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The Secret Service is analyzing whether the bonds taken in August may be counterfeit, said a spokeswoman for the U.S. embassy in Rome. Italy’s financial police in Varese, north of Milan, arrested two individuals carrying the securities in a briefcase, according to a person involved in the case.

The two men currently are in custody as prosecutors in the town of Busto Arsizio carry out their investigation, the person said. The seized notes include securities with face values of $500 million and $1 billion, Italian daily MF reported today, without saying where it got the information.

“There must be a well-organized group behind these alleged crimes,” Fabio Polimeni, a Milan lawyer specializing in counterfeiting cases, said.

Italian authorities seized U.S. treasuries on June 4 with a face value of more than $134 billion from two Japanese travelers attempting to cross into Switzerland. The two men later disappeared and the case is still under investigation. The U.S. government bonds found in the false bottom of a suitcase carried by the men were fake, a U.S. Treasury spokesman said June 18.

“As financial markets become more sophisticated, creative and bigger, we can expect criminal activity to go with it and it’s happening everywhere,” Livia Oglio, a Milan lawyer, said. “The amount seized is phenomenal.”

The officials said investigators had recently turned up information suggesting that Ms. Norton had had discussions while in office with Royal Dutch Shell about future career opportunities. In early 2006, Ms. Norton’s department awarded three tracts in Colorado to a Shell subsidiary for shale exploration. In December 2006, she joined Shell as the company’s general counsel in the United States for unconventional oils, a company spokeswoman said.

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Ms. Norton, 55, was President George W. Bush’s first interior secretary. In that job, she was an ally of Vice President Dick Cheney in the administration’s general approach of opening up more federal lands for energy exploration.

The river’s flow ranges from murky white to a bright shade of orange and the waters are so viscous that they barely ripple in the breeze. In Shangba, the river brings death, not sustenance.

“All the fish died, even chickens and ducks that drank from the river died. If you put your leg in the water, you’ll get rashes and a terrible itch,” said He Shuncai, a 34-year-old rice farmer who has lived in Shangba all his life.

“Last year alone, six people in our village died from cancer and they were in their 30s and 40s.”

Cancer casts a shadow over the villages in this region of China in southern Guangdong province, nestled among farmland contaminated by heavy metals used to make batteries, computer parts and other electronics devices.

Every year, an estimated 460,000 people die prematurely in China due to exposure to air and water pollution, according to a 2007 World Bank study.

Yun Yaoshun’s two granddaughters died at the ages of 12 and 18, succumbing to kidney and stomach cancer even though these types of cancers rarely affect children. The World Health Organization has suggested that the high rate of such digestive cancers are due to the ingestion of polluted water.

“It’s because of Daboshan and the dirty water,” said the 82-year-old grandmother. “The girls were always playing in the river, even our well water is contaminated,” Yun told Reuters during a visit to the village.

The river where the children played stretches from the bottom of the Daboshan mine, owned by state-owned Guangdong Dabaoshan Mining Co Ltd, past the ramshackle family home. Its waters are contaminated by cadmium, lead, indium and zinc and other metals.

The villagers use well water in Shangba for drinking but tests published by BioMed Central in July show that it contains excessive amounts of cadmium, a heavy metal that is a known carcinogen, as well as zinc which in large quantities can damage the liver and lead to cancer.

“China has many ‘cancer villages’ and it is very likely that these increased cases of cancer are due to water pollution,” said Edward Chan, an official with Greenpeace in southern China.

But it’s not just water, the carcinogenic heavy metals are also entering the food chain.

Mounds of tailings from mineral mining are discarded alongside paddy fields throughout the region.

Gianpaolo Tarantini, an entrepreneur who reportedly told prosecutors in the southern city of Bari he supplied 30 escorts for parties hosted by Berlusconi, was detained in Bari airport as he was about to take a flight to Rome.

Tarantini was being held in the local barracks of Italy’s financial police while a judge decides whether to uphold the prosecutor’s arrest warrant, sources said.

He was detained on charges related to cocaine dealing, sources said, after the prosecutor cited risks that he might tamper with evidence or attempt to flee the country.

His lawyer, Nicola Quaranta, declined to comment.

Tarantini was thrust into the spotlight after call-girl Patrizia D’Addario testified he had paid her to spend the night with Berlusconi following a party at the conservative prime minister’s Rome residence in November.

D’Addario has said she made recordings of the visit and Italian papers have posted audio and transcripts of alleged conversations between her and the prime minister.

Berlusconi has not denied sleeping with her but insists he has never paid for sex and prosecutors have said has committed no crime in the case. Tarantini is also accused of supplying escorts to local left-wing politicians.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was appointed receiver of Louisville, Ky.-based Irwin Union Bank FSB and Columbus, Ind.-based Irwin Union Bank and Trust Co.

As of Aug. 31, Irwin Bank FSB had $493 million in assets and $441 million in deposits, while Irwin Union Bank and Trust had $2.7 billion in assets and $2.1 billion in deposits.

The FDIC said Friday both bank’s deposits will be assumed by First Financial Bank in Hamilton, Ohio.

First Financial also agreed to purchase essentially all of the two banks’ assets. The FDIC and First Financial Bank reached a loss-share agreement covering about $2.5 billion of the two banks’ combined assets.

The 27 combined branches of Irwin Union Bank FSB and Irwin Union Bank and Trust will be reopened during their normal business hours beginning Saturday as branches of First Financial Bank.

The FDIC estimates the failure of the two banks will cost its insurance fund about $850 million.

Chairman Sheila Bair said the agency would put out for public comment the options to rebuild the fund — which has been significantly drained by a sharp increase in bank failures — including tapping the FDIC’s line of credit with the U.S. Treasury.

“We are carefully considering all our options, including borrowing from Treasury,” Bair said at a global finance summit in Washington.

She said the FDIC also had lesser-known alternatives for replenishing the fund, such as prepayments of assessments on banks and issuing a note. She did not give further details on those options.

“Payment option ARMs are about to explode,” Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller said after a Thursday meeting with members of President Barack Obama’s administration to discuss ways to combat mortgage scams.

“That’s the next round of potential foreclosures in our country,” he said.

Option-ARMs are now considered among the riskiest offered during the recent housing boom and have left many borrowers owing more than their homes are worth. These “underwater” mortgages have been a driving force behind rising defaults and mounting foreclosures.

In Arizona, 128,000 of those mortgages will reset over the the next year and many have started to adjust this month, the state’s attorney general, Terry Goddard, told Reuters after the meeting.

“It’s the other shoe,” he said. “I can’t say it’s waiting to drop. It’s dropping now.”

The mortgages differ from other ARMs by offering an option to pay only the interest each month or a low minimum payment that leads to a rising balance in the loan’s principal.

Because the new monthly payments can be five or 10 times what borrowers are accustomed to paying, they “threaten a much greater hit to the consumer than the subprimes,” Goddard said, referring to the mortgages often extended to less credit-worthy borrowers that fed the first wave of the financial crisis.

Miller said option-ARMs were discussed at Tuesday’s meeting on mortgage scams, which brought state attorneys general from across the country together with U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Attorney General Eric Holder, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan, and Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz.

For its key selling point is a satellite positioning system that locates the wearer to within ten feet.

The makers claim the GPS tracking device will offer anxious parents peace of mind and allow children the independence to go out to play on their own.

But critics have said the ‘tagging’ is a step too far in the climate of paranoia over child safety.

The letter to President Dmitri A. Medvedev was hand-delivered in Moscow by top administration officials three weeks ago. It said the United States would not need to proceed with the interceptor system, which has been vehemently opposed by Russia since it was proposed by the Bush administration, if Iran halted any efforts to build nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles.

Yavapai authorities are investigating the incident as a probable suicide, said Sgt. Jim Cunningham of the Glendale Police Department.

Hardy went missing from his home near 67th Avenue and Deer Valley Road on Saturday evening.

His wife said that when she left the home at 6:30 p.m., Cornelius was in a room with one of their daughters, who was asleep on the couch. When she returned at 8:30 p.m., her husband was gone and her daughter was still asleep on the couch.