Federal policymakers have concluded that the turmoil plaguing the housing and financial markets is likely to spill deep into 2009, becoming one of the most significant domestic problems to confront the next president when he steps into the Oval Office in January.

Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, publicly indicated on Tuesday that he believes the problems will persist into next year when he outlined a series of steps the Fed is considering in the coming months.

One such step would extend low-interest lending programs to Wall Street’s largest investment banks into next year. The programs, one of which was set to expire in September, can continue only if the Fed issues a finding that there are “unusual and exigent circumstances” that justify them.

Bernanke also recommended that Congress grant the Fed broader authority to monitor and supervise the financial markets to assure greater stability in the future. But with time running out on this session, lawmakers are unlikely to adopt such legislation before next year.

Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. said in a speech last week in London that the problems plaguing the housing and financial markets might last longer than originally expected.

He followed up in another speech on Tuesday by saying that the Bush administration was working to prevent as many home foreclosures as possible, but that “many of today’s unusually high number of foreclosures are not preventable.” Paulson said 1.5 million home foreclosures were started in 2007 and that an estimated 2.5 million more would take place this year.

Still, the markets seemed reassured that Washington officials were redoubling their efforts to resuscitate the weak housing sector, despite the downbeat comments. The Dow Jones industrial average closed, which has fallen sharply in recent weeks, closed up 1.4 percent, or 152 points.

Bernanke said that the Fed would issue next week long-awaited rules to restrict new exotic mortgages and high-cost loans for people with weak credit. Such mortgages have been a central cause of the current market problems.

The Federal Housing Administration will also begin an expanded effort next week to help a larger group of troubled homeowners refinance their adjustable mortgages. Under the plan, homeowners would be eligible to refinance even if they have missed up to three monthly mortgage payments over the previous 12 months. Homeowners who have fallen behind on their payments because of job loss, declining wages and family illness will also be eligible, even if their rates have not increased. Homeowners are now eligible only if they were current on their mortgages before their interest rate was adjusted upward.

For its part, Congress is close to completing legislation on a $300 billion foreclosure-rescue plan that would help troubled borrowers refinance into more affordable loans insured by the federal government. The Senate is expected to approve a measure by next week.

The Fed created the lending programs to Wall Street in March as part of a broader effort to prevent financial institutions from collapsing, as Bear Stearns nearly did before it was sold under heavy pressure from the Fed and the Bush administration to JPMorgan Chase.

President Bush and leaders of the world’s richest nations pledged Tuesday to “move toward a low-carbon society” by cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050, the latest step in a long evolution by a president who for years played down the threat of global warming.

The declaration by the Group of Eight — the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Canada and Russia — was the first time that the Bush White House had publicly backed an explicit long-term target for eliminating the gases that scientists have said are warming the planet. But it failed to set a similar goal for cutting emissions over the next decade, and drew sharp criticism from environmentalists, who called it a missed opportunity.

In a sense, the document represents an environmental quid pro quo. In exchange for agreeing to the “50 by 2050” language, Bush got what he has sought as his price for joining an international accord: a statement from the rest of the Group of Eight that developing nations like China and India, which have declined to accept mandatory caps on carbon emissions, must be included in any climate change treaty.

European leaders, who have long pressed Bush to take a more aggressive stance on global warming, said the declaration could enhance efforts to reach a binding agreement to reduce emissions when negotiators meet in Copenhagen, Denmark, next year under U.N. auspices.

“This is a strong signal to citizens around the world,” the president of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, told reporters at a news conference near here. “The science is clear; the economic case for action is stronger than ever. Now we need to go the extra mile to secure an ambitious global deal in Copenhagen.”

The leaders of the eight industrialized countries, who gathered on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido for their annual meeting, spent months debating the language of Tuesday’s communique in lower-level negotiations. Critics said it was short on specifics, and that both developed and developing countries would need to make much sharper cuts in emissions to head off the worst effects of global warming.

The statement left unclear, for instance, whether the cuts made by 2050 would be pegged to current emissions levels, or 1990 levels, as many advocates had hoped.

The United States and the Czech Republic signed a landmark accord on Tuesday to allow the Pentagon to deploy part of its widely debated anti-ballistic missile shield on territory once occupied by Soviet troops.

The accord, the first of its kind to be reached with a Central or East European country, was signed in Prague by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her Czech counterpart, Karel Schwarzenberg, despite strong opposition from Russia. It must also be ratified by Czech lawmakers, many of whom oppose it.

Russia warned on Tuesday that the accord could lead to a military response, which the Kremlin has previously threatened but never specified.

President Dmitri A. Medvedev and his predecessor, Vladimir V. Putin, who is now the Russian prime minister, had told the United States that the Kremlin saw a missile shield in this part of Europe as a threat to Russian security. Putin said it could even lead to a new Cold War.

But American and Czech officials said the system’s radar component, to be stationed south of Prague, would defend the NATO members in Europe and the United States against long-range weapons from the Middle East, particularly Iran.

“Ballistic missile proliferation is not an imaginary threat,” Rice said Tuesday after meeting with the Czech prime minister, Mirek Topolanek. She said Iran continued to work toward a nuclear bomb, along with long-range missiles that could carry a warhead.

Rice is on a European tour that includes Bulgaria and Georgia, but not Poland. The United States hopes to base 10 interceptor missiles there, but the governments in Warsaw and Washington have so far failed to reach agreement on the terms.

Unlike the Czech Republic, the Polish center-right government led by Donald Tusk has taken a tough negotiating stance. In return for hosting the interceptors, Poland has asked the United States to modernize Polish air defenses so that the country can defend itself against incoming short-range and medium-range missiles.

The accord with the Czech Republic is not without its problems.

The deal signed on Tuesday does not ensure that the radar system will be built immediately or that the next American administration will stick to the project.

Negotiations are still taking place on a second treaty that deals with the legal status of American troops to be deployed at the planned radar base. Both treaties must be ratified by Czech legislators, many of whom are skeptical about the project, while the public is largely opposed.

Topolanek’s coalition government does not have enough seats to assure support for the plans and may need opposition votes. Legislators from the Green Party, the government’s junior coalition partner, have indicated they may block the proposals, and opposition parties have demanded a national referendum. About two-thirds of Czechs oppose the radar deployment, according to opinion polls.

“Ratification will be difficult,” said Jiri Schneider, program director at the Prague Security Studies Institute. “The missile defense plan has sparked a national debate about how exposed we want to be on the international stage.”

With a month remaining before the Beijing Olympics, the International Olympic Committee on Tuesday praised the city’s preparations but also cited two “open issues” that remain: whether the city can deliver good air quality and fulfill promises to allow television networks to broadcast from non-Olympic sites.

“We think we’ve done everything,” said Hein Verbruggen, chairman of the IOC’s Coordination Commission, in a telephone interview. “But now we have to see in practice how it will work.”

Pollution and media access remain uncertainties as Beijing hustles to finish construction projects, plant flowers and get the city ready for the Aug. 8 opening ceremonies. On Tuesday, Beijing organizers christened the two state-of-the-art Olympic media centers that will house more than 20,000 journalists during the games.

The controversy over broadcast access began in March, after the authorities suppressed the violent Tibetan protests in western China. Beijing announced that networks would not be allowed to broadcast live from Tiananmen Square. The square is the symbolic center of Beijing and offers striking views of the Forbidden City. But it is also where Chinese troops crushed pro-democracy protesters in 1989 and is still a magnet for occasional protesters.

Verbruggen, who led a 12-member IOC delegation in Beijing this week, said the issue of broadcast rights from the Forbidden City, the Great Wall of China and other “icon” destinations was discussed during meetings Monday and Tuesday with the Beijing Olympic Games Organizing Committee.

“There will be a lot of opportunities to use all the icons,” Verbruggen said. He said networks would face restrictions on when they were permitted to televise from Tiananmen Square, but that local authorities had “granted it will be possible to film there.”

Last year, Beijing lifted certain domestic travel restrictions on foreign journalists as part of its Olympic pledge to allow more open media coverage. But foreign journalists have continued to experience sporadic interference, especially after the Tibet crisis. Foreign journalists are still blocked from traveling to certain Tibetan areas in western China. On Monday, Human Rights Watch released a report accusing China of failing to fulfill its promises on media freedom.

Now, television networks want assurances that Beijing will follow through on its pledges to allow live shots at non-Olympic venues. Last week, members of a German ZDF television crew said they were harassed by plainclothes and uniformed security officers as they tried to film live shots from the Great Wall of China — even though the crew had government approval. Security officers jumped in front of the cameras during live shots and some Chinese citizens interviewed by the crew were later questioned by authorities, according to the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of China.

Executives at some American television networks privately acknowledge problems securing broadcasting access in Beijing. Some stations that reserved locations for live shots later had their permissions revoked

Oil prices headed in an unusual direction — down — for the second consecutive day on Tuesday, leaving energy experts to wonder whether the drop is the beginning of a lasting trend or just a brief pause before another surge.

Oil settled at $136.04 a barrel, a drop of $5.33, or 3.8 percent. Analysts said the immediate causes included the strengthening of the dollar in recent days and the apparent veering northward of Bertha, the first hurricane of the 2008 hurricane season, meaning it was likely to miss the oil and natural gas facilities in the Gulf of Mexico.

They also noted that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran had dismissed the possibility that war with the United States and Israel was imminent in remarks to reporters in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, relieving worries that Iran might try to block oil shipments in the Strait of Hormuz.

The decline bolstered a rally in the stock market, with the Dow Jones industrial average rising 152.25 points, or 1.36 percent, to 11,384.21. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index ended up 1.71 percent, and the Nasdaq composite climbed 2.28 percent.

But even as a barrel of oil lost more than 6 percent of its value since the Fourth of July weekend, energy analysts warned that it was too soon to predict an outright collapse in prices. Some predicted that this was just one more in a series of pauses that has accompanied the volatile rise in oil prices from $60 last summer and just below $100 at the beginning of the year.

Others were just left bewildered.

Chip Johnson, the president and chief executive of Carrizo Oil and Gas, a Houston-based company, said he was “confused” by “such wild swings.” But he added: “I can’t see oil getting cheap again ever. It’s just too hard to find, and too many people want to use it.”

Any sustained decline in oil prices could help the consumer at a time when higher food and energy prices have forced many to cut back spending on other goods. It could also help the ailing automotive and airline industries, lower the trade deficit and strengthen the dollar. Prices for gold, silver, copper and corn also dropped on Tuesday.

But the factors bringing down oil prices over the last two days could be short-lived. Traders have been using oil as a hedge against the dollar in recent years, and there is no assurance the dollar will strengthen for long if the economy further weakens. Another hurricane could develop at any time, and the strongest normally come in August and September. Tensions in the Middle East, Nigeria and other oil-producing areas can always erupt to put pressure on tight reserves.

“I don’t think there has been any change in the overall direction of the oil market,” said Addison Armstrong, director of market research at Tradition Energy, an energy broker that deals with banks and hedge funds. “The bias is still clearly to the upside, with $150 firmly in the sights of traders.”

A senior Iranian official was quoted Tuesday as threatening that Iran would respond to any military attack by striking Israel and America’s vital interests around the globe.

“In case that they commit such foolishness, Tel Aviv and the U.S. fleet in the Persian Gulf would be the first targets to burst into flames receiving Iran’s crushing response,” said Ali Shirazi, a representative of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, according to the ISNA news agency.

The threat — which drew no immediate response from Israel or the United States — was the latest salvo in the complex maneuvering around Western efforts to persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions, particularly the enrichment of uranium.

The United States, Israel and other Western countries fear that Iran’s nuclear program is designed to build nuclear weapons, but Tehran says it is for civilian purposes.

Congressional investigators said Tuesday that Medicare had paid tens of millions of dollars to suppliers improperly using identification numbers of doctors who died years ago.

The government has no reliable way to spot claims linked to dead doctors, many of whom are still listed as active Medicare providers though they died 10 or 15 years ago, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said.

Medicare covers wheelchairs, walkers, home oxygen equipment and many other types of medical equipment. When suppliers file claims for equipment provided to a Medicare beneficiary, they normally must list an identification number for the doctor who prescribed or ordered it.

“From 2000 to 2007, Medicare paid 478,500 claims containing identification numbers that were assigned to deceased physicians,” the subcommittee said in a new report. “The total amount paid for these claims is estimated to be between $60 million and $92 million. These claims contained identification numbers for an estimated 16,548 to 18,240 deceased physicians.”

Iraqi officials continued to insist Tuesday that a timetable for the withdrawal of coalition troops must be included in any security agreement with the United States.

Meanwhile, in western Anbar province, 22 bodies were found at a Ramadi elementary school that was undergoing construction, 20 of them buried in the playing fields, apparently over a lengthy period, the local police said.

Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the national security adviser, said the government would reject any security agreement that did not include a schedule for the departure of foreign troops.

“We will not accept a memorandum of understanding without having timeline horizons for the cessation of combat operations as well as the departure of all the combat brigades,” al-Rubaie said in a telephone interview. However, he declined to offer specifics on a timeline, suggesting that the Iraqi government itself was not yet sure how quickly it wanted the United States to withdraw.

Earlier in the day, al-Rubaie was in the holy city of Najaf meeting with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most senior Shiite religious leader. The ayatollah has not expressed an opinion on the specifics of the negotiations, emphasizing only that Iraq must protect its sovereignty.

The suicide bombing on Monday outside the Indian Embassy in Kabul was the latest and most audacious attack in recent months on Indian interests in Afghanistan, where New Delhi, since helping to topple the Taliban in 2001, has staked its largest outside aid package ever.

India has poured unprecedented amounts of money and people into the reconstruction of Afghanistan, a vital passage into resource-rich Central Asia. It has spent more than $750 million, building a strategic road across the country’s southwest, training teachers and civil servants, and working on erecting a new seat of the national Parliament.

That engagement has come at a mounting cost to the 4,000 Indian citizens working in Afghanistan. In the last two and a half years, an Indian driver for the road reconstruction team was found decapitated, an engineer was abducted and killed, and seven members of the paramilitary force guarding Indian reconstruction crews were slain.

Last year alone, the Indian Border Roads Organization came under 30 rocket attacks as it built the 124-mile stretch of road across Nimroz province that will ultimately link landlocked Afghanistan to a seaport in Iran.

The embassy bombing on Monday seems to have been the most effective strike: A suicide bomber blew himself up as two Indian diplomats drove into the embassy early in the morning, reducing the compound to rubble and blood. Four Indians, including the two diplomats, were killed. The bulk of the 41 dead were Afghan civilians who had come for embassy services.

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, who is expected to announce on Wednesday that he will after all attend the opening ceremonies of Beijing’s Olympic Games, was warned by China on Tuesday not to meet with the Dalai Lama in France next month.

China’s ambassador to France, Kong Quan, told reporters there would be “serious consequences” for Chinese-French relations if Sarkozy meets the Dalai Lama, asserting that it “would be contrary to the principle of noninterference in internal affairs.”

Sarkozy has been vague on whether he would meet personally with the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader-in-exile of Tibet, regarded by China as a renegade “splittist” who has advocated resistance to China’s sovereignty.

China has repeatedly blamed the Dalai Lama and his subordinates for instigating anti-Chinese riots in Tibet three months ago and encouraging a boycott of the Beijing Olympics, which the Dalai Lama has denied. Representatives of both sides recently resumed suspended reconciliation talks.

France holds the presidency of the European Union, and Sarkozy has said that his attendance at the Aug. 8 opening ceremonies will depend on progress in those talks. The Dalai Lama’s visit to France, for a conference on Buddhism, comes after the opening of the Olympics.

Two former secretaries of state, concluding that a 1973 measure limiting the president’s ability to wage war unilaterally had never worked as intended, proposed on Tuesday a new system of closer consultation between the White House and Congress before U.S. forces go into battle.

Their proposal would require the president to consult senior lawmakers before initiating combat expected to last longer than a week, except for covert operations or rare cases requiring emergency action, in which case consultation would have to be undertaken within three days. Congress would have 30 days to approve the military action or, if it declined to do so, could then order it ended by disapproving it.

The plan would create a new committee of congressional leaders and relevant committee chairmen, with a full-time staff that would have access to military and intelligence material. The president would be required to consult with the group in advance of any major strike and regularly throughout any extended conflict.

The two former secretaries of state, Warren Christopher and James A. Baker III, oversaw a year-long bipartisan study of the tension over war powers that has vexed the U.S. government since its founding. In a report released on Tuesday, the study group concluded that the 1973 law, which is known as the War Powers Resolution and was adopted in the wake of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, was lacking in a number of regards.

The United States and other regional powers will resume talks with North Korea this week on ending the Communist state’s nuclear weapons programs, a South Korean envoy said Tuesday.

The six-nation talks, the first in nine months, are to begin on Thursday, the South Korean envoy, Kim Sook, told reporters before flying to Beijing for the conference among the United States, the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia.

A deadlock was broken late last month when North Korea submitted a long-delayed but partial account of its nuclear programs and the United States moved to take North Korea off its terrorism blacklist and relax some economic sanctions.

Kim said the new talks would l focus on verifying the North’s nuclear account, including the amount of plutonium the North has reported. But the envoys will also discuss speeding up the disabling of North Korea’s main nuclear complex in return for fuel aid shipments.

North Korea has delayed removing spent fuel rods — a source of plutonium — from its main nuclear reactor while complaining that the other five nations had not provided the promised fuel aid in a timely fashion.

Although the Atlantic Ocean sees the lion’s share of its hurricanes August through October, hurricanes have been observed to form in July. Last week, a strong and consolidated area of thunderstorms emerged off Africa and quickly developed into Tropical Storm Bertha. On Monday, Bertha strengthened into a hurricane and underwent a period of rapid intensification becoming a category 3 storm with winds of 120 mph (190 kph). While hurricanes in July aren’t remarkable, the location of Bertha is. Bertha has set records for the farthest east a tropical storm, hurricane, and major hurricane have formed so early in the hurricane season (though reliable records date back to only the early ’70s).

Even though hurricanes are rare in New England, they are able to strike our part of the world with fury. The last significant hurricane to hit the region was Hurricane Bob in 1991 bringing storm surge, high winds, and heavy rain to much of the area. More frequently, the remnants of a hurricane track up the east coast primary impacting us with flooding rains. It is impossible to say what this season will bring for any one spot on the map, but in the short term, Bertha will likely stay out to sea and not pose any threat to the U.S.

The Guantanamo Bay detention center will not close today or any day soon.

But the Supreme Court’s decision Thursday stripped away the legal premise for the remote prison camp that officials opened six years ago in the belief that American law would not reach across the Caribbean to a U.S. naval station in Cuba.

“To the extent that Guantanamo exists to hold detainees beyond the reach of U.S. courts, this blows a hole in its reason for being,” said Matthew Waxman, a former detainee affairs official at the Defense Department.

And without that, much will change.

The decision granted detainees the right to challenge their detention in civilian courts, meaning that federal judges will now have the power to check the government’s claims that the 270 men still held there are dangerous terrorists. That will force officials to answer questions about evidence that they have long deflected despite international criticism and expressions of support, from President Bush on down, for closing the camp.

Some cases, though no one can be sure how many, are likely to result in court orders freeing detainees. The government said Thursday that its prosecutions before military commissions at Guantanamo would continue, but habeas corpus suits resulting from the justices’ decision are certain to complicate the 19 war crimes cases under way, giving detainees’ lawyers a vehicle to try to stop those proceedings.

Just as important, some lawyers said, defending scores of cases will be a huge burden for the government, likely increasing pressure inside the Bush administration to send detainees back to their home countries.

Nearly 100 of the 270 detainees are Yemenis. American officials have said they have not repatriated many of them because of fears that they would be released quickly. The decision Thursday, several lawyers said, could encourage American officials to take their chances, shrinking the population by a third or more.

Detainees’ lawyers have long claimed that the government will not be able to justify the detention of many of the men. Pentagon officials, on the other hand, have maintained that classified evidence establishes that many of them are dangerous. The federal courts will now have the power to sort through those claims.

But the justices’ decision did not change some realities that have long made it easier to say that the Guantanamo detention center should be closed than to figure out how. Just last month Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who advocates closing the camp, told Congress that “we’re stuck” in Guantanamo.

One military official said Thursday that those complications remained as confounding after the ruling as they were before. The official, who was not authorized to discuss the court ruling and spoke on condition of anonymity, noted that practical difficulties had stalled plans for an alternative to Guantanamo. Among those is the question of where to put detainees whom the administration views as too dangerous to release.

Angered by what they consider sexist news coverage of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, many women and erstwhile Clinton supporters are proposing boycotts of the cable networks, putting up videos on a “Media Hall of Shame,” starting a national conversation about sexism and pushing Clinton’s rival, Sen. Barack Obama, to address the matter.

But many in the news media — with a few exceptions, including Katie Couric, the anchor of the CBS Evening News — see little need for reconsidering their coverage or changing their approach going forward. Rather, they say, as the Clinton campaign fell behind, it exploited a few glaring examples of sexist coverage to whip up a backlash and to try to create momentum for Clinton.

Phil Griffin, senior vice president of NBC News and the executive in charge of MSNBC, a particular target of criticism, said that although a few mistakes had been made, they had been corrected quickly and the network’s overall coverage was fair.

“I get it, that in this 24-hour media world, you’ve got to be on your game and there’s very little room for mistakes,” Griffin said. “But the Clinton campaign saw an opportunity to use it for their advantage. They were trying to rally a certain demographic, and women were behind it.”

His views were echoed by other media figures. “She got some tough coverage at times, but she brought that on herself, whether it was the Bosnian snipers or not conceding on the night of the final primaries,” said Rem Rieder, editor of American Journalism Review. “She had a long track record in public life as a serious person and a tough politician and she was covered that way.”

Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, said: “I have not had a lot of regretful conversations with high-ranking media types and political reporters about how unfair their coverage of the Hillary Clinton campaign was.”

Among journalists, he added, the coverage “does not register as a mistake that must not be allowed to happen again.”

Taking aim from the inside, though, was Couric, who has herself has faced harsh criticism as the first solo female anchor of an evening news broadcast. Couric posted a video on the CBS Web site on Wednesday about the coverage of Clinton.

Japan, a country not known for its overweight people, has undertaken one of the most ambitious campaigns ever by a nation to slim down its citizenry.

Summoned by the city of Amagasaki one recent morning, Minoru Nogiri, 45, a flower shop owner, found himself lining up to have his waistline measured. With no visible paunch, he seemed to run little risk of being classified as overweight, or metabo, the preferred word in Japan these days.

But because the new state-prescribed limit for male waistlines was a strict 33.5 inches, he had anxiously measured himself at home a couple of days earlier. “I’m on the border,” he said.

Under a national law that came into effect two months ago, companies and local governments must measure the waistlines of Japanese people between the ages of 40 and 74 as part of their annual checkups. That represents more than 56 million waistlines, or about 44 percent of the entire population.

Those exceeding government limits — 33.5 inches for men and 35.4 inches for women, which are identical to thresholds established in 2005 for Japan by the International Diabetes Federation as an easy guideline for identifying health risks — and suffering from a weight-related ailment will be given dieting guidance if after three months they do not lose weight. If necessary, those people will be steered toward further re-education after six more months.

To reach its goals of shrinking the overweight population by 10 percent over the next four years and 25 percent over the next seven years, the government will impose financial penalties on companies and local governments that fail to meet specific targets. The country’s Ministry of Health argues that the campaign will keep the spread of diseases like diabetes and strokes in check.

The ministry also says that curbing widening waistlines will rein in a rapidly aging society’s ballooning health care costs, one of the most serious and politically delicate problems facing Japan today. Most Japanese are covered under public health care or through their work. Anger over a plan that would make those 75 and older pay more for health care recently brought a parliamentary censure motion against Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, the first against a prime minister in the country’s postwar history.

But critics say that the government guidelines — especially the one about male waistlines — are simply too strict and that more than half of all men will be considered overweight. The effect, they say, will be to encourage overmedication and ultimately raise health care costs.

Yoichi Ogushi, a professor at Tokai University’s School of Medicine near Tokyo and an expert on public health, said that there was “no need at all” for the Japanese to lose weight.

“I don’t think the campaign will have any positive effect. Now if you did this in the United States, there would be benefits, since there are many Americans who weigh more than 100 kilograms,” or about 220 pounds, Ogushi said. “But the Japanese are so slender that they can’t afford to lose weight.”

The standard-bearer for Zimbabwe’s opposition was twice detained by the police on Thursday, and one of his most important deputies was arrested to face treason charges.

The events underscored the daunting obstacles to campaigning against President Robert Mugabe in the two weeks before a presidential runoff.

The opposition presidential candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, who was detained twice last week, was held up by the police twice more on Thursday in what was supposed to have been a day of rallies and campaigning, his party said.

The arrest of the deputy, Tendai Biti, was even more chilling for the party, the Movement for Democratic Change. Biti, the party’s secretary-general, was swiftly apprehended at Harare’s airport on Thursday as he returned from South Africa after a self-imposed absence of two months. He will be charged with treason, a police spokesman said.

Even before his passport could be stamped, “10 men in plain clothes whisked him away,” his party said. “His whereabouts are unknown.”

Senior officials in Mugabe’s governing party, in power for 28 years, have accused Biti, a lawyer who is often the opposition’s public face, of violating the law by announcing the outcome of the initial round of voting in March before the official results were released.

They also alleged that Biti wrote a paper shortly before the disputed March election laying out the opposition’s strategy for a transition to power and efforts to bribe poll officers “so that they exploit any available opportunity to overstate our votes,” according to a quotation from the document published in the state-owned newspaper, The Herald, in April.

The opposition has dismissed the document as a forgery. Others have also found it implausible that Biti, a successful lawyer, would have written something so blatantly self-incriminating.

Jonathan Moyo, formerly information minister and member of the governing party’s Politburo and now an independent member of parliament, said the signature on the document did not look like Biti’s.

“If he authored it, he’s a very stupid fellow,” Moyo said, adding, “We can accuse him of many things, including political naivete, but stupidity as a lawyer isn’t one of them.”

The police spokesman, Wayne Bvudzijena, said Biti was in police custody in Harare. He said Biti was charged with “falsely indicating” that Tsvangirai had won the initial election on March 29 before the official results were released. Election officials announced them after a delay of more than a month.

Biti will be charged with treason, Bvudzijena said, because of statements made in the document on the party’s transition plans. If found guilty, Biti could face death by hanging.

Later on Thursday, Tsvangirai was detained along with an entourage of 20 people at a roadblock near the central town of Kwekwe while they were campaigning, his party said. He was held at the police station in Kwekwe, released after two hours, but later detained again while driving into Gweru, the next stop on his campaign, the Movement for Democratic Change said in a statement. He was released a second time without being charged, a party spokesman told Reuters.

The House took another step Thursday in a running political fight over unemployment insurance by ignoring a veto threat from President Bush and easily approving an extension of benefits for idled workers whose aid is running out.

Less than a day after coming up just short in a vote on the same measure, the House approved granting an extra 13 weeks of unemployment benefits nationwide beyond the standard 26 weeks; the vote was 274-137, the minimum margin needed to override a veto.

Republicans said the result was misleading because a number of lawmakers were absent. They expressed confidence they could sustain a rejection of the bill by Bush if it were to reach the White House.

But in an illustration of the election-year unease among Republicans about the unemployment issue, 49 of them again broke with their party leadership and joined 225 Democrats in backing the proposal, which would also extend benefits even longer in states with unemployment above 6 percent. In those states, benefits would be extended for a total of 26 weeks.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi blamed the Bush administration for a souring economy that was shedding jobs, and she rejected any insinuation that the extra aid amounted to an incentive to remain out of work. “This isn’t about people sitting on their butts back home and saying, ‘Goodie, I am getting an unemployment check,’ ” Pelosi said. “These people want to provide for their families, and to imply anything else is an insult to these millions of people who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own.”

But Republicans said the measure was too generous, would pad benefits in states that do not have high unemployment and drop a long-standing requirement that applicants must have worked at least 20 weeks to draw benefits. Given that the White House has promised a veto, they said, Democrats appeared to be more interested in a political than a policy fight.

“It’s been about politics every day, all day,” said Rep. John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader.

Democrats did move quickly to take advantage of Republican opposition to added benefits at time of economic anxiety. After Wednesday’s narrow defeat of the unemployment measure, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent news releases to the home districts of 20 potentially vulnerable Republicans, upbraiding them for voting “against desperately needed unemployment relief for struggling American families.”

The fate of the unemployment measure remains uncertain in the Senate even without the veto threat hanging over it.

Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said Thursday that he would try to win Republican agreement to quickly bring the House measure up for a vote without spending days trying to clear procedural hurdles. Republicans said Thursday they were not certain they would agree to such an arrangement, particularly if Democrats would not allow any attempts to amend the measure.

Microsoft’s four-month-long courtship of Yahoo has finally thrown Yahoo into the arms of their biggest common rival, Google.

Google and Yahoo said Thursday that they had reached an agreement under which Google would deliver ads next to some of Yahoo’s search results and on some of its Web sites in the United States and Canada.

The nonexclusive deal is aimed at giving a lift to Yahoo’s finances, and the company said it would generate an additional $250 million to $450 million in operating cash flow in the first year.

The agreement will also strengthen Google’s dominance over the lucrative search advertising market. It was signed after Yahoo rejected a proposal by Microsoft to acquire both Yahoo’s search business and a minority stake in the company. The rejection appears to end months of on-again, off-again negotiations between the two companies.

An internal investigation by the National Republican Congressional Committee has determined that $725,000 is missing from its fundraising accounts, money that the group says was stolen as part of a six-year scheme carried out by its former treasurer.

The committee, which raises money for Republican congressional candidates, announced Thursday the results of a forensic audit, focusing on the activities of its former treasurer, Christopher J. Ward. It said Ward had fabricated financial statements to hide the missing money, which went undetected until January.

Ward oversaw the collection and distribution of over $360 million from Republican donors while collecting $120,000 a year as treasurer. He made $10,000 a year as treasurer for the President’s Dinner Committee, the party’s biggest annual fundraising event. He also served as treasurer for the campaigns of 80 other Republican candidates, many of whom have also said money was missing.

American air and artillery strikes killed 11 Pakistani paramilitary soldiers during a clash with insurgents on the Afghan border on Tuesday night, a development that raised concerns about the already strained American relationship with Pakistan.

The strikes underscored the often faulty communications involving American, Pakistani and Afghan forces along the border, and the ability of Taliban fighters and other insurgents to use safe havens in Pakistan to carry out attacks into neighboring Afghanistan.

The attack comes at a time of rising tension between the United States and the new government in Pakistan, which has granted wide latitude to militants in its border areas under a new series of peace deals, drawing criticism from the United States. NATO and American commanders say cross-border attacks in Afghanistan by insurgents have risen sharply since talks for those peace deals began in March.

Although Pakistani government officials softened their response through the day on Wednesday, the Pakistani military released an early statement calling the air strikes “unprovoked and cowardly.” Shaken by the initial Pakistani reaction, administration officials braced for at least a short-term rough patch in relations with Islamabad. “It won’t be good,” said a Pentagon official who followed developments closely throughout the day. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

A leading Sunni political party’s headquarters in western Iraq was blown up early Thursday morning while in southern Iraq, where Shiite factions have been fighting one another, a powerful bomb was discovered on the road to an important Shiite shrine.

Both episodes pointed to probable tensions in the months ahead of provincial elections in which factions are fighting hard to ensure that they have a place at the political table.

The explosion of the headquarters of the Iraqi Islamic Party in Fallujah, west of Baghdad, happened about 6 a.m., according to witnesses, who said the American military had been near the site of the bombing until about an hour before the detonation.

The Fallujah City Council blamed the Americans for the blast, saying it had also damaged a health center next door. Iraqi Islamic Party members were more circumspect.

“We cannot accuse anyone because we do not have enough information,” said Abid al-Kareem al-Sammaraie, an Iraqi Islamic Party member who serves in Parliament.

“Our information is that the American forces were in the same place as the explosion,” Sammaraie said. “We need more information to figure out who is behind that explosion.”

Voting rights groups are criticizing the Department of Veterans Affairs for its decision to ban registration drives among the veterans living at federally run nursing homes, homeless shelters and rehabilitation centers across the country.

The groups say that such drives make it easier for veterans to register and participate in the political process, which could be particularly important this year in a presidential election in which the handling of the Iraq war and treatment of veterans will be major campaign issues.

Mary G. Wilson, president of the League of Women Voters, said: “It just seems wrong to the league that the VA is erecting barriers to voter registration for our nation’s veterans. They appear to be using technicalities to block many veterans from registering to vote.”

Although veterans are not federal employees, department officials based their decision in part on the Hatch Act, which bans federal employees from engaging in partisan political activity.

The department’s policy is “to assist patients who seek to exercise their right to register and vote,” according to a VA directive issued on May 5. “However, due to Hatch Act requirements and to avoid disruptions to facility operations, voter registration drives are not permitted.”

Matt Smith, a spokesman for the Department of Veterans Affairs, said the department “wanted to ensure that our staff remains focused on caring for our veterans instead of having to determine the political agenda of each group that might try to enter our facilities.”

The European Union on Thursday accused U.S. producers of biodiesel of benefiting from subsidies that threaten to put European producers out of business.

Biofuels are controversial because of accusations that they raise food prices and do little to fight global warming.

But they are also a big business, with sales of about 8 billion euros ($12.3 billion) annually in Europe. European Union trade officials say producers in Europe are at risk because of a tax credit that is granted to American exporters.

The commission said it would begin a formal antidumping investigation on Friday that could lead to the imposition of punitive tariffs.

The commission “will leave no stone unturned in this investigation and will act in accordance with its findings,” said Peter Power, a spokesman for Peter Mandelson, the European Union trade commissioner.

The European Union said the suspect subsidies consisted of federal excise and income tax credits along with a federal program of grants for increases in production.

The tainted-tomato outbreak has spread to six more states, federal health officials said Thursday, even as they acknowledged to lawmakers that they had yet to nail down major aspects of a food-safety plan released seven months ago.

A total of 228 people in 23 states have been reported sickened by salmonella-tainted tomatoes, said Dr. David Acheson, associate commissioner for foods at the Food and Drug Administration. The new states with cases are Florida, Georgia, Missouri, New York, Tennessee and Vermont.

Earlier on Thursday, Acheson told members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee at a hearing that the agency needed six to eight more weeks before it could provide details about the safety plan’s specific measures, their timetables and their costs.

Even then, he said, he was uncertain that he would be able to provide a budget for food safety-related measures that went beyond the next fiscal year.

Federal lawmakers, who have pushed the agency for months to specify what it will do to prevent outbreaks of food poisoning and trace the sources of those that occur, criticized the agency as failing to protect the nation’s food supply.

“How could you put forth a plan for food safety for the nation and have no idea what it would cost after the first year of implementation?” asked Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., chairman of the oversight and investigations subcommittee. “How could you put forth a proposal to protect the American people and not even know what it’s going to cost?”