Weekend News Digest

The city’s police commissioner, O.P. Mathur, said that 30 people had been detained for questioning, but there was scant information about the Indian Mujahideen, the little known group that took credit for the bombings in western India.

“In the name of Allah the Indian Mujahideen strike again! Do whatever you can, within 5 minutes from now, feel the terror of Death!” said an e-mail from the group sent to several Indian television stations minutes before the blasts began.

The young men were ambushed when the attackers opened fire in Madain, about 14 miles southeast of Baghdad, as they were on their way to the shrine in the Baghdad neighborhood of Kazimiyah, a police officer said.

The slain men had begun their trek farther south in the Shiite town of Suwayrah, according to the officer, who is based in Baghdad and read the report about the attack. An official at the Baghdad hospital where the bodies were taken confirmed the killings, but both spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.

Over the years, McCain has consistently voiced his opposition to hiring quotas based on race. He has supported affirmative action in limited cases. For example, he voted to maintain a program that encourages the awarding of 10 percent of spending on highway construction to women and minorities.

McCain was asked specifically Sunday whether he supported an effort to get a referendum on the ballot in Arizona that would “do away with affirmative action.”

“Yes, I do,” said McCain in an interview broadcast Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”

So say Pentagon-backed scientists who have pored over the scales of Polypterus senegalus, also called the Senegal bichir or the dinosaur eel.

Long and skinny and of ancient heritage, the 40-centimetre (16-inch) predator has multiple layers of scales that first dissipate the energy of a strike, then protect against any penetration to the soft tissues below and finally limit any damage to the shield to the immediate area surrounding the assault.

The army general staff said in a statement on its website that all the planes had returned safely to their bases and that it was working to confirm “terrorist casualties.”

The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) uses north Iraq as a base from which to make attacks on Turkish territory. Turkey blames the PKK, which is fighting for an ethnic homeland in southeast Turkey, for the deaths of 40,000 people in the past 25 years.

The broader food outlook, however, is bleak.

Like tens of thousands of farmers, Ko Nyi Thaut labors from dawn to dusk preparing his flood-ravaged Irrawaddy delta land for a crop that should have been planted a month ago.

The pollution was among the worst seen in Beijing in the past month, despite traffic restrictions enacted a week ago that removed half of the city’s vehicles from roadways.

Visibility was a half mile in some places. During the opening ceremony of the Athletes’ Village on Sunday, the housing complex was invisible from the nearby main Olympic Green.

Party spokesman Khieu Kanharith told Reuters the one-time communist but now firmly free-market CPP was on course to win 80 of the 123 seats in parliament.

A member of the opposition Sam Rainsy Party (SRP) said early results suggested it was on course for at least 40 seats, although party chief Sam Rainsy, a French-educated former finance minister, put his projected tally much higher.

Q: Afghanistan is something you’ve spoken a lot about…Take us to the next level, why, as you’ve said, and how, we need to put more U.S. forces into Afghanistan . To the Soviets it became a quagmire. How do you avoid that? How do you measure success? If you could give us a little more detail about what you think you’d like to do.

A: I’m not here to lay out a comprehensive military strategy. That’s the job of our commanders on the ground. I can tell you what our strategic goals should be. They should be relatively modest. We shouldn’t want to take over the country. We should want to get out of there as quickly as we can and help the Afghans govern themselves and provide for their own security. Our critical goal should be to make sure that the Taliban and al Qaida are routed and that they cannot project threats against us from that region. And to do that I think we need more troops. I also think that we need to deal with the situation in Pakistan and the fact that terrorists are able to operate with relative freedom of movement there right now.

Nationally, the volunteer rate fell in 2007 for the second year in a row, to 26.2 percent, according to the Corporation for National and Community Service, which is releasing its report Sunday. It showed Miami with a volunteerism rate of 14.5 percent, replacing Las Vegas in last place among major metropolitan areas.

To be fair, the study found 620,000 volunteers were recruited in Miami last year, more than 60,000 over the previous year. And many local nonprofits say they have more volunteers than ever. But there’s no denying how far Miami lags behind other cities, particularly No. 1 Minneapolis-St. Paul, with a 39.3 percent rate.

The Miami woman’s story illustrates a debate about whether black American parents take enough responsibility for raising their children that has spilled into the U.S. presidential campaign through comments by civil rights leader Jesse Jackson and Democratic candidate Barack Obama.

It also sheds light on how complex factors including home foreclosures, lack of health insurance and high incarceration rates combine to put pressure on many inner-city families.

Nearly 800 people in several oil removal operations were busy containing the spill with booms and removing what they could from the water, as a limited number of vessels were being allowed through the affected area in southern Louisiana.

The Coast Guard had closed off a 100-mile (160-kilometer) stretch of the river, from the port of New Orleans down to the Gulf of Mexico, after the oil tanker Tintomara collided Wednesday with an American Commercial Lines barge that was being pushed by a tug boat.

“I think that Chairman Bernanke was handed a pretty tough hand and I think some of the decisions he’s made have been the right ones,” the presumptive Democratic nominee told Reuters in an interview on Saturday evening.

In a move that some criticized as a bailout, the Fed came to the rescue of investment bank Bear Stearns by helping to broker its takeover by J.P. Morgan Chase.

It was the first visit to Samoa by a US secretary of state in two decades.

Brigadier-General Ratu Epeli Nailatikau, Fiji’s interim foreign minister, attended the talks hosted by Samoan Prime Minister Tuilaepa Lupesoliai Sailele Malielegao, who is also foreign minister, a US official said.

“We need to improve their behavior,” McCain told ABC television when asked about his threat to exclude Russia from the Group of Eight if he wins the White House in November.

“His government — former president Putin, and now Prime Minister Putin — has taken his country down a path that I think is very harmful,” McCain said. “They’ve become an autocracy.”

Wall Street is about midway through second-quarter earnings season, and the overall results haven’t been as dreary as some analysts feared. About 61 percent of the Standard & Poor’s 500 index companies reporting results so far have surpassed projections, and 72 percent of them were able to top last year’s sales figures.

Expectations were low for the quarter and that helped some companies beat forecasts. But if you strip out the market’s problem child – the financial sector – S&P said companies are headed for a 10 percent growth rate from last year.

“While these increases have not for the most part been passed on at the retail level, it is inevitable that they will be at some point,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “Car dealers and other retailers cannot continue to absorb rising costs at the wholesale level and not pass some of these increases on to consumers.”

Sherwin Williams Co. on July 17 announced its third price increase in eight months. The company has been having “difficult discussions” with retailers, Chris Connor, chairman and CEO, said on its quarterly conference call.

His audience is captivated by the show, but the Blackwater founder and CEO focuses on a seemingly minor detail: the parachutes.

“They’re made out of the same stuff sandbags are made out of,” Prince tells the group in hurried, staccato sentences. “They are truly disposable. The normal parachutes you put a human out under are much more expensive. With these, you can use them, repack them. It’s very cheap.”

When federal regulators catch a drug company peddling prescription medications for an unapproved use, it takes them an average of seven months to issue a warning, according to a draft report by congressional investigators. It typically takes four more months for the company to fix the problem. During that time, a lot prescriptions can be written.

The report from the Government Accountability Office delves into a gray area of medical practice and federal oversight: the use of medications to treat conditions other than the ones the drugs were approved for, a practice known as “off-label” prescribing.

Welcome to the professional life in this slice of rural southwest Virginia.

Like many before him, the 42-year-old Brown left this region of rolling hills and verdant valleys after high school because he saw no future outside farming and mining.

Europe’s trade chief Peter Mandelson underlined the precarious situation, saying the road to a deal was strewn with “potholes” that threaten to derail the delicate process as it looked set to drag on into a second week.

“There is no guarantee that the fragile package that began to emerge on Friday night will survive,” he wrote in his daily blog on the trade talks, as ministers prepared to reconvene in a bid to fine-tune the World Trade Organization’s latest proposals.

Peter Chin, minister of plantation industries and commodities, told the Sunday Star newspaper the government wanted to make sure that the almost 25-percent drop in prices in recent months did not become a long-term trend.

“The ministry expects palm oil to contribute up to 60 billion ringgit (19 billion dollars) in revenue to the country’s coffers this year, but the substantial drop in the global price may upset this target,” he said.

Finnish paper makers Stora Enso and UPM-Kymmene, which rank among the leaders worldwide, both reported disastrous second quarter results this week as due to continued shrinking demand and sky-rocketing costs linked in part to neighbouring Russia’s ever climbing tax on wood exports.

With their quarterly reports bathed in red as a backdrop, the companies that have already laid off nearly 10,000 people in Finland since 2004 hinted another round of job-cuts and factory closures could be on the horizon.

British billionaire Sir Richard Branson and American aerospace designer Burt Rutan are due Monday to show off their mothership, which is designed to air launch a passenger-toting spaceship out of the atmosphere.

The rollout – a year after a deadly accident at Rutan’s test site – marks the start of a rigorous flight test program that space tourism advocates hope will climax with the first suborbital joy rides by the end of the decade. More than 250 wannabe astronauts have paid $200,000 or put down deposits for a chance to float weightless for a mere five minutes.

The arm picked up 3 cubic centimeters of material Friday night and lifted it over an oven designed to heat samples for analysis, mission officials said Saturday. The arm tilted its scoop, ran a tool motor to try to sprinkle the sample into the oven, and finally inverted the scoop directly over the oven’s open doors.

But the science instrument, called the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, detected that not enough material fell inside and so the oven doors did not close.

In the latest issue of Nature, the researchers described how they zeroed in on an enzyme that flu viruses need to replicate, and managed to capture a snapshot of the enzyme.

Enzymes in influenza viruses are made up of three proteins bound tightly together.

“Scientists have been trying to study its (enzyme’s) structure and no one has yet got a detailed picture of the whole thing,” said Yokohama City University’s Jeremy Tame, a member of the research team.

The 37-million-strong nation’s electricity supply capacity is dangerously close to its limit at 1,080 megawatts when peak hour demand almost reaches 1,000 megawatts.

With a fast-growing economy and demography, demand is climbing by eight percent each year and the country’s hydro-electric capacity is peaking and being strained by chronic droughts and the impact of deforestation on rivers.

Experts say too many of these majestic fish prized since Greek and Roman times — each one of which can weigh up to 900 kilos (nearly 2,000 pounds) — are ending up on the platters of restaurants around the globe.

“Japanese consumption was already a threat to bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean. The European craze for sushi bars has added to that,” said Roberto Mielgo Bregazzi, a Spanish expert and author of several reports for Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund.

Worms calculate how much the strength of different tastes is changing – equivalent to the process of taking a derivative in calculus – to figure out if they are on their way toward food or should change direction and look elsewhere, says University of Oregon biologist Shawn Lockery, who thinks humans and other animals do the same thing.

This research could one day benefit some of the more than 200,000 Americans who detect a foul smell or taste that is actually pleasant or have a weakened or depleted ability to appreciate the scent of a lilac or savor the flavor of a juicy burger.

The phenomenon is not understood by scientists, but a researcher at the Bell Museum in Minneapolis, along with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, is spearheading a program to turn off the lights to protect migrating birds.

Participants in the programs, including the owners, tenants, and management companies from 32 buildings Minneapolis, St. Paul, Bloomington, and Rochester, will dim their building lights during the spring and fall bird migration seasons. Similar programs are in place in Toronto, New York, and Chicago.