BRASILIA, Brazil (AP) - Brazil's leftist president was falling just short of the majority of votes needed to avoid a runoff and win re-election Sunday after his party was slammed in the final days of the campaign with charges of corruption and dirty tricks.

With 83 percent of the ballots counted, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva had 49.6 percent of the vote compared to 40.7 percent for center-right Sao Paulo state Gov. Geraldo Alckmin, election authorities said.

Silva, who had been favored to win due to the economic stability and anti-poverty programs he brought to Brazil, needs 50 percent plus one vote to win the contest Sunday. If he fails to get that, he and Alckmin head to a runoff on Oct. 29.

Silva's campaign manager, Marco Aurelio Garcia, said a first-round win for the president was still possible because many of the uncounted votes were from Brazil's impoverished northeast, which has benefited handsomely from government social programs.

09/30/06 "The Independent" --- - In antiquity, Pliny wrote of the cliffs of Bayada. The chalk runs down to the Mediterranean in an almost Dover-like cascade of white rock, and the view from the top - just below the little Lebanese village of Chama'a - is breathtaking. To the south lies the United Nations headquarters and the Israeli frontier, to the north the city of Tyre, its long promentary, built by Alexander the Great, lunging out into the green-blue sea. A winding, poorly-made road runs down to the shore below Chama'a and for some reason - perhaps because he had caught sight of the Israeli warship off the coast - 58-year-old Ali Kemal Abdullah took a right turn above the Mediterranean on the morning of 15 July. In the open-topped pick-up behind him, Ali had packed 27 Lebanese refugees, most of them children. Twenty-three of them were to die within the next 15 minutes.

The tragedy of these poor young people and of their desperate attempts to survive their repeated machine-gunning from the air is as well-known in Lebanon as it is already forgotten abroad. War crimes are easy to talk about when they have been committed in Rwanda or Bosnia; less so in Lebanon, especially when the Israelis are involved. But all the evidence suggests that what happened on this blissfully lovely coastline two and a half months ago was a crime against humanity, one that is impossible to justify on any military grounds since the dead and wounded were fleeing their homes on the express orders of the Israelis themselves.

Mohamed Abdullah understands the reality of that terrible morning because his 52-year-old wife Zahra, his sons Hadi, aged six, and 15-year-old Wissam, and his daughters, Marwa, aged 10, and 13-year old Myrna, were in the pick-up. Zahra was to die. So was Hadi and the beautiful little girl Myrna whose photograph - with immensely intelligent, appealing eyes - now haunts the streets of Marwahin. Wissam, a vein in his leg cut open by an Israeli missile as he vainly tried to save Myrna's life, sits next to his father as he talks to me outside their Beirut house, its walls drenched in black cloth.

"From the day of the attack until now, lots of delegations have come to see us," Mohamed says. "They all talk and it is all for nothing. My problem is with a huge nation. Can the international community get me my rights? I am a weak person, unprotected. I am a 53-year-old man and I've been working as a soldier for 29 years, day and night, to be productive and to support a family that can serve society and that can be a force for good in this country. I was able to build a home in my village for my wife and children - with no help from anyone - and I did this in 2000, 23 years after I was driven out of Marwahin and I finished our new home this year." And here Mohamed Abdullah stops speaking and cries.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- In the world's biggest economy, one in eight Americans and almost one in four blacks lived in poverty last year, the U.S. Census Bureau said on Tuesday, both ratios virtually unchanged from 2004.

The survey also showed 15.9 percent of the population, or 46.6 million, had no health insurance, up from 15.6 percent in 2004 and an increase for a fifth consecutive year, even as the economy grew at a 3.2 percent clip.

It was the first year since President George W. Bush took office in 2001 that the poverty rate did not increase. As in past years, the figures showed poverty especially concentrated among blacks and Hispanics.

In all, some 37 million Americans, or 12.6 percent, lived below the poverty line, defined as having an annual income around $10,000 for an individual or $20,000 for a family of four. The total showed a decrease of 90,000 from the 2004 figure, which Census Bureau officials said was "statistically insignificant."

A group of 16 organizations of writers, artists, musicians, cartoonists and publishers has issued a statement asking the Cultural Affairs Agency to extend copyright protection from 50 years after their deaths to 70 years -- just as in Europe and North America.

<snip>

"Unless the protection is extended to 70 years as quickly as possible, criticism from overseas will mount," said Hiromi Kawakami, a senior official at the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers.

"The problem will become global when the copyright protection for music of John Lennon and Elvis Presley expires," Kawakami said.

This spring, Yoko Ono, Lennon's widow, and Presley's daughter, Lisa Marie, sent letters to then Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, asking him to extend copyright protection.

Novelist Masahiro Mita, vice president of the Japan Writers Association, said behind the request is an increase in life expectancy and the idea that families depend on the money they get from copyrights even after the artists have died.

"Especially in Japan, there are many 'I' novels, and authors have made subject matter of their family's private business," he said, indicating it is natural for relatives to receive royalties for a long time.

<snip>

Hideaki Shirata, an assistant professor at Hosei University, opposes the extension of copyright protection.

"Culture should be a public property which can be enjoyed freely by all people. A cultural life is the one in which many people can get in touch with works and can easily take part in creation," he said.

"The extension of copyright protection will narrow that down."

This is extremely disheartening.  More people need to read Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture.

Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 1 -- Two American citizens of Pakistani descent returned to the United States on Sunday, five months after they were denied permission to fly home to California unless they submitted to an interrogation by F.B.I. terrorism investigators.

The men, Muhammad Ismail, 45, and his son, Jaber, 19, of the Northern California farming town of Lodi, returned from Pakistan on a flight that landed at Kennedy Airport in New York around 3:30 p.m. Eastern time. They were scheduled to arrive in California on Sunday night or early Monday on a connecting flight, their lawyer said Sunday.

The Ismails are an uncle and cousin of Hamid Hayat, a Lodi man who was convicted in April in federal court of providing material support to terrorists. Mr. Hayat told investigators he had attended a terrorism training camp during a long stay in Pakistan and intended to carry out unspecified attacks in the United States. Mr. Hayat's father, Umer, was convicted on a lesser charge of lying to investigators about the amount of cash he carried to Pakistan on a 2003 trip, but a jury deadlocked on terrorism charges.

The Ismails were not charged in the case. They attributed their predicament to being related to the Hayats, the only people to have been charged in what federal prosecutors have described as an investigation into possible terrorism links in Lodi.

MANAMA, Bahrain, Sept. 29 -- Just months before Bahrain is to hold parliamentary and municipal elections, a former government adviser has set off a political firestorm with a report describing what he says is a vast conspiracy to rig the elections, manipulate the country's sectarian balance and ensure Sunni domination over the country's majority Shiites.

The scandal, which is being called "Bandargate" after the author of the report, Salah al-Bandar, reaches to the core of this tiny island kingdom's simmering tensions.

The report includes hundreds of pages of supporting material, apparently authentic, including canceled checks, hotel bills, accounting sheets and notes. The material suggests that at the very least, unusual business dealings were occurring between government officials, Mr. Bandar says, and that it may have amounted to an effort to set off ethnic conflict.

[...]

In all, Mr. Bandar contends, the documents indicate that $6 million was spent to plant articles in Bahraini newspapers, organize counterdemonstrations when Shiites held protests, set off cellphone text-message campaigns against opposition figures and even support a program to convert Shiites into Sunnis. Government officials have dismissed Mr. Bandar as a disgruntled employee with ulterior motives, insisting that the report is a fabrication.