Weekend News Digest

In his weekly radio address, broadcast from Grand Isle, Louisiana, a community bearing the brunt of the spill, Obama pledged ongoing attention to the disaster.

“So we will continue to leverage every resource at our disposal to protect coastlines, to clean up the oil, to hold BP and other companies accountable for damages,” he said.

The figure is dwarfed by estimates that up to 19,000 barrels a day could be spewing from the leaking well, but was a rare note of success for the embattled British firm.

“In the first full 24-hour cycle, yesterday (Friday) as they bring the production level up, they were able to bring up and produce 6,000 barrels of oil from the well,” said retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen at a press briefing.

The news came as US President Barack Obama warned BP not to renege on its promises to help stricken communities whose livelihoods have been devastated, as he made his third visit to the Gulf of Mexico region.

An estimated 20 million gallons of crude has poured into the Gulf since an explosion tore through the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig, 50 miles (80 kilometers) off Louisiana, more than six weeks ago.

Benedict, who is on his first trip to an Orthodox country, also stressed the need for closer cooperation among other Christian churches, particularly in the Middle East where they are in a minority and struggling to survive.

“Much still needs to be done throughout the world,” the 83-year-old pontiff said with regard to inter-religious dialogue.

Their meeting, on the second day of the pontiff’s landmark trip, comes ahead of talks with the head of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus, who has angrily denounced Turkey for “ethnic cleansing” in the north and for seeking to annex the whole country.

Christofias spoke of the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus, which came in response to a Greek Cypriot coup seeking unification with Greece. Turkish troops remain in the island’s northern third.

After a two-day meeting, finance ministers and central bankers from the world’s leading economies said recent events “highlight the importance of sustainable public finances” and the need for fiscal sustainability.

The ministers, preparing for a Group of 20 summit in Canada this month, said the world economy was recovering faster than expected from the 2008-9 financial crisis.

The G20 ministers meeting in South Korea’s southern city of Busan is framed against the backdrop of turmoil in the eurozone, which has sent the euro tumbling and triggered doubts over the durability of the recovery.

“Recent (eurozone) turmoil has once again raised concerns about the resilience of our financial system and underscores the importance of moving ahead on our financial regulatory reforms,” South Korean Finance Minister Yoon Jeung-Hyun said.

Brainchild of New York performance artist Laurie Anderson, “Music For Dogs” was a surreal hash of slide whistles, synthesiser, strings and saxophone with a high-frequency undercurrent — inaudible to humans — that sent its four-legged patrons into a frenzy.

The 20-minute concert kicked off with a mellow set featuring whale calls and soothing white noise, before moving through a rhythm and beat section to a discordant crescendo almost drowned out by hundreds of barks and howls.

Kan replaced Yukio Hatoyama on Friday to become Japan’s fifth prime minister in four years, after Hatoyama stumbled over a dispute about a US airbase and became mired in political funding scandals.

Kan, a one-time leftist activist, received a generally warm welcome from the press, with one major daily highlighting that he was the first prime minister in over a decade not to hail from one of Japan’s political dynasties.

After soiling wetland wildlife refuges in Louisiana and barrier islands in Mississippi and Alabama, the black tide of pollution has reached some of the famous white beaches of Florida, nicknamed the “Sunshine State.” The toll of dead and injured birds and marine animals is climbing.

But 47 days into the crisis and after several false starts, a partial solution finally seems to be at hand.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said China’s decision to break off military-to-military contacts between the Pacific powers earlier this year could undercut regional stability.

He urged Beijing to accept the “reality” that Washington is committed to arming Taiwan, like it or not.

But after Arizona passed a state law in April cracking down on illegal immigrants, some residents stopped coming forward to report crimes like robberies and domestic violence, for fear of being arrested.

“Ask any officer … You would not believe how many incidents go unreported … even though the law has not gone into effect,” said Escobar, 45, who has worked as a police officer in the city for 15 years.

The figure was up 15.6 percentage points on a poll carried out at the end of May before unpopular prime minister Yukio Hatoyama stepped down and was replaced as party head, and thus premier, by Naoto Kan.

Kan, 63, will become Japan’s fifth prime minister in three years, taking over as the country struggles to rein in a huge public debt, engineer growth in an aging society, and manage ties with security ally Washington and a rising China.

Dr Henry Akpan, the health ministry’s chief epidemiologist, told Reuters 355 cases in at least six locations in the northern Zamfara state had been reported so far and 111 of the dead were children, many of them under five.

“We discovered unusual cases of abdominal pains with vomiting, nausea and some having convulsions,” Akpan said. “These people were around the area where they were digging for gold. The fatality rate is 46 percent.”

The new Hungarian government spooked investors and knocked more than 2 percent off its currency, the forint, versus the euro, after a prime minister’s spokesman said he supported the view the country had only a slim chance of avoiding the kind of debt crisis that plunged Greece into financial instability.

“In Hungary the previous government falsified data. In Greece, they also falsified data. In Greece the moment of truth has arrived. Hungary is still before that,” said Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s spokesman Peter Szijjarto at a news conference.

Pelicans struggled to free themselves from oil thick as tar that gathers in hip-deep pools, while others stretch out useless wings, feathers dripping with crude. Dead birds and dolphins have washed up onshore, coated in the sludge. Seashells that once glinted pearly white under the hot June sun are stained crimson.

Scenes like this played out along miles of shoreline Saturday, nearly seven weeks after a BP rig exploded and the wellhead a mile below the surface began belching millions of gallon of oil.

Obama recorded his weekly radio and Internet address from this barrier island town he visited Friday on his third trip to the Gulf since an April 20 drilling rig explosion unleashed a gusher of crude into the waters there.

He spoke of the people he’d met – an oyster fisherman named Floyd whose oyster beds have been destroyed by oil, and Terry, a shrimper who is losing income because shrimp fishing has been shut down.

Those warring opinions emerged about James R. Clapper after President Barack Obama said Saturday he wants the Pentagon’s current intelligence chief to serve as director of national intelligence – the fourth since the post was created in 2004 – and wants the Senate to confirm him quickly.

“Eminently qualified,” Obama described the blunt-spoken retired Air Force lieutenant general, offering his “complete confidence and support.”

The proportion of people jobless for six months or more has accelerated in the past year and now makes up 46 percent of the unemployed. That’s the highest percentage on records dating to 1948. By late summer or early fall, they are expected to make up half of all jobless Americans.

Economists say those out of work for six months or more risk becoming less and less employable. Their skills can erode, their confidence falter, their contacts dry up. Their growing ranks also will keep pressure on Congress to keep extending jobless benefits, which now run for up to 99 weeks.

“It’s not normal for students, or even necessarily for adults, to sit still for long periods of time,” their teacher Jim Oloff said.

In states such as Idaho, Minnesota and Wisconsin, some teachers have replaced the standard classroom desk with height-adjustable work stations, which they hope will offer notorious fidgeters some relief for their antsy tendencies.

The sinking of the Cheonan was the worst South Korean military disaster since the 1950-53 Korean War. It showed that even impoverished nations such as North Korea can inflict heavy casualties on far better equipped and trained forces, including those backed by U.S. military might.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said plans for more joint U.S.-South Korea anti-submarine exercises, announced after Cheonan went down, are on hold awaiting U.N. action on the incident.

In an Arkansas runoff, Sen. Blanche Lincoln could fall to a fellow Democrat, Lt. Gov. Bill Halter, who says “the only way to change Washington is to change who we send there.” South Carolina Republican Rep. Bob Inglis is trying to fend off primary challengers who have made the race a referendum on his 2008 vote to bail out up the nation’s banking industry.

The political strength of the tea party movement faces tests in several states, particularly in Nevada, where three Republicans are in a bruising fight for the chance to take on Democrat Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, in November.

Once again, an Indian-American was going to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee. It was just a matter of what word and what time on Friday.

Shantanu, 13, an eighth-grader from West Fargo, N.D., stepped to the microphone first and couldn’t spell “ochidore.”

He also met with a Turkish Cypriot Muslim religious leader, part of careful diplomacy reaching out to both sides in the decades-old conflict between ethic Greeks and Turks on the divided island.

Benedict’s three-day pilgrimage to Cyprus is part of preparations for a crisis summit of Middle East bishops in Rome in October. Many bishops from the region have traveled to Cyprus to see Benedict and receive a working paper for the summit that will be made public Sunday.

Mike Richards, Matt Carle and Claude Giroux all scored first-period goals and Philadelphia held off Chicago’s late rally to beat the Blackhawks 5-3 in Game 4 on Friday night and even the series at 2.

Game 5 is Sunday night in Chicago, where the Blackhawks won the first two games.

As expected, the finance ministers and central banks gathered in this southern port city finessed what some said were at times heated differences over how to reshape financial regulation and build safety nets for countries stricken by debt crises.

The Group of 20 welcomed measures taken by the European Union, the European Central Bank and the IMF, including a $1 trillion bailout, to help countries cope with the fallout from unsustainably high debt.

But this is Texas, where incumbent Rick Perry recently shot a coyote while out jogging and enjoys hunting deer with a bow and arrow. The love of weaponry is so ingrained in state culture that having a legal permit to carry a handgun will get you waved through the Texas Capitol security lines without going through a magnetometer.

Against that backdrop, the former Houston mayor heads into the 2010 governor’s race playing defense on a powerful political issue. The biggest liability for White is his past membership in a New York-based gun control group. White says he resigned after finding its positions too restrictive, but his participation in Mayors Against Illegal Guns riled up those who live to preserve Texas’ pro-gun culture.

Collectors and curiosity seekers will have plenty to peruse if they buy a 620-page catalog of Kluge’s estimated $9 million collection being auctioned by Sotheby’s on Tuesday and Wednesday, or if they stop by for a preview that runs through noon Monday at Albemarle House in the rolling hills near Charlottesville.

People with more practical tastes also can find something among the 900 items to buy at the auction – including patio and garden furniture, wooden duck decoys or an eight-piece copper kitchenware set.

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Sotheby’s International Realty has listed the estate at $48 million, reduced from $100 million last fall. The property also includes about 300 acres, multilevel English gardens and fountains, a swimming pool and a rustic guest cabin.

The first of the aluminum-and-steel octagonal structures will be built in Jacmel in southern Haiti under an arrangement with the nonprofit group Rural Haiti Project. Each has 166 square feet of space and is designed to withstand wind, hurricanes and earthquakes.

Haiti’s housing shortage is acute, with homeless camps growing instead of shrinking as even more people leave standing homes in search of aid or unable to pay rent. Others are afraid to return to the thousands of homes rated safe to enter, unsure of whether another quake will come.

After a half-century and millions of travelers, Los Angeles International Airport is on the verge of reclaiming some of its lost luster and gaining a touch of the 21st century – a renovated landmark terminal, shorter check-in times and better restaurants.

“We haven’t given them an experience worthy of a first-class city,” Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said recently,