LONDON — BP, the British oil company, said Thursday it would pay $4.5 billion in fines and other payments to the United States government and plead guilty to 14 criminal charges in connection with the giant oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico two years ago.

The payments include a $4 billion fine to be paid over five years, with much of it to go to government environmental agencies, BP said in a statement.      

Yesterday’s Egyptian-brokered ceasefire between Gaza and Israel collapsed today when Israel launched a major escalation.  In airstrikes almost certainly involving U.S.-made F-16 warplanes and/or U.S.-made Apache helicopters, Israel’s air force assassinated Ahmad Jaabari, the longtime military leader of Hamas. As the Israeli airstrikes continued today, seven more Palestinians were killed and at least 30 were injured, ten of them critically.

HICKAM AIR FORCE BASE, Hawaii — White House and Pentagon officials hope to determine within weeks the number of American troops that will remain for the long term in Afghanistanafter the bulk of United States forces come home in 2014, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said Monday.

Back in 2010, self-styled deficit hawks — better described as deficit scolds — took over much of our political discourse. At a time of mass unemployment and record-low borrowing costs, a time when economic theory said we needed more, not less, deficit spending, the scolds convinced most of our political class that deficits rather than jobs should be our top economic priority. And now that the election is over, they’re trying to pick up where they left off.