In a statement issued from U.S. military headquarters in Kabul, officials said "we are exhausting all available resources to ascertain his whereabouts and provide for his safe return."

The soldier was not part of the large-scale assault launched on Taliban forces in southern Afghanistan early Thursday. That operation, which involves about 4,000 troops from the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, was encountering only light resistance, said officials. The military expects the Taliban to respond more harshly once troops move into towns and begin patrols.

Military officials in Afghanistan, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the situation, said the missing soldier appears to have walked off his base into an unsecured area.

A U.S. official in Afghanistan said the soldier's absence was discovered when he did not show up for morning formation. It is highly unusual for a U.S. soldier to leave a military base unaccompanied by other American troops.

Credit card companies are raising interest rates and fees seven months before new rules go into effect that will limit their ability to do so, much to the irritation of Congress and consumer advocates.

Chase, for instance, will raise the minimum payment required of some of its customers from 2 percent to 5 percent of the statement balance starting in August. Chase and Discover have increased the maximum fee charged for transferring a balance to the card to 5 percent of the amount, up from 3 and 4 percent, respectively. Bank of America last month raised the transaction fee for balance transfers and cash advances from 3 to 4 percent. Card issuers including Bank of America and Citi also continue to cut limits and hike up rates, which they have been doing with more frequency since January.

"This is a common practice and will continue to be common, because issuers can do these things for really no reason until February," said John Ulzheimer, president of consumer education for Credit.com, which tracks the industry. "It's what I call the Credit Card Trifecta - lower limits, higher rates, higher minimum payments."

It's not just the top card issuers making changes. Atlanta, Georgia-based InfiBank, for example, will raise the minimum annual percentage rate it charges nearly all of its customers in September "in order to more effectively manage the profitability of our credit card account portfolio in a very challenging economic environment," said spokesman Kevin C. Langin.

Dining at some restaurants will be a new experience starting today, when California becomes the first state to require that chain restaurants supply calorie counts for virtually everything they serve.

"Consumers should be able to make informed decisions about their health and it will raise the consciousness of how much we eat," said John Rogers, Sacramento County environmental health division chief.

There will be no guessing - or denial - about that double Western Bacon Cheeseburger from Carl's Jr.: 960 calories. Side of Chili Cheese Fries to go with that? 990 calories. Maybe stick to the fried zucchini at 330 calories?

The new law requires restaurants with at least 20 stores in California - about 17,000 locations statewide - to provide a brochure on site listing calories, sodium, saturated fat and carbohydrates for each menu item. Both sit-down and drive-through restaurants must comply.

An investigator at the Securities and Exchange Commission warned superiors as far back as 2004 about irregularities at Bernard L. Madoff's financial management firm, but she was told to focus on an unrelated matter, according to agency documents and sources familiar with the investigation.

Genevievette Walker-Lightfoot, a lawyer in the SEC's Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations, sent e-mails to a supervisor, saying information provided by Madoff during her review didn't add up and suggesting a set of questions to ask his firm, documents show. Several of these questions directly challenged Madoff activities that much later turned out to be elements of his massive fraud.

With the agency under pressure to look for wrongdoing in the mutual fund industry, she wasn't able to continue pursuing Madoff, according to documents and two people familiar with the investigation, and her team soon concluded its work on the probe.

Walker-Lightfoot's supervisors on the case were Mark Donohue, then a branch chief in her department, and his boss, Eric Swanson, an assistant director of the department, said two people familiar with the investigation. Swanson later married Madoff's niece, and their relationship is now under review by the agency's inspector general, who is examining the SEC's handling of the Madoff case.

U.S. President Barack Obama will lobby for nuclear disarmament and a fresh start in relations with Russia during his first visit to Moscow as president next week. But little concrete progress is expected - the hosts fear America's overtures are a trap aimed at further reducing Russia's global influence.

John Beyrle, Washington's man in Moscow, would never have seen the light of day if it hadn't been for a group of decent Red Army soldiers. "My father always saw the Russians as a people that saved his life," the U.S. ambassador recalls. "They could simply have shot him dead."

Beyrle's father had escaped from a German prisoner-of-war camp and headed east in the final months of World War II. Soviet soldiers found him hiding in a haystack and he was afraid they would kill him. He offered them Lucky Strike cigarettes and spent the final weeks of the war fighting on their side.

This background has given his son a high standing in political circles of the Russian capital, and his fluent command of Russian no doubt helps. He has been ambassador for exactly one year and now faces his biggest test - next Monday, Barack Obama will travel to Moscow for his first visit to Russia as American president.

Russia, whose foreign policy is traditionally fixated on America, is buzzing with anticipation that the visit might improve ties between the former Cold War enemies. Beyrle, ever the diplomat, has been at pains to play down all the issues of conflict. Russia and America, he says "have more common interests than disagreements."

The bank, Central Pacific Financial, was an unlikely candidate for a program designed by the Treasury Department to bolster healthy banks. The firm's losses were depleting its capital reserves. Its primary regulator, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., already had decided that it didn't meet the criteria for receiving a favorable recommendation and had forwarded the application to a council that reviewed marginal cases, according to agency documents.

Two weeks after the inquiry from Inouye's office, Central Pacific announced that the Treasury would inject $135 million.

Many lawmakers have worked to help home-state banks get federal money since the Treasury announced in October that it would invest up to $250 billion in healthy financial firms. Yet the Inouye inquiry stands apart because of the senator's ties to Central Pacific. While at least 33 senators own shares in banks that got federal aid, a review of financial disclosures and records obtained from regulatory agencies shows no other instance of the office of a senator intervening on behalf of a bank in which he owned shares.

Inouye (D-Hawaii) declined a request for an interview but acknowledged in a statement that an aide had called the FDIC to ask about Central Pacific's application. Inouye said he was not attempting to influence the outcome. The statement did not address Inouye's personal role in the inquiry, including whether he directed the aide to make the call or knew at the time that it had been made.

These days, bankers are used to bad press and being scolded by politicians. There's been no shortage of either in the past week.

The new attacks on banks have been prompted by the fact that base rates are at a historic low and that central banks are injecting money into the market like never before. In the last week alone, the European Central Bank (ECB) allocated the record sum of €442 billion ($619 billion) to 1,100 financial institutions - at a paltry 1 percent interest rate.

Saddam Hussein told an FBI interviewer before he was hanged that he allowed the world to believe he had weapons of mass destruction because he was worried about appearing weak to Iran, according to declassified accounts of the interviews released Wednesday. The former Iraqi president also denounced Osama bin Laden as "a zealot" and said he had no dealings with al-Qaeda.

Hussein, in fact, said he felt so vulnerable to the perceived threat from "fanatic" leaders in Tehran that he would have been prepared to seek a "security agreement with the United States to protect [Iraq] from threats in the region."

Former president George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq six years ago on the grounds that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed a threat to international security. Administration officials at the time also strongly suggested Iraq had significant links to al-Qaeda, which carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Hussein, who was often defiant and boastful during the interviews, at one point wistfully acknowledged that he should have permitted the United Nations to witness the destruction of Iraq's weapons stockpile after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

The internet's relationship with books, it is fair to say, has been a tumultuous one. Ever since the digital revolution started changing our relationship with information, the printed word - one of the most successful technologies in history - has been on the back foot.

Amazon has altered the face of the industry twice - first in the 1990s by changing the way books are sold and then, more recently, the way they are consumed, with its Kindle electronic book reader. Google has caused its own earthquake in the print world with its Book Search scheme - a plan to suck the text of millions of books into its search engine that has raised the hackles of publishers and authors alike.

Talk to workers at either of these technology companies and there is a feeling of technological inevitability: that the printed book is a stepping stone in the evolution of information, and now lies ready to be devoured by its hi-tech successors.

Not everybody thinks that way, however, including the Open Library - a project with an audacious goal that it hopes can bring the web and books closer together.

The scheme is to create a single page on the web for every book that has ever been published; an enormous, searchable catalogue of information about millions of books. It is still in beta, but already more than 23 million books are in its system, drawing information from 19 major libraries and linking to the text of more than 1m out-of-copyright titles.

Across the country, lawmakers were feeling the heat as their legislatures began the new fiscal year without a budget in place.

In Illinois, the sputtering drive to come up with a state budget broke down completely Tuesday, leaving the state without any plan for paying its employees or delivering government services. The session ended without any firm plans to return or even for Gov. Pat Quinn and legislative leaders to resume negotiations.

In Pennsylvania, talks between Gov. Ed Rendell and top legislators ended Tuesday night with no substantial progress, aides said. Rendell said he didn't think an agreement would come soon. The state faces the prospect of not being able to pay state employees if they cannot resolve an impasse.

As pressure mounted Wednesday on South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford to resign, the embattled Republican insisted he would remain in office despite mounting criticism from within his own party.

The tide of Republican opinion seemed to be shifting against the two-term governor in the wake of an emotional interview yesterday in which he detailed casual encounters with a number of women in addition to his Argentine mistress.

At least 18 Republicans in the state legislature have publicly called for him to step down, including some of Sanford's most vocal supporters, marking a major turn against Sanford within the South Carolina legislature. Several state Republican  leaders are privately urging Sanford to "make the right decision," said U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina).

"He's dropped the flag," DeMint said this morning on Fox News' "Fox & Friends". "The rest of us have to get up and go on. ... A lot of us are talking to him behind the scenes in hopes that he'll make the right decision about what needs to be done."

The government made a series of official moves to close the book on weeks of protest that represented the strongest challenge to its control since the Islamic Republic was founded in 1979. Parliament issued a statement expressing broad gratitude over the June 12 vote and thanking the police and the Basiji militia for maintaining security. President Ahmadinejad made a surprise visit to the Ministry of Intelligence, where he gave a speech to employees.

The government crushed the vast protests following the vote, dispatching armed police and militia and leaving 17 people dead and hundreds more injured. The authorities continued to detain hundreds of journalists, former government officials, political activists and even independent researchers, in the quest to prevent any further demonstrations.

There seemed little prospect for any chance for organized and sustained action against the government’s version of events, political analysts said, in part because the arrests that have starved the opposition of leadership, foot soldiers, and an effective means to communicate.

Flight AF 447 went missing during a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on June 1. The exact cause of the disaster is not yet known.

"The plane was not destroyed while it was in flight. It seems to have hit the surface of the water in the direction of flight and with a strong vertical acceleration," said Alain Bouillard, who is leading the investigation on behalf of France's BEA air accident board.

Bouillard said control of the flight was supposed to have passed from air traffic controllers in Brazil to their counterparts in Senegal, but that never happened.

The report Thursday follows a similar weak jobs report from overseas.

The Labor Department’s unemployment figures showed the jobless rate rose to 9.5 percent last month from 9.4 percent in May.

Recession-weary employers cut a larger-than-expected 467,000 jobs in June, suggesting that the economy’s road to recovery will be bumpy. In addition, a report in Europe showed unemployment in the 16 countries that use the euro rose to a 10-year high in May.

The Dow Jones industrial average was down 184 points, or 2.1 percent, in mid-morning trading. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was down 2.2 percent. The Nasdaq was down 2.5 percent.

Officials emphasized that fear should not stop patients from taking the smoking-cessation medicines, Chantix, made by Pfizer, and Zyban, made by GlaxoSmithKline, which also sells it under the brand name Wellbutrin, for depression.

“Stopping smoking is a goal we should all be working towards,” said Dr. Curtis J. Rosebraugh, director of a drug evaluation office at the Food and Drug Administration. “We don’t want to scare people off from trying a medication that could help them achieve this goal. You should just be careful.”

Pfizer will add a so-called black box warning - the F.D.A.’s most serious caution - to the packaging information for Chantix.

Harve Presnell, whose rich operatic baritone thrilled audiences in the stage and film versions of “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” and who made an unexpected return to the screen as William H. Macy's overbearing father-in-law in “Fargo,” died Tuesday in Santa Monica, California. He was 75 and lived in Livingston, Montana.

The cause was complications of pancreatic cancer, said his agent, Gregg Klein.

Mr. Presnell, who trained as an opera singer, brought an imposing physical presence - he stood 6 feet 4 inches - and a resplendent voice to the Broadway stage, delivering a star-making performance as Leadville Johnny Brown in “The Unsinkable Molly Brown.”

“He anchored that show, with a down-to-earth quality that played perfectly against Tammy Grimes' wonderfully eccentric style,” said Miles Kreuger, the president of the Institute of the American Musical. “It’s a pity they didn’t give him more larger-than-life roles because he had the physical presence and the voice for it.”

This year, Florida’s budget crisis has gutted summer school. Brevard classrooms are shuttered, and students like 11-year-old Uvenka Jean-Baptiste, whose mother works in a nursing home, are spending their summer days at home, surfing television channels or loitering at a mall.

Nearly every school system in Florida has eviscerated or eliminated summer school this year, and officials are reporting sweeping cuts in states from North Carolina and Delaware to California and Washington. The cuts have come as states across the country are struggling to approve budgets, and California’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, declared a fiscal state of emergency on Wednesday.

“We’re seeing a disturbing trend of districts making huge cuts to summer school; they’re just devastating these programs,” said Ron Fairchild, executive director of the National Center for Summer Learning at Johns Hopkins University. “It’s having a disproportionate impact on low-income families.”

SPIEGEL: Ayatollah Kadivar, we are meeting you here at Duke University in the U.S. State of North Carolina, 7,500 miles away from your home. Are you not needed more urgently in Iran now?

Kadivar: Believe me, in these dramatic hours I would much rather be in my homeland. Within the next two weeks, the future of Iran will be decided. Almost all my friends, 95 percent of them, are now in prison; and I am barely able to contact my family, the phones are almost dead.

SPIEGEL: You are said to be the co-author of the most recent declarations of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Kadivar: That is not right. Although I enjoyed his statements, they are not mine. I published my declarations separately, although I support Mousavi strongly. We have found means to communicate with each other. Via the Internet and via third parties, I am in constant contact with my homeland. Every day I receive about 100 messages.

SPIEGEL: Tehran appears quiet at the moment, at least compared with the mass protests of the week before last. Are we currently seeing the beginning of the end of the resistance - or the end of the Iranian regime?

Kadivar: This Iranian form of theocracy has failed. The rights of the Iranian peoples are trampled upon and my homeland is heading towards a military dictatorship. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad behaves like an Iranian Taliban. The supreme leader, Mr. Ali Khamenei, has tied his fate to that of Ahmadinejad, a great moral, but also political mistake.

SPIEGEL: What has your counsel been for opposition leader Mousavi in recent days? Is he truly the undisputed head of the movement?

The American Civil Liberties Union Wednesday accused the Obama administration of using statements elicited through torture to justify the confinement of a detainee it represents at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The ACLU is asking a federal judge to throw out those statements and others made by Mohammed Jawad, an Afghan who may have been as young as 12 when he was captured. His attorney argued that Jawad was abused in U.S. custody, threatened and subjected to intense sleep deprivation.

"The government's continued reliance on evidence gained by torture and other abuse violates centuries of U.S. law and suggests the current administration is not really serious about breaking with the past," said ACLU lawyer Jonathan Hafetz, who is representing Jawad in a lawsuit challenging his detention.

Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said the government would not comment on the types of evidence it will use in Jawad's case challenging his imprisonment. "We intend to prove our case in court rather than attempt to do so through the media," said Boyd.

The operation will involve about 4,000 troops from the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, which was dispatched to Afghanistan this year by President Obama to combat a growing Taliban insurgency in Helmand and other southern provinces. The Marines, along with an Army brigade that is scheduled to arrive later this summer, plan to push into pockets of the country where NATO forces have not had a presence. In many of those areas, the Taliban has evicted local police and government officials and taken power.

Once Marine units arrive in their designated towns and villages, they have been instructed to build and live in small outposts among the local population. The brigade's commander, Brig. Gen. Lawrence D. Nicholson, said his Marines will focus their efforts on protecting civilians from the Taliban and on restoring Afghan government services, instead of mounting a series of hunt-and-kill missions against the insurgents.

"We're doing this very differently," Nicholson said to his senior officers a few hours before the mission began. "We're going to be with the people. We're not going to drive to work. We're going to walk to work."

The Obama administration Tuesday began a campaign to curtail North Korea's ability to finance its trade in missiles and nuclear materials, with the Treasury and State Departments announcing actions against two North Korean companies, including one allegedly connected to the building of a nuclear reactor in Syria.

Administration officials said they are determined to ramp up pressure on the North Korean government in response to a series of missile tests and the detonation of a nuclear device - its second - this year. The playbook is drawn from similar efforts in the Bush administration - and largely directed by the same person, Stuart Levey, Treasury's undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence - that were abandoned by President George W. Bush in late 2006 in an effort to win North Korea's cooperation through diplomacy.

To strike a deal, Bush even authorized the return of $25 million that North Korea had earned in part through counterfeiting and money laundering and removed the country from the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism. But the diplomatic effort fell apart before he left office, and North Korea has since restarted its nuclear program.

Obama administration officials said the lesson they learned is that pressure tactics cannot be dropped until North Korea takes "irreversible steps" to end its program.

Analysts say North Korea is planning another missile test, perhaps as early as this weekend.

All but one of the British Embassy staff arrested in Tehran at the weekend have now been released, Iranian state media has said.

The remaining Iranian national in custody was being held on suspicion of playing a prominent role in recent violence, according to the English language channel Press TV.

Nine employees of the British Embassy were arrested over the weekend amid rapidly deteriorating relations with Iran since the disputed re-election of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Five of those had been released by Monday morning, leaving four in custody.

The Foreign Office confirmed two more had been freed in the past two days, but said it was awaiting confirmation that another had been released on Wednesday.

The weekend arrests intensified the diplomatic row which has escalated between the U.K. and Iran in recent weeks.

Mir Hossein Mousavi, who has led the opposition in demanding annulment of the election on grounds of massive fraud, asked Iranians to continue their protests "in a creative way," according to a statement published on one of his campaign Web sites. He also called for election reforms and press freedom.

"From now on, we will have a government which from the point of view of ties with the public is in the weakest of positions," he said. "A majority of society, of which I personally am a member, do not accept the legitimacy of this government."

Another opposition presidential candidate, Mehdi Karroubi, said on his newspaper's Web site Wednesday that he also considers Ahmadinejad's new government illegitimate. Ahmadinejad is scheduled to be sworn in before parliament for a second four-year term between July 26 and Aug. 19.

Karroubi dismissed what he described as an official show of accepting complaints of irregularities and conducting a partial recount, saying that these and other events indicated that the election should have been annulled.

The Organization of American States decided early Wednesday to launch a diplomatic initiative aimed at resolving the crisis caused by the coup in Honduras, prompting that country's deposed president to delay a trip home that could have provoked a violent clash.

After nearly 12 hours of meetings, the organization approved a resolution shortly before dawn that called on OAS Secretary General Jose Miguel Insulza to undertake efforts to reinstate Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, who was detained and expelled by the military on Sunday.

If those efforts did not succeed in 72 hours, Honduras would be suspended from the OAS, the main forum for political cooperation in the hemisphere, said the resolution.

Zelaya told reporters he would postpone a trip home he had scheduled for Thursday, which diplomats feared could lead to a sharp escalation of tensions in the Central American country. The president named by the Honduran Congress to replace him, Roberto Micheletti, has threatened to arrest Zelaya if he returns.

"I am going to return to Honduras; I am the president," Zelaya told reporters but, he said, he did not want to complicate the diplomatic efforts of the OAS over the next few days.

The Obama administration announced Wednesday an expansion of a key part of its foreclosure prevention program to allow more homeowners who owe more than their home is worth to refinance into lower-cost mortgages.

The effort is an acknowledgment by the administration that falling home prices limited the impact of its housing program, Making Home Affordable. Under the program, homeowners could refinance if their mortgage did not exceed the value of their home by more than 105 percent. Now, the administration is expanding the program to homeowners who are up to 125 percent underwater on their loan.

The refinancing program is central to the Making Home Affordable program, which also includes measures to help distressed borrowers stay in their home. The refinancing program is focused on borrowers who are current on their mortgage but who can not take advantage of historically low mortgage rates because their home values have fallen. The refinancing program is still limited to borrowers with loans backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-backed mortgage financing companies.

Administration officials have said that tens of thousands have already been refinanced under the program since it was launched in March but that the effort was slowed by a recent jump in interest rates. For the week ending June 25, Freddie Mac said in its weekly survey that the average interest rate for a 30-year fixed rate mortgage was about 5.42 percent, after falling to 4.78 percent in April.

The European Union's agricultural ministers decided on Monday of last week that in the future, the meat and milk of the offspring of cloned animals should be allowed on the European market. The European Parliament still needs to approve the proposal. However environmental and animal protection organizations responded immediately to the news and condemned the decision. They consider cloning to be unethical and cruel, and warn that the risks of cloned meat for human health have not been adequately researched.

The ministers' decision was long overdue. In the U.S. and South America, cloning has long been standard practice among breeders. German experts like Heiner Niemann from the Institute for Animal Breeding at the Friedrich Loeffler Institute also have high expectations of the technique. "In the future, cloning will be one of the standard cattle-breeding techniques," says Niemann.

The technology is already widely used in the U.S. Companies like ViaGen, Cyagra or Trans Ova Genetics offer cattle clones for between $10,000 and $20,000. The benefits are obvious: Multiple copies can be made of a bull with particularly desirable characteristics, and multiple "superbulls" naturally have more offspring than just one - meaning more premium meat for the breeder.

"With elite animals, cloning can quickly pay for itself," says Mark Walton of ViaGen. Karen Batra from the Biotechnology Industry Organization estimates there are already about 600 cloned super cattle in the U.S. The meat of their offspring is already on sale in supermarkets, she says, explaining that it doesn't need to be specially labeled. "For breeders, cloning is just another reproductive technique, much like in-vitro fertilization," says Batra.