Obama, on his fifth visit to the region since BP Plc’s deep-sea well in the Gulf of Mexico ruptured in April, pledged to restore the economy and the environment in the aftermath of the world’s worst offshore oil spill.

“Oil is no longer flowing into the Gulf, and it has not been flowing for a month. But I’m here to tell you that our job is not finished, and we are not going anywhere until it is,” he told reporters after holding talks with local business owners.

Swollen by torrential monsoon rains, major rivers have flooded Pakistan’s mountain valleys and fertile plains, killing up to 1,600 people and leaving two million homeless.

Six million people still need food, shelter and water and medicine, the United Nations says. Pakistan’s government, already facing a Taliban insurgency, now faces the risk of social upheaval and long-term economic pain.

Obama waded into the debate on Friday when he appeared to offer his backing for the center called Cordoba House to be built two blocks from the “Ground Zero” site of the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York City.

On Saturday, seeking to clarify his position, Obama said he supported the right of Muslims to build the center but would not comment on the “wisdom” of deciding its location in Lower Manhattan.

The U.S. military accounted for more than 60 percent of the deaths but the total still lags the list of Afghan civilian casualties, which a U.N. report last week showed had risen sharply despite a drop in the number blamed on foreign troops.

The deaths of at least one more U.S. service member, an Australian and a Briton announced in the past two days have pushed the total of foreign military deaths to 2,002 since the Taliban were ousted in late 2001 by a U.S.-led coalition.

Army General David Petraeus said in an interview aired on Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the battle against the Taliban insurgency was an “up and down process” and it was too early to determine its success.

“What we have are areas of progress. We’ve got to link those together, extend them,” Petraeus said in an interview aimed at boosting flagging public confidence in the war effort.

The United Nations has appealed for 460 million dollars to deal with the immediate aftermath of the floods, but has warned that billions will be needed in the long term as villages, businesses, crops and infrastructure have been wiped out.

Pakistan’s weak civilian government has appealed to the international community to help it deal with the challenges of a crisis compared by Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani to the sub-continent’s 1947 partition.

Amid the worst heatwave in its history, Russia has for days battled to cut back hundreds of blazes across the country, including fires in a nature reserve near its top nuclear research centre in Sarov, a town still closed to foreigners as in Soviet times.

The secret nuclear research centre tucked into the woods in central Russia straddles two regions — the Nizhny Novgorod and Mordovia regions — and the emergency ministry said on Sunday the number of fires in both regions had been reduced.

For the first time in at least a quarter of a century, no government minister went to Tokyo’s Yasukuni shrine, a place dedicated to 2.5 million Japanese killed in conflicts, including 14 of Japan’s top WWII criminals.

The anniversary is the first since Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s centre-left Democratic Party ousted the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) last year after its almost unbroken half century in power.

Democrats and Republicans squared off on whether it was appropriate for Obama to wade into the fray over the Islamic center, which would include a mosque and would be built two city blocks away from the site of the former World Trade Center.

At a Friday Iftar dinner at the White House to mark Ramadan, Obama said Muslims “have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country,” including by building a mosque in lower Manhattan.

Germany’s gross domestic product (GDP) expanded 2.2 percent in the second quarter, figures showed Friday, the strongest three-monthly gain in output since East and West Germany reunified in 1990.

This followed figures showing that exports, the backbone of the German economy, rocketed 28.5 percent year-on-year in June to reach 86.5 billion euros (111.7 billion dollars), close to pre-crisis levels.

Hundreds of thousands, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou included, have flocked to beaches for a holiday respite some say could be their last before living conditions are drastically changed by wage cuts and price hikes.

The exodus peaks this weekend ahead of the Dormition (Assumption) of the Virgin Mary feast on August 15, one of Greece’s foremost public holidays.

John Wright has never missed his target over the years, successfully drilling 40 relief wells that were used to plug leaks around the world. People along the Gulf Coast aren’t the only ones hoping he can make it 41-for-41.

“Anyone who has ever worked extremely hard on a long project wants to see it successfully finished, as long as it serves its intended purpose,” Wright, 56, who is leading the team drilling the primary relief well, said in a lengthy e-mail exchange with The Associated Press from the Development Driller III vessel.

But four months after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, regulators have only started to make good on promises to overhaul drilling. Tough measures are stalled in Congress. A $1 billion emergency response network proposed by the industry won’t be operational for another year.

And while doomsday scenarios from the BP spill, like oil washing up the East Coast, have not come to pass, there are no guarantees that drilling will be any safer once it does resume.

Only 32 percent of those citing no allegiance to either major party say they want Democrats to keep control of Congress in this November’s elections, according to combined results of recent Associated Press-GfK polls. That’s way down from the 52 percent of independents who backed Obama over Republican Sen. John McCain two years ago, and the 49 percent to 41 percent edge by which they preferred Democratic candidates for the House in that election, according to exit polls of voters.

Independents voice especially strong concerns about the economy, with 9 in 10 calling it a top problem and no other issue coming close, the analysis of the AP-GfK polls shows. While Democrats and Republicans rank the economy the No. 1 problem in similar numbers, they are nearly as worried about their No. 2 issues, health care for Democrats and terrorism for Republicans.

Ban’s comments reflect the concern of the international community about the unfolding disaster in Pakistan, which is battling al-Qaida and Taliban militants, has a weak and unpopular government, and an anemic economy propped up by international assistance.

“This has been a heart-wrenching day for me,” Ban said after flying over the hard-hit areas with President Asif Ali Zardari. “I will never forget the destruction and suffering I have witnessed today. In the past I have witnessed many natural disasters around the world, but nothing like this.”

Under pressure from Congress and the public, the Army later acknowledged the problem and drastically cut the number of soldiers given the designation. But advocates for veterans say an unknown number of troops still unfairly bear the stigma of a personality disorder, making them ineligible for military health care and other benefits.

“We really have an obligation to go back and make sure troops weren’t misdiagnosed,” said Dr. Barbara Van Dahlen, a clinical psychologist whose nonprofit “Give an Hour” connects troops with volunteer mental health professionals.

The foreign governments are essentially a decade behind in coming to terms with encryption, a technology that’s fundamental to the Internet as a medium of commerce.

Encrypted communications are scrambled in a complex process to ensure that only the intended recipient can read them, using the proper digital key. This often takes place behind the scenes, without the user needing to do anything. When you submit your credit card number on a shopping site, the communication is encrypted. When you log in to your bank’s site, that connection is encrypted as well.

Professor Karol Sikora and other experts had said Abdel Baset al-Megrahi probably had only three months to live when he was freed from a Scottish jail last August and allowed to return home to Libya. But one year later, Al-Megrahi, who is being treated for prostate cancer, is still alive.

Sikora, one of three experts who assessed al-Megrahi’s health for Libyan authorities, was quoted by Britain’s Observer newspaper Sunday as saying he should have been more cautious about the chances of survival.

The same isn’t true for teens who “hook up.” Researchers found that those who have casual flings get lower grades and have more school-related problems compared with those who abstain.

The findings, presented Sunday at a meeting of the American Sociological Association in Atlanta, challenge to some extent assumptions that sexually active teens tend to do poorer in school.

Petraeus, who’s been credited with a successful war strategy in Iraq and who took charge of U.S. and NATO military operations in Afghanistan in July, described an “up and down process” of seizing Taliban-controlled territory and creating “small pockets of progress” that he hoped will expand.

The goal, he told NBC’s “Meet the Press,” is to keep al-Qaida and other extremist groups at bay while the Afghan government has a chance to take control and earn the trust of the local population.

The issue is central in Haiti where hundreds of thousands have emigrated to flee poverty and the money they send to relatives back home is a vital source of income in the earthquake-ravaged Caribbean nation.

Currently, Haitians who emigrate must renounce their Haitian citizenship if they become citizens of another country, making them unable to vote or run for office in their homeland. Jean himself left Haiti for New York City when he was nine, but never sought U.S. citizenship.

“God was good to me,” the team’s surviving driver, Safiullah, said in an interview punctuated by long pauses and tears for his slain colleagues.

On Aug. 5, the day of the attack, the medical team stopped to give three men a lift – a common courtesy in the rugged, remote area. Soon after, 10 members of the International Assistance Mission – six Americans, three Afghans, one German and a Briton – lay dead.

Obama commented during a trip to Florida, where he expanded on a Friday night White House speech asserting that Muslims have the same right to freedom of religion as everyone else in America.

The president’s statements thrust him squarely into a debate that he had skirted for weeks and could put Democrats on the spot three months before midterm elections where they already were nervous about holding control of the House and maybe even the Senate. Until Friday, the White House had asserted that it did not want to get involved in local decision-making.

The mayor, who said little on the topic during five years in office, is campaigning to make streets safer for cyclists after a parked cab abruptly pulled out across a bike lane, causing him to shatter an elbow. The ill-fated ride was his first on city streets since taking office.

Since the July 17 accident, Villaraigosa has utilized the Huffington Post and YouTube to say that it’s time to recognize that bicycles also belong on LA’s streets, which were largely designed for autos. In the YouTube video, he announced plans to convene a bicycle safety summit.

Except sometimes they appear not to be using the same language. With judges using stilted legalese and jurors writing in awkwardly formal English, miscommunication can be common.

Jurors in former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s corruption case return to court Monday for their 13th day of deliberations after their attempts to communicate with Judge James B. Zagel left the judge, attorneys and others scratching their heads.

He was a lifelong criminal, with a rap sheet that included a murder conviction for setting fire to a fellow inmate in a Kansas prison. Two eyewitnesses and his accomplices placed him at the liquor store. And even one of Jones’ attorneys says the defense had “a devil of a time finding a good character witness.”

But there are new questions 10 years after Jones was executed about whether he actually killed 44-year-old Allen Hilzendager while robbing the store, and whether the testimony used to convict him was enough. A judge has ordered DNA testing on a strand of hair that prosecutors used to link Jones to the murder.

“What happened to this 7-year-old angel … by a group of depraved, animal pedophiles ranks in a place where I could never imagine. This is not the Congo,” said then-Trenton Mayor Doug Palmer three days after the March 28 party in a vacant apartment in one of Trenton’s toughest neighborhoods.

Police said they were taking the case personally. Palmer vowed everyone in the apartment would “suffer the full weight of the legal system.” Activists promised to patrol the neighborhood to protect the troubled public housing complex. The stepsister was immediately arrested and, within days, so were five males – three of them juveniles.

Clark’s search for her father succeeded after only a month, though with a bittersweet aftermath. Greenawalt is still searching, seven years after she started – persisting despite doubts and frustrations.

“I’ve dreamt of you since I was a little girl,” Greenawalt wrote to her unknown dad in a Father’s Day blog posting in June. “There are so many things I want to know about you.”

It was a momentous turn on the Pacific battleground of World War II, yet one that would be largely eclipsed in the history books by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the same week 65 years ago. But in recent years some historians have argued that the Soviet action served as effectively as – or possibly more than – the A-bombs in ending the war.

Now a new history by a professor at University of California, Santa Barbara seeks to reinforce that view, arguing that fear of Soviet invasion persuaded the Japanese to opt for surrender to the Americans, who they believed would treat them more generously than the Soviets.

“I can’t ask my crew to do this and the best thing is you can get (the action models) naked without any complaints,” he told AFP at a secluded studio in Hong Kong.

The director is in a race against time to complete his 3.2 million-US-dollar film “3-D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy”, which is due for release in May.

Officials said that nationwide the area alight with fires was almost a quarter that of a week ago, although there appeared to be little progress in reducing the size of the blaze close to Russia’s main nuclear research centre in Sarov.

Two US Air Force C-130 planes carrying aid for Russia touched down early Saturday at a Moscow airport, followed by a charter flight from California ordered by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, state television and the foreign ministry said.

Muslims “have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country,” Obama said at an Iftar meal at the White House for Muslims breaking their Ramadan fast late Friday.

That includes “the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances.”

The 600-million-dollar legislation, signed into law Friday by US President Barack Obama, will nearly double visa fees for some Indian information technology workers entering the United States.

“The US is giving a very strong signal foreigners are not welcome,” said Som Mittal, president of the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), which represents India’s leading software exporters.

The lives of 20 million people — nearly 12 percent of the population — have been disrupted by one of the worst catastrophes in Pakistan’s history. Six million still need food, shelter and water, the UN said in a statement.

Highlighting the scale of the disaster, Prime Minister Raza Yusuf Gilani said in an Independence Day speech the country faces challenges similar to those during the 1947 partition of the subcontinent.

A statement issued by the presidential palace said Obama agreed in a video call to start talking about a review, which Karzai also proposed in a letter.

“The two presidents agreed that discussions regarding a strategic review of the more effective ways of fighting terrorism should begin,” the statement, written in Dari, said.

The prescription drug, called ella, is made by French company HRA Pharma and will be sold in the United States by Watson Pharmaceuticals.

It is the first emergency contraceptive approved since a five-year battle under the Bush administration ended with limited over-the-counter sales and age checks by pharmacists for a rival pill.

“As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country,” Obama said to applause at an event attended by diplomats from Islamic countries and members of the U.S. Muslim community.

“That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances,” he said, weighing in for the first time in a national debate that has grown increasingly heated in recent weeks.

On a warm and muggy day, Obama pledged to “keep up our efforts until the environment is cleaned, polluters are held accountable, businesses and communities are made whole, and the people of the Gulf Coast are back on their feet.”

Obama is in the region for a brief weekend trip with first lady Michelle Obama, daughter Sasha (her sister Malia is at summer camp) and the family dog, Bo. Their 27-hour stop in the Sunshine State is as much a family vacation as it is an attempt by the president to convince Americans that this region, so dependent on tourism revenue, is safe for travel.

But four months after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, regulators have only started to make good on promises to overhaul drilling. Tough measures are stalled in Congress. A $1 billion emergency response network proposed by the industry won’t be operational for another year.

And while doomsday scenarios from the BP spill, like oil washing up the East Coast, have not come to pass, there are no guarantees that drilling will be any safer once it does resume.

The crisis has battered Pakistan’s economy and undermined its political stability at a time when the United States needs its steadfast cooperation against Islamist extremism. The U.N. has appealed for an initial $460 million to provide relief to Pakistan but has said the country will need billions to rebuild once the floodwaters recede.

Because of the flooding, Pakistan canceled celebrations Saturday marking its creation and independence from Britain in 1947. President Asif Ali Zardari met with flood victims in the northwest, and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was expected to visit affected regions on Sunday.

More than 750,000 Medicare recipients with high prescription costs each got a $250 government check this summer, and 3 million-plus more checks are going out to people who land in the program’s anxiety-inducing coverage gap.

Democrats, running scared in an election year, are trying to overcome older people’s mistrust of the new health care law, which expands coverage for younger generations by cutting Medicare payments to hospitals and insurers.

Seventy-five years after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Social Security into law, Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address Saturday: “We have an obligation to keep that promise, to safeguard Social Security for our seniors, people with disabilities and all Americans – today, tomorrow and forever.”

Some Republican leaders in Congress are “pushing to make privatizing Social Security a key part of their legislative agenda if they win a majority in Congress this fall,” Obama said.

The early-morning shootings at Baghdad checkpoints demonstrated the insurgents’ aim to weaken confidence in the government and aggravate sectarian tension as all but 50,000 U.S. troops head home by the end of August.

In the first attack, gunmen armed with silenced pistols killed two policemen asleep in their patrol car at a security checkpoint in the Shiite-dominated New Baghdad neighborhood, said an officer with the federal police in Baghdad. The assailants then set the car on fire and fled, he said.

The Pentagon has said that secret information will be even more damaging to security and risk more lives than WikiLeaks’ initial release of some 76,000 war documents.

“This organization will not be threatened by the Pentagon or any other group,” Julian Assange told reporters in Stockholm. “We proceed cautiously and safely with this material.”

Theodore Olson and David Boies, the high-profile lawyers representing two couples, told the appeals court that same-sex couples are being hurt every day Proposition 8 is enforced and should not be denied their civil rights while the ban’s sponsors pursue an appeal of last week’s decision overturning the 2008 measure.

“Indeed, the only harm at issue here is that suffered by Plaintiffs and other gay and lesbian Californians each day that Proposition 8’s discriminatory and irrational deprivation of their constitutional rights remains in force,” the lawyers argued in a filing late Friday.

Unrest that has killed at least 57 people since June shows no signs of abating despite the deployment of thousands of troops and calls from India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for calm. Tens of thousands of Kashmiris staged angry demonstrations Friday after government forces killed four people and wounded 31 others.

The situation in recent weeks has been reminiscent of the late 1980s, when protests against New Delhi’s rule sparked the armed conflict that has so far killed more than 68,000 people, mostly civilians.

Let’s face it: There is no easy or imminent fix for the flagging recovery.

The sluggish economic summer wore on Friday with news that Americans spent less at most retail stores in July. Earlier this month came word that the trade deficit is ballooning and companies are not adding jobs fast enough to bring down unemployment.

The Yurok Tribe celebrated the items’ return this past week – among the largest repatriation of Native American sacred objects ever – from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian.

“It’s part of the fabric of who we are and why we are,” said Javier Kinney, who helped truck the artifacts back from Suitland-Silver Hill, Md. “It’s a little bit of mixed emotion – sadness that they were gone for so long but joy and excitement that they’re back. It’s like family coming back home.”

Three states – Washington, New Mexico and Utah – allow illegal immigrants to get licenses because their laws do not require proof of citizenship or legal residency. An Associated Press analysis found that those states have seen a surge in immigrants seeking IDs in recent months, a trend experts attribute to crackdowns on illegal immigration in Arizona and elsewhere.

“It’s difficult being undocumented and not having an identification,” said Hernandez, of Puebla, Mexico. “You can use the Mexican ID, but people look down on it.” An American driver’s license is also a requirement for many jobs.

A Brooklyn jury deliberated less than two hours before finding Hal Turner guilty of making death threats.

A judge jailed Turner, of North Bergen, N.J., following the verdict. His attorney declined comment.

John Dunn, the water and pollution control director in the central Iowa city, said people must adopt “temporary lifestyle changes.”

“Water used for any purpose other than essential health and sanitation purposes is hampering our community-wide recovery and extending the amount of time until water is available for drinking,” Dunn said. “The use of water for nonessential purposes must stop.”