Weekend News Digest

At least four people were killed and 21 wounded in the two days of fighting between government troops and the Awakening Council in Fadhil, a ramshackle warren of narrow, fetid streets on the east side of the Tigris River where al-Qaida once held sway.

Members of the Fadhil council said Sunday they decided to give up the fight and hand over their weapons to spare the neighborhood, whose bullet-pocked buildings bore witness to intense combat there two years ago.

For host Qatar – a key U.S. ally that is home to American warplanes and more than 5,000 U.S. troops – the Arab League meeting beginning Monday also showcases its desire to stake out a prominent role in regional affairs even at the risk of angering the West.

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir had promised to attend the 22-nation gathering after assurances from members they would not enforce the International Criminal Court’s arrest order issued March 4. But his lavish arrival sent an apparent message that al-Bashir will have a center stage role at the two-day meeting.

Hundreds of participants in five communities across northern Queensland snacked on sausages, sipped cold drinks and picked up prizes as the portly pests were weighed, measured and killed in the state’s inaugural “Toad Day Out” celebration.

“To see the look on the faces of the kids as we were handling and weighing the toads and then euthanizing them was just…,” Townsville City Councilman Vern Veitch said, breaking off to let out a contented sigh. “The children really got into the character of the event.”

From taking in Guantanamo Bay prisoners to sending more troops into Afghanistan’s most difficult regions and spending their way out of economic crisis, European nations remain reticent about some of the toughest U.S. priorities.

Obama jets across the Atlantic on Tuesday on an eight-day, five-country trip that will be dizzying even by the usual peripatetic standards of presidential foreign travel.

The work of the Information Warfare Monitor initially focused on allegations of Chinese cyber espionage against the Tibetan community in exile, and eventually led to a much wider network of compromised machines, the Internet-based research group said.

“We uncovered real-time evidence of malware that had penetrated Tibetan computer systems, extracting sensitive documents from the private office of the Dalai Lama,” investigator Greg Walton said.

No. 1: It’s already been done.

No. 2: It needs to be done again.

It was Earth Day 1993 when President Bill Clinton launched his ambitious “greening the White House” project. That effort saved more than $1.4 million in its first six years, largely from improvements in lighting, heating, air conditioning, insulation, water sprinklers and other measures.

Tobacco companies and public health advocates, longtime foes in the nicotine battles, are trying to turn the situation to their advantage. The major cigarette makers raised prices a couple of weeks ago, partly to offset any drop in profits once the per-pack tax climbs from 39 cents to $1.01.

Medical groups see a tax increase right in the middle of a recession as a great incentive to help persuade smokers to quit.

Now they say nations have a mandate to tackle climate change.

“The world said yes to climate action, now governments must follow,” the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) said Sunday, a day after hundreds of millions of people worldwide followed its call to turn off lights for a full hour.

That question is of more than artistic interest to the family that rules the tiny principality and their 35,000 subjects. Prince Alois agreed earlier this month to start following the rules set down by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Europe aimed at curbing tax havens – like his scenic patch of mountain valley between Switzerland and Austria, which owes much of its prosperity to its role as a place to put money.

Liechtenstein is hardly alone.

Human rights lawyers brought the case before leading anti-terror judge Baltasar Garzon, who agreed to send it on to prosecutors to decide whether it had merit, Gonzalo Boye, one of the lawyers who brought the charges, told The Associated Press.

The ex-Bush officials are Gonzales; former undersecretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith; former Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff David Addington; Justice Department officials John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee; and Pentagon lawyer William Haynes.

The popular blog is collaborating with The Atlantic Philanthropies and other donors to launch the Huffington Post Investigative Fund with an initial budget of $1.75 million. That should be enough for 10 staff journalists who will primarily coordinate stories with freelancers, said Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post.

Work that the journalists produce will be available for any publication or Web site to use at the same time it is posted on The Huffington Post, she said.

Treasury expects the banks this year to return about $25 billion of money that they received from the government, because they were able to replace it with private capital or decided that they do not want money with strings attached.

“We have roughly $135 billion left of uncommitted resources. The rest is out the door,” Geithner said on ABC-TV’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” program. That means some $565 billion out of $700 billion approved by lawmakers last October already has been deployed and Geithner said banks still need help.

Speaking to the BBC, he played down talk of a deep rift between countries that support further stimulus, such as Britain and the United States, and those that have urged caution, including Germany and France.

Countries will not be asked to reveal their public spending plans at the summit, but they should realize that boosting demand will play a key role in any recovery, he said.

Obama is expected to announce additional aid for General Motors Corp and Chrysler LLC on Monday as both automakers run down cash reserves that had been bolstered by $17.4 billion in emergency loans from the U.S. government.

Obama, who appeared in a taped interview on the CBS-TV news program “Face the Nation,” did not specify what steps he would announce, but said the automakers had more work to do to reduce costs in the face of slumping demand.

Washington is hoping to enlist support from Iran, Russia, China and India amongst others for a new strategy to end a stalemate in Afghanistan and undercut an Islamist insurgency spilling increasingly into neighboring Pakistan.

“We need first, to ensure that there is a regional approach, and second, that neighboring countries like Iran and Pakistan are involved in creating a stable situation in Afghanistan,” said Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen, who will co-chair the conference with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

“The United States is going to be powerfully and fully engaged,” U.S. special envoy for climate change Todd Stern said at the opening of 175-nation U.N. talks in Bonn, the first since Obama took office in January speaking of a “planet in peril.”

“But we are all going to have to do this together, we don’t have a magic wand,” Stern told a news conference. The March 29-April 8 meeting is working on a U.N. climate deal meant to be agreed in Copenhagen in December 2009.

The AK Party won 40.6 percent of the vote in provincial assemblies, CNN Turk and NTV said, a result that would hand Erdogan a fresh mandate to press on with political and economic reforms in the European Union candidate country.

The vote for mayors and municipal and provincial assemblies was marred by violence after five people were killed in the mainly Kurdish southeast as rival supporters for non-party village chief posts clashed, security and hospital sources told Reuters. Nearly 100 people were wounded in the violence.

A task force assembled by Microsoft has been working to stamp out the worm, referred to as Conficker or DownAdUP, and the US software colossus has placed a bounty of 250,000 dollars on the heads of those responsible for the threat.

The worm is programmed to modify itself on Wednesday to become harder to stop, according to Trend Micro threat researcher Paul Ferguson, who is part of the Conficker task force.

Demonstrators also marched in other European capitals as politicians appealed for calm during Thursday’s Group of 20 gathering in London, due to be attended by world leaders including US President Barack Obama.

Police estimated the London crowd at up to 35,000 but there were no reports of any violence as the placard-waving crowd snaked along the four-mile route to Hyde Park.

Germany’s national banking sector stabilisation fund SoFFin would acquire the stake as a first step and “intends to gain full control over Hypo Real Estate Group” (HRE), said a statement from the bank.

“(SoFFin) intends to take action to stabilise Hypo Real Estate Group, in the interest of stabilising the financial markets,” it said.

“After several days of bargaining in good faith, Chrysler and the CAW have not reached an agreement that closes the competitive gap with other automobile manufacturers in Canada, to ensure Chrysler’s immediate viability,” said Al Iacobelli, Chrysler’s chief bargainer.

If both sides fail to reach an agreement, Chrysler has vowed to permanently shutter its Canadian operations, putting some 8,000 Canadians out of work.

Shops in malls which used to stay open until nearly midnight in some states — and 24 hours in others — have begun opening later in the morning and closing earlier at night.

“Generally, we open a half-hour later and close a half-hour earlier, for a net reduction of five to six hours a week,” said Katy Dickey, spokeswoman for Australian group Westfield, which manages 55 malls across the United States.

Todd Stern also praised efforts by countries like China to reign in their carbon emissions, but said global warming “requires a global response” and that rapidly developing economies like China “must join together” with the industrial world to solve the problem.

The debut of Obama’s climate change team was widely anticipated after eight years of obdurate participation in U.N. climate talks by the previous Bush administration.

A draft U.N. plan, outlined to The Associated Press by two Western officials, aims to defuse dangerous tensions. Kurds, a majority in the region, have been trying to wrest control from Arabs, Turkomen and other rival ethnic groups. If open warfare breaks out, it could jeopardize the U.S. goal of stability across Iraq before elections at year’s end.

Peaceful elections are critical to reducing the U.S. presence in Iraq, promised by President Barack Obama.

Short of food, exposed to predators and the African sun, their numbers are plummeting. But salvation may rest in a simple manmade solution – housing for penguins.

Dotting the shore of this penguin colony near the Cape of Good Hope are 200 nesting boxes, each big enough to house a happy family of parents, eggs and chicks. The experiment has already worked well on a more distant penguin island in South African waters, and wildlife rangers are eager to see whether the boxes recently installed on Boulders Beach, where tourists can watch the birds up close, will prove equally attractive.

The veteran bricklayer is entitled to the maximum jobless benefits in Denmark: $594 a week. After taxes, that’s enough to cover rent for his two-room apartment outside Copenhagen, utilities and payments on his 1996 Opel Vectra.

“There’s not much left for fun,” mutters Harmon, a 40-year-old Dane whose surname is tattooed on his right forearm.

Afghanistan’s constitution says Karzai’s term expires May 21, and a vote should be held 30 to 60 days before that. However, the country’s election commission pushed back the election until Aug. 20 because of security fears, lingering mountain snows, and logistical problems such as ballot distribution.

But that decision left at least a three-month gap between the end of Karzai’s term and the election. And because of vote-count delays and a possible election run-off, Sunday’s court decision could mean Karzai will remain in power into October – a five-month extension opposition lawmakers have said they will not accept.

Sulu provincial Gov. Abdusakur Tan said Abu Sayyaf commander Albader Parad told him by phone Sunday that a limited withdrawal of more than 1,000 marines, police and armed village guards on southern Jolo island was unacceptable, adding the militants will not release any hostages.

“They’re insisting on a total pullout,” Tan told The Associated Press by telephone. “That is their position, and he said they’re not budging.”

Thaksin has become the prime attraction at protests that started last week outside the prime minister’s office, speaking via video link from abroad and firing up supporters with calls for nationwide protests.

“The government is trying to block the call-ins but cannot do more than the law permits,” Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva told a gathering of leaders from his Democrat Party. “We are also trying to get him back to the country.”

Rights lawyer Ann Njogu told Reuters more than 30 people had gone into hiding. The government-funded Kenya National Commission on Human Rights said earlier this week that some activists had fled the country.

“They have had to go undercover for fear of either being rounded up, or being killed,” said Njogu, executive director of the Center for Rights, Education and Awareness.

Tensions have risen in the province in recent months with a number of attacks on members of Aceh parties blamed by some on disgruntled elements of the Indonesian military concerned that some former rebels have not dropped separatist aims.

Yudhoyono, who is seeking a second term in office, has visited Aceh twice in two months and has a key stake in ensuring the peace deal struck during his administration after the devastating 2004 tsunami remains on track.

Less then four hours before the closing of the polls at 9:00 pm (1900 GMT), 52 percent of the roughly 500,000 voters had already cast their ballots, local observers of non-governmental CEMI group said.

In Sunday’s vote, called some 18 months in advance, Djukanovic’s coalition is likely to sweep to a landslide victory despite increasingly obvious signs of an economic downturn in this tiny ex-Yugoslav republic.

Protestors massed outside the Equality Ministry, which is drafting a law, and marched through the streets with signs proclaiming: “There is no right to kill, there is the right to live” and “Women yes, abortion no”.

“Get out of here and let the children live,” they chanted, calling on the socialist government’s equality minister Bibiana Aido to resign.

The island’s 71,122 registered voters were asked if they wanted their mostly Muslim island to end its status as a French overseas “collectivity” and become the country’s 101st department.

They were likely to say yes, according to most observers, and thus by 2011 complete a process begun in 1974 when Mayotte remained French as the three other islands of its archipelago chose independence and became the Comoros.

Sixteen people were injured in the battle in the once volatile Fadhl neighborhood, and five Iraqi soldiers were missing – snatched Saturday night by members of the Sons of Iraq , a security official said.

The arrest of Adel Mashhadani, who leads the force in Fadhl, and his assistant, heightened fears among Sunnis that the Iraqi government plans to divide and disband the movements now that its taken control of all but a few thousand of the 94,000 members across the country.

Obama leaves on Tuesday on a whirlwind eight-day tour. He remains enormously popular in Europe , and the throngs that greeted him last year as a candidate are likely to grow. With first lady Michelle Obama along, Obamas’ debut on the world stage as president already is inspiring anticipation of the kind of rock-star reception that greeted John and Jackie Kennedy on their first trip first couple to Europe in 1961.

Yet Obama also heads into his first overseas trip with grand goals – looking to forge a coordinated global response to the economic crisis, hoping Europe will send more of its sons and daughters to help in an escalating war in Afghanistan , and seeking to restore international cooperation that he thinks suffered in the Bush years.

Thanks to suburban sprawl and a growth in numbers of both people and animals, a rash of coyote encounters has alarmed residents.

Wildlife officials are working to educate the public: Coyotes have always been here, they’ve adapted to urban landscapes and they prefer to avoid humans.

In April 2007, he was a student at Virginia Tech when his girlfriend and several other people he knew there were gunned down in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. Thirty-two people died, plus the gunman.

There were times when Woods thought that maybe he should get a gun.

Republican Jim Tedisco, a state legislator for 27 years, faces Democrat Scott Murphy, a businessman who has the backing of the president and influential unions. The special election is to replace Kirsten Gillibrand, who was named to the U.S. Senate in January after former Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton became secretary of state.

The contest quickly became about issues far beyond the sprawling, mostly rural district, which stretches along the Hudson River valley from just north of the New York City suburbs to just below the Canadian border. Voters will flip levers for Murphy and Tedisco, but national leaders will see a judgment on a president, his plan to save the economy and the strength of the country’s two dominant political parties.

Tobacco companies and public health advocates, longtime foes in the nicotine battles, are trying to turn the situation to their advantage. The major cigarette makers raised prices a couple of weeks ago, partly to offset any drop in profits once the per-pack tax climbs from 39 cents to $1.01.

Medical groups see a tax increase right in the middle of a recession as a great incentive to help persuade smokers to quit.

By giving a platform to a politician whose record on abortion and stem cell research clashes with core church teachings about human life, the private Catholic school on the plains of northern Indiana renewed an impassioned debate about what it means to be Catholic.

The Notre Dame administration knew it was entering a political minefield. But the intensity of the reaction in the week since Obama accepted demonstrates the depths to which Catholics are divided about how Catholic individuals and institutions should engage politics in a pluralistic society.

The Afghan soldier fired at the U.S. soldiers, killing one and wounding two others, one of whom died later, it said in a statement.

“One coalition service member was killed … another died of wounds and a third was wounded by an Afghan National Army soldier who reportedly fired upon them,” it said. “The Afghan National Army soldier reportedly killed himself immediately after the incident.”

Speaking ahead of a London G20 summit where the global economic crisis will take center stage, he said most private economists believed the US economy would hit “a more durable bottom” in the second half of 2009 to set the stage for resumption of growth.

“We want to have a stronger, more sustainable recovery, not a recovery based on an artificial boom that is not going to be sustainable,” he said in an interview with the NBC broadcast network.

Most haven’t seen any kind of medical professional in months, many have run out of vital medicines for chronic conditions, and all have few other options to access any kind of healthcare.

According to a recent study by the non-profit organization Families USA, one out of three Americans spent a stretch of time last year with no medical coverage. Health insurance is out of reach to many in the United States because it is so expensive.

Geithner used his first Sunday talk show appearances to promote President Barack Obama’s massive government spending plan to ease credit, help borrowers and inject billions of dollars into the financial sector. Long kept behind the scenes, the treasury secretary has emerged as the administration’s champion of a plan that fueled an uptick in Wall Street markets.

“We came through a period where people borrowed too much and we let our financial system take on much too much risk,” Geithner said. “And the consequences of those choices, made over years, were a huge boom. And that boom, the air is now coming out of that and that’s causing enormous damage.”

Biden and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero held bilateral talks during a pre-G20 warm-up meeting of center-left leaders in the Chilean coastal resort of Vina del Mar on Saturday.

“The relationship we have with Spain exceeds whatever disagreement we may have over Kosovo,” Biden said at the end of the summit. “We talked about the need for expanding communications.”

Referring to US missile strikes on militants, Obama said in a television interview broadcast Sunday: “If we have a high-value target within our sights, after consulting with Pakistan, we’re going after them.”

But asked on CBS program “Face the Nation” if he would send US troops on the ground into militant safe havens inside Pakistan, Obama stressed: “No.”

“Yes, the US will be powerfully and fervently engaged in this process,” Todd Stern said as the 11-day United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) technical meeting got under way.

The entry of the new US team into negotiations involving more than 190 states and riven by deep divisions between rich and developing countries has generated huge expectations, sharpened by the contrast with Obama’s predecessor.

“When you don’t use as much fuel, not only does it not cost you as much, but it also saves lives and injuries of those people who would have to deliver fuel through hostile territory,” Assistant Army Secretary for Installations and the Environment Keith Eastin told AFP.

Despite reducing its overall energy consumption by five percent between 2005 and 2007, the US military spent 13 billion dollars on energy in 2007 and requested an additional five billion due to a spike in oil prices.

President Barack Obama on Friday unveiled a plan to root out extremism in Afghanistan and Pakistan by boosting troops and drastically increasing civilian personnel and aid to the region.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai immediately hailed the proposals.