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The fourth-quarter net loss was $10.36 a share, compared with net income of $261 million, or 9 cents, a year ago, Sprint said today. Sales fell 5.7 percent to $9.85 billion, missing the $9.93 billion average estimate of analysts.

“They pose a threat to humanity,” said University of Sheffield professor Noel Sharkey ahead of a keynote address Wednesday before Britain’s Royal United Services Institute.

Intelligent machines deployed on battlefields around the world — from mobile grenade launchers to rocket-firing drones — can already identify and lock onto targets without human help.

There are more than 4,000 US military robots on the ground in Iraq, as well as unmanned aircraft that have clocked hundreds of thousands of flight hours.

The first three armed combat robots fitted with large-caliber machine guns deployed to Iraq last summer, manufactured by US arms maker Foster-Miller, proved so successful that 80 more are on order, said Sharkey.

But up to now, a human hand has always been required to push the button or pull the trigger.

It we are not careful, he said, that could change.

Military leaders “are quite clear that they want autonomous robots as soon as possible, because they are more cost-effective and give a risk-free war,” he said.

Several countries, led by the United States, have already invested heavily in robot warriors developed for use on the battlefield.

South Korea and Israel both deploy armed robot border guards, while China, India, Russia and Britain have all increased the use of military robots.

But one of the largest studies of modern antidepressant drugs has found that they have no clinically significant effect. In other words, they don’t work.

The finding will send shock waves through the medical profession and patients and raises serious questions about the regulation of the multinational pharmaceutical industry, which was accused yesterday of withholding data on the drugs.

The FDIC is looking to bring back 25 retirees from its division of resolutions and receiverships. Many of these agency veterans likely worked for the FDIC during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when more than 1,000 financial institutions failed amid the savings-and-loan crisis.

FDIC spokesman Andrew Gray said the agency was looking to bulk up “for preparedness purposes.” The division now has 223 employees, mostly based in Dallas.

The agency, which insures accounts at more than 8,000 financial institutions, is also seeking to hire an outside firm that would help manage mortgages and other assets at insolvent banks, according to a newspaper advertisement.

In public, policy makers are debating what role the government should play in trying to stabilize the housing market and minimize foreclosures. Meanwhile, regulators have worked discreetly behind the scenes to closely monitor the growing number of troubled banks and thrifts considered at risk.

“Regulators are bracing for well over 100 bank failures in the next 12 to 24 months, with concentrations in Rust Belt states like Michigan and Ohio, and the states that are suffering severe housing-market problems like California, Florida, and Georgia,” said Jaret Seiberg, Washington policy analyst for financial-services firm Stanford Group.

In job postings on its Web site, the FDIC said it is looking for people with “skill in performing duties associated with a financial-institution closing, such as receivership management, resolutions and/or asset disposition; knowledge of the resolutions process as it relates to complex financial institutions.” Such positions would require “very frequent overnight travel,” the posting said, and would pay up to $180,770.

“The notion of bringing back some people who have been through it before is very smart,” said William Isaac, who was FDIC chairman from 1981 until 1985. All told, the FDIC has roughly 4,600 employees, far fewer than the about 15,000 it had as recently as 1992.

On Sunday, the FDIC ran a newspaper ad seeking companies that could service commercial loans, mortgages and student loans in the event of a bank failure. It didn’t say how much a company could earn in this area.

The pegs restrict the Gulf’s ability to fight inflation by forcing them to shadow U.S. monetary policy at a time when the Fed is cutting rates to ward off recession and Gulf economies are surging on a near five-fold jump in oil prices since 2002.

Rifts are growing across the world’s top oil-exporting region on how to tackle inflation which hit a 27-year peak of 7 percent in Saudi Arabia in January and a 19-year peak of 9.3 percent in the United Arab Emirates in 2006, the most recent figure.

“In the short term free floating … will not fully dissipate inflationary pressure, although it would significantly do so,” Greenspan told an investment conference in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia’s second-largest city.

Saudi and UAE central bank chiefs spoke in favor on Monday of retaining dollar pegs, while Qatar’s prime minister advocated regional currency reform to avert possible unilateral revaluations designed to curb inflation.

“The economies of the Gulf and the United States are completely out of sync and that is exposing the shortcomings of the dollar peg,” said Simon Williams, Middle East economist at HSBC Holdings Plc in Dubai.

Across much of the nation, home values are dropping — even those backed by solid mortgages — and banks are repossessing more every day. Most experts say the dive won’t hit bottom for another year and only after excess inventory is sharply reduced and credit markets improve.

More government intervention may be needed, too, if the free market system doesn’t work quick enough.

“The housing value crisis is spreading and deepening,” said David Abromowitz, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “It has gone way beyond subprime borrowers stretched too far with bad loans and now has clearly extended into the housing markets more broadly.”

Virtually everyone in South Florida had power by 5:30 p.m. and only about 40,000 customers around the state remained in the dark — mostly due to unrelated outages caused by a powerful cold front that is moving down the peninsula, officials said.

At its peak, the main power failure left as many as four million people without electricity in South Florida, along the Gulf Coast, in the Orlando area and elsewhere around the state, according to state officials.

The outage was caused by a fire at Florida Power & Light’s Flagami substation — not in the utility’s nuclear plant at Turkey Point, as reported earlier by some media outlets, FPL President Armando Olivera said during an evening news conference.

Both nuclear reactors at Turkey Point tripped off as a safety measure, taking a plant that supplies power to more than 450,000 homes almost instantly off-line and causing a shortage that affected other parts of the power grid, he said.