Greenspan, whose memoirs hit book shelves on Monday, said the Fed should be careful not to cut rates too aggressively because the risk of an “inflationary resurgence” is greater now than when he was chairman, the Financial Times reported.

The U.S. central bank meets on Tuesday and is widely expected to cut benchmark federal funds rate — currently at 5.25 percent — by at least a quarter of a percent age point to help the economy weather a housing downturn and a credit crunch.

Officials said 55 of the dead were foreigners aboard the MD-82 of budget carrier One-Two-Go, which smashed into an embankment, broke in two and burst into flames while trying to land in heavy rain on Sunday.

The low-fare carrier, in business for less than four years, said the plane’s two flight recorders had been dug out of the wreckage and would be sent to the United States for analysis.

“We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war,” he said in an interview broadcast on French television and radio.

“We must negotiate right to the end,” with Iran, he said, but underlined that if Tehran possessed an atomic weapon, it would represent “a real danger for the whole world.”

The nomination of Mukasey, considered a law-and-order conservative and authority on national security issues, was expected on Monday, according to the sources, who asked not to be named.

A senior Republican aide told Reuters that background materials about the retired 66-year-old jurist were distributed to Senate Republican staffers, in preparation for Mukasey’s anticipated Senate confirmation hearing.

The slimmer majority could make it harder for the government to carry out crucial economic and educational reforms, including overhauling Greece’s fractured and debt-ridden pension system.

But the conservatives inflicted a stronger defeat than expected on their rival socialists, who were seen as being in disarray after receiving the lowest number of parliament seats in 30 years.

Nearly a month into the worst demonstrations to hit Myanmar in decades, the saffron-robed Buddhist clergy are emerging as the focal point of the anti-government protests. With dozens of pro-democracy activists behind bars or in hiding, most people are counting on monks – who have a role in almost all aspects of society from weddings to funerals – to take the lead in challenging the repressive regime in the mostly Buddhist country.

“Monks are our only hope now as they always have been in Myanmar political history,” said Hla Myint, a 75-year-old schoolteacher. “The military rulers can easily crush protests by students and other people. But brutal suppression of monks usually results in negative consequences and further protests.”

But the proceedings may be delayed because public defenders representing two of the defendants have recused themselves, Logan County Prosecutor Brian Abraham said.

The six defendants are charged with assaulting Megan Williams, 20, for more than a week at a ramshackle trailer in Big Creek. Police say she was tortured, sexually assaulted, forced to eat animal droppings and taunted with a racial slur.

It’s because they want to see the stall made famous by U.S. Sen. Larry Craig’s arrest in a sex sting.

“It’s become a tourist attraction,” said Karen Evans, information specialist at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. “People are taking pictures.”

A Web site believed to be controlled by the terrorist group posted statements Friday and Saturday taking credit for the killing Thursday of a high-profile tribal leader who had sided with the United States and announcing a Ramadan offensive.

It also belatedly took credit for a multiple bombing in northern Iraq in August that left at least 322 dead, the largest fatality count in a single attack since the start of the war in 2003.

The claim is surfacing in a bribery investigation that has now stretched to Capitol Hill, where Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don Young, both from Alaska, are under scrutiny.

A lawyer for former state Rep. Vic Kohring said the FBI recently used another state lawmaker, who was cooperating with investigators, to press Kohring to take a plea deal.

Greenspan, who as head of the US central bank was famous for his tight-lipped reserve, is uncharacteristically direct, also accusing President George W. Bush of abandoning Republican principles on the economy.

“I’m saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows — the Iraq war is largely about oil,” he wrote in reported excerpts of “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World,” which is set for release on Monday.

“Everybody is sick and tired of being sick and tired of George Bush,” said Illinois Sen. Barack Obama. “All you have to do is take a look at the president pretending that going around in circles was making progress. If that doesn’t get you ready to get rid of George Bush I don’t know what will.”

The six candidates paraded after each other in a carnival-like atmosphere in a field about 20 miles south of Des Moines. An estimated 12,000 activists streamed in for Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin’s annual steak fry, shelling out $30 each in a fundraiser for a veteran Democrat senator who doesn’t face serious opposition in next year’s election.

Leaders at factories across the country received conflicting reports out of Detroit Sunday afternoon. Several reported progress and optimism but said that if no agreement was reached Sunday night, the union would walk out Monday morning.

A local union in Arlington, Texas, told its members to report to work as scheduled Monday but said it was committed to a strike if necessary. In a joint statement sent to union members and the media, UAW Local 276 leaders told members they expected negotiators either to wrap up talks or declare an impasse at the end of Sunday’s negotiating session.

The network, which launched in 2005 with video clips and other short programs made by viewers, received the “interactive television services” Emmy, a noncompetitive award picked by a panel of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

“We are trying to open up the television medium so viewers can help to make television … and reclaim democracy,” Gore said in accepting the award, given Sunday for the first time during the Primetime Emmys telecast.

The executive European Commission decided in 2004 that Microsoft (MSFT.O) used its Windows operating system, running on 95 percent of the world’s computers and servers, to choke off competing makers of server and streaming media software.

The Commission fined the software giant a record 497 million euros ($690 million) and ordered it to change its business practices. Microsoft appealed, so a special 13-judge panel at the Court of First Instance will decide who was right.

So Ms. Walsh came here on Sunday, to a green pasture outside this central Iowa town, to hear candidates make their pitches to voters who will be among the first to voice their opinions in the presidential race next year. She listened intently, but walked away as uncertain as when the day began.

“I’m still quite torn and can’t commit,” said Ms. Walsh, a 55-year-old high school art teacher. “I like Hillary. I love what Edwards says about poverty. I’m moved by Obama.”

Greenspan, who was the country’s top voice on monetary policy at the time Bush decided to go to war in Iraq, has refrained from extensive public comment on it until now, but he made the striking comment in a new memoir out today that “the Iraq War is largely about oil.” In the interview, he clarified that sentence in his 531-page book, saying that while securing global oil supplies was “not the administration’s motive,” he had presented the White House with the case for why removing Hussein was important for the global economy.

“I was not saying that that’s the administration’s motive,” Greenspan said in an interview Saturday, “I’m just saying that if somebody asked me, ‘Are we fortunate in taking out Saddam?’ I would say it was essential.”