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The cosmic blank spot has no stray stars, no galaxies, no sucking black holes, not even mysterious dark matter. It is 1 billion light years across of nothing. That’s an expanse of nearly 10 billion trillion kilometres of emptiness, a University of Minnesota team announced Thursday.

Astronomers have known for many years that there are patches in the universe where nobody’s home. In fact, one such place is practically a neighbour, a mere 2 million light years away.

But what the Minnesota team discovered, using two different types of astronomical observations, is a void that’s far bigger than scientists ever imagined.

On to Iran, declares Vice President Cheney.

Israel is a “peace-seeking state” that needs $30 billion of US taxpayers’ money for war, declares State Department official Nicholas Burns.

The Democratic Congress, if not fully behind the Iraqi war, at least no longer is in the way of it.

Nor are the Democrats in the way of the Bush regime’s build up for initiating war with Iran.

The Bush regime says it is going to designate part of Iran’s military – the Revolutionary Guards – a terrorist organization, whose bases and facilities Bush intends to bomb along with Iran’s nuclear energy sites. Three US aircraft carrier strike forces are deployed off Iran. B-2 Stealth Bombers are being fitted to carry 30,000 pound “bunker-buster” bombs to use against hardened sites. Politicized US generals assert that Iran is providing arms and aid to the Iraqi resistance to the US occupation. The media is feeding the US population the same propaganda about nonexistent Iranian weapons of mass destruction that they fed us about nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. A former CIA Middle East field officer, Robert Baer, has written in Time magazine that the Bush regime has decided to attack the Revolutionary Guards within the next 6 months. Remember the “cakewalk war”? Well, this time the neocons think that an attack on the Revolutionary Guards will free Iran from Islamic influence and cause Iranians to back the US against their own government.

Mother Teresa had a calling, she told CBS News in a rare interview, based on unquestioned faith.

“They are all children of God, loved and created by the same heart of God.”

But now, it emerges that Mother Teresa was so doubtful of her own faith that she feared she was being a hypocrite, reports CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips. In a new book that compiles letters she wrote to friends, superiors and confessors, her doubts are obvious.

Shortly after beginning work in Calcutta’s slums, the spirit leaves her.

“Where is my faith?” she writes. “Even deep down … there is nothing but emptiness and darkness. … If there be God — please forgive me.”

Eight years later, she’s still looking for the belief she’s lost.

“Such deep longing for God,” she writes. “… repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal.”

As her fame increased, her faith refused to return. Her smile, she says, is a mask.

“What do I labor for?” she asks. “If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true.”

“These are letters that were kept in the archbishop’s house,” says the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk.

The letters were gathered by Rev. Kolodiejchuk, the priest who’s making the case to the Vatican for Mother Teresa’s proposed sainthood. He says her obvious spiritual torment actually helps her cause.

“Now we have this new understanding, this new window into her interior life, and for me this seems to be the most heroic,” says Rev. Kolodiejchuk.

According to her letters, Mother Teresa died with her doubts. She had even stopped praying, she once said.

Trutex would not say whether it was studying a spy in the waistband or a bug in the blazer but admitted teenagers were less keen than younger children on the “big brother” idea.

The Lancashire company, which sells 1m blouses, 1.1m shirts, 250,000 pairs of trousers, 200,000 blazers, 60,000 skirts and 110,000 pieces of knitwear each year, commissioned an online survey for 809 parents and 444 children aged between nine and 16. It said 44% of the adults were worried about the safety of pre-teen children and 59% would be interested in satellite tracking systems being incorporated in schoolwear. While nearly four in 10 pupils aged 12 and under were prepared to go along with the idea, teenagers were more wary of “spying”.

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BNC made about $2 billion of loans in the first quarter, down 40 percent from a year earlier, according to industry newsletter National Mortgage News. The unit’s 23 offices in eight states will be closed.

Rising U.S. home foreclosures and problems in the subprime mortgage market have spilled into broader financial markets in recent weeks.

In a sign of the distress borrowers are facing, U.S. banks’ delinquent or noncurrent loans hit $66.9 billion at the end of the second quarter, up 36 percent from a year ago and up 10.6 percent from the end of the first quarter, the FDIC said.

The rise was the largest quarterly jump since the fourth quarter of 1990, the agency said. The second-quarter figure also represented the largest 12-month increase since 1991.

Noncurrent loans are those for which payments are overdue by at least 90 days.

Accredited Home Lenders said it will cut its work force to 1,000 people — from 2,600 at the end of June — and close 65 branches. The company will immediately stop accepting applications for home loans in the U.S., though it will honor the loans it has already committed to finance.

The company will close its retail lending business, which issues home loans directly to consumers. Accredited is also scaling back much of its wholesale lending division, which issues mortgages through brokers. The company will close five of its 10 brokered loan offices and lay off about three-fifths of the unit’s workers.

Accredited Home Lenders, which issued $15.77 billion in home loans last year, said shutting down most of its business is necessary to navigate the turbulence in the mortgage industry.

Stung by decaying credit quality and a newfound fear of risk on Wall Street, mortgage lenders across the industry have struggled to raise cash this year.

The outage knocked the company’s Internet, telephone and ATM banking services offline for several hours, and Wells Fargo customers continued to experience problems today.

Wells Fargo didn’t offer many details about the system failure, but it was serious enough that the company had to restore from backup.

“Using our backup facilities, we restored Internet banking service in about one hour and 40 minutes,” the company said in a statement today. “We thank the hundreds of team members in our technology group for working so hard to resolve this problem.”

Other banking services such as point-of-sale transactions, loan processing and wire transfers were also affected by the outage, and while all systems are now fully operational, some customers may continue to see their Friday bank balances until the end of the day, Wells Fargo said.

Customers couldn’t perform transactions during the outage, but the company’s Web site was not knocked offline, according to data from Netcraft Ltd., a Bath, England-based Web analysis firm.

TeliaSonera, which lost the northern leg of its U.S. network to the cut, said that the outage began around 7 p.m. Pacific Time on Sunday night. When technicians pulled up the affected cable, it appeared to have been shot. “Somebody had been shooting with a gun or a shotgun into the cable,” said Anders Olausson, a TeliaSonera spokesman.

The damage affected a large span of cable, more than two-thirds of a mile [1.1 km] long, near Cleveland, TeliaSonera said.

The company declined to name the service provider whose lines had been cut, but a source familiar with the situation said the lines are owned by Level 3 Communications. Level 3 could not be reached immediately for comment.

Cogent Communications warned that some customers may be experiencing disruptions because network lines had been cut somewhere between Montville, Ohio, and Cleveland. “Splice crews are currently doing preparation work on the new fiber cable before splicing begins to resolve the outage,” Cogent said in a note to customers.

Capital One, which acquired GreenPoint when it bought Melville-based North Fork Bancorp last year, said about 1,900 employees nationwide will lose their jobs, including the 120 who work in GreenPoint’s Melville and Manhattan locations, its only offices in New York State.

In an announcement made after stock markets closed, McLean, Va.-based Capital One said that although GreenPoint Mortgage will immediately stop making new residential mortgage loans, it will continue to meet its contractual obligations for loans with locked rates that are already in the pipeline. The company will continue to service existing mortgages at a location in Columbus, Ga.