Weekend News Digest

The shuttle touched down under clear blue skies at 8:39 a.m. PDT (11:39 a.m. EDT/1539 GMT) after foul weather stymied two days of landing attempts at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

“Welcome home Atlantis, congratulations on a very successful mission giving Hubble a new set of eyes that will continue to expand our knowledge of the universe,” radioed astronaut Greg H. Johnson from Mission Control in Houston.

Netanyahu’s defiant stance set the stage for a possible showdown with President Barack Obama, who, in talks with the new Israeli prime minister in Washington last week, pressed for a halt to all settlement activity, including natural growth, as called for under a long-stalled peace “road map.”

“The demand for a total stop to building is not something that can be justified and I don’t think that anyone here at this table accepts it,” Netanyahu told his cabinet, referring to Jewish settlements in the West Bank, according to an official.

The Logistics Support Agreement (LSA), on hold for more than two years, allows refueling, maintenance and servicing of military ships and planes from both countries at each other’s ports and bases.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s former communist allies opposed the agreement, saying Indian military bases could become permanent ports of call for the U.S. military engaged in unilateral operations in the region.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel will hold a meeting of top minister on Monday to review bids from Magna, Fiat as well as Belgium-listed industrial holding company RHJ International. No final decision is expected on Monday.

Italian Fiat improved its offer on Saturday after top German officials said on Friday that Magna, a Canadian car parts group, submitted a better plan than rivals. Magna has also improved its bid, a source close to the negotiations told Reuters on Sunday.

“She’s innocent,” said the 45-year-old law graduate who drives an old Toyota on the streets of army-ruled Myanmar’s main city, Yangon.

“But I’m not sure the court will go according to the law. It hardly does so,” he said of the trial, due to resume on Monday.

“The economy is only now beginning to show signs that it might be stabilizing, and the upturn, when it begins, is likely to be gradual amid the balance sheet repair of financial intermediaries and households,” Kohn told a conference at Princeton University.

“As a consequence, it probably will be some time before the FOMC will need to begin to raise its target for the federal funds rate,” he said, referring to the Fed’s policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee.

On Sunday, the army said that spot and seven other major crossings in Mingora were secured, part of street-by-street urban fighting whose success is considered critical to flushing out the militants from the valley as a whole.

The advances in Swat came as helicopter gunships pounded alleged militant hide-outs in a nearby tribal region, killing at least 18 people, while police announced the arrest of a militant commander and six other Taliban fighters elsewhere in the northwest.

At stake is the GOP’s status as a major party, Powell and Ridge suggested.

“I believe we should build on the base because the nation needs two parties, two parties debating each other. But what we have to do is debate and define who we are and what we are and not just listen to dictates that come down from the right wing of the party,” said Powell, the nation’s top military officer under President George H.W. Bush and later secretary of state for President George W. Bush.

Fast food is up, fine dining tabs are down and hotel rooms are available for under $50 in a city that has been calling on recession-weary tourists to come back and play the quarter slot machines.

Value is the hippest thing on Las Vegas Boulevard this year.

The stories spread quickly across this smattering of tropical islands in southeastern Indonesia, the only place the endangered reptiles can still be found in the wild: Two people were killed since 2007 – a young boy and a fisherman – and others were badly wounded after being charged unprovoked.

Komodo dragon attacks are still rare, experts note. But fear is swirling through the fishing villages, along with questions on how best to live with the dragons in the future.

Medicare and Social Security will go broke sooner rather than later because of the recession. With millions of baby boomers beginning to leave the work force, the cost of these popular benefit programs threatens to swamp the government in debt in the coming years if nothing is done.

Congress and the White House are under increasing pressure to find a solution.

Witnesses said a group of bearded and turbaned men attacked the preacher at the temple in Austria’s capital and his followers moved to defend him.

Police spokesman Michael Takacs said the scene was “like a battlefield.” Six suspects were in custody with more arrests possible, he said.

The CEOs of PepsiCo, Nestle, BP and other of the world’s major businesses began meeting in Copenhagen, where politicians will gather in December to negotiate a new U.N.-brokered climate treaty.

Despite the global financial crisis, both Ban and Gore said there was no time for delay in hashing out the specifics of how to cut greenhouse gases that contribute to warming the planet.

President Barack Obama on Saturday chose retired astronaut Maj. Gen. Charles Bolden to lead NASA. He also named former NASA associate administrator Lori Garver as the agency’s No. 2. If confirmed, Bolden, who has flown in space four times and was an assistant deputy administrator at one point, would be the agency’s first black administrator.

Bolden would also be only the second astronaut to run NASA in its 50-year history. Vice Adm. Richard Truly was the first. In 2002, then-President George W. Bush unsuccessfully tried to appoint Bolden as the space agency’s deputy administrator. The Pentagon said it needed to keep Bolden, who was a Marine major general at the time and a pilot who flew more than 100 sorties in Vietnam.

“Abeer was a strong woman,” said her aunt, Ameena Hamza Rashid al-Janabi. “She was very proud to be young.”

Relatives of the girl, Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, and prosecutors detailed the teen’s hopes and life during the civilian trial of former Pfc. Steven Dale Green, 24, in western Kentucky. They showed pictures of the family at home, and relatives recounted their aspirations for a better life.

Still, jurors in Kentucky couldn’t agree this week whether to sentence the 24-year-old to death for heinous crimes he committed while serving in Iraq, indecision that may signal growing public awareness of combat stress and its consequences, experts say.

Jurors declined to talk to reporters, but forms they completed during deliberations indicate some factored in the stress of Green’s bloody combat tour, poor mental health treatment in Iraq and weak leadership in his unit.

Officials in this northern Colorado county insist they’re reaping savings by placing released inmates into less-costly supervision programs that can include screening for domestic violence and mental health problems. Supporters of such pretrial programs, which are being tried from Atlanta’s Fulton County to Spokane, Wash., argue that the usual practice of requiring bond for release doesn’t prevent crime.

“It simply separates those who have money from those who don’t,” said Tim Murray, executive director of the Washington-based nonprofit Pretrial Justice Institute.

To wardens, he’s a thorn in the side.

To prison advocates, Paul Wright is a success story: Once a killer, then a prisoner, now a journalist with a cause. He has carved out a niche with his Prison Legal News, a self-help magazine.

By the time he turned 75, McQuade was a millionaire. Then, on one horrible day back in the spring of 2003, he realized it was all gone.

On Tuesday, a judge will sentence the final executive convicted in the scheme – the $275 million collapse of Carolina Investors and parent company HomeGold Financial Inc. Former HomeGold Chief Financial Officer Karen Miller faces up to five years in prison. She cooperated with authorities and pleaded guilty to conspiracy nearly four years ago. The other five executives have been sent to prison.

Troops moved into Mingora on Saturday, fighting street-by-street battles with Islamic insurgents who last month flouted a ceasefire agreement and moved toward the capital Islamabad, sparking a fierce US-backed military retaliation.

By Sunday, officials said several important intersections and three squares in Mingora were under their control, including the notorious Green Square where the Taliban reportedly carried out beheadings late last year.

The 62-year-old Roh, who held office from 2003-2008 and was credited with striving to make South Korea more democratic, had left a suicide note before plunging to his death off a cliff, a former aide said.

“He jumped off a rock on the mountain at 6:40 am (2140 GMT Friday),” ex-chief presidential secretary Moon Jae-In told journalists.

Fighting resumed late afternoon in two districts of the oceanside capital Mogadishu after a brief morning skirmish.

“One of my neighbours and two other civilians have died,” said Asha Olow, speaking to AFP by telephone. “Fighting is still going on in our neighbourhood.”

The opposition figurehead, who is charged with breaching the terms of her house arrest after an American man swam in homemade flippers to her lakeside home, responded to the judge who asked if she was guilty of the charge.

“I have no guilt as I didn’t commit any crime,” her lawyer and spokesman Nyan Win reported Aung San Suu Kyi as saying.

The 76-year-old, soft-spoken economist and 19 members of his cabinet took their oath of office from Indian president Pratibha Patil at the presidential palace in New Delhi.

The portfolios of those sworn in have yet to be allocated.

From July 4 small numbers of tourists will be allowed inside the statue, climbing the 168 steps to her seven-rayed crown, which was closed as part of a security clampdown after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

What they will find are the secrets of a monument that in many ways is the heart of US identity — symbol of freedom, heart-stopping movie backdrop, and inspiration for an unending supply of key chains and fridge magnets.

“They’re finding about 24 percent are not qualified based on Army criterion for being in the Army,” US Brig. Gen. Steven Salazar says of an ongoing rescreening of Iraq’s 253,000 soldiers.

“A very small number of them are overage, a little bit bigger number of them would be medically disqualified, and then somewhere – around 15 percent they’re finding – are illiterate,” says General Salazar, deputy commander of the Multinational Security Transition Command-Iraq, in an interview.

With the opening of a grand villa residence surrounded by shady pines, high on the slopes of Mt. Vodno overlooking Skopje, banished forever is the former ignominious reality of presidents sharing space in the antiquated parliament building downtown, almost 18 years since the small Balkan country declared independence from Yugoslavia on Sept. 8, 1991.

Despite the tranquility of his elevated quarters, however, the new residence’s first occupant, who was inaugurated May 12, won’t have time to relax.

In Mogadishu, government spokesman Farhan Mahdi Mohamed told Agence France-Presse news agency that the government had begun to take away key parts of Mogadishu from the militias of Al Shabab and Hizb Islamiya.

“This is a large military offensive against violent people,” Mr. Mohamed said. “The government will sweep them out of the capital and the fighting will continue until that happens.”

First, he is still smiling after shelling out $10.25 times four for his family, not including three small popcorns at $5.75 each. While the total seems high at first blush, it’s a drop in the bucket compared with the cruise idea that morphed into an Arizona road trip that morphed into a “staycation.”

“I just saved several thousand dollars, so anything less than $100 feels like nothing to me,” says the bank clerk with a smile.

Cameron, who has ordered some of his Conservative Party lawmakers to quit over their excessive claims, said fresh faces are necessary to help rebuild confidence in Britain’s political system.

The Conservatives are far ahead of Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Labour Party in opinion polls and widely expected to win power at the next election, which Brown must call by June 2010.

Suu Kyi, who has been in detention without trial for more than 13 of the past 19 years, is being tried on charges of violating the terms of her house arrest after an uninvited American, John W. Yettaw, swam across a lake to her home earlier this month and stayed for two days. The offense is punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment.

Suu Kyi pleaded not guilty Friday, but expectations are high that she will be found guilty after the court accepted the charges and moved to proceed with the trial. Myanmar’s courts operate under the influence of the ruling military, and almost always deal harshly with political dissidents.

It’s just one of the difficulties faced by U.S. and Iraqi officials as they struggle to nurse the war-ravaged province of Anbar back to health. One showcase of their efforts is the reopening last year, for women only, of the Nursing School in Anbar’s capital, Ramadi. Another is a field school in the town of Saqlawiyah that has just graduated its first batch of 10 female nurse’s aides.

Nowhere are nurses more badly needed than in Saqlawiyah and its surrounding villages, where 50,000 people have no women doctors and only one female nurse and one midwife, both old and overworked.

Myanmar said the statement issued last week by Thailand, amid growing international outrage over Suu Kyi’s trial, was factually wrong and “deviated from the practice of ASEAN.”

Thailand holds the rotating chair of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), one of the few groups that allows the former Burma as a member.

The joint U.N./African Union UNAMID peacekeeping force said it could not confirm the identity of those who attacked the base at Umm Baru but suspected the rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) that has been active in the area in recent months.

“Umm Baru was overrun. It has fallen,” said UNAMID information director Kemal Saiki. “Our own base just a few kilometers away heard the heavy gunfire.” Saiki said the attack started at around 4pm (1300 GMT) and ended around 8.30pm.

Abdifatah Shaweye, deputy governor of Mogadishu, said the bomber drove a 4×4 vehicle to the gate of a police headquarters and detonated it by the guards.

“Four died on the spot, two others died of serious injuries, and one civilian (died),” a police commander, who asked not to be named, told Reuters.

The violence last July shocked a nation that prides itself for having emerged from communism in 1990 after a peaceful revolution, and inhabitants of the capital Ulan Bator voiced their concern over the potential for more unrest.

“I hope there won’t be riots this time,” said Garda, a 75-year-old retiree who voted for incumbent Nambaryn Enkhbayar of the ex-communist Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party.

Meanwhile MPs and public figures re-elected the conservative Horst Koehler to the largely ceremonial post of president for a second five-year term, in a boost to Chancellor Angela Merkel ahead of general elections in September.

Authorities expected half a million people around the historic Brandenburg Gate for a celebration of all things German from beer to Beethoven, with the country’s newly felt sense of national pride on full show.

The attack on Kathmandu’s only Roman Catholic place of worship marked the “saddest day” in the history of the religion in the impoverished mountain nation, one prominent church leader said.

The building was jammed with around 500 people when the homemade device packed with nails went off at the start of morning Mass, creating panic as people rushed for the exits, police said.

Berlusconi, 72, hit out at critics and the media over his ties to Noemi Letizia in the wake of the announcement by his wife Veronica Lario that she was seeking a divorce after he turned up to fete the girl’s 18th birthday bash.

“Explain to parliament my relationship with Noemi Letizia? I’m thinking about it,” the billionaire tycoon told T9 television in one of a series of interviews ahead of European parliament elections in June.

The deadly blast comes as troops battle Taliban rebels in a major ongoing operation in a valley 140 kilometres (90 miles) away, with officials saying it is likely the bomb was revenge for the offensive in Swat.

“The purpose of such type of incidents is to terrorise the masses,” provincial information minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain told AFP, confirming the toll and adding some of the dozens hurt were in a serious condition.

The controversy over the Eastern Partnership plan was just one dispute laid bare at the summit in Russia’s Far Eastern city of Khabarovsk, alongside conflict on an energy charter and a new warning over gas supplies.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus, holder of the rotating EU presidency, said the European Union had sought to reassure Russia over its Eastern Partnership initiative. But he failed to assuage Medvedev’s suspicions.

A year after Hussein got to Stockholm , his immigration lawyer called and said that Hussein would never be allowed to settle in Sweden permanently with his wife and two teenage sons, so he decided to go home. Besides, he figured, Iraq’s government had said things were better there.

Hussein returned to Baghdad two months ago. His shop is still deserted. He said that customers were afraid to come to Sheik Omar. He’s looked for other jobs, but he hasn’t found one.

“I’m looking around,” said Samo, whose close-cropped hair is already flecked with gray, an occupational hazard in his line of work. “I know people who are buying shops, hotels, properties. The economy is strong here, not like back home.”

Samo, if you hadn’t guessed, is a Somali pirate.

Accounts from some of the 1.5 million refugees who’ve fled Swat have painted a picture of destroyed villages and burning countryside under massive Pakistani army bombardment. Two weeks into the offensive, however, the military felt confident enough Friday to take foreign reporters on a guided tour of Swat to refute those claims.

A helicopter flight along the vast Swat valley, the site of the government’s stand against a brutal Islamist militia that had overrun the northwestern district, seemed to support the military’s contention that it’s been waging a counterinsurgency operation, not a massive offensive to level the place.

“The Minister of Trade presented his resignation letter” before he was grilled by the parliament’s Integrity Committee last weekend, Dr. Ali al Adeeb , a high-ranking member of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s ruling Dawa party, told McClatchy . “I expect that he will be deposed before the no confidence vote.”

The trade minister, Falah al Sudany , also a Dawa party member, couldn’t be reached for comment Saturday.

In what’s likely to be the most dangerous and crucial phase of the campaign to retake the vast Swat area back from armed Islamic extremists, the army has taken the fight to the narrow streets of Mingora, where thousands of civilians are thought to remain trapped.

Residents who’ve fled said that several hundred fighters are present, and they’ve mined the streets, created bunkers and tunnels and taken positions on rooftops.

He looked down at his tie and his clean gray suit.

“Don’t be fooled by my clothes,” he said.

Sen. Jon Kyl made clear he would use the procedural delay if Obama follows through on his pledge to nominate someone who takes into account human suffering and employs empathy from the bench. The Arizona Republican acknowledged that his party likely does not have enough votes to sustain a filibuster, but he said nonetheless he would try to delay or derail the nomination if Obama ventures outside what Kyl called the mainstream.

“We will distinguish between a liberal judge on one side and one who doesn’t decide cases on the merits but, rather, on the basis of his or her preconceived ideas,” Kyl said.

After all, President Barack Obama pledged to shut down the military detention center on Cuba for suspected terrorists. And Democratic control of the government would suggest that any gun legislation leads to tighter controls on weapons, not expanded use.

Even as they grouse, however, liberal lawmakers acknowledge that no one factor explains last week’s disappointing back-to-back votes in Congress.

Case in point: Four Muslim men charged last week with plotting to blow up synagogues and military planes. The informant is a convicted felon and Pakistani immigrant who turned informant seven years ago to avoid deportation. This wasn’t his first foray into undercover work for federal authorities.

With considerable fanfare, a steady stream of terrorism busts has been announced by the FBI since Sept. 11, 2001. And in most cases, accusations soon followed that the stings were overblown operations that entrapped hapless ne’er-do-wells. Federal authorities say such arrests save lives.

“We wash our own windows now, take care of the plants ourselves,” says Ryan Dohogne, general manager of Silicon Valley Auto Group. Although they haven’t laid anyone off, yet, Dohogne said they’re saving everywhere they can.

Five miles away, former indoor plant specialist Michael A. Jones is having what he calls “a humbling experience” at a nonprofit food pantry, choosing dented cans of corn and tuna, a crunched box of Rice Krispies and some soon-to-expire milk to supplement his food stamps.

But in a blow to anti-smoking groups, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia also upheld U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler’s 2006 rejection of plans to force the companies to fund smoking cessation programs, which could have cost them billions of dollars.

The appeals court’s three-judge panel ruled that the companies, including Altria Group Inc and its Philip Morris USA unit, violated federal anti-racketeering laws by conspiring to lie about the dangers of smoking.

He happens to live in New Jersey, where state education authorities have long worried about a dearth of math teachers.

Last week he heard about a new program called “Traders to Teachers” being set up at Montclair State University to retrain people in the finance industry who have been laid off in the deepest crisis to hit Wall Street since the Great Depression.

Freed of the shackles of office, Cheney is now in the eye of fierce public debate, while in power he often lurked in the shadows.

Leading the Republican charge against President Barack Obama on Guantanamo Bay and harsh CIA interrogation methods, Cheney is rocking Washington with a rare clash between past and present administrations.

A consensus is growing that GM — which faces a June 1 deadline from the US government to come up with a viability plan or face an aid cutoff — will seek bankruptcy court protection even as it scrambles to win last-minute concessions.

GM reached a tentative deal with the United Auto Workers union on cost-saving concessions that still must be ratified by rank-and-file workers.