a result. The logic of Dorner's desperation, and the chain of events that led to his ultimate death, parallels Mixon's; proud men without hope, cornered, deciding to go out fighting.

Neither man was a self-understood revolutionary and it would be inaccurate (or perhaps too accurate a reflection of the dearth of revolutionary activity in contemporary society) to try and declare otherwise. However, the material conditions that produced Dorner, as with Mixon, are not uncommon. The meaning and the effects of their actions speak volumes about the depth of racialization, criminalization and hopelessness in Obama's supposed "post-racial" America.

The former US ambassador to Islamabad on Wednesday criticized Washington's "callousness" over the killing of Pakistani troops as he called for both nations to rethink how they see each other.

Cameron Munter served as ambassador during some of the most difficult times of the turbulent US-Pakistan relationship including the slaying of Osama bin Laden and a US border raid that killed 24 Pakistani troops in November 2011.

Munter, who resigned last year, said that the United States had shown a lack of generosity over the deaths of the 24 troops. Pakistan shut down NATO supply routes into Afghanistan until the United States apologized seven months later.

"The fact that we were unable to say that we were sorry until July cost our country literally billions of dollars," Munter said, pointing to the costly shift to sending supplies for the Afghan war via Central Asia.

"But worse than that, it showed a kind of callousness that makes it so difficult simply to begin to talk about those things, that I've always tried to stress, that we have in common," he said at the Atlantic Council, a think tank.