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“I was looking at people’s arms and hands, thinking, ‘I could draw from that,'” Dowell said.

It’s all part of training he and a select cadre of officers in Idaho and Texas have received in recent months to draw blood from those suspected of drunken or drugged driving. The federal program’s aim is to determine if blood draws by cops can be an effective tool against drunk drivers and aid in their prosecution.

If the results seem promising after a year or two, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will encourage police nationwide to undergo similar training.

For years, defense attorneys in Idaho advised clients to always refuse breath tests, Ada County Deputy Prosecutor Christine Starr said. When the state toughened the penalties for refusing the tests a few years ago, the problem lessened, but it’s still the main reason that drunk driving cases go to trial in the Boise region, Starr said.

Idaho had a 20 percent breath test refusal rate in 2005, compared with 22 percent nationally, according to an NHTSA study.

Chavez said that the country’s oil and gas reserves won’t last forever and the government will seek alternative energy sources. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin agreed to help Venezuela’s nuclear energy program during a meeting in Moscow last week, Chavez said.

“We’re not going to make an atomic bomb, so don’t bother us like with Iran,” he said on state television. “We’re going to develop nuclear energy with peaceful purposes.”

Chavez is a close ally of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who’s under international sanctions for continuing with the country’s nuclear energy program under suspicions by the U.S. and its allies that Iran is working toward making atomic weapons.

…

They are a powerful and tangible representation of the hurricanes that have been wrought by the global economic crisis; an iron curtain drawn along the coastline of the southern edge of Malaysia’s rural Johor state, 50 miles east of Singapore harbour.

It is so far off the beaten track that nobody ever really comes close, which is why these ships are here. The world’s ship owners and government economists would prefer you not to see this symbol of the depths of the plague still crippling the world’s economies.

So they have been quietly retired to this equatorial backwater, to be maintained only by a handful of bored sailors. The skeleton crews are left alone to fend off the ever-present threats of piracy and collisions in the congested waters as the hulls gather rust and seaweed at what should be their busiest time of year.

…

The Aframax-class oil tanker is the camel of the world’s high seas. By definition, it is smaller than 132,000 tons deadweight and with a breadth above 106ft. It is used in the basins of the Black Sea, the North Sea, the Caribbean Sea, the China Sea and the Mediterranean – or anywhere where non-OPEC exporting countries have harbours and canals too small to accommodate very large crude carriers (VLCC) or ultra-large crude carriers (ULCCs). The term is based on the Average Freight Rate Assessment (AFRA) tanker rate system and is an industry standard.
A couple of years ago these ships would be steaming back and forth. Now 12 per cent are doing nothing

The previous owners of the beachfront home in Malibu Colony — a densely built stretch of luxury homes that has been a favorite of celebrities over the years — were financially devastated in Bernard Madoff’s massive fraud scheme, real estate agent Irene Dazzan-Palmer said.

The couple signed the property over to Wells Fargo last spring, and the bank subsequently denied requests to show the house to prospective buyers, Dazzan-Palmer said.

Residents in the gated community told the Los Angeles Times that a woman they believe was Cheronda Guyton took up occupancy at the home in May. Residents said they obtained Guyton’s name from the community’s guards, who had issued her a homeowner’s parking pass.

Residents also wrote down the license plate number of a 2007 Volvo sport-utility vehicle they say was parked in the home’s garage. A check of state motor vehicle license plates by the Times found the vehicle was registered to Guyton.

Guyton is a Wells Fargo senior vice president responsible for foreclosed commercial properties, resident Phillip Roman said.

“It’s outrageous to take over a property like that, not make it available and then put someone from the bank in it,” said Roman, who lives a few homes away from the property.

Residents said Guyton, along with her husband and two children, often hosted guests at the home, including a large party the last weekend of August. Malibu Colony is about 25 miles from downtown Los Angeles.

While the remains had yet to be officially identified, Peter Reichard, the assistant New Haven police chief, said the authorities were assuming they were of Ms. Le, 24, a slight, California-bred daughter of Vietnamese immigrants who was studying pharmacology.

The discovery appeared to have ended the six-day search for Ms. Le that began with speculation of a runaway bride but quickly gave way to near certainty that a crime had been committed.

Yale University’s president, Richard C. Levin, wrote in an e-mail message to students Sunday night, “Our hearts go out to Annie Le’s family, fiancé and friends, who must suffer the additional ordeal of waiting for the body to be identified.”

At the elite Ivy League university’s medical school campus in the Hill section of New Haven, about half a mile from the main campus of neo-Gothic and Georgian Revival architecture, students seemed shocked and fearful Sunday night.

“I’m freaked.” said Lucas Cheadle, 26, who is studying for his doctorate in neuroscience. Mr. Cheadle appeared agitated as he spoke, taking out a cigarette as he walked a few blocks from 10 Amistad Street, where the body was found. “My awareness of danger has definitely increased,” he said.

The authorities have not identified any suspects, but Ms. Le’s disappearance recalled a disturbing case from December 1998: the stabbing death of Suzanne Jovin, 21, a Yale senior whose body was found in a neighborhood not far from campus; that crime remains unsolved.

Ms. Le was from Placerville, Calif., a town of about 10,000 people in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. She earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Rochester, where she met Jonathan Widawsky, a graduate student at Columbia University whose family lives on Long Island in Huntington, N.Y. They fell in love. They planned to be married on Sept. 13 at the North Ritz Club in Syosset, N.Y., a catering hall by a big pond and a gazebo, set well back from the highway. More than 160 people were set to attend.

By Friday, family members had canceled the wedding.

Ms. Le’s absence was first noted on Tuesday, hours after she was seen on surveillance video entering the four-story lab building at 10 Amistad Street, down the street from Yale New Haven Hospital and about 10 blocks south of the main Yale campus. A young woman, 4-foot-11 and 90 pounds, she was wearing a brown skirt and bright green T-shirt.

Her purse containing her ID, cellphone and money was found in her office in another Yale building a few blocks away.

Over the following days, investigators pored over hundreds of hours of video from dozens of cameras, hoping to catch a glimpse of Ms. Le.

By Thursday, Yale officials said that more than 100 law enforcement officials were looking for Ms. Le. A $10,000 reward was posted for her whereabouts.

Ms. Le was not naïve about her safety. In February, she wrote an article for a student magazine offering tips on how to avoid becoming the victim of a crime.

“New Haven is a city, and all cities have their perils,” she wrote, “but with a little street smarts, one can avoid becoming yet another statistic.”

On Saturday, the police reportedly found bloody clothes above ceiling tiles in the lab building on Amistad. Other reports said the clothes were not the same ones Ms. Le was last seen wearing.

On Sunday, the search appeared to have moved to a waste-processing facility on the industrial fringe of Hartford where trash from much of New Haven, as well of the rest of the state, is burned to generate electric power. Officials did not say if they had found anything there.

Joe Avery, a New Haven police spokesman, said the body “was found behind the wall in something called a chase, which is a space that carries utilities from one floor to another.”

At the news conference Sunday night, Chief Reichard declined to supply more details. “We have an ongoing homicide case,” he said, “so we cannot tell you what we have, where we found anything or what it is.”

On Long Island, near Mr. Widawsky’s family’s home, those who knew the couple were already mourning.

“This is Annie’s bouquet,” a woman said to a television reporter earlier, proffering a sad-looking array of roses. “It’s wilting.”

On Bittersweet Place in Huntington, the Widawsky family remained in seclusion. The Le family, who had traveled to New Haven, was not heard from either.

Deborah Kiley of Deborah’s Hair Loft in Huntington, N.Y., was to have styled the hair of Ms. Le, her mother, Mr. Widawsky’s mother and five attendants on Sunday morning. She said she was praying for Ms. Le and her family.

“I can’t even accept it right now,” Ms. Kiley said. “I never forget a soul I meet. I was going to be part of a beautiful day, which is the most important day of a girl’s life other than the day she gives birth.”

The city could face a budget shortfall of $65 million to $95 million in the middle of the current fiscal year, Fairbanks said, as Phoenix – like most Valley cities – continues to take in fewer sales-tax dollars than expected.

Finance officials say they won’t be able to determine the size of the gap until departments submit their expenses this fall, and the council likely won’t take any action until early 2010. But the revenue trend doesn’t look good.

From January through August, Phoenix collected about $231 million in sales-tax dollars, $23 million, or 9 percent, less than projected. That means fewer dollars to pay for such services as police and fire protection, parks and libraries.

“In the U.S. and many other countries, the too-big-to-fail banks have become even bigger,” Stiglitz said in an interview today in Paris. “The problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis.”

Stiglitz’s views echo those of former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who has advised President Barack Obama’s administration to curtail the size of banks, and Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer, who suggested last month that governments may want to discourage financial institutions from growing “excessively.”

A year after the demise of Lehman forced the Treasury Department to spend billions to shore up the financial system, Bank of America Corp.’s assets have grown and Citigroup Inc. remains intact. In the U.K., Lloyds Banking Group Plc, 43 percent owned by the government, has taken over the activities of HBOS Plc, and in France BNP Paribas SA now owns the Belgian and Luxembourg banking assets of insurer Fortis.

While Obama wants to name some banks as “systemically important” and subject them to stricter oversight, his plan wouldn’t force them to shrink or simplify their structure.

Pang, 42, had been taken from his Newport Beach, California, home yesterday afternoon by paramedics who had responded to a call from the house, said Sergeant Doug Jones of the Newport Beach Police today. He was taken to Hoag Hospital, Jones said.

Charles Sipkins, a Pang family spokesman, confirmed the death and declined to comment further. Pang’s lawyer, James Riddet, wasn’t available.

Pang, who was free on $1 million bail, pleaded not guilty on July 27 to charges in a separate criminal case that he structured cash withdrawals to avoid having to report them. He was charged in an indictment with two counts of making a total of about 50 cash withdrawals in amounts of as high as $9,900 to evade a U.S. law that requires reporting cash withdrawals of $10,000 or more.

A trial date was set for Sept. 15, though it was postponed last month to August 2010.

$823 Million Invested

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission accused Pang of lying to Taiwanese investors about his credentials, forging insurance documents and paying existing investors with funds raised from new ones, while claiming the returns came from investments in life insurance policies.

The financier was arrested in the criminal case in April, shortly after the SEC obtained an emergency order freezing the assets of Irvine, California-based PEMGroup.

PEMGroup’s investors, including eight financial institutions and about 35 wealthy individuals, have $823 million invested with PEMGroup, according to a May 6 report by the receiver. The underlying assets would be worth $193 million to $360 million, the receiver said in an August status report.

Thomas Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles, said in an e-mail that his office didn’t have confirmation of Pang’s death. In past cases, U.S. prosecutors have dismissed the case against a defendant upon the receipt of a death certificate, Mrozek said.