The Morning News

Karzai made the offer only hours after a suicide bomber in army disguise attacked a military bus Saturday, killing 30 people – nearly all of them Afghan soldiers.

Strengthening a call for negotiations he has made with increasing frequency in recent weeks, Karzai said he was willing to meet with the reclusive leader Mullah Omar and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a former prime minister and factional warlord leader.

Polling stations across the former Soviet republic of 47 million people, which is sandwiched between Russia and the European Union, opened at 7:00 am (0400 GMT) and were due to close at 10:00 pm (1900 GMT).

The election to the single-chamber parliament, the Rada, was called to resolve a power struggle between Western-leaning President Viktor Yushchenko and his prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, who is closer to Ukraine’s former ruler Moscow.

The incident happened Saturday near the town of Beytussebab in Sirnak province not far from the Iraqi border, a statement issued by Sirnak officials said. The bus carried a total of 14 people.

Seven Village Guard militiamen were among the dead.

The Supreme Court handed Pakistan’s opposition a potentially knock-out blow on Friday when it dismissed petitions seeking to disqualify Musharraf, a vital US anti-terror ally, from an October 6 presidential vote.

The verdict was the first good news in months for the one-time commando — who is battling slumping popularity and a wave of Islamist violence — and removed the biggest hurdle to him securing another five-year term.

The forces were deployed as the top U.N. envoy on Myanmar, Ibrahim Gambari, was in the country trying to persuade the military rulers to end a deadly crackdown on demonstrators that has sparked international outcry.

Many protesters said that despite that effort they were seeing a repeat of the global reaction to a 1988 pro-democracy uprising, when the world stood by as protesters were gunned down.

Today, he can’t keep a job, pay his bills, or chase thoughts of suicide from his tortured brain. In a few weeks, he may lose his house, too.

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More than in past wars, many wounded troops are coming home alive from the Middle East. That’s a triumph for military medicine. But they often return hobbled by prolonged physical and mental injuries from homemade bombs and the unremitting anxiety of fighting a hidden enemy along blurred battle lines. Treatment, recovery and retraining often can’t be assured quickly or cheaply.

“This is my first day, so I’m a little nervous,” the 25-year-old first daughter admitted.

Her face lit up, though, as soon as she started talking about the subject of her nonfiction narrative – a teenage mother with HIV whom she met during an internship with UNICEF in Latin America.

Gingrich, who previously said he was considering joining the race, told Fox News the McCain-Feingold campaign law would have forced him to leave his American Solutions political organization if he declared his candidacy.

“I wasn’t prepared to abandon American Solutions, even to explore whether a campaign was realistic,” he said.

The mosquitoes that carry dengue are thriving in expanded urban slums scattered with water-collecting trash and old tires. Experts say dengue is approaching record levels this year as many countries enter their wettest months.

“If we do not slow it down, it will intensify and take a greater social and economic toll on these countries,” said Dr. Jose Luis San Martin, head of anti-dengue efforts for the Pan American Health Organization, a regional public health agency.

A clerk in the Iraqi customs office in Diyala province, she was in the capital to drop off and pick up paperwork at the central office near busy al Khilani Square, not far from the fortified Green Zone, where top U.S. and Iraqi officials live and work. U.S. officials often pass through the square in heavily guarded convoys on their way to other parts of Baghdad .

As Hussein walked out of the customs building, an embassy convoy of sport-utility vehicles drove through the intersection. Blackwater security guards, charged with protecting the diplomats, yelled at construction workers at an unfinished building to move back. Instead, the workers threw rocks. The guards, witnesses said, responded with gunfire, spraying the intersection with bullets.

Sectarian violence, meanwhile, claimed at least 40 more lives across Iraq, with a flurry of attacks around the northern city of Mosul where bombs, gunmen and mortar fire killed 14.

Two U.S. soldiers were killed by gunfire, one in Diyala province north of Baghdad and one in a southern district of the capital.

The parliament said the Army and the CIA were terrorists because of the atomic bombing of Japan; the use of depleted uranium munitions in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq; support of the killings of Palestinians by Israel; the bombing and killing Iraqi civilians and the torture of imprisoned terror suspects.

“The aggressor U.S. Army and the Central Intelligence Agency are terrorists and also nurture terror,” said a statement by the 215 lawmakers who signed the resolution at an open session of the 290-member Iranian parliament. The session was broadcast live on state-run radio.

“This legislation was necessary because Congress failed in its most basic responsibility: to pass the spending bills that fund the day-to-day operations of the government,” Bush said in his weekly radio address.

The temporary spending measure will keep the federal government running through November 16 after Monday’s start of the new fiscal year, giving Democrats and Republicans time to work out budget disagreements.

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“Logically, with the weak dollar, you would think there would be an avalanche of wines going out and the shut-out of European wines especially coming into the United States,” Jon Frederikson of the California-based Gomberg-Frederikson wine consultancy told AFP.

“Remarkably, though, imports are continuing to come in because demand here is quite strong and prospects for growth over the next decade are excellent,” he said.

“That’s not going to happen,” Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., hastens to add, although a little more than a year before the 2008 election, the major leading political indicators still point downward for a party abruptly turned out of power in 2006.

Fundraising for Republican campaign organizations lags. That is strikingly so in the House, where the party committee spent more than it raised in each of the past two months, reported only $1.6 million in the bank at the end of August and a debt of nearly $4 million.

Fred Thompson, Sam Brownback and Duncan Hunter are trailing in polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, which traditionally have had the earliest primaries. But the three are hoping to claim Wyoming, where the state GOP last month moved its delegate-selection conventions to Jan. 5.

“I want to tell you how good it is to be in the Cheneys’ home state,” Thompson told the crowd. Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne, both grew up in Casper.

On Friday the US Department of State announced it was sending a team to Iraq led by a senior official to evaluate security measures for US diplomats who have relied on Blackwater and other private security firms for protection in the violence-ridden country.

“My instructions to the panel are simple: their review should be serious, probing and comprehensive,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in a statement about the review.

India has long been famous for its tea, and the $1.5 billion industry launched by British colonials nearly two centuries ago is, after China’s, the world’s second largest. More than 1 million tons were grown in 2007, much of it here in the northeastern state of Assam.

But production costs are mounting and a brutal insurgency has targeted the planters. Globalization, with the spread of cheaper tea from countries such as Vietnam and Kenya, has increased competition. While there have been glimmers of good news recently – a $320 million revitalization package announced by the government, and an uptick in prices from historic lows – the business is still at the bottom rungs of profitability.

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On one side are corporations that maximize profits through enormous scale, with dozens of estates and tens of thousands of workers. On the other side are the growing number of micro-producers, many with just a couple acres of land, that are increasingly powerful in the market. All are competing in a market where prices have fallen 30 percent in just a decade.

The single currency, shared by 11 other European nations besides France and Germany, shot to a new all-time high of 1.4263 dollars on Friday.

While French President Nicolas Sarkozy has made no secret of his distress at the euro’s upward trajectory, which tends to punish French exporters, his German counterparts remain serene.

Craig, who was removed from leadership posts on the Senate Appropriations and Energy committees after a sex scandal, is known as one the most powerful voices in Congress on behalf of the timber and power industries. Environmentalists have fought him for years on issues from endangered salmon to public land grazing.

Now Senate Democrats, exercising their slim majority, have waded into two contentious issues – both related to Snake River salmon.

Thursday marks the 50th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s launch, on October 4, 1957, of Sputnik 1, the starting signal for the Space Race and a propaganda coup that Russia’s present leaders can only envy.

The launch of the world’s first man-made satellite, a silvery orb with four frond-like antennae and two radio transmitters, was at first obscure.

The official announcement was buried in leaden prose in the corner of a Pravda newspaper front page, the identity of Sputnik’s creator kept a state secret.

If British billionaire Richard Branson’s vision is realised, by 2010, tourists could be paying around 200,000 dollars to board “SpaceShipTwo” and be rocketed into space to experience weightlessness before returning to earth.

Branson’s Virgin Galactic has already begun taking reservations for seats aboard “SpaceShipTwo”, a six-seater reusable spacecraft developed by American engineer Burt Rutan.

While the achievements of space programs run by China, Japan and India are modest in comparison to the milestones set by the United States and former Soviet Union, experts at a recent conference in Pasadena believe it is only a matter of time before Asia leads the field.

China, which sent a man into space for the first time in 2003, plans to launch its own moon probe before the end of the year, followed by India in the first half of 2008. Japan kick-started the Asian lunar race on September 14 when it successfully launched its first lunar orbiter.