Turkey’s President Abdullah Gul said the army was “doing what is necessary in the fight against terrorism,” while Rice said the United States, Iraq and Turkey shared a “common interest” in stopping rebel activities.

Annoyance over Washington’s perceived approval of the Turkish action created a diplomatic incident, with the president of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region reportedly refusing to meet Rice in Baghdad.

A suicide bomber blew himself up inside a cafe in the town of Al-Abbara, in the province of Diyala, killing 16 people and wounding 24, police Lieutenant Colonel Najim al-Sumadaie from Baquba told AFP.

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In another incident, a bomber exploded his explosives-laden car at a police checkpoint in central Baquba, north of Baghdad, killing two people and wounding 15, a police officer said.

Arguably the most important document ever to be auctioned, the vellum manuscript was picked up by a telephone bidder, selling for the lower range of its pre-sale estimate of 20 to 30 million dollars.

The royal charter, dated 1297 and bearing the wax seal of King Edward I, enshrined the rights of man into English law and is considered the precursor of such landmark historical documents as the US Declaration of Independence.

U.S. District Court Judge Henry Kennedy, who in 2005 had ordered the government to preserve information on prisoner mistreatment at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, scheduled a court hearing on the tapes for Friday, overriding government objections.

Lawyers for a group of Guantanamo Bay inmates contesting their detention had requested the hearing to learn whether the government had complied with the preservation order. They cited reports that information obtained from the interrogations implicated five unnamed Guantanamo detainees.

Many states still lack a stockpile of drugs, masks, gloves and other equipment needed to battle a pandemic of diseases, despite five years of constant and detailed warning, the Trust for America’s Health said in its report.

“Overall, federal funding for state and local preparedness will have declined by 25 percent in 3 years if the president’s FY (fiscal year) 2008 request is approved,” the report reads.

McCain, who has sponsored a bill to curb greenhouse emissions, “is far and away the (Republican) candidate most committed to addressing global warming and the nation’s energy challenges,” the League of Conservation Voters said in its 2008 guide to the U.S. presidential primaries.

But while leading his closest rivals for the Republican nomination, the Arizona senator is far behind all Democratic contenders in the league’s lifetime ratings and even trails Republican Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, who has an enthusiastic Internet backing but registers low in national polls.

The Karachi Express train was on its way from the southern city to Lahore when most of its carriages came off the rails near the town of Mehrabpur, officials said.

“We’ve taken out three dead and about 50 injured, with both minor and major injuries,” said district police chief Abdul Hadi Bullo who was at the scene.

Americans have been providing Turkey with intelligence to go after Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq. And a “coordination center” has been set up in Ankara so Turks, Iraqis and Americans can share information, two officials said Tuesday.

But defense and diplomatic officials in Washington and Baghdad told The Associated Press that U.S. commanders in Iraq knew nothing about Sunday’s attack until it was already under way.

At the same time, the Energy Department announced plans to consolidate the nuclear weapons complex that maintains warheads and dismantle those no longer needed, saying the current facilities need to be made more efficient and more easily secured and that the larger complex is no longer needed.

“We are reducing our nuclear weapons stockpile to the lowest level consistent with America’s national security and our commitments to friends and allies,” White House press secretary Dana Perino said. “A credible deterrent remains an essential part of U.S. national security, and nuclear forces remain key to meeting emerging security challenges.”

The White House would not say whether President Bush will sign the legislation, which unanimously passed the House by voice vote Tuesday a few days after it sailed through the Senate. Without Bush’s signature, the bill would become law during the congressional recess that begins next week.

It would be the first makeover of the FOIA in a decade, among other things bringing nonproprietary information held by government contractors under the law. The legislation also is aimed at reversing an order by former Attorney General John Ashcroft in the wake of the attacks, in which he instructed agencies to lean against releasing information when there was uncertainty about how doing so would affect national security.

The overwhelming congressional support for the legislation owes in part to administration allies who successfully insisted on stripping out language explicitly reversing Ashcroft’s order.

Two House panels are planning mid-January hearings featuring former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, author of a bombshell report last week that linked more than 80 baseball players to the illegal use of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs. Players, likely some of those named in the report, could be invited to testify as well.

Mitchell thinks Congress should give Major League Baseball a chance to implement his recommendations before taking independent action.

The official issued a memo that said that once local and regional Federal Emergency Management Agency officials approve a project, Washington must release the money within three days.

But in a decision critics say led to the loss of precious time in New Orleans’ recovery, FEMA higher-ups countermanded the order.

Instead, the rebuilding of schools, roads, hospitals, firehouses and other desperately needed infrastructure was held up for months of interagency reviews that ended at the White House Office of Management and Budget.

The ad, which is airing in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, shows Huckabee in front of a Christmas tree as he says, “Are you about worn out by all the television commercials you’ve been seeing, mostly about politics? Well, I don’t blame you. At this time of year sometimes it’s nice to pull aside from all of that and just remember that what really matters is the celebration of the birth of Christ and being with our family and friends.”

Huckabee is courting evangelical voters and other religious conservatives in his bid to win the Iowa caucuses Jan. 3. In Texas for a fundraiser, he said the ad was a harmless holiday greeting even though it excludes other religions.

…

Although this may not seem large in the overall economy, Hatzius says the effect is magnified because banks need to scale back their lending to keep capital ratios intact after accounting for the losses. As a result, he said lending could be cut by two trillion dollars.

…

“The US is on the precipice of its first consumer recession since 1991, which was the last time the market suffered from a confluence of high energy prices, weakening employment conditions, real estate deflation and tightening credit,” said David Rosenberg, Merrill Lynch’s chief North American economist.

The next time his family saw him, five months later, he was a smiling jihadist holding a Kalashnikov on the Web site of an Algerian group calling itself al-Qaida in Islamic North Africa.

“He was a such a nice boy. There was no sign of this,” Dalila Belkacemi said of her son  who rammed a truck laden with explosives into a coast guard barracks on Sept. 8, killing 30.

Double truck bombings last week on a U.N. building and a government office were the latest in a wave of suicide attacks that have plunged this nation into a dark new reality just as it was emerging from more than a decade of Islamic insurgency. A new brand of terror with the al-Qaida name has sprung up, attracting youths like Nabil.

The judge, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, said in a ruling on Monday that he would undertake a POW review for Yemeni prisoner Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who is charged in the Guantanamo war crimes tribunals with conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism.

If Hamdan is found to be a POW, he could be tried by court-martial, but not by the special military tribunals the United States set up at its naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to try non-U.S. citizens on terrorism charges.

Deputies in the single-chamber Rada voted 226-0 — the absolute minimum for a vote to pass — in favour of Tymoshenko, proposed by pro-Western President Viktor Yushchenko. The opposition, who control just under half of the 450 seats, boycotted the vote.

The ruling coalition then voted in a new government, including Volodymyr Ogryzko, a strong proponent of Ukraine entering NATO and the European Union, as foreign minister.

The congressionally mandated quarterly report suggests that the drop in violence won’t hold unless Iraq’s central government passes key legislation, improves the way it manages its security forces and finds a way to reconcile the country’s competing sects. It said none of those steps has been taken.

“Although security gains, local accommodation and progress against the flow of foreign fighters and lethal aid into Iraq have had a substantial effect, more needs to be done to foster national, ‘top-down’ reconciliation to sustain the gains,” the report said.

Kurdish President Massoud Barzani called the attacks “crimes” and said he wouldn’t meet with Rice, the first open break between the United States and its allies in Iraqi Kurdistan , one of the few regions of the country that have largely escaped massive sectarian violence.

Turkey has long complained that guerrillas from the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which the U.S. considers a terrorist organization, have been given shelter in Iraqi Kurdistan . The PKK seeks to form an independent Kurdistan from parts of Iraq , Iran , Turkey and Syria , and it enjoys broad support in Kurdish Iraq.

Nearly half the states are predicting budget shortfalls in the next two years, with 13 saying they could face a deficit for the fiscal year that begins July 1 in most places. Among the states predicting problems are California, Florida and New York.

The deficits could reach at least $23 billion, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities released Tuesday.

“We’re really teetering on the edge,” said Iris Lav, the center’s deputy director. “With the deficits this large already before there’s actual evidence we’re in a recession, that seems quite serious.”

For the week ended December 15, sales at U.S. retail chain stores open at least a year rose 2.1 percent, the smallest year-over-year advance since June 23, according to data from the International Council of Shopping Centers and UBS Securities LLC.

“ICSC-UBS household surveys continue to show that consumers are completing their holiday season shopping slower than at comparable times in prior years,” the ICSC said in a note.

The screenwriters union, on strike since November 5 against major movie and TV studios, said it would deny waivers that would allow producers of the Academy Awards, as well as the Golden Globe Awards, to hire union writers for their shows.

Organizers of both awards said their shows would go on with or without the blessing of the Writers Guild of America. But the WGA’s action raised the possibility that some Hollywood stars, who are members of the Screen Actors Guild, might boycott the awards in sympathy with the WGA’s strike.

With the holiday shopping season nearing its peak, the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee voted 51-0 in favor of nearly eliminating lead in toys and beefing up the beleaguered federal safety agency.

The House bill also would mandate more independent safety testing of children’s products, require wider use of tracking labels to make recalls more efficient, and impose a ban on the sale and export of recalled goods.

The Fed is racing to tighten up the rules governing the trillion-dollar mortgage market as US home sales continue to fall and property foreclosures spike across the country.

Fed chairman Ben Bernanke said the central bank was moving to clean up mortgage lending while also aiming to protect unwary home buyers from potential fraud.

The unprecedented close timing between the holidays and the caucuses is producing not only a clash between the sacred and profane but new complications and challenges for the candidates as well. Should they be home with their families for Christmas, or is the race too tight and the time too short for even a brief hiatus? What about all those political ads flooding Iowa’s airwaves, about 700 of which are airing on any given day in December? Will they take a breather during Christmas? Will there be a moratorium on attack ads, especially on Christmas Eve and Day, when many Iowans will be in church or traveling anyway – only to resume the assault on December 26?

The fact that this videotaped scene was in reality the centerpiece of the government’s case against seven defendants accused of conspiring to wage war against America is a testament to the strange challenges of trying to preemptively prosecute the war on terrorism.

…

Yet because the technique of waterboarding exists in a legal gray area, many members of Congress may prefer a don’t-ask-don’t-tell approach. Reports published this week in the Washington Post indicate that at least four members of Congress, including current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, received detailed briefings on interrogation techniques used in the CIA’s secret prisons, and had offered no objection. Pelosi has not denied or otherwise commented on that published claim.

The report however says that Iran continues to funnel weapons to Shiite insurgents, despite reassurances by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that he would help halt the flow.

The Pentagon’s 60-page quarterly report, titled “Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq,” covers the September-November 2007 period and is a regular report on activities in Iraq produced for the US Congress.

The US Senate was expected to vote on a half-trillion catch-all budget bill for 2008, passed late Monday by the House of Representatives, which included 31 billion dollars solely for US-led efforts in Afghanistan but none for Iraq.

US President George W. Bush’s Democratic foes hold both chambers, but his Republican allies in the Senate reportedly planned to increase the figure to a total 70 billion dollars for both wars. The White House had threatened to veto the entire bill if it contained no funding for Iraq.

By a vote of 70-25, the Senate attached a Republican amendment adding $40 billion for the war in Iraq to the fiscal 2008 spending bill. The money would not be saddled with any of the conditions Democrats have sought for ending combat, now nearing five years.

“We need to pass this spending bill, with troop funds, without any strings and without any further delay,” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said.

Left out of the spot is perhaps Romney’s most noteworthy pardon denial: his rejection of the request of an Iraq war veteran who was trying to become a police officer after his National Guard service.

Anthony Circosta’s offense? Shooting a friend in the arm with a BB gun as 13-year-old. The impact didn’t break the skin.

The energy bill, boosting mileage by 40 percent to 35 miles per gallon, passed the House 314-100 and now goes to the White House, following the Senate’s approval last week.

In a statement, the White House said Bush will sign the legislation at the Energy Department on Wednesday.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin was joined by his two Republican colleagues in favor of the proposal, while the commission’s two Democrats voted against it.

Martin pushed the vote through despite intense pressure from House and Senate members on Capitol Hill to delay it. The chairman, however, has the support of the White House, which has pledged to turn back any congressional action that seeks to undo the agency vote.

GM said the buyouts, which will be offered to 5,200 of its 72,000 UAW factory workers, will include a combination of early retirement incentives and other programs similar to those offered in 2006.

Under a 2006 deal with the UAW, more than 34,000 workers left GM after accepting buyout packages that ranged from $35,000 to as much as $140,000.

The ECB said it allocated more than 348 billion euros (500 billion dollars) at a flat rate of 4.21 percent in a refinancing operation spokesman Niels Buenemann said was aimed “at helping the banks over the end year period.”

Buenemann said while the operation should help smooth out a period “which is always tense, but this year particularly,” the ECB would make more cash injections in 2008 if needed to ensure credit markets were well supplied.

The former head of Czech car maker Skoda, Helmuth Schuster, told judges in this western city that a centralised account used to finance favours to several members of the VW workers council was run for several years by the office of former VW boss Ferdinand Piech.

Schuster also said that several VW board members, not only former personnel director Peter Hartz who has been convicted in connection with the affair, had stressed repeatedly that it was crucial for VW and its system of co-management to keep workers councils on board.

At its height, the empire, which lasted from the 13th century to the 17th century, extended over an area larger than Western Europe and was renowned for its gold mines.

Researchers have often reported or suspected the presence of blood on many African relics, purportedly shed during ancient ceremonies involving animal sacrifice. While crusts or patinas supposedly made of blood have been found on many such artifacts, accurately confirming the presence of blood has proven hard because little has remained on the objects over the ages.

The amazingly adaptive behavior, detailed in what is the first study of this ant’s diet, has allowed the invaders to spread successfully and rapidly.

The tiny dark-brown and black critters, an invasive species originally from Argentina, have infested coastal communities and displaced native ant species, even though many of the locals are 10 times larger than the Argentinians.

Shivering is one of the many automatic and subconscious functions that the body performs to regulate itself. Other so-called homeostatic functions include the adjustment of breathing rates, blood pressure, heart rate and weight regulation.

Shivering is essentially the body’s last-ditch effort to keep itself warm.

That’s according to several studies of archaeological material, tax accounts, church registers and account books of monasteries, which juxtapose marine life as it looked in the distant past with fish data from today’s warming world. The results, detailed in 14 papers in a special issue of the journal Fisheries Research, shed light on how global warming is impacting fisheries.

Global and regional climate models predict that air and sea temperatures will rise by about 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius) in the next 70 to 100 years.

Scientists studying ancient fish bones dated to a prehistoric warm period (between 7,000 and 3,900 B.C.) in Scandinavia found an abundance of warm-water species such as anchovies and black sea bream, which are typically thought to reside much farther south. While these species disappeared from the archaeological record when temperatures cooled, many have returned to the waters around Denmark as temperatures have risen over the last decade.

Humans possess a sophisticated repertoire of mathematical capabilities unmatched anywhere else in the animal kingdom. Still, there is increasing evidence that at least some of these abilities are shared with other animals. For instance, many animals can figure out which of two sets of dots is larger or smaller.

Too easy

To see how far back more advanced capabilities such as addition might go, researchers at Duke University in Durham, N.C., focused on somewhat distant relatives of humans-rhesus monkeys. While the ancestors of chimpanzees-humanity’s closest living relatives-diverged from us about 6 million years ago, humans and rhesus monkeys parted ways roughly 25 million years ago. In comparison, the age of dinosaurs only ended roughly 65 million years ago.

The scientists tested two monkeys and 14 college students on a math task where they had to add two sets of dots together. They were each shown one set of dots on a computer touchscreen for a half-second, and then another set a half-second later. They were then shown two separate clusters of dots at the same time, one of which was the correct sum of the first two sets. The monkeys were rewarded with Kool-Aid for choosing the right answers.

Two spacewalking astronauts took a close look at a pair of balky solar array joints outside the International Space Station (ISS) Tuesday to help engineers on Earth draw up repair plans.

Expedition 16 commander Peggy Whitson and flight engineer Dan Tani found widespread contamination inside a massive gear that rotates both of the station’s starboard solar arrays, but no sign of damage to a joint at the base of one of those solar wings, during nearly seven hours of orbital work.

“Hopefully we got a good amount of data for the folks on the ground,” said Tani, who led the spacewalk, after the reentering station’s Quest airlock.

European manufacturers have been pursuing several anti-pollution approaches in order to meet their own goal of limiting carbon dioxide emissions to 140 grammes per kilometer next year.

The European Commission, the EU executive arm, on Wednesday is to unveil plans calling for carmakers to reduce emissions to an average of 130 grammes across their fleet of new passenger cars from 2012.

“We want to track down how the settlement actually happened,” Niels Lynnerup, a researcher at Copenhagen University’s forensic medicine department, told AFP.

The island, today a semi-autonomous Danish territory, had been colonised at least 3,000 years ago by Arctic Inuit people, who were then forced to leave, apparently because plunging temperatures eventually made the place uninhabitable.

Announcing that Australia would deploy an unarmed customs ship and a surveillance aircraft to monitor the Japanese hunt, Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said whaling and protest ships needed to exercise caution.

“We are dealing here with an area of water that is thousands of miles away from mainland Australia, if there is an adverse incident on those seas, the capacity for rescue is very low,” Smith told reporters.

The researchers said on Wednesday they had found more than 2 million genetic variants within the Pinot Noir grape, providing winegrowers with a “treasure trove” in the hunt for new strains.

Pinot Noir, made famous by the 2004 film Sideways, has been dubbed the “heartbreak grape” because it is so difficult to grow and susceptible to disease.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat, who chairs the U.S. House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the Food and Drug Administration, said in a letter to FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach that there is not enough data to prove consuming products from cloned animals is safe.

“Both the House and the Senate Agriculture Appropriations Committees strongly encourage the FDA to obtain more information and conduct additional studies before acting further on this issue,” she said in the letter.

Unearthing new species of mammals in the 21st century is considered very rare. The discoveries by a team of American and Indonesian scientists are being studied further to confirm their status.

The animals were found in the Foja mountains rainforest in eastern Papua province in a June expedition, said U.S.-based Conservation International, which organized the trip in the Southeast Asian nation along with the Indonesian Institute of Science.

Fisheries biologists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were quick to caution Tuesday that the increased estimate does not in itself prove that the genetically distinct whales are finally recovering after numbers fell by more than half – a drop blamed largely on overharvesting by Alaska Native subsistence hunters.

“While we are encouraged by this higher estimate, further surveys will be required to determine if this is a reliable upward population trend,” said Doug DeMaster, director of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Seattle.

A fleet of space and ground telescopes have captured images of this cosmic violence, which people have never witnessed before, according to a new study released Monday by NASA.

“It’s like a bully, a black-hole bully punching the nose of a passing galaxy,” said astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, who wasn’t involved in the research.

A little-noticed provision of the energy bill, which is expected to become law, phases out the 125-year-old bulb in the next four to 12 years in favor of a new generation of energy-efficient lights that will cost consumers more but return their investment in a few months.

The new devices include current products such as compact fluorescents and halogens, as well as emerging products such as light-emitting diodes and energy-saving incandescent bulbs.

“This will get us in line with the rest of the advanced industrial world in moving toward more efficient lighting,” says Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., chairman of the Senate energy committee and author of the Senate measure requiring the tougher standards.