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The New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights and two Paris-based groups, the International Federation of Human Rights and the League of Human Rights, said they filed the complaint with the Paris prosecutor’s office as Rumsfeld arrived in France for a visit.

The groups say their complaint could go forward because people suspected of torture can be prosecuted in France if they are on French soil.

The complaint says Rumsfeld, in his former position as defense secretary, “authorized and ordered crimes of torture to be carried out … as well as other war crimes.”

Filed Thursday, the complaint cites various documents, including memos from Rumsfeld, internal reports and testimony from former U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski – the one-time commander of U.S. military prisons in Iraq – to bolster its claims.

It asks the prosecutor to open an inquiry and take Rumsfeld into custody.

“We know that we can’t get him into prison right now, but it would be great to make sure that he couldn’t safely leave the U.S. anymore,” said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

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“I believe we’re going to see more insider trading cases,” Linda Chatman Thomsen, the SEC’s enforcement director, told reporters on the sidelines of a securities fraud conference.

“I am disappointed in the number of cases we are seeing by people who make an abundant livelihood in the market that they are sort of abusing by insider trading,” Thomsen said, referring to cases already brought against professionals this year.

Insider trading “appears to be rampant” among Wall Street securities professionals, she added.

Alice Fisher, assistant attorney general with the Justice Department’s criminal division, echoed Thomsen’s sentiment and said: “The number of insider trading cases don’t seem to be going away.”

In the past year, SEC enforcement lawyers have brought increasing numbers of insider trading lawsuits and settlements. Recent high-profile cases include charges against a husband and wife in Hong Kong for trades in Dow Jones & Co Inc shares ahead of News Corp’s $5 billion takeover bid, and guilty pleas from three former Countrywide Financial Corp executives for trading company shares ahead of a disappointing profit report.

Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.

Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush administration’s ‘benchmarks’ for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years. ‘The foreign companies would not have to invest their earnings in the Iraqi economy,’ the analyst Antonia Juhasz wrote in the New York Times in March, after the draft law was leaked. ‘They could even ride out Iraq’s current “instability” by signing contracts now, while the Iraqi government is at its weakest, and then wait at least two years before even setting foot in the country.’ As negotiations over the oil law stalled in September, the provincial government in Kurdistan simply signed a separate deal with the Dallas-based Hunt Oil Company, headed by a close political ally of President Bush.

How will the US maintain hegemony over Iraqi oil? By establishing permanent military bases in Iraq. Five self-sufficient ‘super-bases’ are in various stages of completion. All are well away from the urban areas where most casualties have occurred. There has been precious little reporting on these bases in the American press, whose dwindling corps of correspondents in Iraq cannot move around freely because of the dangerous conditions. (It takes a brave reporter to leave the Green Zone without a military escort.) In February last year, the Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks described one such facility, the Balad Air Base, forty miles north of Baghdad. A piece of (well-fortified) American suburbia in the middle of the Iraqi desert, Balad has fast-food joints, a miniature golf course, a football field, a cinema and distinct neighbourhoods – among them, ‘KBR-land’, named after the Halliburton subsidiary that has done most of the construction work at the base. Although few of the 20,000 American troops stationed there have ever had any contact with an Iraqi, the runway at the base is one of the world’s busiest. ‘We are behind only Heathrow right now,’ an air force commander told Ricks.

Investors sold dollars in a climate of market nervousness ahead of a Federal Reserve meeting on interest rates next week.

The dollar hit a new 33-year low against the Canadian currency. The “loonie” rose to $1.0400, or 96.15 Canadian cents per U.S. dollar, this morning after the release of Thursday’s durable goods report, according to Interbank foreign-exchange rates from Dow Jones.

The dollar climbed to 96.65 Canadian cents in late New York trading, still down from the 97.06 Canadian cents it bought Wednesday. Thursday’s low circles the bottom of the modern era of floating exchange rates, 96.04 Canadian cents, hit on May 24, 1974.

Inventories last week fell 5.29 million barrels to the lowest since January, the U.S. Energy Department said. New U.S. sanctions against Iran, warnings of a Turkish assault on Kurdish militants in Iraq and a falling dollar helped push prices higher. Brent futures in London reached a record.

“The market has been particularly surprised by that 5 million-barrel drop in crude, that was really one out of left- field,” said Mark Pervan, a commodity strategist at Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. in Melbourne. “As much as we’re seeing concern about Middle East stability, it’s a dollar-driven story as well. It’s a bit of a perfect storm.”

Crude oil for December delivery rose as much as 64 cents, or 0.7 percent, to $91.10 a barrel in after-hours electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the highest since trading began in 1983. It traded at $91.02 at 12:20 p.m. Singapore time. Prices are 51 percent higher than a year ago.

Yesterday the contract jumped $3.36, or 3.9 percent, to $90.46 a barrel, a record close. It was the biggest one-day gain since April 23.

This particular disaster occurred only on paper. But those grim numbers are some of the pandemic planning assumptions used by nearly 3,000 banks, insurance companies and security firms in a just-concluded, three-week, paper-based exercise that may have been the largest pandemic test of its kind.

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When asked “based on the lessons learned from the exercise, how effective are your organization’s business continuity plans for a pandemic,” 56% answered “moderately,” the next highest group was “minimally,” at 28%. Only 12% said their business continuity planning was very effective.

The three-week scenario compresses the 12-week period a pandemic wave would likely last. Among the other things that may happen in an actual pandemic are school closings, as well as blackouts or brownouts in major metro areas because of degraded service as a result of absenteeism. Internet service throughput could be reduced by 50% due to congestion, and Web browsing timeouts would become common. Airlines would cut schedules, and garbage would pile up on streets.

Putin, in Portugal for a summit with leaders of the European Union, said the standoff over Iran’s nuclear program should be resolved through talks, pointing at North Korea as an example.

“Why worsen the situation and bring it to a dead end by threatening sanctions or military action,” Putin said in a veiled reference to the U.S. push for harsher international sanctions against Tehran.

“Running around like a madman with a razor blade, waving it around, is not the best way to resolve the situation,” the Russian leader said.

The National Association of Realtors (NAR) said in a monthly snapshot that sales of existing homes and apartments fell to a seasonally adjusted rate of 5.04 million units in September from 5.48 million in August.

The drop was worse than expected. Most economists had only expected sales to decline to around 5.25 million. August sales were revised lower from an original tally of 5.50 million homes.

Stripping out apartment turnover, sales dived to their lowest level since January 1998.

Analysts said the grim news boosts the odds that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates for the second time in as many months at a policy meeting next Wednesday.

The depth of the housing depression was underlined by an annual reading which showed sales of homes and apartments across the United States have plummeted a dramatic 19.1 percent from September 2006.

The sales slowdown has pushed home prices lower in many cities in the past 12 months in a market downturn which has also forced many mortgage lenders out of business.

The national median existing-home price for all housing types fell 4.2 percent from a year ago to 211,700 US dollars.

The glut of unsold homes swamping the market rose 0.4 percent at the end of September to 4.40 million, marking a 10.5-month supply at the current sales pace.