Weekend News Digest

“I pledge that tomorrow night, and if necessary throughout our convention, we will act as Americans and not as Republicans because America needs us now,” McCain said.

McCain, his wife Cindy, and his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, toured the emergency management center in Mississippi, a state that could be hit hard by the approaching hurricane.

The crisis could give a jolt of energy to other breakaway regions, especially those with links to Russia, or embolden China to pursue a tougher line in Tibet and Taiwan in the absence of tough Western measures.

“Any country that has a potential separatist movement will view the events in Georgia through its own unique prism,” Richard Holbrooke, the former U.S. envoy who mediated peace in Bosnia in the mid-1990s, told The Associated Press.

Bush’s January 2007 decision to send an extra 20,000 troops to Iraq was criticized for deepening the unpopular conflict but has since been credited with sharply reducing the violence.

Citing secret memorandums and interviews with a host of current and former officials, the Times said Bush’s decision to increase troops for a counterinsurgency in Iraq came after months of tumultuous debate within the administration.

Samak Sundaravej is still looking for a peaceful way out of the crisis that erupted Tuesday when thousands of demonstrators rampaged through Bangkok’s historic district and invaded his offices, demanding that he resign.

The premier called the emergency parliament session after police briefly clashed with rowdy supporters of the so-called People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) on Friday, while rallies spread outside the capital to key tourist spots.

The researchers found that the great Laurentide icesheet which smothered much of North America during the last Ice Age melted far swifter than realised, dumping billions of tonnes of water into the ocean.

The discovery raises worrying questions about the future stability of Greenland’s icesheet, for the Laurentide melt occurred thanks to a spurt of warming that could be mirrored once more by the end of this century, they said.

Some 8,147 square kilometers (3,145 square miles) of forest were destroyed between August 2007 and August 2008 – a 69 percent increase over the 4,820 square kilometers (1,861 square miles) felled in the previous 12 months, according to the National Institute for Space Research, or INPE, which monitors destruction of the Amazon.

“We’re not content,” Environment Minister Carlos Minc said. “Deforestation has to fall more and the conditions for sustainable development have to improve.”

Police arrested Ingushetiya.ru owner Magomed Yevloyev on Sunday, taking him off a plane that had just landed in Ingushetia province near Chechnya, said the site’s deputy editor, Ruslan Khautiyev.

Police whisked Yevloyev away in a car and later dumped him on the road with a gunshot wound in the head, Khautiyev said. He said Yevloyev died in a hospital shortly afterward.

“See that?” she said. “That’s where the rainwater comes in from the roof.”

Hui is one of a growing band of people across the country turning to collected rainwater for non-drinking uses like watering plants, flushing toilets and washing laundry.

Some $500 million in investment and production tax credits will expire Dec. 31 unless Congress renews them. Without that help, solar and wind power companies say they will reverse planned expansions and, in many cases, cut payrolls and capital investment.

Schott Solar has visions of quadrupling its operation in Albuquerque, N.M., to reach 1,500 jobs and $500 million in investment. But the investment tax credit, company spokesman Brian Lynch said, is what makes solar power cost-competitive. Without it, expansion plans must be reconsidered.

A fleet of tiny, specially equipped unmanned aerial vehicles, launched from an island in the East China Sea 700 or so miles downwind of Beijing , are flying through the projected paths of the pollution taking chemical samples and recording temperatures, humidity levels and sunlight intensity in the clouds of smog.

On the summit of 9,000-foot Mt. Bachelor in central Oregon and near sea level at Cheeka Peak on Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula , monitors track the pollution as it arrives in America.

As the economy collapses, the laboratory at a main 1,000-bed hospital has virtually shut down. X-ray materials, injectable antibiotics and anticonvulsants have run out.

Emergency resuscitation equipment is out of action. Patients needing casts for broken bones need to bring their own plaster. In a country with one of the world’s worst AIDS epidemics, medical staff lack protective gloves.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Sunday said he would press fellow European Union leaders to review ties with Russia in retaliation for Moscow’s decision to sent troops to Georgia and recognize two Georgian breakaway regions.

But underlining the differences in approach inside the 27-member EU, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier took a softer line, saying isolating Russia would harm the interests of the bloc.

Negotiating teams from President Robert Mugabe’s ruling ZANU-PF and both factions of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) returned home after holding separate talks with South African President Thabo Mbeki on Friday.

The South African president’s spokesman told AFP on Sunday that the talks would continue, but silence from the parties about the way forward pointed to tensions.

After a briefing Sunday from Federal Emergency Management Agency officials, Bush urged residents to heed local officials’ order to evacuate.

“Do not put yourselves in harm’s way or make rescue workers take unnecessary risks,” he said. “And know that the American people stand with you. We’ll face this emergency together.”

McCain’s wife Cindy meanwhile said Palin credentials were bolstered by the fact that she hails from Alaska, the closest part of the US continent to Russia, to which her husband has adopted a tough political line.

“She’s got the right judgement. She doesn’t think like Senator Obama does that Iran is a minor irritant,” McCain said an interview with Fox News Sunday on the eve of the Republican National Convention here.

“She’s been a commander in chief of the Alaska national guard,” said McCain, adding Palin’s son, who is in the US Army, is shortly to be deployed to Iraq.

No sitting US president or vice president has ever paid respects to the dead of the US nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, a sore point for many survivors in Japan.

Pelosi will travel to Hiroshima for a meeting of parliament speakers from the Group of Eight major industrial nations. Pelosi, who is second in line to the presidency, is a member of Barack Obama’s Democratic Party.

The convention is being radically curtailed. Vice President Cheney will also stay in Washington, officials said. A third speaker scheduled for Monday, California Gov. Arnold Schwarenegger, will remain in the state to deal with a budget crisis.

The cancellations are a crushing disappointment for organizers who have spent more than a year planning the convention, and is a huge setback to a party that had hoped to use the convention to lift the spirits of supporters and reach out to swing voters.

In a phone conversation Friday night, Walt Monegan , who was Alaska’s top cop until Palin fired him July 11 , told The Anchorage Daily News that the governor also had e-mailed him two or three times about the trooper, Mike Wooten , though the e-mails didn’t mention Wooten by name.

What role Palin played in seeking her ex-brother-in-law’s dismissal is the governor’s first brush with scandal in a political career that has been premised on reforming Alaska’s corruption-plagued Republican party and raises questions not only about her willingness to use her office to further a personal agenda but also about her administrative abilities.

Rarely seen on the stump is the “Happy Warrior” of eight years ago, the McCain who once likened battling members of his own party to “Star Wars” hero Luke Skywalker trying to escape the Death Star .

His chummy, free-wheeling bull sessions with reporters aboard his “Straight Talk Express” bus – a key to his victory in the 2000 New Hampshire primary – are now carefully controlled, cautious exchanges, a consequence of YouTube’s 24/7 real-time risk to expose anything that sounds like a gaffe.

The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta said in an e-mail statement that the near-simultaneous battles came in the three main oil producing states of southern Nigeria, leaving 29 dead and others unaccounted for after they jumped from their military boats.

The group reported that six of its own fighters were also killed in the clashes, which they say they launched as reprisals for attacks they allege the military carried out on civilians.

The union has been negotiating with the company since April on a contract that would cover more than 14,000 workers and tens of thousands of retirees. The current contract expires Monday, and rank-and-file had given union leaders the authority to launch a nationwide strike if contract negotiations had failed.

While both sides declined to publicly discuss details of the contract, the agreement headed to members provides a lump sum payment of $6,000 following ratification, plus a $1 hourly increase in the first year and 4 percent increases in each of the following three years.

“When people don’t have much money, they cut on big stuff and buy things that make their lives a little bit better, like consumer electronics,” TomTom (TOM2.AS) co-founder Corinne Vigreux said.

Vigreux said she expected the satellite navigation device company to be largely unaffected by the slowing economy in Europe and the United States, but retailers were being “very careful” on inventory levels in the run-up to Christmas.

Moscow has been knocking at the door of the Geneva-based body since 1993, just two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and during the first flush of the country’s embrace with capitalism.

Now it is the only major world trading power outside the bloc and has seen its former Soviet satellites such as Georgia and Ukraine steal a march and join the organisation in 2000 and 2008, respectively.

According to a study by the Bulgarian Properties real estate agency, which works exclusively with foreign clients, holiday property sales in Black Sea and mountain resorts dropped 40 percent in the first half of 2008 compared to 2007.

“The withdrawal of British and Irish buyers from the Bulgarian market was prompted by the financial crisis in their countries but also by the bad infrastructure and the excess of concrete here,” said Dobromir Ganev of the Property Association in Varna on the Black Sea.

The deadly disease sylvatic plague was discovered in May in a huge prairie dog town in the Conata Basin. The black-tailed prairie dog is the main prey of ferrets, and the disease quickly killed up to a third of the area’s 290 ferrets along with prairie dogs.

The disease stopped spreading with the arrival of summer’s hot, dry weather, but it poses a serious threat to efforts to establish stable populations of one of the nation’s rarest mammals, said Scott Larson of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Pierre.

In this region in Afiaso in the country’s south, their efforts have focused on conserving the nearby Kakum National Park.

“We used to cut down many trees for agricultural use, which brought us a lot of hardship including windstorms, decreased rainfall and increased solar intensity,” said Nana Opare Ababio III, the traditional chief of a 620-member village.

On Monday, a state of emergency was declared in the central municipality of Panagyurishte, after already three weeks of shortages.

Major breaks in the main pipe channelling water uphill from the Maritza river, over 40 kilometres (25 miles) away, had sent thick rusty water, if any, running from the taps.

A new approach could save lives by getting certain groups of people, such as tourists and the elderly, out first.

Waiting too long to evacuate people can have disastrous effects, as seen in 2005 with Hurricane Katrina. On the other hand, ordering too many precautionary evacuations can lead to one of hurricane official’s worst fears: complacency the next time around.