Residents said dozens of people were arrested during the night as security forces raided homes in Yangon neighbourhoods near Shwedagon Pagoda, Myanmar’s holiest Buddhist shrine and a key rallying point for the mass protests.

They patrolled the streets during an overnight curfew and swept into homes to make targeted arrests from a blacklist of campaigners following the largest anti-regime demonstrations in almost 20 years, residents said.

The results of the investigation are likely be a factor as Japan weighs whether to take action against military-ruled Myanmar, such as cutting back economic assistance.

Kenji Nagai, 50, was shot when the military opened fire on protesters in Yangon on September 27. Footage smuggled out of the country appeared to show a soldier shooting Nagai at point-blank range, but Myanmar officials have said he was shot accidentally.

About 3,200 miners were trapped a mile underground Wednesday when falling pipe damaged the elevator. By 7 a.m. Thursday (1 a.m. EDT), about 1,200 had been rescued, according to a union official.

“The speed at which people are coming up has improved. It is no longer a snail’s pace,” said Peter Bailey, health and safety chairman for the National Mineworkers Union.

Nonetheless, GOP activists who get out the primary vote in gritty South Central are being treated like Hollywood celebrities in the presidential campaign. Republican voters make up only 15 percent of their area’s registered voters.

California Republicans have instituted new rules for awarding delegates to their 2008 national nominating convention, prompting their party’s White House hopefuls to pursue a counterintuitive strategy of seeking GOP votes in Democratic strongholds like Waters’ district.

Paul, a Texas congressman who once ran for president as a Libertarian, also will report having $5.3 million cash on hand, campaign spokesman Jesse Benton said.

The amount places Paul well ahead of all but the Republican front-runners in the race. His fundraising for the quarter almost matches what Sen. John McCain is expected to report. His total is half the amount that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is reported to have raised.

A draft statement prepared for Domenici’s formal announcement Thursday disclosed that the 75-year-old New Mexico Republican has a progressive disease that can cause dysfunction in the parts of the brain important for organization, decision-making and control of mood and behavior.

“The progress of this disease is apparently erratic and unpredictable. It may well be that seven years from now, it will be stable,” Domenici intends to say, according to a draft of remarks prepared for delivery.

The legislation had bipartisan support in the U.S. Congress and the veto risks angering many Republicans who fear the issue could hurt their party in the 2008 elections.

Democrats called the veto “cruel” and “heartless.” The measure would have provided an extra $35 billion over five years for a health program for low-income children. Cigarette taxes would have been raised to fund the expansion from the current $25 billion level.

Maliki appeared to toughen his stand again against Blackwater over a September 16 shooting in Baghdad in which 11 Iraqis died, an incident that sparked outrage among Iraqis who see the firm as a private army which acts with impunity.

In Washington, a House of Representatives committee heard in testy hearings on Tuesday that Blackwater guards had been involved in 195 shooting incidents in Iraq from the start of 2005 until September 12 this year, an average of 1.4 a week.

In nearly every key relationship Russia has with Europe, the Kremlin under Vladimir Putin – who this week hinted he may stay in power – has pushed its way back to a central place at the decisionmaking table on Kosovo, Iran, energy, military alliances, and nuclear proliferation. And as a key supplier of natural gas to Europe, it’s managed to do so at very little economic risk to itself, say diplomats and experts in Europe.

President Bush’s veto of a popular bill to provide health insurance for poor children, the S-CHIP program, on Wednesday marked a first volley.

The White House says the proposed bill is $30 billion more than what America can afford. Democrats say that the veto is a sign that Mr. Bush and Republican lawmakers who refuse to back a veto override have the wrong priorities.

“Today the president showed the nation his true priorities: $700 billion for a war in Iraq, but no health care for low-income kids,” said House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel (D) of Illinois, in a statement.

The U.S. Senate on Wednesday was poised to approve nearly $460 billion to allow the Pentagon to pay soldiers, buy weapons and conduct research over the next 12 months.

That’s up from about $335 billion when President George W. Bush took office in 2001, before the September 11 attacks that year, which helped spark a surge in defense spending.

Musharraf, a key US ally who seized power in the nuclear-armed nation in 1999, is expected to win Saturday’s presidential vote although he still faces Supreme Court legal challenges against its legitimacy.

Former prime minister Bhutto’s opposition Pakistan People’s Party was meeting in London on Thursday to mull mass resignations by MPs, in a bid to rob the vote by federal and provincial lawmakers of any semblance of credibility.

The attack – apparently well planned in one of Baghdad’s most secure neighborhoods – raised questions about whether it sought to punish Poland for its contributions to the U.S.-led military force in Iraq. But Poland’s prime minister, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, said his nation would not retreat “in the face of terrorists.”

The diplomatic convoy was hit by three bombs and then attackers opened fire in the Shiite-controlled Karradah district. Polish guards returned fire as the injured ambassador, Gen. Edward Pietrzyk, was pulled from his burning vehicle. At least 10 people, including four Polish security agents, were wounded.

The country’s volcanological survey raised Mount Kelud’s alert status to the second-highest level on Sunday, following increased activity.

A mix of carbon dioxide and toxic substances seven times normal levels has been recorded from the volcano in recent days, prompting authorities to isolate the area, said Saut Simatupang, head of the survey’s volcano observation unit.

Federal prosecutors accuse Brent Wilkes, the chief of firm ADCS Inc., of bribing former representative Randall “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for the California politician’s help in winning lucrative government defense contracts.

Cunningham, a 65-year-old Vietnam War veteran, was sentenced to eight years and four months in prison in March 2006 after he pleaded guilty to taking bribes.

The six men, who filed a new lawsuit in Oregon state Circuit Court in Multnomah County, allege that Timur Dykes, a former spiritual leader in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and former scout leader, repeatedly abused them when they were boys.

Dykes, a convicted sex offender, is listed on Multnomah County’s registered sex offender Web page. He is not named as a defendant in this suit.

James Nichols first claimed an unknown gunman shot him, according to the tape played in court Wednesday. When a sheriff’s deputy asked why Nichols didn’t call police, Nichols started changing his story.

“If someone shoots you and you shoot back, do have a right to do that?” Nichols asked.

That death toll is significantly higher than the 10 originally reported in the incident which prompted intense criticism of Blackwater’s operations protecting American diplomats and other officials in Iraq, the New York Times reported Wednesday.

Citing witnesses, Iraqi investigators and a US official, the Times said the shootout in Baghdad’s Nisour Square started when a Blackwater guard fired a single shot at a hospital pathologist driving his mother on an errand, killing him.

Burke, the archbishop of St. Louis, was asked if he would deny Communion to Giuliani or any other presidential candidate who supports abortion rights.

“If any politician approached me and he’d been admonished not to present himself, I’d not give it,” Burke told The Associated Press Wednesday. “To me, you have to be certain a person realizes he is persisting in a serious public sin.”

“If money mattered, I think (Nelson) Rockefeller would be president – would have been president – of the United States,” the Arizona senator said in an interview with The Associated Press Wednesday.

McCain said he wouldn’t talk about financial details for the just-ended third quarter.

Two news organization polls in recent weeks showed the first-term Republican trailing Democratic challenger Steve Beshear by as many as 20 percentage points in his bid for re-election Nov. 6.

“Gov. Fletcher is toast,” said Michael Baranowski, a political scientist at Northern Kentucky University. He said the best Fletcher can hope for is “to avoid getting creamed at the polls, and even that doesn’t look likely.”

About 125,000 people will receive $500 each in damages under a state law invoked when a company, without cause, withholds pay for more than 30 days.

A Philadelphia jury last year awarded the workers the exact amount they had sought, rejecting Wal-Mart’s claim that some people chose to work through breaks or that a few minutes of extra work here and there was insignificant.

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Meanwhile, the Bank of England’s efforts to ease the global credit squeeze appear to have floundered.

On Tuesday, the central bank revealed that, for the second week in a row, it had received no bids in an auction for 10 billion pounds of emergency liquidity.

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According to recent media reports, British banks are shunning the BoE and turning to the European Central Bank for extra funds — owing to lower interest rates and guaranteed anonymity.

The Bank of England was expected to leave its main lending rate unchanged as well, at 5.75 percent after recent financial markets turmoil forced the central bank to rescue troubled lender Northern Rock.

ECB governers who met in Vienna will scan the horizon for signs of growing inflation but could also report tighter credit conditions than when they met a month ago and left the bank’s benchmark rate at 4.0 percent.

Fifty years after Sputnik became the world’s first artificial satellite, a new race is under way with the finish line on the moon. NASA, the former lunar champion, already is predicting defeat.

“I personally believe that China will be back on the moon before we are,” NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said in a low-key lecture in Washington two weeks ago, marking the space agency’s 50th anniversary, still a year away.

“It really is like the Arnold Schwarzenegger of dinosaurs – it’s all pumped up,” said Scott Sampson, curator of the Utah Museum of Natural History.

The newly named Gryposaurus monumentensis, or hook-beaked lizard from the monument, was discovered near the Arizona line in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 2002 by a volunteer at the site. Details about the 75-million-year-old dinosaur, including its name, were published in the Oct. 3 edition of Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

The findings of Peter Rose, a former graduate student at Southern Methodist University, were published recently in “Palaeontologia Electronica,” an online journal of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Mainstream scientists have been quick to accept Rose’s findings, said Louis Jacobs, a professor of geological science at SMU.

While most people rank the sabertooth alongside the Tyrannosaurus rex dinosaur as a killing machine, in reality today’s lions are far more powerful, the study found.

Using the skull of a modern-day lion for comparison, a team of scientists at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) found the sabertooth had a relatively weak bite.

At somewhere between 10 and 16 million years old, the planet’s solar system is still in its “very young adolescence,” but is at the perfect age for forming Earth-like planets, said lead researcher Carey Lisse of Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory.

The massive dust ring surrounding one of the system’s two stars is smack in the middle of the system’s “habitable zone” where water could one day exist on a rocky planet.

It said the violations took place at an oilfield controlled by Chevron at Tengiz.

“In the past the violations were almost systematic, there are 98 accidents of which 15 were hidden between 2003 and 2006,” Environment Minister Nurlan Iskakov told a news conference.

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said in a letter to Mukasey on Wednesday that he intended to hold the nominee to a higher standard in light of the Bush administration’s refusal to turn over subpoenaed materials about the politically charged firings of nine U.S. attorneys last year and other matters.

Aides said Leahy would continue to press that investigation — along with an inquiry into dissent within the Justice Department over a warrantless wiretapping program launched after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — even if Mukasey is confirmed.

But Leahy indicated to Mukasey that the lack of cooperation from the administration would not be used to hold up his nomination. The senator proposed that the men meet privately Oct. 16 to discuss the nomination and Mukasey’s views on a variety of subjects. Sources said a confirmation hearing could be scheduled as soon as the following day.