Weather was spring-like and participation brisk, although it remained to be seen whether New Hampshire would match the record-busting turnout of the Iowa caucuses won by Obama and Republican Mike Huckabee only five days earlier. Republicans, their national race for the nomination tangled, watched a New Hampshire contest unfold between McCain and Romney at the top of their field, polls indicating McCain had an edge but no clear-cut advantage.

Supporters mobbed an upbeat McCain at a Nashua polling station, making it hard for him to reach voters as they filed inside. Noting he outpolled rivals in two tiny northern hamlets that voted before the rest of the state, McCain cracked: “It has all the earmarks of a landslide, with the Dixville Notch vote.” Romney boldly predicted: “The Republicans will vote for me. The independents will get behind me.”

“It is a dangerous situation,” he said in a White House news conference. “They should not have done it, pure and simple. . . . I don’t know what their thinking was, but I’m telling you what my thinking was. I think it was a provocative act.”

The top U.S. Navy commander in the area said an Iranian fleet of high-speed boats charged at and threatened to blow up a three-ship U.S. Navy convoy passing near but outside Iranian waters on Monday, as they headed into the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranian fleet “maneuvered aggressively” and then vanished as the American ship commanders were preparing to open fire, said Vice Adm. Kevin Cosgriff. No shots were fired.

“We’re listening to different ideas about what may or may not need to happen,” he said. “We’ll work through this. We’ll work through this period of time.”

He wouldn’t comment on any specific ideas he is considering, such as tax cuts aimed at lessening the chance of a recession. “We’ll look at all different options.”

But the latest U.S. blitz brings more than just firepower to the field – a determination to speed up work on basic services and other civic projects that commanders believe will win more converts to the American effort.

…

By emphasizing that the offensive was twofold, the Pentagon appeared to acknowledge that it will be difficult to maintain lower levels of violence without swaying more support from the streets – particularly as al-Qaida is waging a renewed campaign of suicide attacks in recent weeks against America’s new Sunni allies.

The Pentagon’s emphasis on the “non-lethal” aspects of the operation – while vague – indicates Washington feared the window could slam shut on ongoing successes in recruiting former enemies, many of whom are being paid $300 a month by the U.S. military.

There has been increasing frustration among American military and political leaders that the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite Muslim, has been hesitant to embrace the so-called “Awakening Council” movement – mainly among Sunnis – that has seen about 70,000 men switch sides and join the Americans against al-Qaida.

President Maumoon Gayoom was unhurt, but his shirt was ripped as the attacker tried a second time to stab him before being overpowered by security guards, government spokesman Mohammed Shareef said.

“One brave boy saved the president’s life,” he said.

Witnesses said protesters built burning barricades and stoned cars in Kisumu, a stronghold of opposition leader Raila Odinga, after Kibaki named 17 new ministers.

Local reporter Baraka Karama told Reuters police shot dead one protester in Kisumu. Residents of Nairobi’s Mathare and Kibera slums said hundreds of opposition supporters took to the streets, some brandishing machetes.

D. M. Dassanayake, the 51-year-old minister for nation building, suffered severe head injuries and died while undergoing surgery, said doctor Lalini Gunasekera at the Ragama hospital here.

…

In a separate later incident, the bomb which went off at the Regent Flats complex in Colombo Fort did not cause casualties, police said.

“There is a strong chance that you will learn about it once it’s already been done,” Sarkozy told a press conference when asked about reports that a wedding is planned next month.

“It is serious,” he said of the romance, which has unleashed a media blitz since the couple were first photographed in December visiting the Disneyland theme park near Paris.

Three months after divorcing his second wife Cecilia, Sarkozy has been under pressure to comment publicly on his relationship with 40-year-old Bruni amid signs that the celebrity spotlight could be hurting his approval ratings.

In the last election, Democrats took both seats in Congress for the first time in nearly a century and both houses of the legislature for the first time since 1874. Democratic Gov. John Lynch won a second term with a record 74 percent of the vote, and lawmakers recently authorized same-sex civil unions and a smoking ban in bars and restaurants.

The “Live Free or Die” state is becoming “Blue Hampshire.” The Granite State, said a blog for the conservative National Review, is “trending alarmingly Granola State.”

No American court has yet ruled on the legality of Bush administration interrogation policies. But the war on terror isn’t the first time US officials have used harsh methods to try to “break” a detainee.

From 1964 to 1967, Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko was subjected to extreme isolation and sensory deprivation and was administered drugs because his CIA handlers believed he was still working in secret for the KGB. They imprisoned him in a windowless concrete cell to try to disrupt him psychologically and force him to confess his loyalty to Moscow, according to CIA documents and a congressional investigation. He never did.

Many outside the evangelical movement are puzzled by the apparent lack of outrage following reports of high-living, tax-exempt religious broadcasters. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has been looking into six megachurch pastors and broadcast ministries, requesting financial records. Richard Roberts has stepped down as president of Oral Roberts University following charges that he used the school’s resources for family perks, such as a trip to the Bahamas for his daughter.

These charges come as no surprise to those within the evangelical world. Such tales of excess and profligacy have been an open secret for years.

This servicing mission will be the Hubble Space Telescope’s fifth and last.

Word today is that the Space Shuttle Atlantis could lift off in August with a crew of seven astronauts and cargo of equipment, tools and new instruments for Hubble. But that launch date could change. “That’s dependent upon the shuttle flights between now and the servicing mission,” said NASA’s Alan Stern, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C. He added that safety always comes first.

Tusker, a towering 50-year-old bull, was shot Sunday at the Charara camp on the shores of Lake Kariba, 370 kilometers (230 miles) northwest of Harare, parks officials and independent Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force said.

“Tusker was the resident Charara elephant … he was a legend and a great favorite of tourists and locals alike,” said Johnny Rodrigues, head of the trust.

The lawsuit, seeking unspecified damages for copyright and trademark infringement, was brought Monday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan by Missy Chase Lapine, the author of “The Sneaky Chef: Simple Strategies for Hiding Healthy Foods in Kids’ Favorite Meals.”

“Jerry Seinfeld is an enormously wealthy and well-known comedian, and Jessica Seinfeld is his wife, but that does not give them license to slander and plagiarize,” the lawsuit said.

…

An estimated 2 million Iraqis are living outside their country, most of them having left since the U.S.-led invasion nearly five years ago, according to UNHCR.

“The number of people fleeing Iraq has declined considerably because of the visa restrictions that have been imposed by governments around Iraq, particularly Syria and Jordan,” Redmond said.

“There used to be 3,000 people a day, but that’s not possible now because they require visas,” he told The Associated Press. He said he was unable to say exactly how many people are leaving Iraq now, but he was sure it was much lower.

Bilawal Bhutto Zardari took a deep breath before meeting the world’s media Tuesday, coolly claiming his mother’s legacy even as he acknowledged he has much to learn. The 19-year-old had not faced reporters since soon after Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party named him their symbolic leader last month – an act many suggested smacked of royalty.

Young Bhutto Zardari was ready for the succession question, stressing the party needed to show a united front to stem violence after his mother’s assassination on Dec. 27. They chose him unanimously. Politics was in his blood.

“It wasn’t handed on like some piece of family furniture,” he said of the post. “(The party) asked me to do it and I did.”

Western ambassadors later told the opposition at a meeting to respect the result of Saturday’s election — which Saakashvili won with a tiny majority over the threshold required to avoid a second-round run-off — but they responded by pledging mass protests and hunger strikes.

“You have stolen 500,000 votes,” Levan Gachechiladze, the candidate who represented the main nine-party opposition coalition, bellowed at Levan Tarkhnishvili, the election commission chief.

Britain said the agreement would open the way for the EU to ratify the 1996 Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and the 2001 Cape Town Convention on International Interests in Mobile Equipment, which is important to the aviation industry.

“I am delighted that, with the agreement of the government of Gibraltar and in the spirit of ongoing cooperation, we have now concluded a set of arrangements with Spain which will allow the EU to move ahead and ratify all such instruments,” Foreign Secretary David Miliband said in a statement to parliament.

In his first full press conference since the December 27 assassination of his mother, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari defended his appointment as her successor and cast doubt on the government probe into the killing.

“I fear for my country. I fear that if free and fair elections are not held it may disintegrate,” he told reporters in London, referring to polls postponed for six weeks until February 18 following his mother’s murder.

“The family’s and party’s request is for a UN-sponsored investigation, because we do not believe that an investigation under the authority of the Pakistan government has the necessary transparency,” he said.

Early Sunday, Iranian patrol boats “charged” toward two U.S. frigates and a destroyer and threatened to blow them up. The U.S. warships were about to fire when the Iranian vessels retreated.

The Navy said Monday that it hoped that Iran wouldn’t act “so irresponsibly” again. In Tehran, Iran’s foreign minister dismissed the incident as almost routine. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said he knew of no plans to protest Iran’s actions formally.

Defense attorneys say the report, which supports prosecutors’ requests for life terms, contains inaccuracies and mischaracterizations about evidence introduced during the trial.

The hearing is expected to last at least three days, with U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke, an appointee of President Bush, planning to hear each objection individually.

The lawyer for the two of the visitors mauled in the Christmas Day attack is threatening a defamation lawsuit over what he claims is a despicable blame-the-victim strategy on the part of the zoo, and animal rights activists have long accused Zoo Director Manuel Mollinedo of putting too much emphasis on showmanship.

“We’ve asked for his termination,” said Elliot Katz, president of In Defense of Animals.

Though Georgia’s judges are technically outlawed from banishing offenders, some have skirted the rule by restricting them from all but one of the state’s 159 counties. Now, one convict is challenging the practice, claiming it is unconstitutional.

“It’s a throwback to the dark ages,” McNeill Stokes, the defense attorney who argued the case Monday, said in an interview. “The whole point behind this is zealous prosecutors wanting to get rid of problems in their counties.”

Higher crude oil prices, which last week topped a record $100 a barrel, are pushing up motor fuel costs, the Energy Information Administration said in its new monthly forecast.

The price of crude oil now accounts for about two-thirds of the cost of making gasoline, according to the Energy Department’s analytical arm.

The reason is likely to be distance from specialists and screening operations that are concentrated in urban areas, though investigators said lack of insurance coverage and poverty could be factors.

“When you look at our study it suggests that the barrier to transplantation is not from within the transplant centers but it’s really the barriers to getting in the front door in the first place,” said Dr. David Axelrod of the Dartmouth Medical School, in Lebanon, New Hampshire, who led the research.

The delay of shuttle Atlantis’ mission to the space station, caused by fuel sensor failures in December, means Atlantis likely will not be ready for the Hubble mission planned for August. NASA has two other higher-priority flights for its space shuttles as well.

“Our watchword is safety,” Alan Stern, NASA’s associate administrator for science missions, told reporters in a conference call from the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas.

Perry Price, 46, had just shot a goose and went back to his pickup truck to let his dog out to go find it in the brush.

He leaned over the bed of the truck and lay his shotgun down inside as he unhooked the tailgate, his hunting companion told investigators.

Among the devices unveiled at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is a pocket-sized mobile TV by Motorola that can play live TV, on-demand clips and programs saved on a digital video recorder.

“We’ll have everything in an all-in-one device: images, video, GPS (global positioning system), media player, and television,” says Motorola’s Ebin Ephrem, who expects the gadget to be commercialized in Europe within six months.

The fans of rival candidate Ron Paul shout “Tax Hike Mike” over the Huck boosters, who scream “We Like Mike,” and the press is jammed by the dozens in the middle, unable to get through the front door to witness the day’s crucial newsmaking moment, when the Huck-a-campaign pulls off its latest Huck-a-coup – the launch of the Huck-a-burger. Yes, this is really happening.

A McCain victory in New Hampshire would be the consummate comeback for a comeback specialist, a survivor who weathered more than five years in a Vietnam POW camp, a wrenching congressional scandal and three bouts with aggressive skin cancer.

For rival Mitt Romney, a McCain resurgence would be a searing loss, another second-place finish for a campaign that had anticipated back-to-back wins in Iowa and New Hampshire and had spent tens of millions of dollars more than other Republicans.

Outside the Brookside Congregational Church in Manchester, Huckabee waded into the crowd to greet voters outside the polling place. He ran into Joe Legay, 70, and asked him what candidate was getting Legay’s vote.

“I’m independent,” Legay said, ducking the question.

“So I have one more chance, what can I do? Can I pour you coffee?” Huckabee asked, then poured him a cup of coffee from a doughnut shop coffee container. “Where else than in New Hampshire does a candidate come out and personally pour coffee?”

US President George W. Bush told Turkish President Abdullah Gul after talks at the White House that Washington would keep helping Ankara’s military against their “common enemy,” rebels of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

“It’s an enemy to Turkey; it’s an enemy to Iraq; and it’s an enemy to people who want to live in peace,” said Bush. “The United States, along with Turkey, are confronting these folks. And we will continue to confront them.”

Investors tried to take the market higher at many points during the day, but eventually succumbed to another stream of bad news. All three indexes are down substantially so far this year, having been pummeled since Jan. 1 on worse-than-anticipated readings on the economy.

That could mean that fourth-quarter earnings reports, which start pouring in later this week, may not meet already lowered expectations.

In the morning, the National Association of Realtors said its index tracking pending U.S. home sales fell 2.6 percent in November, a larger decline than the market expected. Jitters about Countrywide and KB Home, which posted a disappointing fourth quarter loss, kept Wall Street on edge throughout the day, and comments by President Bush reiterating the problems facing the economy likely added to the market’s uneasiness.

The stock fell $2.17, or 28.4 percent, to $5.47 on Tuesday after sinking to a 52-week low of $5.05.

In a prepared statement earlier in the day, the company said there was “no substance to the rumor that Countrywide is planning to file for bankruptcy, and we are not aware of any basis for the rumor that any of the major rating agencies are contemplating negative action relative to the company.”

The 611 job cuts will come across the company’s divisions and will reduce its after-tax earnings by 8 cents per share, the company said in a statement. About half of the job cuts will come in its education division.

McGraw-Hill attributed the cuts in its financial services division to current business conditions, which were affecting both the credit ratings services and other businesses of Standard & Poor’s.

Its shares tumbled more than 9 percent.

Chief Executive Jeffrey Mezger warned in a prepared statement that 2008 “will be another tough year for the homebuilding industry.”

Believing a more aggressive cut was needed to ward off a more serious economic downturn, directors at the Boston, Minneapolis and San Francisco Fed banks voted to request a 50-basis-point cut in the discount rate for emergency loans to banks to 4.5 percent, the minutes showed.

The Fed Board announced a 25 basis-point discount rate cut to 4.75 percent on December 11, 2007, at the same time the Federal Open Market Committee cut the benchmark federal funds rate target by 25 basis points to 4.25 percent.

“Upon further review of the core business and as part of last month’s announced turnaround plan, we’ve decided to divest ourselves completely of our institutional sales business as the scale of the business did not warrant the expense of capital,” ETrade spokeswoman Pamela Erickson said.

Roughly 30 jobs will be cut, Erickson said.

The news came after the company’s share price hit its lowest level since 1996, tumbling more than 20 percent. In afternoon trading on Nasdaq, shares were down 61 cents or 21.91 percent at $2.20.

Stiglitz, named by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to head a panel to find a new method of economic calculation that will include quality-of-life factors, said the current yardsticks “only reward governments if they increase materialistic production.”

“If you improve the quality of life, but it doesn’t show up in more material consumption, it doesn’t show up in GDP, and you’ll be criticized,” the US economist told AFP in a phone interview.

“Thanks to the 13 billion Swiss francs in new capital, and the replacement of a cash dividend by a share dividend, we have sufficiently firmed up our capital base,” Rohner told the Swiss newspaper Handelszeitung in an interview to appear on Wednesday.

UBS in December turned to the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC) and an unnamed Middle Eastern investor to help restore its balance sheet which had been badly hit by losses in the US mortgage crisis.

The deadline was Wednesday, but the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said it now hopes to provide a recommendation to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne in time for a decision by him within the next month.

The department has never declared a species threatened or endangered because of climate change, Hall said.

The carcasses of the jackals – an endangered species protected by Indian law – were found scattered in sugarcane fields over the past four days on the outskirts of Dudhwa National Park, nearly 155 miles southwest of the Uttar Pradesh state capital of Lucknow, said the official, K.K. Singh.

The jackals live mostly in unprotected forest areas just outside the park, which is home to tigers and other large animals.

The five-year study of switch grass done by the University of Nebraska and the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service was published this week by the National Academy of Sciences.

Researcher Ken Vogel said he estimates that an acre of switch grass would produce an average of 300 gallons of ethanol based on the study of grass grown on marginal land on farms in Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota.

The phosphorescence comes from boron in the gem, the same element that makes it appear blue in normal light, explained Jeffrey Port, curator of the National Gem Collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

But while all blue diamonds glow in ultraviolet light, most glow blue. The Hope glows red, indicating a different mix of boron and nitrogen, Post explained in a telephone interview.

Cases of the sometimes deadly mosquito-borne disease have been reported in Texas and this may be the beginning of a new trend, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and his senior scientific adviser, Dr. David Morens.

A warming climate and less-than-stellar efforts to control mosquitoes could accelerate its spread northwards, they cautioned.

“Widespread appearance of dengue in the continental United States is a real possibility,” they wrote in a commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“Finally, a plan … to clear the rubbish from the streets of Campania: better late than never,” the environmental association Legambiente said on its website.

Prime Minister Romano Prodi announced a 120-day campaign to end a crisis that has seen some 110,000 tonnes of uncollected garbage accumulate in Naples and the surrounding Campania region.

Regional giant Asia Pulp and Paper (APP) and affiliates are clearing land and building an access road outside their legal concessions in the Bukit Tigapuluh area of Sumatra’s Jambi province, a coalition of five environmental groups said in a press release accompanying a new joint report.

“From our surveys and other NGO surveys we know this is a very critical habitat for tigers, elephants and recently introduced orangutans,” Desmarita Murni, a campaigner with WWF, one of the groups, told AFP.

The German federation for renewable energy (BEE) warned however that further progress was likely to be hampered by falling investment in renewable energy sources.

A total of 9.1 percent of the energy for Europe’s biggest economy was produced from sources such as the wind and the sun, compared with eight percent in 2006, the group said.

The group’s warning came days ahead of an auto show beginning Thursday in New Dehi where multinational car firms will unveil new models aimed at capturing a slice of the fast-growing Indian automobile sector.

India’s transport sector accounts for 18 percent of the country’s emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) — one of the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, the green group said in a statement.

The mysterious star clusters are considered orphaned, as they don’t belong to any particular galaxy. Instead, they are clumped together into a structure called Arp’s Loop along a wispy bridge of gas stretched like taffy between three colliding galaxies – M81, M82 and NGC 3077. These galaxies are located about 12 million light-years from us in the constellation Ursa Major.

“We could not believe it, the stars were in the middle of nowhere,” said Duilia de Mello of the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

The tiny galaxies are about one-tenth to one-twentieth the size of the Milky Way and have 40 times fewer stars. Light from the ancient clusters was emitted about 2 billion years after the Big Bang, the theoretical beginning to the universe that occurred about 13.7 billion years ago. So the galaxies are seen as they existed in a very young universe.

The galaxies are not the most distant seen by the Hubble Space Telescope, but astronomers consider them to be the best evidence of precursors to larger, spiral structures such as the Milky Way.

The study will likely impress manufacturers of magnetic devices, many of whom never dreamed these things could actually work and have been selling them merely to cash in on this $5-billion-a-year industry. But skeptics will have a tough time brushing this one off.

In a tightly controlled study-a rarity in the world of alternative medicine-Thomas Skalak of the University of Virginia found that static magnets reduced swelling by up to 50 percent in the tiny hind paws of rats. Skalak published his results in the November issue of the American Journal of Physiology.

A museum on Tuesday unveiled a virtual reconstruction of one of the bustling arteries that led into ancient Rome, allowing visitors to wander through rebuilt monuments and interact with the city’s political elite.

Using a concept similar to that of online virtual worlds, the project creates characters, or avatars, that roam the ancient Via Flaminia, exploring funerary monuments that lined the road, bridges and arches. They can also roam through the villa belonging to Livia, wife of Rome’s first emperor, Augustus.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) and broadcasters NBC announced the decision to replace the show with a press conference after actors last week vowed to boycott the event in support of striking writers.

The HFPA and NBC said that instead of the traditional dinner and awards ceremony, this year’s Golden Globes winners would be revealed during an hour long press conference at 6 pm (0200 GMT) Sunday in Beverly Hills.