The Morning News

“Our opponent is not being candid with you about his tax plans,” said Palin. “It is not mean-spirited, and it is not negative campaigning to call out someone on their record.”

Obama backers waving signs briefly interrupted the rally, a move Palin dismissed.

Paul Schlesselman, 18, of Helena-West Helena, Ark., and Daniel Cowart, 20, of Bells are accused of dreaming up the plan. While authorities say they had guns capable of creating carnage, documents show they never got close to getting off the ground.

Among the blunders: They drew attention to themselves by etching swastikas on a car with sidewalk chalk, only knew each other for a month, couldn’t even pull off a house robbery, and a friend ratted them out to authorities.

Stevens, 84, was convicted Monday of lying about hundreds of thousands of dollars in home renovations and gifts he received from a corrupt oil contractor. The verdict came down just a week before Election Day, too late for Republicans to put someone new on the ballot against Democrat Mark Begich.

Nevertheless, Republican presidential nominee John McCain, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, urged their Senate colleague to resign.

The stock market’s amazing climb, with its second-largest point gain ever, was a welcome burst of good news for a nation suffering big job losses and seemingly tumbling into a painful recession.

Consumer pessimism reached record levels in October amid rising unemployment, plunging home prices and shrinking retirement and investment accounts. The Conference Board, a private research group, said consumer confidence fell to its lowest point since it began tracking consumer sentiment in 1967.

The world’s largest software maker also is making Word, Excel and other key elements of Office – its flagship “productivity” programs – able to run in a Web browser. The move is meant to help confront rivals such as Google Inc. that offer free word processing and spreadsheet programs online, threatening one of Microsoft Corp.’s most precious profit centers.

The Windows and Office news came Tuesday at a Microsoft conference for software developers.

But recently, the Iraqi man known as Abu Ghadiyah began doing even more – launching his own armed forays into his homeland, U.S. and Iraqi officials say.

Finally the United States lashed out, frustrated it says, after years of vainly pressuring Syria to shut down his network supplying the Sunni insurgency.

According to a statement issued Tuesday by the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and Google, the agreement “will expand online access to millions of in-copyright books and other written materials in the U.S. from the collections of a number of major U.S. libraries participating in Google Book Search.”

If approved by a federal court in Manhattan, the settlement will end the legal action, taken against Google two years ago, that had been closely followed by the publishing industry as it debates how copyright law should work online.

U.S. officials said the raid killed a top operative of al-Qaida in Iraq who intelligence suggested was about to conduct an attack in Iraq, but Syria and the Iraqi government criticized the raid.

Outside the Damascus Community School, known popularly as the “American School,” in the upscale Maliki neighborhood, activities seemed normal. Drivers waited outside the building to pick up the foreign, mostly Arab pupils as they left for home shortly before sunset.

Newer, more costly drugs are driving the increase, said researchers, despite a lack of strong evidence for the new drugs’ greater benefits and safety. And there are more people being treated for diabetes.

The new study follows updated treatment advice for Type 2 diabetes, issued last week. In those recommendations, an expert panel told doctors to use older, cheaper drugs first.

The guidelines call for Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. to try to reduce the scope of government requests that appear to conflict with free speech and other human rights principles. They also require participating companies to seek requests in writing, along with the names and titles of the authorizing officer.

But ultimately, the documents are less about “what happens when you get a knock on the door than what are you doing before then,” said Leslie Harris, chief executive of the Center for Democracy and Technology, one of the main groups behind the guidelines.

U.S. consumer confidence plunged to a record low in October amid signs the economy is sliding into a deep recession, threatening to pull the rest of the world with it.

The Nikkei business daily said the Bank of Japan was considering a 25 basis-point interest rate cut to underpin the economy, pushing the yen down in its biggest one-day decline against the dollar in more than 30 years.

The $3 billion Westfield center in West London will have a strong focus on luxury when it opens on Thursday. Promotional material cites Louis Vuitton, Prada, Tiffany and Gucci among its stores but Managing Director Michael Gutman downplays these.

“We have a mass-market offer here, even though a couple of the precincts have attracted particular attention,” he told Reuters by telephone.

Yemeni captive Ali Hamza al Bahlul is on trial at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. naval base in Cuba, where a jury of nine U.S. military officers will have to decide whether creating propaganda is a war crime.

Prosecutors allege Bahlul was Osama bin Laden’s media secretary and part of the al Qaeda leader’s trusted inner circle. They accused him of scripting the videotaped wills of September 11 hijackers Mohamed Atta and Ziad al Jarrah, who were his roommates in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 1999.

The Swiss-based WWF, also known as the World Wildlife Fund, said in its latest Living Planet Report that more than three quarters of the world’s population lives in countries whose consumption levels are outstripping environmental renewal.

Its Living Planet Report concluded that reckless consumption of “natural capital” was endangering the world’s future prosperity, with clear economic impacts including high costs for food, water and energy.

Nearly two decades after the end of the Cold War, Gates said the U.S. nuclear program is suffering from an exodus of qualified designers and technicians, the stockpile has not been modernized and no weapons have been tested since 1992.

“Let me first say very clearly that our weapons are safe, secure and reliable. The problem is the long-term prognosis — which I would characterize as bleak,” Gates said in a speech to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington think tank.

In response to a nearly 60 percent fall in oil prices from a record of $147.27 hit in July, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries agreed at an emergency meeting last week to cut production by 1.5 million barrels per day (bpd).

OPEC Secretary General Abdullah al-Badri said if prices continued to fall, OPEC would call another extra meeting.

But a Taliban spokesman rejected the idea.

Violence has intensified in Afghanistan and Pakistan in recent months, raising fears for the prospects of both countries at the heart of the U.S.-led global campaign against militancy.

With cold rain falling and a chance of snow showers in the forecast, Major League Baseball (MLB) announced that Game Five would not resume on Tuesday. It is now tentatively scheduled to resume on Wednesday at 8:37 p.m., weather permitting.

Steady rain made the Citizens Bank Park field treacherous and threatened the safety of the players, leading MLB Commissioner Bud Selig to suspend Monday’s game — unprecedented in the 104-year history of the Fall Classic.

If the deal, backed by union leaders, is approved by members in a vote over the next few days, it will bring the 53-day strike to an end and reopen Boeing’s Seattle-area factories that have been closed since September 6.

Boeing shares, which have fallen more than 50 percent this year, jumped 6 percent in morning trading, followed by some of its key suppliers.

Baghdad also issued a belated rebuke of Washington for a helicopter strike on Syria, a sign of the pressure Iraq’s government is under to reassure its neighbors that it is not letting U.S. forces use its territory against them.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki will now send U.S. negotiators the proposed amendments to the security deal, government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said.

The Indian Ocean archipelago nation’s election commission said that with nearly all votes from Tuesday’s historic polls counted, Mohamed “Anni” Nasheed had won 54 percent of votes to 46 percent for incumbent leader Maumoon Abdul Gayoom.

Gayoom, 71, had ruled the tourist paradise islands unchallenged since 1978, and had in the past thrown Nasheed into jail.

Gabriel pressed the start button at the Hooksiel complex some 500 metres (500 yards) off Germany’s North Sea coast.

The five megawatts produced at the pilot site will flow into the gas and electrical station in the coastal city of Wilhelmshaven, enough to serve 5,000 households.

The sale kicked off two weeks of auctions across southern Africa that will put 108 tonnes of tusks on the block, in a one-off sale to the Asian powers.

Four African countries have been authorised by CITES, the international convention that regulates trade in endangered species, to hold the sales only to China and Japan.

The Fed’s move would probably take rates to the lowest levels since 2003, when the economy was growing at a snail’s pace, and could mean a full percentage point decline this month alone, a rare sharp drop and an indication of how quickly the central bank sees the need to respond to the sinking economy.

The rate reduction co-incides with a Fed rule change that allows it to pay interest on banks’ excess reserves – a change that experts say gives Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke the ability to provide almost unlimited liquidity to the US banking system. This October one-two combination will be a powerful lever for the economy, economists say, perhaps enough to finally begin to relieve some of the pressures on credit markets.

That’s why the International Monetary Fund (IMF) moved quickly to approve loans to Ukraine and Hungary Sunday. Belarus and Serbia are also asking for assistance.

The IMF loan helped stabilize Hungary’s currency on Monday. But many Eastern European currencies have fallen as much as 25 percent against the dollar and euro. The euro’s own devaluation of late is part of the problem.

The women in their seats look surprised at the question. Some of them laugh.

What begins as jokes about bad husbands grows into a serious discussion about gender roles and women’s rights. Islam supports women’s empowerment, Ms. Munir tells her students, so men should, too.

But taking such actions in Pakistan and now Syria may involve high diplomatic risks and offer limited military gain, say experts outside the military. “It could be morally justifiable, legally justifiable, and strategically a mistake,” says Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

For the past few months, there have been reports of US airstrikes inside Pakistan as violence increased in neighboring Afghanistan. Over the weekend, the US reportedly conducted a strike inside Syria’s shared border with Iraq.

A reader e-mailed us with the same sentiment in different language. “Are you f***ing joking! Your bias has stooped to an all-time low. Wait, it will probably get worse as election day nears.” Those asterisks, by the way, are hers, not ours.

And get a load of this one, from someone in Rochester, N.Y., who did not like our analysis of the final presidential debate. “You guys are awfully tough on McCain. There may be some legitimacy to the claim of press bias. Mom.”

As we all were reminded in the 2000 election, the presidency is not decided by popular vote. It’s decided by the Electoral College.  The candidate who gets 270 Electoral College votes wins, so poll analysis turns into a simple math game. What collection of states can a candidate put together to get to 270?

Right now, it looks like Barack Obama has a lot more routes to 270 than John McCain does.  Obama is starting off with what I call an electoral college “head start.”  More states are likely in his camp than John McCain’s, giving Obama about 234 electoral votes to bank on compared to John McCain’s 163.

Alan Doss said peacekeepers were forced to “respond,” apparently meaning they shot at troops who are supposed to be their allies, after the soldiers opened fire on those trying to leave Rutshuru, about 45 miles north of Goma. He vowed to keep Rutshuru and other strategic towns out of rebel hands.

“We are going to remain there, and we are going to act against any effort to take over a city or major population center by force,” Doss told reporters in New York in a videoconference.

Army Col. Stephen Henley said Mohammed Jawad’s statements “were obtained by physical intimidation and threats of death which, under the circumstances, constitute torture.”

Jawad’s defense attorney, Air Force Maj. David Frakt, told The Associated Press that the ruling removes “the lynchpin of the government’s case.”

China and oil-rich Persian Gulf states should fund the bulk of a major boost in the IMF’s bailout pot, Gordon Brown, the British prime minister who has burnished his reputation by taking the lead on the financial meltdown, said Tuesday.

Those countries have the largest currency reserves and therefore should do the most, Brown said, without specifying how much more money should be added to the fund for helping nations whose banking systems and currencies are being battered.

The move comes a day after a brand of chicken eggs produced by China’s Dalian Hanwei Enterprise Group was pulled off some shelves in the country after Hong Kong food safety regulators found excessive levels of melamine in eggs of the same brand.

The government of Dalian, a northeastern port city where the company is based, said it would punish anyone found responsible for the contamination of the eggs, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

The attack showed the Tamil Tigers can still strike even as an army offensive pushes deep into the rebels’ de facto state in the north. The government has vowed to destroy the rebels by the end of the year and end a civil war that has plagued the South Asian nation for a quarter century.

The rebel air assault came just hours after a pro-rebel Web site accused the Sri Lankan air force of killing three people with an airstrike on a civilian town in the north of the Indian Ocean island.

The killing of the three 101st Airborne Division soldiers was one of the most brazen attacks against U.S. forces since the Iraq war began in 2003.

The case marked the first time an Iraqi investigative judge sent a case involving an Iraqi killing specific Americans to trial.

Initially the Sudanese government said five had been killed, but the undersecretary at the Foreign Ministry, Mutrif Siddiq, told reporters only three of the Chinese workers were confirmed dead and three others were injured and receiving medical care. Three more remain missing.

“Our forces are now scouring all the hiding places to search for the missing, whether killed or injured,” Siddiq told reporters at the airport, where the coffins of three victims were unloaded.

The plan announced by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith would group together Muslim extremists, animal rights protesters, anti-abortion activists, neo-Nazis and others she said “encourage or spread extremism and hatred through preaching violent messages.” The list would include only people from abroad.

Smith said publishing the names – roughly 230 – amounts to a toughening of existing exclusion orders that already list and ban certain groups from Britain. Authorities expect to publish the list on the Home Office Web site in the coming months.

Speaking at a meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Darfur, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad accused Khartoum of a litany of duplicitous actions, all of which he said had been documented by an expert panel of the U.N. Sanctions Committee.

They included “violating the limited arms embargo on Darfur, using aircraft painted to resemble U.N. humanitarian aircraft, (and) conducting offensive overflights in Darfur.”

The state prosecutor said Alexei Frenkel had acted out of revenge when he ordered the killing of Andrei Kozlov, the 41-year-old deputy head of Russia’s central bank who had revoked Frenkel’s banks’ licenses.

Kozlov was shot dead in September 2006 as he left an amateur soccer match in Moscow.

The accusations stem from May 1998, when about 100 people occupied Chevron’s Parabe platform off the coast of West Africa for three days.

The case in San Francisco District Court was brought against Chevron by Larry Bowoto, one of the occupiers of the platform, under the Alien Tort Claims Act. The act, dating back to 1789, allows foreigners to sue over human rights abuses committed in their countries by a U.S. organization or someone acting on behalf of a U.S. organization.

Whoever wins will face the formidable task of matching late president Levy Mwanawasa’s strong track record of fiscal discipline, praised by Western donors, and cracking down on corruption, both rare successes in Africa.

Acting president Rupiah Banda, a prominent businessman with wide government experience, campaigns as a steady hand who can keep Mwanawasa’s business-friendly policies going.

The MDC opposition’s Secretary-General Tendai Biti said the allocation of ministries was still being discussed in talks on forming a cabinet. He said the opposition party was committed to reaching an agreement but would not accept a bad deal.

“The core of our differences with (the ruling) ZANU-PF is the pure lack of sincerity on the part of ZANU-PF,” Biti told a news conference.

After 13 hours of talks on Monday with a regional security body, Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai remained deadlocked over who should control the powerful home affairs ministry, which oversees the police.

They agreed only to call for an urgent summit of the 15-member Southern African Development Community (SADC), which is certain to pile pressure on the rivals to stick to the unity accord signed six weeks ago.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said after meeting here with his French counterpart Bernard Kouchner that security in the Georgian breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia “is assured by Russian military contingents after the recognition of their independence by Russia.

“As far as the European Union monitors are concerned, we believe the Medvedev-Sarkozy plan should be respected. It says they should be deployed in areas adjacent to Abkhazia and South Ossetia,” Lavrov said.

The demonstrators used guerrilla tactics, harassing the police in the streets around Christiania and setting fire to rubbish bins, chairs and old refrigerators.

Protesters said the police had provoked the action by demolishing a house that authorities said had been built illegally on a historic site, the old ramparts of Copenhagen.

The Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States recognised that the young woman, Adidjatou Mani Koraou, now 24, had been “a victim of slavery.”

It held “the Republic of Niger responsible for the inaction” of its administrative and legal services, in a ruling read out by a court official.

Kubilius met with President Valdas Adamkus and later told reporters that the head of state asked him to begin talks with three smaller centre-right movements which have pledged to work with the Conservatives, who came top in a general election Sunday.

“The president and I have an identical take on the current situation and the challenges we’re facing, as well as the means to deal with them,” Kubilius said after meeting with Adamkus, who is seen as a non-partisan figure.

The jets, backed by artillery fire, pounded “effectively” Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) hideouts in the regions of Hakurk and Avashin-Basyan as well as Zap, a major rebel stronghold, the statement said.

“The targets were hit successfully,” it said, without mentioning any casualties among PKK ranks.

Among other things, the amendments would give Iraqi authorities the right to determine whether a U.S. service member was on- or off-duty when he or she committed an alleged crime outside American bases, where such an American would be tried. It also would allow authorities to inspect all U.S. cargo entering the nation.

Iraqi politicians see the changes as a way to preserve Iraqi sovereignty.

Instead, they say the best that can be hoped for is to halt North Korea from producing nuclear fuel to make any more weapons.

The view is far from universal, and the governments at multilateral talks over the North Korea nuclear program publicly stick to the objective of a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula .

Here among the concrete slums perched over Bolivia’s capital, La Paz, any job is precious, especially one with benefits and paid vacation like Ms. Targui’s.

“We want to work and we want job protection,” says Targui between rhythmic hisses of the iron. “There may be something going on at the embassy, but we want Bolivia and the US to be united. As enemies you don’t gain anything.”

Investigators initially thought an assassin, hired by the communist regime in Bulgaria, jabbed him with a poison-tipped umbrella. But later reports suggested a spring-loaded pen, probably KGB-designed, had fired a ricin-tipped pellet into his leg.

Today much of the Markov murder remains shrouded in mystery. The case, however, is just one of many unsolved mysteries spurring intense debate in Eastern Europe between critics and defenders of the communist system.

Québec’s francophones have long been ridiculed by the Parisian French – the scholars, elites, and aesthetes from the ancestral homeland. They have deemed the Québecois accent an “abomination” of what they consider the most beautiful language.

They shouldn’t sneer.

Farming a field 10 times larger than any of his neighbors’ in this scruffy village in central China, he is on the front lines of a new government drive to transform Chinese agriculture, and with it the lives of 750 million country dwellers.

If the land reform announced last week works as officials hope it will, many peasants will emulate Mr. Zhang’s effort to turn family plots into a modern farm, and help bang one of the last nails into the coffin of Mao Zedong’s collectivist dream.

But today, as Hussein-era pilots mix with fresh recruits, Lieutenant Jasim and many other young officers – who’ve trained on equipment that rivals that of their US counterparts – say the old pilots are hardly the mentors one might expect senior officers to be. “The pilots from the Saddam regime don’t have very much experience,” says Jasim. “I speak with them, but they don’t have enough experience to learn from.”

After nearly evaporating following the US-led invasion in 2003, the Iraqi Air Force is making a comeback. Now, fresh recruits and old regime pilots must come together to create a new Air Force that will be radically different from Hussein’s massive assault-capable fleet that operated with notoriously loose safety standards. But scaling back the force’s historically aggressive posture while managing its rapidly swelling ranks will be a delicate balance.