Weekend News Digest

But as the anniversary approaches of the Jan. 1, 1999, arrival of the euro, economists say the new currency is finally fulfilling its promise as a way to lower borrowing costs, ease trade and tourism, boost growth and strengthen the European community.

And doing it amid a global financial crisis that, for the moment, underlines the safety in numbers that comes from joining one, big currency.

The Marriott building was badly damaged by the September blast – blamed on a Pakistani militant group accused of killing U.S journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002 – but renovations, a security overhaul and the addition of a giant bombproof wall meant the hotel was ready to welcome guests again, the owner said.

“We have expressed our resolve that we will not bow before the enemies of Pakistan,” said owner Saddaruddin Hashwani.

“Herman Rosenblat and his wife are the most gentle, loving, beautiful people,” literary agent Andrea Hurst said Sunday, anguishing over why she, and so many others, were taken by Rosenblat’s story of love born on opposite sides of a barbed-wire fence at a concentration camp.

“I question why I never questioned it. I believed it; it was an incredible, hope-filled story.”

The fierce competition among them, immortalized in the 1928 play “The Front Page,” even turned bloody at times, and that drive to outdo one another led to 35 Pulitzer Prizes, journalism’s highest honor.

Today, only two major dailies remain in this city of 3 million, and both are in serious trouble from declining circulation, plummeting ad revenue and a new kind of competition that threatens to make newsprint itself obsolete.

Nana Akufo-Addo of the ruling party faced opposition candidate John Atta Mills, whose campaign maintains that the country’s economic growth has not been felt in people’s wallets.

“On the whole, the election has been peaceful, with just some queues at some of the polling stations too long and too slow,” said Kwesi Jonah, a scholar-in-residence at the Institute of Democratic Governance, an independent thinktank.

But the group said it would not block lawmakers from entering Parliament on Monday, easing fears that the country was in for a repeat of the mass demonstrations that paralyzed the government for months and culminated in an eight-day seizure of the capital’s airports by yellow-clad protesters.

This time, it was Thaksin loyalists instead of his opponents who took to the streets.

The commemoration came amid heightened tensions with India over the Mumbai terror attacks and a Pakistani troop buildup along their shared border, though Pakistan’s leaders used the occasion to call for peace.

“We don’t want to fight, we don’t want to have war, we don’t want to have aggression with our neighbors,” Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani said in a televised speech.

Now, because of the recession, the plug is being pulled on 80-year-old, money-losing Shands AGH. Next fall, its eight-hospital not-for-profit parent company will shut the 220-bed hospital and shift staff and patients to a newer, bigger teaching hospital nearby as part of an effort to save $65 million over three years across the system.

Like many U.S. hospitals, Shands is being squeezed by tight credit, higher borrowing costs, investment losses and a jump in patients – many recently unemployed or otherwise underinsured – not paying their bills.

Privately, his advisers say that’s close to true – he’s spending more time on the state’s severe economic woes than on the Senate selection.

Still, while the Democratic governor has said he won’t pick a replacement until after Clinton is confirmed, his time also is taken up talking to top Democrats in New York and Washington about the potential replacements who include Caroline Kennedy.

The public punishment was a clear sign to villagers that the Taliban are now in charge. And the province they took over lies just 30 miles from the Afghan capital of Kabul, right on the main highway.

The Taliban has long operated its own shadow government in the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan, but its power is now spreading north to the doorstep of Kabul, according to Associated Press interviews with a dozen government officials, analysts, Taliban commanders and Afghan villagers. More than seven years after the U.S.-led invasion, the Islamic militia is attempting – at least in name – to reconstitute the government by which it ruled Afghanistan in the late 1990s.

Valuables like these are in for a closer look as 44 states cope with deficits.

Like families pawning the silver to get through a tight spot, states such as Minnesota, New York, Massachusetts and Illinois are thinking of selling or leasing toll roads, parks, lotteries and other assets to raise desperately needed cash.

The video shows an SUV slowly weaving through sand bag barriers at a military checkpoint just as a line of school children, most wearing white caps, comes into view. They walk along a pathway between the street and a wall, several of them pausing for a few seconds in a group before moving forward again. The vehicle moves toward the security camera while the children walk in the opposite direction, nearly passing the SUV when the footage ends in a fiery blast.

Photos of the bombing’s aftermath showed bloodied text books lying on the ground beside small pairs of shoes. Afghan officials said the kids were attending a final day of class for the year to find out whether they would move up to the next grade.

The attacks included one in the Iraqi capital – the first major attack in more than a week – that killed at least 22 people and injured 54.

In other violence, a suspected al-Qaida in Iraq fugitive was killed in a gunbattle with police in the western city of Ramadi, police said. He was one of four suspected insurgents who escaped during a jailbreak and ensuing riot at a Ramadi police station on Friday that left six policemen and seven insurgents dead.

These days, it seems as if everybody’s taking the plunge, and that’s threatening to saturate the fundraising field.

Cold-water charity events have even spread as far as Hawaii, where volunteers last fall plunged into a pool filled with iced-down water to raise money for Special Olympics Hawaii.

Commercial fishermen in California, Oregon and Washington are struggling to stay afloat financially. They say the downturn could force fishermen who depend heavily on crab and salmon to leave the shrinking ranks of the region’s fishing fleet.

“With this crab season being slim at best, it’s going to be pretty hard to make it through to the next one,” said 58-year-old Duncan MacLean, a commercial fisherman since 1972. “I would suspect there are going to be lots of people falling by the wayside.”

A growing number of cash-strapped states are attacking bulky, frustrating and time-consuming bureaucracies with a Japanese weapon: the notion of kaizen, or continuous improvement.

“It has taken off like wildfire around the country,” said Teresa Hay McMahon, performance results director in Iowa, where kaizen was first used in state government about five years ago.

Brown, who frequently uses the comparison of the Second World war to describe the current global financial crisis, will tell Britons they have the strength of resolve to tackle a recession.

“Today the issues may be different, more complex, more global. And yet the qualities we need to meet them the British people have demonstrated in abundance before,” Brown says in excerpts of the speech released by his office on Sunday.

Aziz, a former deputy prime minister, and Ali Hassan al-Majeed, dubbed ‘Chemical Ali’ for his role in gassing Saddam’s enemies, were in a Baghdad court charged with quashing political parties under Saddam’s Baath party government.

Majeed has already been sentenced twice to death and is being tried on separate charges over a 1988 gas attack that killed 5,000 of Iraq’s minority Kurds. Disputes within Maliki’s government have so far stalled Majeed’s execution.

The world’s official timekeepers have added a “leap second” to the last day of the year on Wednesday, to help match clocks to the Earth’s slowing spin on its axis, which takes place at ever-changing rates affected by tides and other factors.

The U.S. Naval Observatory, keeper of the Pentagon’s master clock, said it would add the extra second on Wednesday in coordination with the world’s atomic clocks at 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC.

The Georgian-born Stalin is in third place in the poll of most popular Russians run by Rossiya state television channel and which will close on Sunday night with a final vote.

Millions of Soviet citizens perished from famine during forced collectivization, were executed as “enemies of the people” or died in Gulag hard labor camps during Stalin’s rule which lasted for almost 30 years until his death in 1953.

About 75 people became the first riders of the 20-mile (32-km) system that snakes through a sprawling desert metropolitan area that includes the cities of Tempe and Mesa.

Planners project building 30 additional miles of light-rail lines by 2025, but it has yet to be determined if the area’s love of cars will trump trains.

Bangladeshi hopes are high that the vote for the country’s ninth parliament will be credible and put in place a stable civilian government that can attract much-needed aid and investment to the impoverished country of more than 140 million.

But whether the results will be accepted remains a worry due to past post-election experiences and the accusations the two main contenders, former prime ministers Sheikh Hasina and Begum Khaleda Zia, have hurled at one another.

An aid official speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity confirmed Friday’s massacre, saying the killings took place in a Catholic church in the Doruma area, around 40 kilometres (25 miles) from the Sudanese border.

“There are body parts everywhere. Inside the church, the entrance and in the church compound,” the aid official said.

Cash-strapped General Motors and Chrysler managed to secure a last-minute lifeline of up to 17.4 billion dollars in government-backed loans after weeks of wrangling in Washington.

But analysts warned it could be a just temporary reprieve amid a perfect storm of a global credit crisis, rapidly falling demand for vehicles and a global economic slump.

Instead of awaiting the traditional champagne toasts for New Year, Russian and Ukrainian gas executives have cancelled their holiday plans as the sides try to strike a deal over Kiev’s two billion dollars of unpaid gas debts.

Russian energy giant Gazprom has warned it will cut off supplies to Ukraine if the debt is not settled, saying that a new contract needs to be signed by January 1 and no deal can be inked without the money being paid.

“There is no deal for the Honda team. There is neither agreement nor negotiations,” the source told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Honda, with an annual racing budget of around 400 million dollars, pulled out of the Formula One world championship earlier this month and was put up for sale with the Japanese manufacturer struggling in the current global economic slowdown.

Guinea, the world’s top bauxite exporter, will renegotiate all mining contracts and freeze gold extraction until further notice, Captain Moussa Dadis Camara said.

“We have blocked the mining sector,” he told around 1,000 representatives of civil society at the junta’s base in Conakry. “There will be a renegotiation of contracts.”

The German auto industry is “the spinal cord of our economy,” Frank-Walter Steinmeier told the Welt am Sonntag, according to advance copies. It is Germany’s largest industry and biggest export.

“We must also stimulate the purchasing of automobiles with state incentives,” such as a tax break, said Steinmeier, a member of Germany’s “grand coalition” government and expected rival to Merkel in next year’s general election.

Imad Ahmed Farhan, who police say has admitted to murdering at least 100 people, is on the run with two other “emirs” or local leaders of Al-Qaeda who broke out of their cells in a police station in the western city of Ramadi.

“During an exchange of fire between prisoners trying to escape and police officers in the station, six policemen and seven prisoners were killed,” provincial police chief Tareq al-Dulaimi said.

Born out of the mantra that the war in Afghanistan cannot be won by military means alone, the mission of these small units – 26 in total – is to coordinate with local leaders and do development work – thus winning Afghan hearts and minds.

It was not always like this. As the war here began in October 2001, there was much talk about the need for reconstruction. But a RAND Corp. study found that, even as President Bush was promising a “Marshall Plan” for Afghanistan, the country received less assistance per capita than postconflict Bosnia, Kosovo, or Haiti, and less than half of what later would be spent in Iraq.

They watched through their window as the child rinsed plates under the open faucet. She wasn’t much taller than the counter and the soapy water swallowed her slender arms. To put the dishes away, she climbed on a chair.

But she was not the daughter of the couple next door doing chores. She was their maid.

Marked “Escapee Program,” it contains a list of thousands of names of people who, through cunning, bravery and luck, slipped through the Iron Curtain that divided Europe after World War II and found freedom in the West.

President Harry Truman’s administration launched the program in 1952 to rehabilitate and resettle refugees from Eastern Europe, feting them as heroes who defied communist tyranny.

President Abdullahi Yusuf will address a special session of the country’s parliament to announce his retirement from politics, said Abdirashid Sed, a confidant of Yusuf and the most senior figure to comment so far on the president’s plans.

“He decided to step down because he does not want to be seen as an obstacle to peace in Somalia,” Sed told The Associated Press. “He wants to give a chance to the younger generation.”

The demotions included more than 20 military heads, including those who ran the country’s army, navy and air force. The list also includes security force chiefs.

Coup spokesman Nouhou Thiam said the demotions were effective immediately and added that the military heads of the regime under longtime dictator Lansana Conte would be reassigned to other jobs in the army.

Urs Tinner, 43, was freed several days ago, his mother Hedwig Tinner told The Associated Press by telephone from eastern Switzerland.

His brother Marco Tinner, 40, remains in detention while prosecutors appeal his release to the federal criminal court in Bellinzona, she said, refusing to comment further on the case.

Birgit Stutz said Saturday that she and other rescuers cheered when they finally finished digging a half-mile escape route through the snow for the animals. The horses had been abandoned by a hunter and faced almost certain death.

Stutz said the horses eagerly accepted being bridled and seemed to know they were safe as volunteers led them on a seven-hour hike down the mountain in freezing temperatures on Tuesday. She said about 40 or 50 people took part in the rescue over the course of a week.

He says they punched him, kicked him, stole his camera and terrified his wife and children.

Khoa, a high school math and geography teacher, thinks the message was clear: Stop blowing the whistle on school corruption – or else.

The Ahlu Sunna Waljamaca, a government-allied Sunni Islamist group, vowed on Saturday to seize towns controlled by al Shabaab after retaking Gurael, a trading town north of the capital Mogadishu.

Most of the south and center of Somalia except Mogadishu and Baidoa is controlled by various Islamist factions opposed to the Western-backed transitional government and to its Ethiopian military allies.

Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) targets in the Hakurke region of northern Iraq were hit on Saturday night and several other targets near the Iraqi-Turkish border were bombed on Sunday afternoon, the sources said.

The strikes in a mountainous border area claimed no civilian casualties, said Lieutenant-Colonel Ihsan Kamal, commander of the border guards’ operation room in Iraq’s largely autonomous Kurdistan region.

The move came 10 days after Prime Minister Yves Leterme stepped down in the so-called “Fortisgate” scandal, with his aides accused of trying to influence a court case leaked to the break-up of the major bank Fortis.

“The king has charged Mr Van Rompuy to form a government. He has accepted the mission,” said a short statement, after the speaker had held almost 90 minutes of talks with the monarch.

Despite a boycott call by separatists and armed rebels, more than 60 percent of voters participated in the multi-stage elections which came after a period of direct rule from New Delhi.

“The large turnout is a vote for democracy. It is a vote for national integration. Therefore, we are all happy,” Singh told reporters in New Delhi.

Rives, the Air Force’s top lawyer, nodded toward a man in military camouflage near the pilot.

The man was Col. Lindsey Graham , an Air Force Reserve attorney and the only member of Congress who’s served on active duty in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The bombing in Kadhimiyah, a holy area for Shiite Muslims and the home to the tombs of two Imams, or spiritual leaders, underscores fear that the security gains of the past year are fragile and easily reversible, even in the country’s capital.

Only a month ago, the bridge between Kadhimiyah and the Sunni neighborhood Adhamiyah was a scene of joy. In a sign that the worst had passed, the bridge between the Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods, which had been closed for years, was reopened.

The Families of Flight 93 sent a letter earlier this month asking President George W. Bush to empower the Secretary of the Interior to take the land in dispute from a homeowner who had been in negotiations with the National Parks Service, said Patrick White, vice president of the families’ organization.

The group says ground must be broken early next year in time for a memorial to be build for the 10th anniversary of the crash in 2011.

Tom Kilgore, who heads the Tennessee Valley Authority, said the utility will pay to test local wells for contamination and would start air quality testing.

Kilgore spoke to between 200 and 300 residents who gathered Sunday to get answers about the environmental and economic impact of Monday’s spill.

The paralyzing 100-day work stoppage by writers ended in February with a historic deal that gave writers a slice of profits from new media and Internet sales, an area where they had once received nothing.

The deal negotiated by the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) was described as a “groundbreaking” achievement by movie industry experts.

“I know it’s not, and so I don’t really feel like I need to respond to people that view it that way,” Mrs. Bush said in an interview that aired Sunday. “I think history will judge and we’ll see later.”

Rice took a similar view in a separate interview, saying that claims that the Bush administration has been one of the worst ever are “ridiculous.”

“I think that (the coup in Guinea) should serve as a real warning to the region, to the Southern African Development Community (SADC) of what might happen if Robert Mugabe is allowed to cling to power and in fact die in office as he seems to want to do,” Jendayi Frazer, US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs told reporters>

Frazer was speaking in the Ghanaian capital Accra where she had come to observe the presidential elections.

On December 1, Bush said that his “biggest regret” was the massive US “intelligence failure” on Saddam Hussein’s purported weapons of mass destruction, the core of the public case for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Bush stopped well short of saying he should not have gone to war, and ducked a question on whether he would have taken a different route had he known that the late dictator had not possessed such arsenals.

After a difficult 2008, the United States is expected to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan by next summer to add to the almost 70,000 international soldiers already here under NATO and US command.

Dutch Major General Mart de Kruif told reporters it was not yet clear how many of these reinforcements would be deployed in Regional Command (RC) South which includes Kandahar and Helmand provinces that see heavy fighting.