Weekend News Digest

Besides the name, there won’t be many immediate changes to what Court TV has become. The six remaining hours of legal-oriented material during the day will remain, labeled “In Session.”

The Tuesday premiere of “Ocean Force Huntington Beach O.C.” typifies the network’s direction. The series follows lifeguards on a busy California beach, emphasizing heart-pounding rescues rather than hours spent ogling hot bodies.

That’s about as far from swearing in a witness as you can get, but Court TV’s viewers are used to the disconnect.

The muted anniversary of Saddam’s death saw little violence, a far cry from the blood that was spilt on the day the former Iraqi leader was executed and the horrific wave of killing that ensued until the surge of U.S. troops six months later.

But there were a number of operations carried out by American and Iraqi forces. The U.S. military said coalition forces killed six insurgents and detained another 14 on Saturday and Sunday during operations targeting al-Qaida in Iraq in central and northern parts of the country.

“We realize that security in Iraq is very fragile and tenuous,” said U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Gregory Smith. He added that although much progress had been made since thousands of extra U.S. troops deployed in June, “there is no place in Iraq today that is safe from terrorism.”

A team of maids, cooks and doctors looks after the women, whose pregnancies would be unusual anywhere else but are common here. The young mothers of Anand, a place famous for its milk, are pregnant with the children of infertile couples from around the world.

The small clinic at Kaival Hospital matches infertile couples with local women, cares for the women during pregnancy and delivery, and counsels them afterward. Anand’s surrogate mothers, pioneers in the growing field of outsourced pregnancies, have given birth to roughly 40 babies.

More than 50 women in this city are now pregnant with the children of couples from the United States, Taiwan, Britain and beyond. The women earn more than many would make in 15 years. But the program raises a host of uncomfortable questions that touch on morals and modern science, exploitation and globalization, and that most natural of desires: to have a family.

A former ruling party official said the election in nuclear-armed Pakistan, a key U.S. ally against terrorism, was likely to be delayed for up to two months but Bhutto’s party vowed to take part and another party said it probably would too.

Bhutto’s assassination in a bloody suicide attack on Thursday stoked sporadic violence across the country and deep anger against President Pervez Musharraf casting doubt about Pakistan’s stability and its transition to civilian rule.

Pushing the stakes still higher, his opposition rival Raila Odinga rejected the results as rigged and announced an alternative inauguration for Monday in a Nairobi park.

To curb spreading chaos in a nation usually known as a haven of stability in volatile east Africa, the government sent trucks of police onto the streets and banned live TV transmissions.

As smoke billowed from protests in Nairobi slums, Kibaki was sworn in on the lawn of State House just an hour after the final vote tally was announced, his hand on a Bible.

“We have made no projections of peace at hand. We realise that security is very fragile and that at any moment any attack could occur at any place in Iraq,” military spokesman Rear Admiral Gregory Smith told a news conference in Baghdad.

“There is no place in Iraq today that is safe from terrorism,” Smith added.

Former prime minister Bhutto was killed in a gun and bomb attack on Thursday as she stood up through the sun-roof of her bullet-proof vehicle to wave to supporter as she left an election rally in the city of Rawalpindi.

Saakashvili, who swept to power in a 2003 “Rose Revolution,” dismayed his Western allies in November when he responded to massive opposition protests by sending in police with teargas and by closing down the biggest opposition television station.

He called the election months earlier than the scheduled date as part of a package of concessions to ease the stand-off with the opposition, which accuses him of ruling in an autocratic style and failing to ease poverty and unemployment.

“Saakashvili is the president who used force against his own people. He has no moral right to stay in power,” Tina Khidasheli, a leader of the main opposition coalition, said at an election rally in the centre of Tbilisi on Saturday.

There are no reliable polls in Georgia, but analysts predict Saakashvili, a 40-year-old U.S.-educated lawyer with a Dutch wife, will win about 60 percent of the vote.

The National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) on Friday charged Zuma, who less than two weeks ago beat Mbeki in a divisive race for the African National Congress leadership, with corruption, fraud, money laundering and racketeering.

The timing of the indictment prompted claims by Zuma’s supporters that the state president was trying to undermine the new ANC leader.

But the Sunday Independent reported that NPA head Moketedi Mpshe had denied his agency had been improperly influenced.

“It’s absolute nonsense. (Mbeki) does not even know we were going to charge (Zuma) or what we were going to charge him with. It’s got nothing to do with the president,” it quoted him as saying.

But the security improvements that brought violence down to 2005 levels are fragile and reversible, Gen. David Petraeus said during a press briefing. They depend on a complicated equation of troop concentrations, citizen security forces, cooperation from Iraq’s neighboring countries and relative quiet from militias such as the Shiite Mahdi Army.

U.S. forces will thin out through the year, rather than abruptly handing control to Iraqis. First Iraqi politicians must work out “fundamental” governance issues, Petraeus said, and continue expanding the Iraqi security forces. The country’s police and army added about 100,000 members this year and benefited from a 70,000-member, Sunni-majority U.S.-funded Concerned Local Citizens groups. Before the movement spread nationally, it helped to stabilize Anbar province, known as an al Qaida hotbed until recently.

It’s unrealistic for U.S. forces to wait for car bombs and suicide vests to disappear before beginning to wind down, he said.

The only certainty of the puzzling 2008 race, in a party which usually closes ranks quickly around a favorite son, is that it will, eventually, produce a nominee.

At least four major Republican hopefuls can claim plausible paths through the thicket of nominating contests — Mike Huckabee, John McCain, Mitt Romney and Rudolph Giuliani.

But even candidates are loath to forecast the outcome.

“I’m asked how’s it going to come out?” said Romney, the former Massachusettes governor in Pella, Iowa on Saturday. “I can’t tell you exactly what’s going to happen.”

As six candidates took their closing messages to morning talk shows, Democrat Barack Obama acknowledged that the criticism directed at him might be taking a toll.

“That may have some effect but ultimately I’m putting my faith in the people of Iowa that they want something better,” Obama said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

What a difference public financing makes.

Romney has chosen to bypass the taxpayer-financed presidential campaign fund, a move that lets him use his wealth without limitation. If he has put more of his money in during the past three months, his campaign isn’t saying. The public won’t find out until Jan. 31, when Romney must submit campaign finance reports to the Federal Election Commission.

Edwards has been certified to get $8.8 million in public funds, and he plans to collect. The step not only restricts his spending, it also prohibits him from dipping into his personal wealth. Meanwhile, his campaign is getting more than $2 million in help from labor-backed independent groups.

When confronted with questions that might conflict with his message of the day or political record, the Republican candidate has shown a tendency to bob and weave or simply dismiss history. He has done so all year, providing an easy target for his opponents.

“If a person is dishonest in his approach to get the job, do you believe he will be honest in telling you the truth when he does get the job?” former minister and Romney opponent Mike Huckabee said Saturday.

This past week, Romney did it again over questions about whether he was planning to air negative ads – in particular on the subject of illegal immigration – against John McCain. The Arizona senator has been surging in New Hampshire, where Romney is angling for back-to-back victories after a hoped-for win in this week’s Iowa caucuses.

In a wide-ranging interview with The Associated Press, the former New York mayor touted his crime-fighting record even as he acknowledged taking too much credit for it at times. Giuliani also dismissed suggestions that his Republican presidential campaign is stalled.

“I think we are very relevant,” he said during a 15-minute interview

Giuliani’s rare and brief visit to Iowa came as he refocused his campaign message on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks – a shift brought by a slippage in national polls and an attempt to capitalize on turmoil in Pakistan. While he still leads in many states that hold primaries in late January and February, Giuliani is struggling for attention and support in early voting states that matter now, starting with Iowa on Thursday.

Pelosi called for an international investigation into the December 27 assassination of Bhutto, which Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s government has blamed on al Qaeda.

Bhutto’s party dismissed the government account, saying Musharraf’s administration, a close ally in President George W. Bush’s war against terrorism, was trying to cover up its failure to protect her.

But Democratic and Republican runners said the US administration should still be pressing Musharraf for tougher anti-terror action, and free elections, following last week’s assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto.

“I’m not calling for him to step down,” Democrat Hillary Clinton told ABC television, as Bhutto’s murder revived debate about candidates’ foreign-policy credentials just before Iowa kicks off the 2008 White House race on Thursday.

“We obviously congratulate the president on his election,” department spokesman Rob McInturff told AFP.

The slump worsened even more than most analysts expected, heightening fears that the country might be thrust into a recession.

New-home sales tumbled 9 percent in November from October to a seasonally adjusted annual sales pace of 647,000, the Commerce Department reported Friday. That was the worst sales pace since April 1995.

“It was ugly,” declared Richard Yamarone, economist at Argus Research. “It is the one sector of the economy that doesn’t show any signs of life. It doesn’t look like there is any resuscitation in store for housing over the next year,” he said.

Volume will probably be thin on Monday, when New Year’s Eve coincides with the final trading day of 2007. The market will be shut for New Year’s Day on Tuesday. But Wednesday, Thursday and Friday will be closely watched because the first five trading days tend to mirror the market’s performance over the course of the year.

“There will be cash flows that come in right at the beginning of the year that portfolio managers try to get deployed early,” said Fred Dickson, market strategist and director of retail research at D.A. Davidson & Co, in Lake Oswego, Oregon. “That may give us a lift, unless they decide to take their time and survey the overall economic landscape.”

Both companies have been asked to hand over documents by Britain’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO), which is probing possible breaches of the United Nations’ oil-for-food sanctions against dictator Saddam’s regime.

GSK and AstraZeneca denied any wrongdoing and said they were co-operating fully with the investigation.

“GSK does not believe that its employees or its agents in Iraq knowingly engaged in wrongdoing regarding the oil-for-food programme,” said a spokesman for the firm.

Ratan Tata, head of the tea-to-steel Tata conglomerate, will unveil the “People’s Car” January 10 at a New Delhi auto show that will carry a sticker price of 100,000 rupees, or 2,500 dollars, which some analysts say could revolutionise automobile costs worldwide.

And Tata, which has been on an aggressive overseas expansion drive, is also expected to win its reported two-billion-dollar bid for the British Land Rover and Jaguar brands in January — putting it in the unusual position of making two prestige cars as well as the world’s lowest-cost automobile.

But as scientists try to forecast how global warming might affect the nation’s most geographically diverse state, they envision a landscape that could look quite different by the end of this century, if not sooner.

Where celebrities, surfers and wannabes mingle on Malibu’s world-famous beaches, there may be only sea walls defending fading mansions from the encroaching Pacific. In Northern California, tourists could have to drive farther north or to the cool edge of the Pacific to find what is left of the region’s signature wine country.

Abandoned ski lifts might dangle above snowless trails more suitable for mountain biking even during much of the winter. In the deserts, Joshua trees that once extended their tangled, shaggy arms into the sky by the thousands may have all but disappeared.

Fatma Fathi Mohamed died in hospital in the Nile Delta city of Mansoura, three days after she was admitted to a smaller local hospital with a high temperature and difficulty breathing, it said in a statement carried by the state news agency MENA.

Her death was the 17th in Egypt since the deadly virus arrived in February 2006 and it was the 42nd case of bird flu reported among humans in the Arab world’s most populous country.