Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's political future may be in doubt after fresh accusations surfaced yesterday that he illegally accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from a New York businessman, The Associated Press reports today.

Olmert said he would step down if indicted. And in an interview with Lally Weymouth of Newsweek and The Post, Olmert said he was giving thought to the "ramifications" of resigning.

"I don't really see that this will bring any better outcome for the country at this point," Olmert said in the interview. "Not that a person is indispensable or irreplaceable...But given the circumstances right now, I think it will not do good that I step down at this point. I have to think about it. I have to think about the possible ramifications of an early retirement."

The latest police probe into Olmert's finances, the fifth in the past two years, is focusing on whether the prime minister took cash for campaigns over at least a six-year stretch when he was Jerusalem's mayor and minister of trade for former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Israeli police said Morris "Moshe" Talansky, a 75-year-old financier from Long Island, is suspected of giving money to Olmert directly or through his associates.

A final agreement brokered by congressional leaders on a nearly $300 billion farm bill still faces a significant hurdle, with the Bush administration saying it would likely veto what it called a "massive, bloated" measure, The Post's Dan Morgan reports today.

It is likely the bill will reach the House and Senate floors next week for votes that could test the depth of its support.

The Bush administration has pressed Congress to cut farm subsidies sharply in the wake of soaring food prices and record farm profits or face the veto pen.

A 2006 Post examination into government spending for agricultural subsidies identified more than $15 billion in wasteful, unnecessary or redundant payments.

The use of harsh interrogation tactics by CIA officials could be set for debate again after a federal judge in New York announced plans to review next week one of the Bush administration's most controversial legal opinions related to detainee interrogations, The Post's Dan Eggen reports today.

The 2002 memo on specific CIA interrogation techniques, which was accompanied by an already-released and disavowed government document that defines torture, will be reviewed on Monday by U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the Southern District of New York. He said he wants to see if the still-classified document has appropriately been withheld from the public

The American Civil Liberties Union is suing the Bush administration under the Freedom of Information Act seeking records related to the use of such interrogation tactics.

The already released document focuses on interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, that were deemed legal by the CIA, according to court documents and intelligence officials. In December, the CIA admitted to destroying video recordings from 2002 of harsh interrogations of al-Qaeda suspects. Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey said in February that Justice Department lawyers found that the agency's use of waterboarding was legal and, thus, would not investigate whether a crime had been committed.

A Washington Post investigative article focuses new attention on deals involving federal land and campaign contributors to presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain.

The Post's Matthew Mosk reports that McCain championed legislation that will let an Arizona rancher trade remote grassland and ponderosa pine forest in his home state for acres of valuable federally owned property that is primed for development, a land swap that now stands to directly benefit one of his top presidential campaign fund-raisers.

The Arizona Republican was a key figure in pushing the deal through Congress after the rancher, Fred Ruskin, and his partners hired lobbyists that included McCain's 1992 Senate campaign manager, two of his former Senate staff members and an Arizona insider and major McCain donor. The job of building as many as 12,000 homes on the property was later given to SunCor Development, a Tempe, Ariz., firm run by Steven A. Betts, a longtime McCain supporter.

Betts says there is "absolutely no" connection between his contributions to McCain's presidential bids and the deal.

Questions about the Arizona development follow a New York Times story in April about McCain's relationship with a real estate developer and campaign fundraiser who also benefited from land swaps.

One of disgraced former Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff's biggest clients -- the tiny Northern Mariana Islands in the Pacific just north of Guam -- has lost its 20-year fight to remain exempt from U.S. immigration and labor laws.

The islands played a small, if somewhat noticeable, role in a Post investigation into the lobbying activities of Abramoff, who pleaded guilty to fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy to bribe public officials in 2006 and was sentenced to nearly six years in prison.

Today, President Bush signed into law the "Consolidated Natural Resources Act of 2008," which forces the Northern Mariana Islands to fall under U.S. immigration and labor laws, among other things.The law also gives the protectorate, which includes Saipan, a nonvoting delegate to the House.

As D.C. police chief a decade ago, Charles H. Ramsey had to deal with the fallout from a Post investigation which found that city police officers shot and killed more people per capita than any other large city police force. Ramsey requested a Justice Department probe, which led to 10 years of federal oversight and a drop in the number of police shootings.

Last year, Ramsey became Philadelphia's police commissioner, and now he's coping with another matter of alleged misconduct by officers. A video has surfaced showing police beating three suspects during a traffic stop.

The video, which was recorded Monday night from a helicopter news crew from Fox affiliate WTXF-TV following a police chase, shows three police cruisers stopping a car by the side of a road and, moments later, about six officers kicking and striking three men with a baton.

At a press conference, Mayor Michael A. Nutter, called the behavior "unacceptable" and added that it was "not acceptable to do anything less than what we expect of Philadelphia police officers, and they know that."

Ramsey, who was D.C.'s top cop from 1998 to 2007, said a sergeant and five officers have been taken off active street duty and a probe into the incident has begun.

Democratic Reps. Jane Harman and Neil Abercrombie spent more than $2 million on their 2006 re-election campaigns but paid only $5,000 to campaign workers, according to campaign finance reports, The Post's Carrie Johnson and Paul Kane report today.

The two Democrats, from Southern California and Hawaii, respectively, have been accused by former aide Laura I. Flores of using congressional staff to perform campaign duties. Flores was sentenced to six months in prison Friday after she pleaded guilty to embezzling $200,000 from official accounts controlled by her former employers.

The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has urged a House ethics panel to launch its own probe into the allegations. Harman and Abercrombie have denied any wrongdoing.

To round up enough votes to override a threatened veto of the farm bill, House and Senate negotiators have been dropping in plums for almost everybody. So it's no big surprise that there may be some last-minute money in it for a few hundred farmers in Alaska, reports Dan Morgan.

Negotiators are considering authorizing $15 million a year for "geographically disadvantaged farmers," a provision championed by Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens (R), one of Congress's most successful practitioners of bringing home the bacon.

The money won't help ranchers or farmers in remote reaches of Montana or Kansas. It's limited to those in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Pacific territories -- and icy, mountainous Alaska. Under a provision passed last year by the Senate -- but not the House -- farmers in those jurisdictions could be eligible for a federal check if they have to travel more than 30 miles to sell their products or buy fertilizer.

Investigators allege that Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt's office ordered state computer technicians to destroy copies of e-mail messages that might have been politically damaging, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Jo Mannies first reported and The Kansas City Star's Kit Wagar reports today.

The lawsuit -- filed by an independent investigative team set up by Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon -- claims Blunt's office tried to arrange the destruction of backup computer tapes that routinely copy every e-mail on the governor's office computers several times a day. The goal was to block the release of e-mails to reporters, who were investigating political activities by Blunt's staff while on the state payroll, the lawsuit alleges.

In another e-mail archives matter, the Bush administration has been unable to find similar "disaster recovery files" for White House e-mails from a three-month time period in 2003, according to court documents filed this week, The Post's Dan Eggen reports today.

The White House has identified more than 400 computer backup tapes from March through September of 2003 that may have been lost. That period was a crucial time in the Bush presidency; the United States launched the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003, and an end to major combat operations was declared on May 1.

The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has sent a letter to the House ethics committee asking lawmakers to investigate claims that congressional staff members were forced to support political campaigns.

The letter comes after Laura I. Flores, a former aide to Reps. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), was sentenced to six months in prison Friday after she pleaded guilty in January to wire fraud for embezzling $200,000 from official accounts controlled by her former employers.

Prosecutors petitioned to reduce Flores' sentence in exchange for help with the inquiry into whether members of Congress used phones, supplies and staff time for campaign purposes, a source familiar with the case told the Post's Carrie Johnson.

"These examples suggest that the misuse of official resources may be a pervasive problem, wrote CREW's executive director, Melanie Sloan, in a letter to the committee's two ranking members. "While most members undoubtedly take care to ensure that their office staffers do not engage in campaign work while in House offices on government time, it appears that many do not."