Weekend News Digest

On Friday, NBC, a unit of General Electric Co., said it was in talks to sell the last two of the 67 spots for the game, which have gone for between $2.4 million and $3 million per 30-second slot.

“Considering the state of the economy in the United States, we couldn’t be any more thrilled,” said Dick Ebersol, chairman of NBC Universal Sports & Olympics.

The Obama administration on Friday pledged stricter oversight of food safety to prevent breakdowns in inspections.

Officials say Peanut Corp. of America sold tainted peanut products to food makers. At least 529 people have been sickened as a result of the outbreak, and at least eight may have died because of it. More than 430 products have been recalled.

Steele takes the helm of a beleaguered Republican Party that is trying to recover after crushing defeats in November’s national elections that gave Democrats control of Congress put Barack Obama in the White House.

GOP delegates erupted in cheers and applause when his victory was announced, but it took six ballots to get there. He’ll serve a two-year term.

Rep. Beth Kerttula assumes Gov. Sarah Palin is out of town, though Palin’s staffers say so far their boss has been there for most of the legislative session that began Jan. 20.

It’s a small matter, but it’s part of the buzz around the Capitol among lawmakers who are seeing less of their governor than in years past and wondering what it means in the wake of a Republican vice presidential run that brought Palin global fame and notoriety.

Daschle, the South Dakota Democrat chosen to lead President Obama’s health reform efforts, recently filed amended tax returns to report $128,203 in back taxes and $11,964 in interest, according to a Senate document obtained by The Associated Press.

Daschle’s spokeswoman said Saturday that Daschle told senators about the tax problems when he met individually with his former colleagues, who asked him to let the committee disclose the tax returns.

This senior administration official, who spoke to The Associated Press, said the administration was on track to announce its overhaul of the $700 billion bailout program soon, possibly as early as next week.

This official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the plan has not yet been unveiled, said that it would employ a full range of tools to get credit flowing again to families and businesses.

The “buy American” provisions would require major public works projects to favor U.S. steel, iron and manufacturing over imports.

U.S. allies and trading partners warn that favoring U.S. companies would breach Washington’s trade commitments and could set off tit-for-tat countermeasures around the world.

On the contrary, Obama appears likely to streamline the U.S. focus with an eye to the worsening economy and the cautionary example of the Iraq war that sapped political support for President George W. Bush.

“There’s not simply a military solution to that problem,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said last week, adding that Obama believes “that only through long-term and sustainable development can we ever hope to turn around what’s going on there.”

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“What are you supposed to pay them?” Weisberg asked. “Or are you not supposed to pay them? And if you don’t pay them, how do you expect that employee to stay employed at that company?”

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Many argue that anyone who works at a bank right now should feel lucky to be employed – after all, hundreds of thousands of their colleagues have been shown the door over the past year.

Still, there was no getting around the fact the NFL was hardly immune from the world’s ongoing financial chaos.

“We’re not part of the economic crisis in the sense that we have any specific steps that we can take for the broader economy,” he said. “As it relates to the NFL, we have announced, very aggressively, that we are going to look at all of our season ticket prices. … I believe about three-quarters of the league will hold their ticket prices flat.

“The purple fingers have returned to build Iraq,” Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said in a televised address after the polls closed, referring to the indelible ink stains on index fingers that show voters have cast their ballots.

The 2005 election took place amid an al Qaeda-inspired Sunni insurgency and was followed by a surge in sectarian slaughter between once dominant Sunni Arabs and majority Shi’ite Muslims.

With the world economy in its worst state since World War Two, ministers met on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in the Swiss ski resort of Davos and agreed keeping trade open was a central element in any solution to the crisis.

“It is very clear that we have to be better at communicating the message to all the people across the world that in order to come out of the economic downturn we need to keep trade open,” European Union Trade Commissioner Catherine Ashton said.

Carrying banners reading ‘You are the Crisis’ and throwing snowballs, several hundred protesters marched to fences surrounding the heavily guarded Hotel Seehof in the Davos ski resort, where many world leaders and business people stay during the forum.

Protester Alex Heideger, a member of the Davos Green Party, said these were the people to blame for the economic mess.

Nearly 10 percent of U.S. refining capacity could be idled within days if negotiators for the United Steelworkers union and Shell Oil Co fail to reach a deal by 12:01 a.m. CST on Sunday, when the existing three-year contract expires.

Top U.S. refiner Valero Energy Corp and BP Plc say they plan to idle some of their refineries if there is a strike.

The unit, to be funded by the United States, will have its own uniform and work alongside the Afghan National Police (ANP), using the same weapons as the ANP who have AK-47 Kalashnikov rifles, Interior Minister Hanif Atmar told a news conference.

He did not say how the unit would be recruited, how large it would be or exactly where it would be deployed.

“Sex, rape and video at the U.S. embassy in Algiers,” wrote Algeria’s most influential French-language newspaper El Watan in a front page headline.

The U.S. government has said the CIA chief in Algiers had returned to Washington and the Justice Department was probing the officer’s alleged misconduct.

Eduard Limonov, head of the banned National Bolshevik Party, was among those arrested by security forces when he was about to address an unauthorized protest meeting in central Moscow, an AFP correspondent reported.

Police said a total 41 people had been arrested in a series of protests in Moscow which noisily called for Putin’s resignation but at most could only muster a couple of hundred demonstrators.

The protesters spent nearly two hours marching towards Government House, arriving just before midnight (1700GMT) after making their way past four steel barricades across their route, manned by unarmed riot police.

Rally leaders read a list of demands to the cheering crowd, vowing to return and stage a permanent protest in 15 days’ time if these were not met.

Hundreds of Mogadishu residents took to the streets to express their support for the young cleric, who vowed to build an inclusive government, reach out to hardline groups and bring Somalia back into the regional fold.

“My government will come up with an adequate plan to overcome the difficulties the nation is facing,” Sheikh Sharif said after taking the oath on the Koran during a ceremony at the Kempinski hotel in neighbouring Djibouti.

The prime minister highlighted Japan’s involvement in projects in the Mekong region and the Delhi-Mumbai industrial corridor and said overseas development assistance (ODA) would increase by 20 percent this year.

“Japan is ready to provide ODA not less than 1.5 trillion yen or about 17 billion dollars in total,” he told the World Economic Forum here.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said at the event in Belem that it was urgent for the rich nations “to resolve this crisis so the poor countries can develop.”

But he warned against worrying signs of protectionism, saying: “It’s not fair that, now that the rich countries are in crisis, they forget their talk about free trade.”

Pretoria said Western nations should take these steps to help its stricken neighbour rebuild almost a year after disputed elections which left Zimbabwe in tatters.

Months of deadlock over the details of a power-sharing deal ended Friday when opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai agreed to be sworn in as prime minister, and parties took the first steps to forming an inclusive government.

Chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo went after warlord Thomas Lubanga, charged with recruiting 30,000 child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo, saying Mr. Lubanga’s acts would “haunt a generation.”

But 48 hours later, the prosecution’s first witness, a child soldier, caused the entire court to gasp.

It’s a national election full of firsts: The first held by a fully sovereign Iraq; the first in which Iraq’s vital Sunni Arab minority is playing a large role; and the first in which Iraqis can vote for a flood of individual candidates – 14,467 of them vying for 440 seats – as well as parties.

“Those whom they elect – provincial council directors or governors – eventually are the ones who actually control the resources … who can or cannot deliver water, electricity, sanitation, and provide employment,” says United Nations special representative Stefan de Mistura in Baghdad.

Those are just two of the healthcare initiatives included in the omnibus $819 billion stimulus bill. They’re aimed at pumping cash into the ailing economy at the same time they shore up the nation’s unravelling healthcare system.

The stimulus package, which still must be approved by the Senate, allots $117 billion for healthcare spending.

If nations instead choose to barricade their economies behind new commercial barriers, they risk making the global economic crisis even worse, leaders said.

“Trade is the best economic stimulus,” said Doris Leuthard, the Swiss economics minister who hosted trade chiefs from the world’s most powerful countries on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum.

In a corner hang photos of four reporters he has lost in the past eight years – one beaten to death, one allegedly poisoned, two shot – the most recent on Jan. 19.

It’s not easy to put a paper out these days, Muratov says.

Less known is the “Holocaust by Bullets,” in which over 2 million Jews were gunned down in towns and villages across Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. Their part in the Nazis’ Final Solution has been under-researched, their bodies left unidentified in unmarked mass graves.

“Shoah,” French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann’s documentary, stands as the 20th century’s epic visual record of the Holocaust. Now another Frenchman, a Catholic priest named Patrick Desbois, is filling in a different part of the picture.

In a letter to the Vatican, Bishop Richard Williamson, who recently denied in a TV interview that 6 million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, called his remarks “imprudent.”

The letter was posted on Williamson’s personal blog and addressed to Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, who has been dealing with the rehabilitation of Williamson and other renegade bishops who had been excommunicated.

An Iraqi officer confirmed the incident, which occurred near the northern city of Mosul, but said the policemen were manning a checkpoint when they were gunned down.

A U.S. statement said the incident began when U.S. soldiers entered a neighborhood looking for a suspected al-Qaida operative who was believed to be in a building.

England’s second-largest city has decided to drop apostrophes from all its street signs, saying they’re confusing and old-fashioned.

But some purists are downright possessive about the punctuation mark.

Wen will hold talks with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown during the three-day visit as global policymakers seek to build a consensus ahead of the G20 crisis summit of leading developed and developing nations in London on April 2.

“I hope this message will serve as a new opportunity to deepen friendships between our two peoples and promote vibrant growth of our relations,” Wen said on his arrival.

Reminding politicians of the discontent that helped topple the previous center-right prime minister, Geir Haarde, the first leader to fall as a direct result of the global crisis, some 2,000 people again demonstrated outside parliament.

The crisis, sparked after Iceland’s fast expanding banks collapsed under a weight of debt, forced Iceland to take a $10 billion International Monetary Fund-led rescue package and caused widespread anger.

Thousands of soldiers from Congo’s eastern Great Lakes neighbors, which attacked the giant central African country in a 1998-2003 war, launched joint operations with the Congolese army in December and early January.

“It was a difficult decision, but a decision was needed… The deadline must certainly not go beyond the month of February,” Kabila said.

The Maoists’ peace offer is the first since negotiations collapsed in a southern state in 2004 where too they are active.

“our party is ready to talk to the government in the interest of the people, in the interest of the working, downtrodden masses, provided the government creates a conducive atmosphere,” the Communist Party of India-Maoist’s arm in Chhattisgarh and neighboring Orissa state said in a statement.

Hopes of success are slim after six previous visits that yielded no results.

It is not known who he will meet, especially since on his last visit in August last year he was snubbed by Suu Kyi, who refused to see him despite being held incommunicado under house arrest since May 2003.

“Since the president and the government have not taken their responsibilities, I therefore proclaim that I will run all national affairs as of today,” he said.

“A request for the immediate resignation of the president will soon be filed with parliament in order to comply with the legal procedure,” the Antananarivo mayor told thousands of supporters.

The protest started at Britain’s third-largest oil refinery, Lindsey in Lincolnshire, eastern England, where workers first walked out Wednesday over the use of Italian and Portuguese contractors on a 200-million-pound (222 million euros, 286 million dollars) building project.

But it had spread by Friday to other refineries and plants across Britain, where unemployment is currently at its highest rate for 10 years as the credit crunch hits hard.

The ceasefire announced on September 21, will end at midnight GMT Friday, the group said in an emailed statement.

“Because the Nigerian government and military continues to act in bad faith, MEND is compelled to call off its unilateral ceasefire effective 0100 hours (0000 GMT),” the group said.

Former prime minister Grigol Mgaloblishvili announced his resignation only three months after taking the job in a government shake-up following Georgia’s war with Russia in August.

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili quickly announced that he would be replaced by Gilauri, who also served as first deputy prime minister.

She’s a woman on a mission, but some things are just too risky.

Last August, Iraq’s Shiite-dominated security forces raided the government compound where her husband, Hussein al Zubaidi , a member of the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party and the head of the provincial council’s security committee, was sleeping. They killed the governor and hauled her husband away. They accused Zubaidi of connections to terrorism, and Faraj hasn’t seen him since.

The plant, in a sparsely populated region, is supposed to begin producing basic compounds of lithium, which is used to make batteries for cell phones, power tools, computers and other electronic devices, by year’s end.

Government officials think that Bolivia possesses the world’s biggest lithium reserves, and they also think that the country is poised to profit big-time from the automakers’ push to develop electric cars that will run on lithium ion batteries.

Sheik Sharif Ahmed , who led a federation of Islamic courts that briefly ruled southern Somalia in 2006, is a former schoolteacher who’s respected by Western officials and ordinary Somalis alike. Analysts say he might be the leader best equipped to unite Somalia’s fractious mix of clans, warlords and Islamist insurgents.

The boyish-looking Ahmed, who’s in his 40s, takes over a country where the United Nations says more than 3 million people – half the population – need urgent humanitarian aid. The interim government also is under threat from a powerful Islamist group known as al Shabaab, which is on the U.S. list of foreign terrorist groups and controls much of southern Somalia , including the parliamentary seat of Baidoa and chunks of the capital, Mogadishu .

His son and recent successor, the Rev. Robert A. Schuller, has abruptly resigned as senior pastor of the Crystal Cathedral. The shimmering, glass-walled megachurch is home to the “Hour of Power” broadcast, an evangelism staple that’s been on the air for more than three decades.

The church is in financial turmoil: It plans to sell more than $65 million worth of its Orange County property to pay off debt. Revenue dropped by nearly $5 million last year, according to a recent letter from the elder Schuller to elite donors. In the letter, Schuller Sr. implored the Eagle’s Club members – who supply 30 percent of the church’s revenue – for donations and hinted that the show might go off the air without their support.

His dad worked there.

As a fifth grader, Rollin didn’t daydream about becoming a baseball player or an astronaut. He wanted to be an autoworker. Just like his father, Mike.

Food safety watchdogs and legal experts say criminal charges have only been brought against a handful of companies involved in high-profile outbreaks though federal law allows cases to be prosecuted without proof the company knew it was distributing contaminated food. They say the law is not used often because there has been little will to pursue criminal charges in all but the most noteworthy and outrageous cases, and that has put the public at risk.

“Part of that system is the ability to penalize the people that fail,” said Michael Taylor, a food safety scientist at George Washington University. “And there’s been a real failure to do so at the federal and state level.”

The FDA’s Dr. Stephen Sundlof said the agency would help investigate criminal allegations in the outbreak, traced to a single Blakely, Georgia, peanut plant that has been closed.

“The FDA’s office of criminal investigation is involved in a justice department investigation of PCA,” Sundlof told reporters in a telephone briefing, declining to elaborate on the probe.

Since Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were nationalized in September, the government-controlled companies have been retooled as housing-aid agencies. Both put a moratorium on foreclosures late last year and both are pioneering programs to let borrowers rent their homes after default.

Over the last two years of a housing downturn, many renters in good standing have been forced out because their landlord went into default.

“Some have slammed the U.S. Chamber for opposing ‘Buy American’ provisions, calling our position ‘economic treason,'” Thomas Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said in a statement. “Try ‘economic patriotism’,” he said.

“Such provisions would cost American jobs, trigger retaliation from our trading partners, slow economic recovery by delaying shovel-ready infrastructure projects and cede our leadership role as a long-standing proponent of free and fair trade and global engagement.”

Nadel, 76, went missing on January 14 as investors in his Sarasota, Florida-based funds learned that their investments were nearly worthless. He turned himself in to the FBI in Tampa, Florida, on Tuesday.

U.S. Magistrate Mark Pizzo said he would try to issue a warrant of removal by Monday to send Nadel to New York, where he was charged. He rejected arguments by Nadel’s lawyers that their client would not run and said he was not sure if Nadel might have money stashed away.

In a report that showed a broad-based contraction across nearly all sectors, the Commerce Department said gross domestic product shrank at a 3.8 percent annual rate, the biggest contraction since the first three months of 1982.

President Barack Obama, who is pushing Congress to approve a package of spending and tax cut measures that could cost close to $900 billion, said the report highlighted the need for quick government action.

“The decline in housing wealth and credit availability is nearly unprecedented,” said economists Mary Daly, Bart Hobijn and Joyce Kwok in the bank’s latest economic newsletter.

As a result, with less income sources to fall back on — from home equity loans to credit cards — labor market participation rates have held up, and even risen for some groups, relative to recessions in the early 1990s and in 2001, the economists said.

The pension, represented by Labaton Sucharow LLP, filed the suit in Manhattan Federal Court and seeks a recovery “in the billions of dollars” on behalf of UBS shareholders.

The suit contends that New Orleans Employees and other UBS shareholders lost about 60 percent of their investment after U.S. prosecutors alleged UBS actively solicited wealthy individuals to open “undeclared” Swiss bank accounts, a violation of U.S. laws. No charges have been filed. UBS is in talks with the Department of Justice.

Friday’s ruling by a panel of the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals was a victory for smaller merchants who had accused American Express of charging them excessive fees. It means the merchants may band together on litigation that they could not otherwise afford to pursue individually.

In a 36-page ruling for a three-judge panel, Judge Rosemary Pooler reversed a lower court decision upholding a “mandatory arbitration clause” that blocked merchants from bringing claims as a group, either in court or before an arbitrator.

Though astronomers have found more than 330 planets circling stars in other solar systems, none has the size and location that is believed to be key to supporting life.

“A null result is as important as finding planets,” Michael Bicay, director of science at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, told reporters in Titusville, Florida, where the Kepler telescope is being prepared for launch.

Rajendrasinh Babubhai Makwana, an Indian citizen who had been working as a contractor employee at Fannie Mae’s facility in Urbana, Maryland, was indicted on Tuesday by a federal grand jury for computer intrusion.

The indictment alleges that Makwana entered a malicious code on October 24, 2008, the day he was terminated and told to turn in his Fannie Mae laptop and other equipment, and it was set to propagate throughout the Fannie Mae network on January 31.

Between 1430 and 1525 GMT, sites turned up in search results were marked as harmful and users received the message: “Warning! This site may harm your computer.”

“What happened? Very simply, human error,” Goggle vice president for search products and user experience Marissa Mayer said on the company’s official blog.

But it’s going to be hard.

The reminders are everywhere, including on the screen in the form of the Super Bowl ads, which rival the game for entertainment value.