On Wednesday, a strong earthquake shook Southeast Asia, collapsing buildings, killing at least five people and injuring dozens in Indonesia. That tremor triggered a small non-destructive tsunami off the coastal city of Padang on Sumatra, the Indonesian island ravaged by the 2004 tsunami disaster. A tsunami warning was issued for wide areas of the region and nations as far away as Africa.

Thursday’s magnitude-7.8 quake rattled the same area of Sumatra.

Their proposal was not expected to set a deadline to end the war, as many Democrats want, but restrict troops to narrow objectives: training Iraq’s military and police, protecting U.S. assets and fighting terrorists, Democratic party officials told The Associated Press.

The goal is to attract enough Republicans to break the 60-vote threshold in the Senate needed to end a filibuster. Democrats have proved unable to do that since they took control of Congress eight months ago.

Abe had said he was quitting over the stalemate in parliament but senior officials said health problems were also a factor, and public broadcaster NHK reported that the prime minister had been admitted to hospital after medical checks.

Abe’s year in office has been marked by scandals involving cabinet members and a disastrous election defeat in July.

While federal civil rights or state hate crime charges remain an option, a state kidnapping count that carries a sentence of up to life in prison will provide the best chance for successful prosecution, officials said.

“As a practical matter, sentenced to life, what else can be done?” U.S. Attorney Charles T. Miller told The Associated Press.

After two days of congressional testimony from Gen. David Petraeus, the military commander in Iraq, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, the gap between the positions of the candidates on the war, the campaign’s top issue, was as great as ever and may even be widening.

McCain, who has begun to inch back up in opinion polls after suffering serious setbacks to his candidacy this summer, spent his second day traversing Iowa in a bus festooned with a banner that said it all: “No Surrender.”

The Rev. Michael Jude Fay, who resigned last year as pastor of St. John Roman Catholic Church, pleaded guilty to interstate transportation of money obtained by fraud. He faces up to 10 years in prison, a $250,000 fine and must pay restitution.

Prosecutors said Fay took between $1 million and $2.5 million over seven years, but the priest has disputed that. He admitted taking between $400,000 and $1 million.

The Ebola virus is depleting Western Gorilla populations to a point where it might become impossible for them to recover.

Commercial hunting, civil unrest and habitat loss due to logging and forest clearance for palm oil plantations are compounding the problem, said the Swiss-based group known by its acronym IUCN.

Just 30 percent of Americans approve of Bush’s handling of Iraq, but that was an 8-point jump from July, said the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.

The boost came primarily from Republicans, men and independents, NBC reported.

The replacement of Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov with a barely known finance official, Viktor Zubkov, came three months before parliamentary elections and less than six months ahead of a presidential poll to replace Putin.

The lower house of parliament is expected on Friday to rubber stamp the nomination of Zubkov, head of the government’s financial crimes investigation agency and a former Soviet state farm manager.

The new case was discovered close to a farm south of London where an outbreak was first reported last month.

Restrictions imposed then were only lifted four days ago and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) imposed a new England-wide ban on the movement of cattle, sheep, pigs and other ruminants.

That means the big decisions about post-“surge” policy are very likely to be left to the next president. And that made Tuesday’s Senate hearings with General Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, US ambassador to Iraq, all the more telling, almost like a presidential debate – not least because five candidates for US president were among the senators offering their takes on Iraq.

Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker made the case for more time for the US escalation in Iraq before the Senate as they had before House committees on Monday, knowing that pressure from Congress for setting a timetable for a US withdrawal has subsided. The result was that the congressional discussion seemed to be more about post-Bush visions than short-term planning.

The retirement announcements of Sens. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and John Warner of Virginia put two safe Republican seats in play, and with strong Democrats waiting in the wings, they could wind up in the “D” column. There’s more than a year to go before the November 2008 elections, but political prognosticators are already predicting several Democratic pickups in the Senate.

“I can see [the Democrats] getting to 55, and if it’s a stretch, 56,” says Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia who tracks every race.

A swarm of the bees was captured about five miles from where demolition workers found a colony of Africanized bees in January, commissioner Bob Odom said Tuesday.

The most recent find was close enough to the earlier find that the bees might have come from the same colony. But they might also have flown ashore from a passing ship or barge, Odom said in a news release.

Instead, Putin confounded expectations by picking financial-crime investigator Viktor Zubkov to take over from Mikhail Fradkov as Prime Minister. Zubkov is head of the Financial Monitoring Committee, responsible for overseeing the movement of money in Russia. Speaker of the Duma Boris Gryzlov hastened to give assurances that Zubkov would be confirmed without a hitch this Friday.

The deal struck last month between Iran and the Vienna -based International Atomic Energy Agency calls on Tehran to answer questions about its past nuclear activities. But it doesn’t demand that Iran stop enriching uranium, as Western nations have demanded.

At a special meeting of the IAEA’s Board of Governors here, European nations offered tepid support for the deal.

One defense official dismissed speculation Israel had aimed for any nuclear-related target. Two others said the target included weapons Israeli and U.S. officials have said Iran provides to Hezbollah through Syria.

“They saw a weapons flow,” one official said, referring to weapons caches intended for Hezbollah, which fired thousands of rockets into Israel during a 36-day conflict last year.

He also said the Islamic Republic could help in Iraq if the U.S. and British governments stopped alleging it is fighting a proxy war there by arming Shiite Muslim militias accused of attacking coalition forces and Sunni Arabs.

In an interview on Iranian state television, Ahmadinejad said Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker raised allegations of Iranian meddling solely because of the political debate within the United States over the war in Iraq.

The Univision debate showed the growing power of Latino voters; it also showed how that group – which has the potential to swing electorally crucial states like Florida, Nevada and New Mexico – is trending increasingly Democratic. Univision invited all of the G.O.P. candidates to the same forum next week. But only one, Senator John McCain of Arizona, accepted the invitation and the debate has been indefinitely postponed.

That kind of snub wouldn’t have seemed possible only three years ago. President George W. Bush won reelection in 2004, in part, due to historic Latino support for a Republican candidate. Fulfilling the dream of Karl Rove, his former top political adviser, Bush drew nearly 40% of the Latino vote, double that of any previous G.O.P. presidential nominee.

But more critical than Petraeus’ unsettling answer was the questioner – G.O.P. Senator John Warner of Virginia, who recently announced his impending retirement after 30 years in the Senate. Earlier in his career, Warner had served as a Marine and as Navy secretary. While the courtly Virginian didn’t react openly to Petraeus’ answer, it plainly marked yet another demerit in the book of those lawmakers increasingly careful in weighing their support for the war.

It’s hardly a typical 13-year-old’s concern. But then, Ariel Community Academy is unusual. Its 420 students, nearly all black and about 81% from low-income families, are testing an intriguing proposition: Can teaching urban black kids finance and economics help some of them escape poverty – and shake African-American skepticism about Wall Street?

Despite the growth of the black middle class, the percentage of affluent blacks investing in the stock market is actually falling, while such investment by their white peers remains steady. That’s partly because blacks have historically relied on real estate as a primary wealth builder. Plus, blacks save far less than whites for retirement. That’s why John W. Rogers Jr., CEO of the company that backs the academy, says, “The issue of financial literacy in our schools will hopefully avert a crisis.”

Kenyan officials said Monday that they planned to use international protocols to repatriate the lions, which are considered part of the country’s heritage.

The killing of the railway workers by the infamous “Maneaters of Tsavo” over a nine-month period briefly halted the construction of the Kenya-Uganda line, a project so perilous it was dubbed the “Lunatic Express.”

Lawmakers voiced concern at a congressional hearing over recent mass toy recalls by Mattel and other toy groups affecting millions of Chinese-made toys tarnished with lead paint or other safety defects.

“‘Made in China’ has now become a warning label,” Republican Senator Sam Brownback said at a Senate Financial Services and General Government subcommittee hearing on Chinese-made toys.

“This is your last briefing. You want to go out well,” one reporter yelled.

“Please, be as rude as you want,” President George W. Bush’s spokesman said.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also said preliminary figures for 2005 showed an increase in the U.S. infant mortality rate from the previous year, although it called the rise statistically insignificant. Black babies under age 1 remained far more likely to die than white babies.

The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics said in a report that a child born in the United States in 2005 can expect to live 77.9 years, up from 77.8 in 2004 and continuing a rise dating back decades. U.S. life expectancy was 75.8 years in 1995 and 69.6 years in 1955.

Edwards has bought two minutes of air time on MSNBC, scheduled to air after Bush’s 15-minute televised speech from the White House at 9 p.m. EDT.

Bush is expected to announce plans to reduce the American troop presence in Iraq by up to 30,000 by next summer, but say that he will condition those and further cuts on continued progress.

“Sitting on committees in Washington does not guarantee that someone has the skills to solve the problems on the international stage,” Romney told The Associated Press in a telephone interview while campaigning in Midland, Texas.

He suggested that his comments did not apply to GOP opponent John McCain, a four-term Arizona senator who Romney said has “led in many ways,” including his service in the Navy. Rather, he singled out Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois and former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina.

General David Petraeus said the evidence included captured hard drives that contained digitized items taken from the wallet of a US soldier killed in an assault in January in Karbala along with four other US soldiers.

“The evidence is very, very clear,” Petraeus told a news conference here. “We captured it when we captured Qais Khazali, the Lebanese Hezbollah deputy commander and others. And it’s in black and white.”

The meeting will be held at the level of foreign ministry policy coordinators, said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack.

Nicholas Burns, the department’s number three official, “is going to be hosting next week here in Washington a political directors’ meeting of the P5+1 and I expect the meeting will be centered largely on discussions of what sanctions would be in the next resolution.”

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Carl Sandburg, Circles of Doors

Oscar Wilde, Theocritus

E.B. White

Will Rogers

James Thurber

Carl Sandburg, Smoke and Steel

Groucho Marx