Disbanding parliament would prompt new elections within 60 days and further undermine Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s shaky government, which is limping along with nearly half of the 40 Cabinet posts vacant.

The disarray undermines the purpose of last year’s U.S. troop “surge” – to bring down violence enough to allow the Iraqi government and parliament to focus on measures to reconcile differences among minority Sunnis and Kurds and the majority Shiites. Violence is down dramatically, but political progress languishes.

For decades, contractors have been asked to report internal fraud or overpayment on government-funded projects. Compliance has been voluntary, and over the past 15 years the number of company-reported fraud cases has declined steadily.

Now, the Justice Department wants to force companies to notify the government if they find evidence of contract abuse of more than $5 million. Failure to comply could make a company ineligible for future government work.

Twelve years later, after much digging, drilling and piecing together, it became clear that the helmet-crested, duck-billed dinosaur didn’t belong to any previously identified species. This was new.

The composition of its skull – with a nose on top of its head and elongated nasal passages – meant its call was probably one of its most unique aspects, said Terry Gates, a Utah Museum of Natural History paleontologist who was part of a team of Mexican, American and Canadian experts involved with the excavation.

“Project Lifeline,” backed by the U.S. Treasury and Department of Housing and Urban Development, would pause foreclosure proceedings for borrowers more than 90 days in arrears while servicers determine whether they could make payments under new terms, the lenders said in a statement.

The effort would cover all types of home loans, unlike an earlier plan aimed at freezing interest rates for subprime mortgage holders who cannot afford rates that reset to higher levels.

The top U.S. automaker posted a quarterly loss reflecting a slump in its North American market, but analysts were encouraged that the sweeping deal with the United Auto Workers covering 74,000 workers would cut labor costs more aggressively than expected.

Analysts also said the quarterly results showed that the top U.S. automaker would continue to face pressure in the U.S. market, which has been hurt by a slower economy, higher fuel costs, and tighter credit markets.

An Australian warship also arrived off the Dili coast on Tuesday to support the first of 200 fast reaction troops sent to reinforce international security forces as doctors said President Jose Ramos-Horta would remain on life support until next week.

The United Nations said 11 people had been questioned over Monday’s attack, in which a rebel soldier leader was also killed, and that international security forces had responded swiftly.

“We apologise for the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians,” Rudd said.

The apology is being viewed as a watershed in Australia, with major television networks airing it live and crowds gathering around huge screens in major cities to witness the event.

“Gazprom is satisfied with the offers made by the Ukrainian side,” Putin said. “We have agreed on the principles of cooperation.”

“We agreed that Ukraine will pay back the debt” accumulated in 2007, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko said.

Rajesh Gopal, who heads Project Tiger, a conservation programme launched in the 1970s, unveiled the latest figures and blamed “poaching, loss of quality habitat and prey” as the main reasons for the decimation.

The census, which took nearly two years to complete, counted the big cat population inside dedicated reserves and those in forests, Qamar Qureshi, a scientist with the Wildlife Institute of India which conducted the survey, told AFP.

The installation, entitled “Journey”, was conceived by Thompson in close collaboration with a Moldovan woman, named only as Elena, who was trafficked into the UK sex industry when she was just 18.

It comprises seven shipping containers which the spectator passes through, with each container depicting a particular stage of Elena’s journey.

Defense Department officials announced on Monday the filing of formal charges against alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and five other Al Qaeda suspects. They were charged with involvement in planning or helping to coordinate the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 individuals at New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and aboard a hijacked airliner that crashed in Pennsylvania.

In announcing the charges, Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann said the defendants participated in a “long-term, highly sophisticated organized plan by Al Qaeda to attack the United States of America.”

An investigative subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee sought briefing papers used to prepare Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach for testimony he gave at a hearing on the drug in March. The administration’s response was released today by the panel.

The subcommittee last year began investigating whether von Eschenbach gave misleading testimony on Ketek at the hearing. The commissioner and the FDA are under scrutiny from lawmakers who say the agency hasn’t done enough to ensure the safety of Ketek and other medications. The subcommittee held a hearing today on Ketek, which has been linked to fatal side effects.

The four were linked to two espionage conspiracies, which the US Justice Department said posed a “grave danger” to national security.

Pentagon official Gregg William Bergersen, Chinese citizen Yu Xin Kang and Taiwan-born US citizen Tai Shen Kuo were accused of passing classified information to China, mostly pertaining to US military sales to Taiwan, according to Justice Department officials.

“The era of rampant lynching is a shameful chapter in American history,” Bush said at a black history month event at the White House, which began with serious comments about prejudice and ended with music performed by The Temptations.

“The noose is not a symbol of prairie justice, but of gross injustice,” the president said. “Displaying one is not a harmless prank. Lynching is not a word to be mentioned in jest.”

The study concludes that natural forces such as evaporation, changes wrought by global warming and the increasing demand from the booming Southwest population are creating a deficit from this part of the Colorado River system.

Along with Lake Powell, which is on the border between Arizona and Utah, Lake Mead supplies roughly 8 million people in the cities of Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and San Diego, among others, with critical water supplies.

Napoleon’s post-mortem said he died of stomach cancer aged 51, but the theory he was assassinated to prevent any return to power has gained credence in recent decades as some studies indicated his body contained a high level of the poison arsenic.

“It was not arsenic poisoning that killed Napoleon at Saint Helena,” said researchers at the National Institute of Nuclear Physics and the University of Pavia who tested the theory the British killed him while he was in exile on the South Atlantic island in 1821.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said that aggressive interrogation could be appropriate to learn where a bomb was hidden shortly before it was set to explode or to discover the plans or whereabouts of a terrorist group.

“It seems to me you have to say, as unlikely as that is, it would be absurd to say you couldn’t, I don’t know, stick something under the fingernail, smack him in the face. It would be absurd to say you couldn’t do that,” Scalia told British Broadcasting Radio Corp.

Any executions would probably add to international outrage over Guantanamo, since capital punishment is banned in 130 countries, including the 27-nation European Union.

Conducting the executions on U.S. soil could open the way for the detainees’ lawyers to go to U.S. courts to fight the death sentences. But the updated regulations make it possible for the executions to be carried out at Guantanamo.

Kenyan flowers – mostly roses – account for a quarter of Europe’s cut flower imports, and Kenyan growers have been pushing to keep exports up for the holiday despite ethnic violence that has paralyzed the East African country.

They’ve chartered planes to embattled western cities, enlisted police to protect flower-truck convoys and made pleading cell phone calls to frightened workers urging them to return.

But Moscow said Putin would go to a NATO summit in April, signaling a desire to heal rifts with the bloc on one of his last international engagements before leaving office a month later.

Putin gave his missile warning just after a more reassuring step — he and Ukraine’s President Viktor Yushchenko settled a gas debt row at talks in the Kremlin, minutes before a Moscow-imposed deadline on Kiev to pay up or face supply cuts.

The stone and wood structure Namdaemun, or “Great South Gate,” was reduced to a charred hulk on Monday, with newspaper editorials lamenting the destruction of an iconic symbol of national pride.

Laborer Heo Eun stood at Namdaemun and summing up the sense of loss and shock shared by many South Koreans said: “It feels like the heart of the nation was destroyed overnight.”

He said the United States and European countries did not understand the potential consequences of independence for Kosovo, whose Albanian leaders are expected to announce the move on Sunday in defiance of Serbia.

“It would undermine the basics of security in Europe, it would undermine the basics of the United Nations charter,” Lavrov told reporters in Geneva.

“I know what he’s going to say,” said Karanja, a 30-year-old computer systems manager. “I can’t hear that right now.”

Karanja is a Kikuyu, the dominant tribe in Kenya . Three years ago, against his father’s wishes, he married a woman from the smaller Luo community, Everlyn Adoyo , whom he’d courted by showing up at her home unannounced almost every day for several months until she agreed to go out with him.

However, few details have emerged from weeks of negotiations led by Annan, and it isn’t clear what a political compromise would look like- or whether the two sides are even close to a deal.

Annan said that President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga – who charges that Kibaki stole December’s massively flawed election- had agreed to share power in a coalition government, and that the talks were focusing on the form such a government would take. He also indicated that new elections could be called.

Pentagon officials said that the Tupolev 95 bomber- the world’s only propeller-driven strategic bomber- flew within 2,000 feet of the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier. The Navy scrambled four F-18 fighters to escort the Russian aircraft away.

Adm. Gary Roughead , the chief of Naval Operations, said he didn’t consider the incident “provocative,” noting that the bomber made no effort to vary its path as it approached the carrier.

Arab journalists quickly condemned the move as censorship. Many said it would be impossible to curb the information revolution that brought events such as the war in Iraq and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict into the living rooms of millions of Arab viewers.

With the power to shape public opinion, the satellite channels face constant pressure from Middle Eastern regimes to tone down investigative reporting. Officials accuse the stations of inciting violence, favoring opposition parties and sensationalizing news.

Many U.S. churches have been victims of embezzlement over the years, reflecting not just moral weakness on the part of the wrongdoers, but lax financial controls. Often, church budgets are overseen by volunteers or employees with little guidance or professional training.

Now, some colleges are hoping to prevent such faith-shattering abuses by offering programs devoted specifically to managing church finances and personnel.

Thick masses of molten sugar were smoldering at temperatures as high as 4,000 degrees, even after a helicopter dumped thousands of gallons on the fire.

“We’re dealing with a dormant volcano full of lava,” said Capt. Matt Stanley from the fire department in nearby Savannah.

Some members of Congress have accused FEMA of playing down the danger of possible formaldehyde contamination in the trailers – 7,200 of them stored at the Hope airport – but an agency spokesman said Tuesday the trailers are safe.

The decision to use some of the trailers for Arkansas and Tennessee twister victims comes after requests by state officials and members of Arkansas’ congressional delegation, who have criticized the trailers in the past as a sign of federal ineptitude after hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

The U.S. population will grow to 438 million in 2050 from 296 million in 2005 if current population trends continue, the Pew Research Center study found.

Non-Hispanic whites would account for 47 percent of the total in 2050, it concluded.

By that time, one in every five Americans will be a foreign-born immigrant, compared to one in eight in 2005.

But this farm is not in California, where illegal immigration raids are causing labor shortages and strict environmental regulations are increasing costs.

Instead, Cox’s farm is just south of the border in Mexico where he can hire workers at a tenth of the cost.

Frank, chairman of the Financial Services Committee, warned lenders that regulators would crack down on groups shuttling minorities into subprime loans designed for people with weak credit histories or low incomes.

“We are still seeing more blacks and Hispanics being pushed into subprime mortgages than they should be and that’s where you’ll see more regulation,” the Massachusetts Democrat said in response to a question after a speech at Boston University.

In his first visit to the United States since taking office in 2006, Calderon added that he hoped the winner of November’s U.S. presidential election could change a perception in the United States that Mexicans are an enemy of American workers.

“Probably the worst thing that happened in this country is this anti-Mexican or anti-immigrant spirit or perception in the people, and we need to change that,” he said in response to a question after giving a speech at Harvard University.

Buffett discussed his offer to bond insurers Ambac Financial Group, MBIA Inc. and Financial Guaranty Insurance Co. during a telephone interview with the CNBC business television network.

Buffett said he had sent that offer to the three bond insurers last week, and that he was giving them 30 days to find a better deal.

Canada-based Research In Motion, maker of ubiquitous BlackBerry mobile devices that combine telephone, email, and Internet capabilities, notified US and Canadian telecom carriers on Monday afternoon of a major disruption of service.

BlackBerry data services “in the Americas” suffered from “intermittent delays” for about three hours and the problem was fixed in the early evening East Coast time in the United States, according to RIM.

Research in Motion Ltd. Tuesday said the upgrade was part of “routine and ongoing efforts,” and that similar upgrades in the past had caused no problems.

The outage, which started about 3:30 p.m. EST, annoyed subscribers who are used to checking and writing e-mail whenever they’re in cellular coverage and able to make voice calls. It affected only some of the BlackBerry users in North America – for others, the service kept working fully.

The largest annual loss in the history of the auto industry signals that even with a garage full of hot vehicles and a historic new labor contract, GM has little hope of making a profit again before 2010 as the weak U.S. economy and competition eat away at its gains.

GM reported the record-setting loss on Tuesday and promptly offered a new round of buyouts to 74,000 U.S. hourly workers in hopes of replacing some of them with lower-paid employees.

In an interview on CNBC, Buffett said his Berkshire Hathaway Inc. holding company has offered a second level of insurance on up to $800 billion in municipal bonds. The reinsurance offer is for bond insurers Ambac Financial Group Inc., MBIA Inc. and Financial Guaranty Insurance Co., known as FGIC.

Word of the offer gave some investors relief although Buffett said a deal would only back municipal bonds, and not the risky and complicated financial instruments that many see as more likely to have problems. Still, further assurances on the soundness of municipal bonds could help shore up Wall Street’s confidence and reinforce the differences in quality among various levels of debt.

The housing market peaked in most U.S. markets in the last two years. Of home buyers in 2006, 39 percent of those with a median 10 percent down payment now have negative home equity similar to 30 percent of those who purchased in 2007, said online company Zillow in its quarterly home value report.

Overall, only 3 percent of those who purchased in 2003, and less than 1 percent of all homes in the United States regardless of when they were purchased, have negative equity.

Though the black-and-white images are fuzzy, they are the most detailed and best confirmed look back in both time and distance that humans have seen, said Johns Hopkins University astronomy professor Holland Ford. He was part of a team of scientists taking the pictures with NASA’s space telescopes, Hubble and Spitzer.

The galaxy, called A1689-zD1, is from when the universe was about 700 million years old, not long after the formation of the first galaxies.

The last remnants of thick, old sea ice are dispersing and the unusual weather cycles that contributed to sea ice loss last year are continuing, he said.

“The buoys are streaming out,” Rigor said, referring to the markers used to monitor the flushing of ice into the North Atlantic.

Leading off the U.N. General Assembly’s second day of talks on climate change, Tuvalu issued a cry for help Tuesday on dealing with the impact of global warming on its 10,000 people, who live on nine low-lying coral atolls in the South Pacific being lapped at by rising seas.

“Adaptation is undoubtedly a crucial issue for an extremely vulnerable small, island nation like Tuvalu,” said Tavau Teii, the deputy prime minister and environment chief.

“We have this really amazing creature, sparrow sized, which lived essentially in the trees, showing us a very new, very interesting side of the evolutionary history of those animals,” said Alexander W. A. Kellner of the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

“We would never have thought of it,” Kellner said in a telephone interview.

The draft treaty, also backed by China at a U.N.-sponsored forum, would prohibit the deployment of weapons in space and the use or threat of force against satellites or other spacecraft, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.

“Weapons deployment in space by one state will inevitably result in a chain reaction,” Lavrov said in a speech at the Geneva-based, 65-member Conference on Disarmament. “This, in turn, is fraught with a new spiral in the arms race both in space and on Earth.”

Pacific Biosciences says its new gene-sequencing machines are far faster than existing equipment, and will be able to do in minutes what it took the federally funded academic effort five years and $300 million to do, and genome pioneer Craig Venter nine months to do in 2000.

“It will change health care forever if it works,” Hugh Martin, the chief executive officer of the company, said in a telephone interview on Monday.

Representatives of 117 countries and regional organizations attended a ministerial session of the General Assembly to take stock after last December’s Bali conference in Indonesia.

The Bali conference yielded an action plan that set a late 2009 deadline for a landmark new treaty to cut global-warming greenhouse gases once the current Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.

Science and Technology Minister Sergio Rezende said the decision by the 11 cabinet ministers making up the council “is the first approval for genetically modified corn in Brazil,” according to the state news agency Agencia Brasil.

One of the varieties authorized was a pest-resistant crop called MON 810 by its maker, the US biotech company Monsanto, and marketed under the names Guardian and YieldGard.

The new documentary “Astrospies” will delve into the U.S. Air Force’s Cold War-era space reconnaissance program and its Soviet Union counterpart during a Tuesday edition of the series NOVA on the Public Broadcasting System.

“We used to have a joke in the program,” said former astronaut Richard Truly in a statement. “That, one day, there was going to be a little article back on page 50 of a newspaper that said, ‘an unidentified spacecraft launched from an unidentified launch pad with unidentified astronauts to do an unidentified mission.”

These new findings suggest, for example, that Columbus did not bring these parasites to the New World – although Vikings might have, scientists added.

“It’s kind of quirky that a parasite we love to hate can actually inform us how we traveled around the globe,” said researcher David Reed of the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville.

Popular people who monitor themselves carefully in social situations and thereby appear to be the most socially appropriate are often highly sought after as romantic partners, a study finds, but these people show less satisfaction and commitment in relationships than socially-awkward people.

By self-monitoring, people assess how their actions affect others and adjust to fit the appropriateness of the situation. They screen their words and behavior to suit the people around them.