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    Washington - They huddled in a quiet corner at the US Airways lounge at Ronald Reagan National Airport, sipping bottomless cups of coffee as they plotted to turn America's missile defense program into a personal cash machine.

    Michael Cantrell, an engineer at the Army Space and Missile Defense Command headquarters in Huntsville, Ala., along with his deputy, Doug Ennis, had lined up millions of dollars from Congress for defense companies. Now, Mr. Cantrell decided, it was time to take a cut.

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    In 2004, America's malleable mainstream media allowed itself to be manipulated by artful Republican operatives into devoting weeks of broadcast attention and drums of ink to unfairly desecrating John Kerry's genuine Vietnam heroics while obligingly muzzling serious discussion of George W. Bush's shameful wartime record of evasion and cowardice.

    Last week found the American media once again boarding Republican swift boats

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    And so it has begun. The final month of the presidential race, the campaign that feels as if it commenced some time during the Coolidge administration. And as we slide into these last weeks, what we all feared is coming true. Just when you thought the bottom of the swamp had been scraped, sludge gurgles up from the primordial ooze.

    This is the endgame, the ugly stuff, meant to assassinate character and distract the electorate with foolishness as our financial house of cards flutters away into the uncertain winds of whatever's left of the global economy. "It's a dangerous road, but we have no choice," a "top McCain strategist" told the New York Daily News. "If we keep talking about the economic crisis, we're going to lose."

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    The GOP assault on American voters has hit full stride as the economy and John McCain tank in synch.

    With just over three weeks until election day, the Republicans have mounted an all-out attack against newly registered voters and the organizations working to sign them up. As many as 75% of these new voters are expected to vote Democratic, but the attacks have also spread to long-established voters as well.

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    It is now clear the approval by Congress of President Bush's $700 bailout package on Friday October 3rd has done nothing to ease the current financial crisis. Credit markets have worsened for several days after the bill passed the Congress. The stock market also plummeted to nearly ten-year lows.

    So much for dire warnings from the Bush Administration that Congress was risking a Great Depression if it did not quickly fork over the dough. The bailout's supporters said Congress had to do something to unfreeze the credit markets.

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    Quito, Ecuador - In a matter of weeks, a Russian naval squadron will arrive in the waters off Latin America for the first time since the Cold War. It is already getting a warm welcome from some in a region where the influence of the United States is in decline.

    "The U.S. Fourth Fleet can come to Latin America but a Russian fleet can't?" said Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa. "If you ask me, any country and any fleet that wants can visit us.

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    New York - Wall Street may be in the throes of agony, but business is booming at the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen a bit farther north in the Manhattan neighbourhood of Chelsea.

    And that's not particularly good news.

    Just ask Ishmael, a young man who has been eating his meals at Holy Apostles for about three months now. "I come here in order to save money," he told IPS.

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    Gov. Sarah Palin abused the powers of her office by pressuring subordinates to try to get her former brother-in-law, a state trooper, fired, an investigation by the Alaska Legislature has concluded. The inquiry found, however, that she was within her right to dismiss her public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan, who was the trooper's boss.

    A 263-page report released Friday by lawmakers in Alaska found that Ms. Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, had herself exerted pressure to get Trooper Michael Wooten dismissed, as well as allowed her husband and subordinates to press for his firing,

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    Pentagon officials have prepared a new estimate for defense spending that is $450 billion more over the next five years than previously announced figures.

    The new estimate, which the Pentagon plans to release shortly before President Bush leaves office, would serve as a marker for the new president and is meant to place pressure on him to either drastically increase the size of the defense budget or defend any reluctance to do so,

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    At any other time, what happened in the U.S. Justice Department last week would have been big news. At any other time, when internal reports by Justice Department call for more investigation into a case of unethical, if not criminal, conduct on the part of lawmakers and the White House, the administration would have a lot of explaining to do.

    But the Bush administration got lucky. As its Treasury and Federal Reserve chiefs warned that the sky was falling and the economic crash and continuing tumult on Wall Street made them seem prophetic,

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    Chillicothe, Ohio - Presidential candidate Barack Obama on Friday accused Republican John McCain of trying to divide the country, but he let fellow Democrats handle harsher attacks while he kept his message mostly upbeat.

    Speaking to an outdoor audience, Obama said "it's not hard to rile up a crowd by stoking anger and division." He said Americans want "someone who can lead this country" with a steady hand in a time of economic crisis, not divide it.

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    The Connecticut Supreme Court Friday issued a 4-3 decision in favor of eight gay couples who were the plaintiffs in Kerrigan and Mock v. the Connecticut Department of Public Health, effectively legalizing same-sex marriage in the state. Connecticut will now become the third state in the country behind Massachusetts and California where gay couples are allowed equal access to marriage. As in California and Massachusetts, out-of-state couples will be eligible to marry in Connecticut.

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    Washington - If the United States focused on curbing climate change as soon as a new president took office - or sooner - it could help pull the world from the financial brink, environmental policy experts told Reuters.

    "Skyrocketing energy prices and the financial crisis have been a wake-up call that something's got to change," said Cathy Zoi, chief executive officer of the Alliance for Climate Protection, which is chaired by former Vice President Al Gore.

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    In the Rocky Mountain swing state, business leaders are working alongside unions to defeat a right-to-work ballot initiative. But that doesn't mean Colorado is friendly to organized labor. Inside one of the wackiest political compromises in history.

    With markets plummeting, financial firms failing, and both presidential campaigns running television ads vilifying corporate executives, it seemed like a natural time to pass the nation's strictest ever corporate malfeasance laws.

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    Women in America are more likely to be poor than men. Over half of the 37 million Americans living in poverty today are women. And women in America are further behind than women in other countries - the gap in poverty rates between men and women is wider in America than anywhere else in the Western world. Consider the following facts:

    Poverty rates are higher for women than men. In 2007,13.8 percent of females were poor compared to 11.1 percent of men.

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    Oklahoma City - A legal advocacy group has filed a legal challenge to an Oklahoma law prohibiting a woman from getting an abortion unless she first has an ultrasound and the doctor describes what the test shows.

    The Center for Reproductive Rights said in the lawsuit filed Thursday in Oklahoma County District Court that the law intrudes on privacy, endangers health and assaults dignity.

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    Listeners have submitted lots of questions about voting rules, and this Q&A attempts to answer some of those most frequently asked. Almost all states and many county election offices have good Web sites and toll-free phone numbers where you can find more specific answers. The National Association of Secretaries of State also has a Web site, www.canivote.org, where voters can check their registration status online, find their polling site and get other useful voting information specific to their state or county.

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    Amid unrelenting pessimism about the health of the global economy and world governments' ability to solve the financial crisis, stocks swung wildly on Friday, with the Dow Jones industrial average down 370 points, or 4.3 percent, by early afternoon in New York, continuing this week's aggressive sell-off.

    And at the opening of trading, Wall Street had seemed in a free-fall. The Dow Jones industrial average fell almost 700 points or about 8 percent in the first 10 minutes, dipping briefly below 8,000.

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