The latest numbers, issued just before 1 p.m., show Begich up by 3,724 votes.

The state has counted over 24,000 absentee and questioned ballots Tuesday from Southeast Alaska, Anchorage, the Kenai Peninsula and Kodiak.

The only votes left to count are approximately 2,500 special absentees from people living outside the U.S. or in remote parts of Alaska with no polling place.

The state will count those final ballots on Nov. 25.

President Dmitry Medvedev is expected to sign a nuclear cooperation agreement with his Venezuelan counterpart, Hugo Chavez, during a visit to Latin America next week, part of a determined Russian push into the region.

The reactor is to be named after Humberto Fernandez Moran, a late Venezuelan research scientist and former science minister, announced Chavez. It is one of many accords he hopes to sign while hosting Medvedev in Caracas next week.

The prospect of a nuclear deal between Moscow and Caracas, following a surge in Russian economic, military, political and intelligence activity in Latin America, is likely to alarm the U.S. and present an early challenge to the Obama administration.

Although CO2 levels are still down almost 4.7 percent compared with the baseline year of 1999, they rose 2.3 percent in the first seven years of the new century, from 17.6 billion tons in 2000 to 18 billion tons in 2006.

The report, which gathered information about 40 industrialized economies, showed an especially sharp rise in emissions from former Soviet bloc countries, whose emissions shot up 7.4 percent since 2000. The spike was not unexpected given the rapid recovery many post-Soviet economies have made after floundering in the 1990s.

Significantly, the report includes no information about economies in the developing world. Under the Kyoto Protocol, non-industrialized countries are under no obligation to either reduce emissions or even gather data on them.

Wall Street struggled to undo a day of losses late Tuesday, and the Dow moved higher in the last hour as the Big Three American automakers took their case for a bailout to Capitol Hill.

After bounding higher on a strong outlook from Hewlett Packard that offered a rare glimmer of economic good news, financial markets fell into negative territory around in the afternoon before fighting back.

The Dow Jones industrial average closed 151.17 points or 1.8 percent higher. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was up 0.98 percent or 8.37 points while the technology-heavy Nasdaq was flat despite comments from Hewlett Packard.

“High volatility is now the norm,” said Brian Belski, chief United States sector strategist at Merrill Lynch. “It wouldn’t be a regular day in the market unless you see these big swings.”

Shares of the home-improvement retailer Home Depot lost their early gains and were slightly higher after the company reported third-quarter earnings that beat Wall Street expectations. The home-supply chain reported earnings of 45 cents a share, compared with estimates of 38 cents.

Czech police battled hundreds of far-right rioters armed with an array of weapons north of Prague on Monday in a successful attempt to prevent them from entering a Roma neighborhood.

The riot took place in the northern town of Litvinov, which lies 110 kilometers (68 miles) northwest of Prague. The estimated 500 members of the far-right Workers' Party had gathered for a march in the town before suddenly turning off the approved route toward Janov, a section of the town with a large Roma community.

Their progress was blocked by an estimated 1,000 police officers, who were also seeking to contain an estimated 300 Roma men, who had gathered to defend their community, many armed with sticks and knives, according to the Web site of Radio Prague.

Just weeks before leaving office, the Interior Department's top lawyer has shifted half a dozen key deputies - including two former political appointees who have been involved in controversial environmental decisions - into senior civil service posts.

The transfer of political appointees into permanent federal positions, called "burrowing" by career officials, creates security for those employees, and at least initially will deprive the incoming Obama administration of the chance to install its preferred appointees in some key jobs.

Similar efforts are taking place at other agencies. Two political hires at the Labor Department have already secured career posts there, and one at the Department of Housing and Urban Development  is trying to make the switch.

Between March 1 and Nov. 3, according to the federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Bush administration allowed 20 political appointees to become career civil servants. Six political appointees to the Senior Executive Service, the government's most prestigious and highly paid employees, have received approval to take career jobs at the same level. Fourteen other political, or "Schedule C," appointees have also been approved to take career jobs. One candidate was turned down by OPM and two were withdrawn by the submitting agency.

Thus far, much of the commentary in Washington, D.C., in the pages of major newspapers and on the Web, has been against providing financial support for the companies, which they will say they desperately need in hearings that began Tuesday.

The waves of criticism have been so strong that Susan Tompor, a columnist for The Detroit Free Press, was moved to write on Sunday’s front page: “I never knew Detroit was a dirty word.”

It is a remarkable shift for an industry that has long wielded considerable clout in Washington, D.C.

The rates for loans between banks have begun edging up again, and consumer borrowing costs are also up - that is, assuming consumers can find a bank willing to lend.

President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team is reportedly planning how the new administration will better manage the bailout. But two months is a long time to wait while the Bush Treasury burns through the bailout billions, with little to show in terms of enhanced stability and even less in terms of enhanced confidence.

Last week Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson outlined a complex new bailout strategy intended to promote consumer borrowing. Mr. Paulson defended this latest iteration, saying he would never apologize for changing his approach as the facts change. But it is not surprising that everyone else is feeling whiplashed.

Before the bailout even got under way in October, Mr. Paulson had to sideline his original strategy - to buy up banks’ bad assets - because, he soon came to realize, it was too complex and indirect to deliver the swift jolt the financial markets needed.

The dismissals, which were confirmed by senior Iraqi and American government officials on Sunday and Monday, came as estimates of official Iraqi corruption soared. One Iraqi former chief investigator recently testified before Congress that $13 billion in reconstruction funds from the United States had been lost to fraud, embezzlement, theft and waste by Iraqi government officials.

The moves have not been publicly announced by Maliki’s government, but word of them has begun to circulate through the layers of Iraqi bureaucracy as Parliament prepares to vote on a long-awaited security agreement.

That pact sets the terms for continued American presence here after the United Nations mandate expires Dec. 31, but also amounts to a framework for a steady reduction in that presence. Such a change will undoubtedly lessen American oversight of Iraqi institutions.

Stocks fell sharply Monday as Citigroup announced plans to eliminate more than 50,000 positions and retailers' woes appeared to deepen.

Citigroup's jobs cuts are in addition to the 23,000 the company already announced this year and will bring its workforce to about 300,000. The struggling New York bank also said it would also cut expenses by 20 percent after posting four straight quarters of losses.

The company's stock was down 6.6 percent, making it one of the biggest losers on the Dow Jones industrial average. It has lost nearly two-thirds of its value this year.

The Dow Jones industrial average closed down 2.6 percent, or 224 points, and the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index also was down 2.6 percent, or 23 points. The tech-heavy Nasdaq was down 2.3 percent, or 35 points. Stocks spent a short part of the day in positive territory but for the most part were down.

One of the Dow's few bright spots was General Motors, which was up 5.7 percent. The company has said it could run out of money next year, but investors appear optimistic about a $25 billion emergency bill Democrats are expected to unveil on Capitol Hill Monday to help the struggling auto industry. President Bush and congressional Republicans have opposed the legislation because it would use cash from the $700 billion financial rescue program Congress created to shore up the U.S. banking system.

It's likely cause was exposure to toxic chemicals that included pesticides that were often overused during the war, as well as a drug given to U.S. troops to protect them from nerve gas, a frequent weapon of choice of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

And no effective treatments have been devised for the disorder.

Those are three key conclusions of a Congressionally mandated landmark report released Monday by a federal panel of scientific experts and veterans.

"It is very clear that Gulf War illness is a real condition that was not caused by combat stress or other psychological factors," said Lea Steele, scientific director of the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses, which issued the report, and an associate professor at Kansas State University.

The Sirius Star - a crude "super tanker" flagged in Liberia and owned by the Saudi Arabian-based Saudi Aramco company - was attacked on Saturday more than 450 nautical miles southeast of Mombasa, Kenya.

The crew of 25, including British, Croatian, Polish, Filippino and Saudi nationals, are reported to be safe

U.S. Navy Fifth Fleet Cmdr. Jane Campbell said the super tanker weighs more than 300,000 metric tons and "is more than three times the size of a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier."

Oil industry insiders say a tanker of this size can carry up to 2 million barrels of oil, and the ship's operator, Dubai-based Vela International Marine Ltd, says it is fully laden.

Cecil Bello has stumbled into a new corner of the credit squeeze. The 32-year-old management consultant has had the limits reduced on three of her credit cards.

In September, U.S. Bank notified the Fairfax County resident that she no longer had a $14,500 limit on a card that had a balance of about $5,000. Her new limit left her just $500 from being maxed out, she said.

Then came an Oct. 26 letter from American Express that said she now had a limit of $14,000, down from $22,000. That letter said her "total debt is too high relative to your payment history with us and other creditors."

Early this month, she received an e-mail from American Express notifying her that another card with a $5,000 limit had been reduced to $3,000 and that her new cash advance limit was down to $200.

Bello said she had made more than the minimum payments on time each month.

"I am taking responsibility for paying off my debt," she said. "But when credit card companies trap people this way, it's almost impossible to dig yourself out of the hole."

Like many other card users, Bello has learned the hard way that credit card companies are increasingly putting the clamps on their customers. Lenders are taking a wide range of steps to mitigate their risk as unemployment rates tick up and the number of delinquent borrowers grows. Besides cutting credit limits, card companies are raising rates and fees, and suspending offers such as zero percent balance transfers. They are also making rewards programs less rewarding and shutting down inactive accounts, said industry analysts and watchdogs.

The video appearance by Obama confirmed Schwarzenegger's role as a global leader on climate change, a position shored up only hours before when the California governor set a bold new target for his state to get a third of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020.

In his address, the president-elect accused Bush of failing to show leadership on the issue of climate change. "That will change when I take office," he said.

He went on to lay out an ambitious agenda, beginning with targets aimed at reducing greenhouse gas ambitions to 1990 levels by 2020. He also reiterated a campaign pledge to invest $15 billion each year in development of clean technology - including coal and nuclear power.

"This investment will not only help us reduce our dependence on foreign oil, making the United States more secure. And it will not only help us bring about a clean energy future, saving our planet. It will also help us transform our industries and steer our country out of this economic crisis by generating five million new green jobs that pay well and can't be outsourced."

Communications between the suspected top spy and his commanding officer seemed like a throwback to the Cold War. Investigators allege that in order to send messages to his Russian contact, Herman Simm, 61, used a converted radio which looked like a relic from yesteryear's world of consumer electronics. But there was nothing old-fashioned about what Simm, a high-ranking official in the Estonian Defense Ministry in Tallinn, reportedly transmitted to Moscow over the years. It was the very latest intelligence information.

Although Simm was arrested with his wife Heete in the Estonian capital Tallinn on Sept. 21, this spy story - which has been largely kept under wraps until now - primarily concerns the European Union and NATO based in faraway Brussels. Since Simm was responsible for dealing with classified information in Tallinn, he had access to nearly all documents exchanged within the E.U. and NATO. Officials who are familiar with the case assume that "virtually everything" that circulates between E.U. member states was passed on to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR - including confidential analyses by NATO on the Kosovo crisis, the war in Georgia and even the missile defense program. Investigators believe that Simm is a "big fish."

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mr. de Boer, since 2000, the industrialized nations have continued to increase their greenhouse gas emissions. Has the world failed in moving to protect the climate?

de Boer: I don't think so. We have released data from 2006 - in other words, just one year after the Kyoto Protocol went into effect. Emissions keep rising, but they will start going down. The countries that signed the Kyoto Protocol are still in a position to reach their goals.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: But it still seems like many of these countries, such as Japan, aren't paying much attention to their climate-protection obligations.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: And how do things look with Canada?

Financial officials faced new calls on Tuesday from House lawmakers to aim more of the government’s financial relief package at programs that would directly help homeowners avoid foreclosure, as the lame-duck Congress began considering how to most effectively stem the credit crisis facing financial institutions, the auto industry and the economy as a whole.

At a hearing on Tuesday morning of the House Committee on Financial Services, several members expressed dismay at the prospect of a continuing or even accelerating avalanche of foreclosures, despite the commitment of hundreds of billions of dollars to the broad bailout program being put into effect by the Bush administration. Later in the day, the Senate Banking Committee was scheduled to hear from the auto industry.

Representative Barney Frank, the committee chairman and an architect of the compromise that produced the bailout bill, read from several pages of the legislation that he said authorized more direct steps on behalf of homeowners. And one member after another, especially among the Democrats, urged Treasury Secretary Henrry M. Paulson, Jr., who runs the main program aimed at troubled loans and the lenders who issued them, to do more to encourage renegotiation of loans on houses that have plummeted in value.

Paulson, testifying along with the heads of the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation,  two other crucial players in the economic rescue efforts, said they were focusing on economic stabilization, but Frank complained that the underlying problem of foreclosures was not being effectively addressed.

Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson, Jr., defended his decisions on using the $700 billion financial rescue package, arguing that worsening conditions forced him to repeatedly change direction on how to use the money and that the actions taken would be no "panacea" for the economy.

Congressional leaders expressed deep skepticism of Paulson's use of the emergency package, passed in early October. After selling the plan as a tool to take troubled assets off the books of banks, the Treasury Department is now using the money to make investments in banks and other financial firms, and many of those firms are using that money to acquire weaker competitors rather than to make loans to customers.

Paulson has been reluctant to use the rescue package to directly aid homeowners at risk of foreclosure, to the frustration of congressional Democrats. Moreover, many in Congress are frustrated that the deployment of billions of dollars has not brought stability to financial markets.

"There is no playbook for responding to turmoil we have never faced," Paulson told the House Financial Services Committee Tuesday morning. "We adjusted our strategy to reflect the facts of a severe market crisis."

"The purpose of the financial rescue legislation was to stabilize our financial system and to strengthen it. It is not a panacea for all our economic difficulties," Paulson said in prepared testimony. "The crisis in our financial system had already spilled over into our economy and hurt it."

The results of the study, published by the respected journal Health Affairs, belie the notion held by many American politicians that health care in this country is the best in the world. That may be true at a handful of pre-eminent medical centers, but it is hardly true for the care provided to a huge portion of the population.

The Commonwealth Fund’s survey of 7,500 patients in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Britain and the United States focused on patients who suffered from at least one of seven chronic conditions: hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, lung problems, cancer or depression.

The care they received in this country - or more often did not receive - ought to be a cause for shame. More than half of the American patients went without care because of high out-of-pocket costs. They did not visit a doctor when sick, skipped a recommended test or treatment or failed to fill a prescription. The uninsured suffered most, but even 43 percent of those who had insurance all year skipped care because of costs.

Investigations ensued. The chiefs of two redevelopment agencies were forced out. One of them faces criminal charges. Yet the main revelations came not from any of San Diego’s television and radio stations or its dominant newspaper, The San Diego Union-Tribune, but from a handful of young journalists at a nonprofit Web site run out of a converted military base far from downtown’s glass towers - a site that did not exist four years ago.

As America’s newspapers shrink and shed staff, and broadcast news outlets sink in the ratings, a new kind of Web-based news operation has arisen in several cities, forcing the papers to follow the stories they uncover.

Here it is VoiceofSanDiego.org, offering a brand of serious, original reporting by professional journalists - the province of the traditional media, but at a much lower cost of doing business. Since it began in 2005, similar operations have cropped up in New Haven, the Twin Cities, Seattle, St. Louis and Chicago. More are on the way.

Their news coverage and hard-digging investigative reporting stand out in an Internet landscape long dominated by partisan commentary, gossip, vitriol and citizen journalism posted by unpaid amateurs.

In a mountainous kingdom in what is now southeastern Turkey, there lived in the eighth century B.C. a royal official, Kuttamuwa, who oversaw the completion of an inscribed stone monument, or stele, to be erected upon his death. The words instructed mourners to commemorate his life and afterlife with feasts “for my soul that is in this stele.”

University of Chicago archaeologists who made the discovery last summer in ruins of a walled city near the Syrian border said the stele provided the first written evidence that the people in this region held to the religious concept of the soul apart from the body. By contrast, Semitic contemporaries, including the Israelites, believed that the body and soul were inseparable, which for them made cremation unthinkable, as noted in the Bible.

Circumstantial evidence, archaeologists said, indicated that the people at Sam’al, the ancient city, practiced cremation. The site is known today as Zincirli (pronounced ZIN-jeer-lee).

Other scholars said the find could lead to important insights into the dynamics of cultural contact and exchange in the borderlands of antiquity where Indo-European and Semitic people interacted in the Iron Age.

After a mortar sent Andrew Spurlock hurtling off a roof in Iraq, ending his Army career in 2006, the seasoned infantryman set aside bitterness over his back injury and began to chart his life in storybook fashion: a new house, a job as a police officer and more children.

“We had a budget and a plan,” said Spurlock, 29, a father of three, who with his wife, Michelle, hoped to avoid the pitfalls of his transition from Ramadi, Iraq, to Apopka, Florida.

The move proved treacherous, as it often does for veterans. The job with the Orange County Sheriff’s Office fell through after officials there told Spurlock that he needed to “decompress” after two combat tours, a judgment that took him by surprise. Scrambling, he settled for a job delivering pizzas.

Spurlock’s disability claim for his back injury took 18 months to process, a year longer than expected. With little choice, the couple began putting mortgage payments on credit cards. The family debt climbed to $60,000, a chunk of it for medical bills, including for his wife and child. Foreclosure seemed certain.

While few Americans are sheltered from the jolt of the recent economic crisis, the nation’s newest veterans, particularly the wounded, are being hit especially hard. The triple-whammy of injury, unemployment and waiting for disability claims to be processed has forced many veterans into foreclosure, or sent them teetering on its edge, according to veterans’ organizations.

Yahoo said Monday evening that Jerry Yang, its chief executive, would step down from that role after the company finds a replacement.

Yang, a co-founder of Yahoo, assumed control of the company a year and a half ago from Terry Semel, a Hollywood studio boss that he hand-picked for the job. His tenure has been a tumultuous period during which Yahoo rejected a $47.5 billion takeover offer from Microsoft and failed to cement an advertising partnership with Google.

The Microsoft offer was worth $33 a share - more than three times Yahoo’s closing price of $10.63 on Monday. The stock was up more than 4 percent in after-hours trading.

Yang, 40, helped turn Yahoo from an early directory of Web sites into a sprawling Internet giant that is used by nearly 500 million people; but shareholders have been asking whether Yang was the right man to run the company, which last month cut its sales forecast and announced plans to lay off workers. 

“It’s definitely a positive from a shareholder perspective,” Ross Sandler, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, said of Yang’s departure. “Jerry has done less than a stellar job since taking the reins from Terry Semel last year, not just completely botching the Microsoft deal, but with poor execution and multiple company restructurings that have done little to restore confidence for any of Yahoo’s shareholders, employees or customers.”

After a private meeting in the Obama transition offices on the 38th floor of the Kluczynski Federal Building in downtown Chicago, the two men issued a joint statement saying that they agreed “that Americans of all parties want and need their leaders to come together and change the bad habits of Washington so that we can solve the common and urgent challenges of our time.”

The statement continued: “We hope to work together in the days and months ahead on critical challenges like solving our financial crisis, creating a new energy economy, and protecting our nation’s security.”

There were few other clues to the dynamics between the two men, who until two weeks ago were vying for the presidency, and whose relations during the campaign were at times a bit frosty. When a reporter asked Senator McCain at the outset of the meeting on Monday whether he would help Obama with his administration, he replied, “Obviously.”

Citigroup will reduce its global workforce by about 50,000 jobs, or about 15 percent, as the financial services giant tries to steady itself after recording losses of more than $20 billion over the past year, executives said Monday.

The company plans to sell a number of subsidiaries, including a massive back-office operation in India, and will terminate thousands of employees in the financial centers of New York and London. The extent of the job cuts roughly doubles the total that Citigroup had set as a target in an announcement last month.

Despite the cuts, executives said the company is not planning to change its basic business model. Citigroup, the largest and most international U.S. bank, will continue to sell a wide range of financial products and services around the world, though dominate relatively few of its markets.

"We will be the long-term winner in the industry," chief executive Vikram Pandit wrote in an e-mail to employees Monday.

The U.S. military would require two to three years to remove its roughly 150,000 troops and equipment from Iraq safely, and the timing of that withdrawal should be based on security conditions on the ground, the nation's top military officer said today.

"To remove the entire force would be, you know, two to three years," Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at a Pentagon news conference.

While Mullen said that he and the top commanders for Iraq and the region, Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. Ray Odierno, were "comfortable" with the status of forces agreement signed with Iraq today, he described some logistical hurdles to a U.S. troop withdrawal along a fixed timeline.

"We have 150,000 troops in Iraq right now. We have lots of bases. We have an awful lot of equipment that's there. And so we would have to look at all of that tied to, obviously, the conditions that are there, literally the security conditions," he said.

"Clearly, we'd want to be able to do it safely."

How was it that a German priest writing in Latin and living in a French city far from the coast became the first person to tell the world that a vast ocean lay to the west of the American continents?

That is one of the bigger mysteries in the history of the Renaissance.

But it is not the only one involving Martin Waldseemueller, a map-making cleric whose own story is sufficiently obscure that his birth and death dates aren't known for certain.

Waldseemueller appears to have also known something about the contours of South America's west coast years before Vasco Nunez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and Ferdinand Magellan sailed around the bottom of the continent. History books record them as the first Europeans to bring back knowledge of the Pacific Ocean.

The evidence of this knowledge is in Waldseemueller's world map of 1507, perhaps the most valuable of the 5 million maps owned by the Library of Congress. It was acquired for $10 million in 2003 and went on permanent display last year.