A group of five Israelis aboard a private plane to Los Angeles could have been a high-flying business delegation. The group, which left Israel on Wednesday, is indeed alleged to have been involved in business -- but not exactly the kind that goes through the Southern California-Israel Chamber of Commerce.

Brothers Meir and Itzhak Abergil (sometimes spelled Abargil) -- along with three associates -- were extradited to the U.S., where they are wanted for a list of crimes in the Los Angeles area, including the murder of an Israeli drug dealer in town. They are also suspected of drug trafficking, organized crime activity and money laundering linked to a huge embezzlement case that collapsed the Israeli Trade Bank almost a decade ago.

The Abergil brothers headed what is believed to be one of Israel's most powerful and dangerous crime families -- "the lords of organized crime" by Israeli standards, Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said Wednesday. In a recent phone conversation broadcast on Israel's Channel 10 television Wednesday evening, Meir Abergil is alleged to say they were "peanuts compared to the mafias they have in America."

Julian Assange, the founder of whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, came out swinging against some high-level Arab officials in an interview with the pan-Arab satellite channel Al Jazeera this week, saying they maintain close ties with the CIA and are spies for the U.S. intelligence agency in their respective countries. 

"Top officials in several Arab countries have close links with the CIA, and many officials keep visiting U.S. embassies in their respective countries voluntarily to establish links with this key U.S. intelligence agency. These officials are spies for the U.S. in their countries," he was quoted in media reports as saying in the interview aired on Wednesday night.

Assange also alleged that a number of Arab countries run special torture centers where U.S. authorities dispatch suspects for "interrogation and torture."

After raising the issue in private back-channels as well as personally with U.S. presidents, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has decided to publicly and officially appeal to President Obama to release Jonathan Pollard. 

Netanyahu's decision follows a personal letter from Pollard, hand-delivered to the prime minister by Esther Pollard, wife of the convicted spy. "I hereby request that you submit an official request for my release to the President of the United States now, without further delay, and that concurrently you announce this request publicly," wrote Pollard, who stated his willingness to "bear the risk of any consequences " that may result from the prime minister's action.

Jonathan Pollard, a former U.S. naval intelligence analyst, was convicted of passing classified information to Israel and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987. Israel did not acknowledge Pollard for many years but granted him Israeli citizenship in 1995, during Netanyahu's first term in office. A few years later, Israel publicly conceded Pollard had been an Israeli spy.

American intelligence officials have been staunchly opposed to any compromise on the issue and are believed to have foiled previously reported deals on his release. Others maintain that Pollard's sentence was disproportionate at best, and based on circumstances that are no longer relevant.

Sudan denied allegations Saturday by an international prosecutor that President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, who is wanted for crimes against humanity, has stolen about $9 billion from one of Africa’s poorest countries.

In a U.S. diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, said if the breadth of Bashir’s wealth became known, it would “destroy his reputation” among the Sudanese, many of whom support the president’s defiance of the West.

“Ocampo suggested if Bashir’s stash of money were disclosed (he put the figure at possible $9 billion), it would change Sudanese public opinion from him being a ‘crusader’ to that of a thief,” according to the March 2009 document outlining the prosecutor's meeting with American officials.

The Americans were confounded. Maksat Idenov (pictured), the Harvard Business School-educated head of Kazakhstan’s state-owned oil company, had abruptly booted Guy Hollingsworth, a Chevron Corp. executive, from a meeting and from talks over a potentially lucrative deal.

A month went by before they finally figured out what had gone wrong. The executive of the California-based energy giant had been spotted playing golf in the Kazakh capital, Astana, and sunning in Spain with Idenov’s predecessor and rival, according to a Feb. 14, 2008, dispatch from the U.S. Embassy in Astana released by WikiLeaks.

“Idenov amplified his anger with Hollingsworth by explaining that Hollingsworth does not understand how we are doing business now,” said the dispatch.

The confidential dispatches from Central Asia depict a slicked-back 21st century version of the Great Game, the 19th century battle between the Russian and British empires over Central Asia’s riches. In today’s great game, diplomats and jet-set corporate executives gather business intelligence to outsmart corrupt autocrats and navigate teetering bureaucracies and make fortunes in the energy business.

Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah appears to have acknowledged the credibility of WikiLeaks, breaking with the official stance of the group's patron, Iran, that the leaked diplomatic cables are part of some American and Israeli-backed conspiracy.

By supporting WikiLeaks, Nasrallah now finds himself in the same camp as an unlikely figure: Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, who said in comments published Saturday that the documents expose Iran's "vulnerability."

In a speech late Friday night, the Hezbollah leader said the resistance would be targeted by conspiracies even greater than those already revealed in the leaked United States diplomatic cables, hinting mysteriously at more to come.

During the July 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, the party and its supporters "faced serious threats and conspiracies" from many sides, Nasrallah said, adding: "This is what we see in WikiLeaks day after day, and which we will see on a greater [scale]" (Arabic link).

Was Nasrallah's ominious prediction a rhetorical flourish, or does he have knowledge of sensitive cables on Lebanon that have yet to be published?

American diplomats appeared pleased with Saudi Arabia's new strategy to control editors and journalists, according to a secret State Department dispatch disclosed this week by the watchdog site WikiLeaks that offered a rare peak into the shadowy mechanisms of censorship in the ultra-conservative kingdom.

The May 11, 2009, diplomatic cable titled "Ideological and Ownership Trends in the Saudi Media" noted approvingly that the government seemed to be opening up to a certain amount of foreign cultural influence in the form of Hollywood movies and television shows while cracking down on Islamist messages deemed too extreme even for the state-approved brand of fundamentalist Wahhabi Islam.

But despite the author of the report's apparent hope that shows like "Desperate Housewives" and "Late Night With David Letterman" would serve as an antidote to some of the more conservative trends in the country, the document makes clear that the government has no intention of ceding control over the message, just tweaking it a little.

Saudi regulatory bodies, which are beholden to the royal family, have evolved to thrive in a dynamic new media environment, switching to a more subtly coercive and decentralized approach. "Instead of being fired or seeing their publications shut down, editors now are fined [$10,600] out of their own salaries for each objectionable piece that appears in their newspaper," the cable read. "Journalists, too, are held to account."