A high-level British offer of help to clean up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill was rebuffed by America shortly after the accident, fuelling fresh fears of political tension between the two countries over the disaster.

A few days after the BP-leased rig sank on April 22, the Cabinet Office made a direct offer to the US State Department to airlift half of Britain’s 1,200-tonne stockpile of chemical dispersants, The Times has learnt.

At the time there was an urgent demand for fresh supplies. The offer to provide the chemicals, at the cost price of £3 million, was made through diplomatic channels and via the Civil Contingency Secretariat, the Government’s emergency planning unit.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change, which was also involved in drafting the plan, said that the US had chosen not to accept the offer. Officials said the US claimed that the chemicals held in Britain did not have the correct paperwork but the spokeswoman said: “We are not aware of any problems with licensing. I cannot say why they have not accepted the offer. That is a question for the US State Department.”

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Saudi Arabia has conducted tests to stand down its air defences to enable Israeli jets to make a bombing raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities, The Times can reveal.

In the week that the UN Security Council imposed a new round of sanctions on Tehran, defence sources in the Gulf say that Riyadh has agreed to allow Israel to use a narrow corridor of its airspace in the north of the country to shorten the distance for a bombing run on Iran.

To ensure the Israeli bombers pass unmolested, Riyadh has carried out tests to make certain its own jets are not scrambled and missile defence systems not activated. Once the Israelis are through, the kingdom’s air defences will return to full alert.

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Three German-built Israeli submarines equipped with nuclear cruise missiles are to be deployed in the Gulf near the Iranian coastline.

The first has been sent in response to Israeli fears that ballistic missiles developed by Iran, Syria and Hezbollah, a political and military organisation in Lebanon, could hit sites in Israel, including air bases and missile launchers.

The submarines of Flotilla 7 — Dolphin, Tekuma and Leviathan — have visited the Gulf before. But the decision has now been taken to ensure a permanent presence of at least one of the vessels.

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Oil companies face an immediate tax rise of 1 cent per barrel to help to pay for the clean-up in the Gulf of Mexico under proposed legislation rushed out by the White House yesterday.

The measure, unveiled as BP began a new attempt to contain the ruptured well that has leaked millions of gallons of crude oil into America’s southern coastal waters, would put an extra $500 million (£340 million) over ten years into the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, which covers damage caused by such disasters.

Under a $118 million spending plan outlined in the package, people affected by the spill — such as fishermen who have lost their livelihoods because of the contamination — will be granted financial assistance, and federal agencies will get additional funds to monitor the slick and assess its impact.

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David Cameron will begin today to forge the first peacetime coalition for more than 80 years after becoming Britain’s 53rd Prime Minister.

The Conservative leader opened a new political era by cautioning that “hard and difficult work” lay ahead for the new Government that will include five Liberal Democrats in Cabinet and some 15 others in ministerial jobs. Nick Clegg was last night confirmed by the Queen as Deputy Prime Minister.

Mr Cameron struck a businesslike tone devoid of triumphalism as he arrived in Downing Street to end five days of post-election uncertainty and become the first Tory for 31 years to depose a Labour prime minister.

He and Mr Clegg would “put political differences aside” as they moved to tackle the deficit, ease deep social problems, rebuild public trust in politics and bring about a more responsible society. The maxim of his Government would be: “Those who can, should, those who cannot, we will always help.” He promised that the elderly, frail and poorest would not be forgotten.

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Haunted by the memory of a lost opportunity to kill Osama Bin Laden before he attacked the World Trade Center in New York, US military planners have won President Barack Obama’s support for a new generation of high-speed weapons that are intended to strike anywhere on Earth within an hour.

Obama’s interest in Prompt Global Strike (PGS), a nonnuclear weapons programme, has alarmed China and Russia and complicated nuclear arms reduction negotiations.

White House officials confirmed last week that the president, who won the Nobel peace prize last year, is considering the deployment of a new class of hypersonic guided missiles that can reach their targets at speeds of Mach 5 — about 3,600mph.

That is nearly seven times faster than the 550mph Tomahawk cruise missiles that arrived too late to kill Bin Laden at an Al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in 1998.

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For a head of state to visit the White House and not pose for photographers is rare. For a key ally to be left to his own devices while the President withdraws to have dinner in private was, until this week, unheard of.

Yet that is how Binyamin Netanyahu was treated by President Obama on Tuesday night, according to Israeli reports on a trip seen in Jerusalem tonight as a disastrous humiliation.

After failing to extract a written promise of concessions on Jewish settlements, Mr Obama walked out of his meeting with Mr Netanyahu but invited him to stay at the White House, consult with advisors and “let me know if there is anything new”, a US congressman who spoke to the Prime Minister said today.

“It was awful,” the congressman said. One Israeli newspaper called the meeting “a hazing in stages”, poisoned by such mistrust that the Israeli delegation eventually left rather than risk being eavesdropped on a White House phone line. Another said that the Prime Minister had received “the treatment reserved for the President of Equatorial Guinea”.

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The Iranian Government has been accused by Afghan and Western officials of delivering tonnes of weaponry to the Taleban, including plastic explosives, mortars, grenades and technical manuals.

Weapons and documents shown to Channel 4 News indicate that more than ten tonnes of weapons have been intercepted at Iran’s desert border with Afghanistan in the past year, with a tonne and a half recovered in the past week.

The reports come as General David Petraeus, the head of US Central Command, warned the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Iran also provided a base for al-Qaeda operatives. Afghanistan’s intelligence agency estimates that about 60 per cent of the weaponry it has intercepted from Iran has been supplied by the Iranian Government rather than black market dealers.

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Pakistani forces have taken control of a warren of caves that served until recently as the nerve centre of the Taleban and al-Qaeda and sheltered Ayman al-Zawahiri, the second-in-command to Osama bin Laden.

“It was the main hub of militancy where al-Qaeda operatives had moved freely,” Major-General Tariq Khan, the Pakistan regional commander, said as he gave journalists a tour of Damadola yesterday.

The village, nestling among snow-capped peaks in the Bajaur region along the Afghan border, has been fought over for 16 months. It is the first time that the Pakistani Army has set foot in the village, which had long been dominated by the insurgents operating on the both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

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Patients were routinely neglected or left “sobbing and humiliated” by staff at an NHS trust where at least 400 deaths have been linked to appalling care.

An independent inquiry found that managers at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust stopped providing safe care because they were preoccupied with government targets and cutting costs.

The inquiry report, published yesterday by Robert Francis, QC, included proposals for tough new regulations that could lead to managers at failing NHS trusts being struck off.

Staff shortages at Stafford Hospital meant that patients went unwashed for weeks, were left without food or drink and were even unable to get to the lavatory. Some lay in soiled sheets that relatives had to take home to wash, others developed infections or had falls, occasionally fatal. Many staff did their best but the attitude of some nurses “left a lot to be desired”.

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Google has been forced into a hasty revamp of its social networking service Buzz after the new feature was met with a storm of criticism because of gaping privacy flaws.

The company today announced it will introduce a prominent “kill button” that will allow people to turn off Buzz altogether.

Central to the row is a feature that automatically enrolled Gmail users to the service but also revealed the identities of the people they e-mailed most frequently. The blunder was met with a torrent of complaints, including one woman who said that an abusive ex-husband could now follow her every move.

Google has now apologised, announcing it will fix Buzz so that Gmail users can now choose who they want as their “friends” under the system. Sources at the company said today that the new changes will be implemented in “the next couple of days”.

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Hugo Chávez has launched his latest radio venture, a programme called Suddenly with Chavez in which he can take to the airwaves any time of the day or night.

Heralded by the Venezuelan Government as a “communicational guerrilla” in its battle to advance the country’s Bolivarian revolution, the new show on state radio has no schedule and can be broadcast whenever Mr Chávez desires.

Inaugurating the new show yesterday, the President said that the programme could surprise viewers “at midnight or at dawn”, because “we have many things to report”.

The first edition took in Venezuelan-Argentinian relations, the World Boxing championship, the upcoming 200th anniversary of Latin American independence and the launch of a new state supermarket chain using stores expropriated from the French chain Exito.

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President Ahmadinejad demonstrated yesterday that he has become a master of playing cat and mouse with the West — and this time the mouse was real.

Once again, the Iranian leader offered a last-minute concession to head off the West’s drive for new sanctions against the Islamic republic. At the same time, Iran thumbed its nose at UN restrictions on its ballistic missiles programme by sending a rocket into space carrying a mouse, two turtles and some worms.

In an interview on state television, Mr Ahmadinejad said that Iran had no problem shipping enriched uranium abroad in a deal that Tehran had resisted for months. The surprise announcement came as the West prepared to ask Russia and China to back UN sanctions on the Iranian energy sector, central bank and Revolutionary Guards — the first UN sanctions since March 2008.

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