Weekend News Digest

The growing interest among merchant fleets to hire their own firepower is encouraged by the U.S. Navy and represents a new and potential lucrative market for security firms scaling back operations in Iraq.

But some maritime organizations told The Associated Press that armed guards may increase the danger to ships’ crews or that overzealous contractors might accidentally fire on fishermen.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, for one, wants the next president to think about what nuclear middle-age and decline means for national security.

Gates joins a growing debate about the reliability and future credibility of the American arsenal with his first extensive speech on nuclear arms Tuesday. The debate is attracting increasing attention inside the Pentagon even as the military is preoccupied with fighting insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. The unconventional tools of war there include covert commandos, but not nuclear weapons.

In Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, the government said it would deposit $2.7 billion into the Saudi Credit Bank to help lower-income citizens deal with financial difficulties, the country’s Al-Ektisadiya newspaper reported.

The two moves came just a day after finance ministers from the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council held an emergency meeting to echo assurances, which they have repeatedly voiced over the past few weeks, that the region’s banks face no liquidity crisis.

Decades worth of household trash, construction waste and assorted refuse buried in the landfill is providing electricity to thousands of homes.

“It’s like you’re buying back your own garbage, but in a different form,” said Tom Marturano, director of solid waste and natural resources for the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission, which owns and operates the 1-E site.

McCain strategist Mark Salter said “about a third of it was returned immediately” because they were the wrong size, or for other reasons.

Salter’s explanation was the first time the campaign has said any of the items had been returned.

An unknown number of soldiers, rebels and civilians were killed in the renewed fighting in North Kivu province, according to civilians who said the onslaught began around 2 a.m.

Government troops raced down the road north from the provincial capital of Goma to reinforce a counterattack Sunday morning. One tank careened into a group of fleeing civilians and killed three teenage boys, civilians said.

The U.S. Federal Reserve is expected to cut rates sharply following share selloffs and currency collapses in developed economies and the emerging markets of Asia and Latin America.

Advance third-quarter U.S. economic growth data due on Thursday is expected to show a 0.5 percent contraction in gross domestic product after 2.8 percent growth the previous quarter.

The consensus among Fed watchers is for a half-point cut in overnight rates to 1 percent, which would be the lowest level since June 2004. The central bank is also expected to signal a willingness to lower borrowing costs again if needed — especially with inflation pressures fading fast.

“The economic and financial stability backdrop could not be more challenging,” said Robert DiClemente, chief U.S. economist at Citigroup. “The deteriorating economic outlook suggests still greater scope for action.”

While the board stopped short of disciplinary action, its leader, Shakour Shaalan, acknowledged there was concern among female staff about Strauss-Kahn’s behavior.

Shaalan said he personally warned Strauss-Kahn, a former French finance minister, against further improper conduct. He said the board had accepted Strauss-Kahn’s apology.

“We expect the result of the election will be such that we can form a government together with the centre-right and liberal parties,” Conservative leader Andrius Kubilius told reporters.

Recent polls have suggested that the Conservatives could secure up to 50 seats, double what they held in the 141-seat parliament elected four years ago.

“If the fall in markets has its origins in the fear of an international recession, then the coming week will be very bad,” analyst Carl Weinberg, of High Frequency Economics, said in New York

“The economic calendar is full of indicators that will be uniformly atrocious.”

After a week of growing economic gloom and plunging stock markets, Asian and European leaders meeting in Beijing promised wide-ranging reforms while UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon also called for quick change.

“Leaders pledged to undertake effective and comprehensive reform of the international monetary and financial systems,” the 40-member Asia Europe Meeting (ASEM) said in a statement released late Friday.

“We are tired of the policy of growth at any price, and of this greed-driven financial world that has destroyed real values,” Carlo Petrini told AFP at the movement’s biennial gathering in Turin, northern Italy.

“This consumer society creates waste, people have been reduced to the role of consumers. We need to slow down,” he said.

A battle re-enactment last month pushed realism to the limits: a retired New York City police officer portraying a Union soldier for a documentary film was shot in the shoulder, possibly by a Confederate re-enactor.

The shooting sent the 73-year-old to the hospital and left the Isle of Wight Sheriff’s Office in rural southeastern Virginia with a Civil War-style CSI case. Investigators used film to piece together what happened and have narrowed a suspect to one re-enactor.

Now a California company is bringing the iconic aircraft back to the United States, with plans to offer aerial tours of the San Francisco Bay area in a newly built zeppelin. It’s one of just three in the world – the others are in Germany and Japan.

Airship Ventures Inc.’s zeppelin arrived in the Bay Area on Saturday, passing over the Golden Gate Bridge en route to its new home at Moffett Field, a former naval air station in Mountain View, about 40 miles south of San Francisco.

It is disappearing at alarming rates as thieves feed a local construction boom.

Caribbean round grains, favored in creating smooth surfaces for plastering and finishing, are being hauled away by the truckload late at night. On some islands not much bigger than Manhattan, towns and ecologically sensitive areas are now exposed to tidal surges and rough seas.

He skips meals to make ends meet. A bachelor, he lives in a tiny apartment in Tokyo, sharing a kitchen, toilet and shower with nine neighbors. He doesn’t have health insurance because he can’t afford the premiums.

The 29-year-old laborer is one of a burgeoning class in Japan – the working poor. The number of Japanese earning less than $19,610 a year surged 40 percent from 2002 to 2006, the latest data available, the government says. They now number more than 10 million.

Mukherjee was given reassurances by the chief minister of the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, whose ruling party had threatened to pull out in protest against the Sri Lankan government’s intensifying offensive against the LTTE.

“The Chief Minister assured me that he will not precipitate any crisis in the UPA government,” Mukherjee said.

Liu Guijin, the special Chinese envoy on Darfur, said he held talks in the United States, Britain and France to discuss the charges brought by the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo.

He accused Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir in July of masterminding a campaign of genocide in Sudan’s Darfur.

Mistrust runs deep among residents of this ethnically and religiously diverse city, which U.S. forces see as one of their last battlegrounds against al Qaeda militants as violence drops sharply across most of Iraq.

Near a giant U.S. military base, American humvees rumble down “Baghdad Highway.” The thoroughfare is lined by buildings flattened into heaps of cinderblock or pockmarked by mortar blasts and bullets.

“Because of lack of response from Chinese we have to be realistic, there is no hope,” Tenzin Taklha told Reuters.

“His holiness does not want to become a hindrance to the Tibetan issue, and therefore has sent a letter to the parliament regarding what options he has.”

The meeting, dubbed a Pakistan-Afghanistan “Jirgagai,” or mini-jirga, is a follow-up to a grand assembly in Kabul last year in which delegates called for talks with Taliban militants to end bloodshed in both countries.

A jirga is a consultative system the proudly independent Pashtuns have used for more than 1,000 years to settle affairs of the nation or rally behind a cause.

The incumbent mayor for Sao Paulo, Latin America’s most economically vital city, looked likely to win the vote against a rival put forward by Lula, according to polls.

Gilberto Kassab, a centre-right politician from the Democrats party, has a comfortable eight-point lead over Marta Suplicy, a former tourism minister in Lula’s leftwing government, a poll published by the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper Thursday showed.

In a demonstration organised by Walter Veltroni’s centre-left Democratic party (PD), left-wing activists marched to the Circus Maximus under a sea of red and green opposition flags proclaiming that “another Italy is possible.”

Veltroni, whose PD is riding low in the polls after its defeat to Berlusconi’s new conservative People of Freedom (PDL) in May, called the protest the biggest in recent years.

The Iraqi Islamic Party of Vice President Tariq al Hashimi suspended all “official communication” with American military and civilian officials in Iraq Saturday until it receives an “explanation . . . official apology . . . and a vow to stop the campaign of harassment against the party.”

The statement followed an incident Friday in which U.S. and Iraqi forces raided a home six miles west of Fallujah in predominantly Sunni Anbar province, detained one man and killed another. The Islamic Party accused the American military of detaining five innocent members of the party and killing Sajed Yasseen Hameed , 44, “in his bed in cold blood.”

But illegal returns are a real-life phenomenon and are no laughing matter in 11 states that encourage recycling by adding a refundable deposit to beer, soft drink and other beverage containers.

Michigan would have at least $10 million a year more for environmental cleanup if not for people redeeming containers that were bought in other states. California could be spending more on recycling programs and a conservation corps for at-risk young adults.

Travis Lacey left investment bank Jeffries & Co. and Wall Street behind in September to work for Baird in Chicago. He also left behind the nagging sense of worry that had plagued him since his company had started announcing layoffs earlier in the year.

“Anyone in that environment, you never know what’s going to happen,” Lacey said. “There are a lot of good bankers that unfortunately are at the wrong place at the wrong time, especially in New York.”

Ten days before the vote on Proposition 8, campaign finance records show that total contributions for and against the measure have surpassed $60 million, according to an analysis by The Associated Press.

That would be a record nationally for a ballot initiative based on a social rather than economic issue, campaign finance experts say. It also eclipses the combined total of $33 million spent in the 24 states where similar measures have been put to voters since 2004.

“Asians don’t like confrontation or being adversarial, but that’s politics,” says Pfeiffer, a 41-year-old lawyer who was 6 when his parents brought him to America from Vietnam.

“The more we’re raised and bred here, the less likely we are to be passive. So much of our culture, it’s a very, very obedient culture. … You don’t argue with the government. You don’t argue with Big Brother. There’s the assumption that you give up all your individual rights for the whole. Which is astounding to me, because I’m American now.”

Merck and Co. hopes the findings will open a new market for its drug Isentress, the first drug on the market in a new class called integrase inhibitors.

Isentress worked slightly better than an older HIV drug called efavirenz in suppressing levels of the AIDS virus, the researchers told a meeting of the American Society of Microbiology and the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

McCain, who has been trailing Democratic rival Obama by more than 10 points in some national and state polls, told NBC television’s Meet the Press that his campaign was “doing fine.”

“Those polls have consistently shown me much farther behind then we actually are,” McCain said. “We’re doing fine.

At least seven in 10 Americans older than 45 expect they will have to continue to work beyond 65, the usual age of retirement, a study by the AARP, a huge lobbying and interest group for people over 50, showed Monday.

Most of them said they would have to continue to work because they will need the money or will need to support members of their family.

In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” McCain was asked about a suggestion by a Michigan economist that the government provide $15 billion cash to help the U.S. auto industry survive the financial crisis.

McCain noted the U.S. Congress recently authorized $25 billion in low-interest loans to help the industry retool to produce more fuel-efficient vehicles.

The new president will take the reins of a limping superpower facing deep doubts overseas about the limits of its strength, and sharply diminished US standing even among Washington’s closest friends, recent studies find.

“America’s moral leadership and decision-making competence will continue to be questioned at home and abroad, despite the arrival of new leadership in Washington,” a Georgetown University working group said earlier this year.

Still reeling from 2006 mid-term polls which saw Democrats wrench away their control of the Senate and the House of Representatives, Republicans look set to take further losses in a toxic political climate.

Reverberations from the economic crisis look set to help Democrats widen majorities in both chambers, and the party is envisioning years of dominance in Congress.

If Republican John McCain can pull off an upset on November 4, judging by his advisors, his own cabinet is likely to be staffed with hawkish figures on foreign affairs and instinctive deregulators in economic policy.

Obama’s advisors include such luminaries of the Clinton White House as Larry Summers, who is touted by some pundits as staging a possible return to the Treasury as the United States grapples with its worst economic crisis in years.

Only the second person to face trial in Guantanamo since the facility opened in 2002 for hundreds of war-on-terror detainees, Bahlul, 39, will face terrorism and murder charges under the special military tribunal system set up for Guantanamo detainees.

In the first test of the “war crimes” tribunals — the first time they have been used since World War II — military jurors in August found Osama bin Laden’s former driver Salim Hamdan guilty of providing material support to terrorism but rejected stronger terrorist conspiracy charges the government lodged.

Created in 2006 by the US Congress, the commissions have been put to the test just once, in the trial of Salim Hamdan, the former driver of Al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden.

The result of that trial, concluded in August, was mixed: defense lawyers say he was denied basic rights under the special military commissions legislation, and the military jury found him guilty of supporting terrorism.

“Other nations seek a path to NATO membership, and they have the full support of the United States government,” Bush said as he signed NATO accession protocols for Albania and Croatia, bringing them one step closer to membership.

“Today I reiterate America’s commitment to the NATO aspirations of Ukraine, Georgia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, and Montenegro,” said the US president, who has made the alliance’s eastward expansion a foreign policy priority.

Earlier in the year, with several months to go before the US election November 4, neither candidate had unveiled many details of their socio-economic plans to prospective voters.

But as steadily souring US economic trends — property foreclosures have skyrocketed and unemployment rose to 6.1 percent in September, heightening fears of recession — snowballed into a full-bore global crisis, the rivals are now locked in a vicious battle over who whose economic plan would do better for the US public.

The report by the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion, posted on the website of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), examines a number of mobile and web technologies and their potential uses by militants.

The posting of the report on the FAS site was reported Friday by Wired magazine contributing editor Noah Shachtman on his national security blog “Danger Room” at wired.com.

A series of recent surveys have suggested Palin’s presence on the ticket is hurting McCain’s chances in the November 4 election, at a time when Democratic rival Barack Obama has surged clear in most key polls.

The inquests into what has gone wrong with McCain’s campaign appear to have already begun, according to reports, with Palin’s camp blaming the Arizona senator’s senior advisers for mismanaging her contribution.

The US had pledged 629 million dollars last December during a conference in New Delhi that raised 2.7 billion dollars to fight against the avian flu, which the UN says could cause a global crisis.

“The United States is pledging an additional 320 million dollars in international assistance for avian and pandemic influenza,” said Paula Dobriansky, US Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs told the conference in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.