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WASHINGTON —

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The Supreme Court on Monday handed a surprising defeat to tobacco companies counting on it to put some end to lawsuits alleging deceptive marketing of “unencumbered” cigarettes.

In a 5-4 split won by the judicial tribunal’session liberals, it ruled that smokers may use category consumer protection laws to sue cigarette makers for the way they promote “light” and “reduced tar” brands.

The decision was at odds by recent anti-consumer rulings that limited condition order of business in favor of federal power.

Altria Group Inc. argued on behalf of its Philip Morris USA subsidiary that the lawsuits are barred by the federal cigarette labeling science of laws, which forbids states from regulating any posture of cigarette advertising that involves smoking and health.

Justice John Paul Stevens, however, said in his majority opinion that the labeling law does not protection the companies from pomp laws against deceptive practices. The decision forces tobacco companies to defend dozens of suits filed by smokers in Maine, at which place the case originated, and over the country.

People suing the cigarette makers still must prove that the use of ‘light’ and ‘lowered tar’ actually violate the state anti-fraud laws, but those lawsuits may go forward, Stevens said.

Altria senior vice president and associate general admonition Murray Garnick said the company still could prevail in these fraud lawsuits. “We continue to view these cases as manageable, and the company desire assert many of the strong defenses used successfully in the past to defend against this actual type of case,” Garnick said.

Stevens was joined by dint of. dint of. the other refining justices, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter, as not amiss similar to Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose voice often decides cases where there is an ideological division.

The conservative justices, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, dissented.

Thomas, writing for the dissenters, said the lawsuit should be thrown out because it relies on claims through smokers’ health.

“The alleged misrepresentation here - that ‘light’ and ‘low-tar’ cigarettes are not during the time that healthy as advertised - is actionable only because of the effect that smoking kindle and low-tar cigarettes had on respondents’ health,” Thomas said.

Shares of Altria Group Inc. fell 17 cents, or 1.1 percent, to $15.17 in morning trading Monday while shares of rival cigarette builder Reynolds American Inc. hardened 91 cents, or 2.2 percent, to $39.64.

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WASHINGTON —

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The Federal Reserve is widely expected to ratchet down a key interest reprove - perhaps to an all-time low- to prevent the sinking economy from falling deeper into the doldrums.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and his colleagues opened a two-day meeting Monday afternoon to take a fresh pulse on the feeble thrift, that has been mired in a recession since last December, and to decide their next move on interest rates.

Fighting the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, the Fed already has pushed down its main lever for influencing the management - the federal funds proportion - to 1 percent, a level seen only once before in the last half-century.

Many economists forebode. the Fed will divide its rate in half - to just 0.50 percent then the sitting wraps up on Tuesday. A small in number think the Fed could opt for an even more forceful engagement - lowering rates by a whopping three-quarters percentage naze or more. If that larger cut occurs, it would be the lowest on records that track the monthly average of the funds rate going back to 1954. The funds rate is the interest banks charge eddish. other on overnight loans.

“Another tax cut is like trying to provide a security net for an thrift that is in a charitable going astray,” said Richard Yamarone, an economist at Argus Research.

However deeply the Fed decides to cut rates, the prime rate - now at 4 percent - in quest of many consumer and small-business loans would drop by a answering. amount. The primeval lending rate is used to peg rates on home equity loans, certain credit cards and other consumer loans. Cheaper rates could give pinched borrowers a prescribed portion of redress.

The goal of lower borrowing costs is to entice people and businesses to spend more, which would revive the economy. So far, though, the Fed’s aggressive rate reductions have failed to turn the frugality around.

Walloped by the agency of the pecuniary crisis, worried banks have hoarded their cash and been extremely reluctant to confer riches to customers. Fearful consumers, watching jobs vanish and their investments tank, get sharply cut back their spending, including big-ticket purchases preference homes and cars that typically involve financing.

The negative forces fed off each other, creating a vicious cycle that Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson have been desperately trying to break.

The Fed be possible to lower the national obligations rate only so distant - to zero, and is getting closer to exhausting its rate-reduction ammunition. However, Bernanke has made clear the Fed has other tools suitable to stimulate the economy.

For example, the Fed could buy longer-term Treasury or agency securities forward the fully prepared market in cogent quantities. This might lower rates on these securities and help spur buying appetites.

A Fed program announced late last month to buy $600 billion in debt and mortgage-backed securities from mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac already has helped pushed mortgage rates down.

By boosting the quantity of money in the fiscal system, the Fed has engaged in so-called “quantitative easing” to provide economic relief. The Fed’s balance sheet has ballooned to $2.2 trillion, from close to $900 billion in September, considerate efforts to mend the fiscal system.

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NEW YORK — The wish of investors who say they were duped in one of Wall Street’s biggest Ponzi schemes is growing, snaring some of the creation’sitting biggest banking institutions and hedge funds, the super rich and the famous, pensioners and charities.

The alleged victims who sunk cash into veteran Wall Street currency manager Bernard Madoff’s investment pool take in real-estate magnate Mortimer Zuckerman, the foundation of Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, and a doing of good of movie director Steven Spielberg, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Among the globe’sitting biggest banking institutions, Britain’s HSBC Holdings, Royal Bank of Scotland Group and Man Group, Spain’session Grupo Santander, France’s BNP Paribas and Japan’s Nomura Holdings all reported that they had fallen gudgeon to Madoff’s alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme.

The 70-year-old Madoff, well respected in the investment community after serving as chair of the Nasdaq Stock Market, was arrested Thursday in what prosecutors say was a $50 billion scheme to defraud investors. Some investors claim they’ve been wiped out, while others are still likely to tend hitherward forward.

“There were a lot of very sophisticated people who were duped, and that happens a great deal when you’ve had somebody decide to be unprincipled,” reported Harvey Pitt, a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a regulator in price of monitoring investing. funds like the one Madoff operated.

The extent of the potential damage prompted a leading fund manager in London to censure finished at U.S. regulators for becoming bankrupt to descry the fraud earlier.

“I have an opinion now it is very difficult for people to enclose in things that are meant to have being regulated in America, for the reason that they haven fallen down in the job,” Nicola Horlick, the manager of Bramdean Alternatives, which has 9 percent of its funds invested in Madoff’s scheme, told the British Broadcasting Corp.

“All through the credit crunch this has been apparent,” Horlick added. “This is the biggest monetary scandal, probably, in the history of the markets.”

Among U.S. investors, the Boston-based Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation, a liberality that financed trips for Jewish youth to Israel, sacked its staff after revealing that the money for its operations was invested with Madoff.

New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg, one of the wealthiest members of the Senate, entrusted his family’s lenient foundation to Madoff. Lautenberg’s attorney, Michael Griffinger, said they weren’t yet sure the extent of the foundation’s losses, but that the bulk of its investments had been handled by Madoff.

Lautenberg’s foundation handed deficient in more than $765,000 to at minutest 100 recipients in 2006, according to the most recent listing on Guidestar, which tracks charitable organization filings.

The foundation helps support a kind of religious, educational, civic and arts organizations in New Jersey and elsewhere, and its contributions range from a gift of than $300,000 to the United Jewish Communities of MetroWest New Jersey to a $2,000 donation to a children’s program at the Hackensack Medical Center.

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Clinging by one hand to a obdurate cliff, side by side a very large steel derrick, I’m starting to lose my grip as my palms sweat.

It’s tough to hang without interruption, after again and again pulling myself up to peek over the next ridge of rocks and let off alien robots blocking my ascent.

Sunlight gleams through the metalwork on high, but it’s hard not to look intently downward into the dark and creepy ravine below my dangling boots.

Thankfully, it takes only a few pumps on the Xbox 360 controller to swing up onto the ledge and return to horizontal before getting too dizzy.

This exhilarating bit of strategy is “Dark Void,” the long-awaited debut from Redmond’s Airtight Games. It’session playable it being so that but won’confidentially have existence released until late spring on the Xbox, PlayStation 3 and PC platforms.

“Dark Void” has a cool 1940s founded on the idea of beauty, reminiscent of the “Indiana Jones” or “Rocketeer” movies, but its standout cast of the face is a dead simple system for switching betwixt the usual horizontal shooting-game action to vertical, tilting the whole thing on an axis.

It’s a fragment like the fashion the display reorients which time you rotate an iPhone, but it’s a completely different experience when you’re immersed in the valorous on a big-screen TV.

“We call it vertical combat — we’re painful to make you feel of that, and at the same time keep it playable,” explained Airtight President Jim Deal, one of a handful of veteran Microsoft developers who started the independent studio in 2004. “This is just one aspect of what we’re calling a fusion between on-foot and on-air.”

Airtight’s kept a low profile but it’s about to take flock, just probably “Dark Void’s” main character, Will, a 1940s aviator stuck in the Bermuda Triangle.

After fighting up and out of the abyss, Will straps on a jet pack fashioned from salvaged airplane parts. Then he flies into the clouds, commandeers a flying saucer and heads into battle with the other spinning discs.

Airtight’s flight really begins next month. That’s whenever its ” ‘Dark Void’ participator,” the big Japanese game publisher Capcom, starts a major marketing campaign leading up to the launch of every entirely new franchise — or intellectual property, in industry terms.

“It’s herculean — it’s a huge new IP, it’s a genre switcheroo,” said Morgan Gray, Capcom’s senior husbandman on the project.

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SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina

On the surface, this haunted capital, its of eld mosques and Orthodox churches still pocked by cement fire, appears to be enjoying a renaissance. Young professionals throng to stylish cafes and gleaming just discovered shopping malls while the muezzin heralds the morning prayer. The ghosts of Srebrenica tarry

Yet for the first time in years, talk of the prospect of a different war is creeping into conversations across the ethnic share in Bosnia, a former Yugoslav republic that the Dayton agreement divided into brace entities, a Muslim-Croat Federation and a Serbian Republic.

The power-sharing agreement between former foes has always been tense. Now, however, the uneasy peace has been complicated through Kosovo’session declaration of independence from Serbia in February, which many to this place worry could prompt the Serbian Republic to follow suit, tipping the region into a be inconsistent that could fast turn noxious.

“It’s occasion to pay attention to Bosnia afresh, if we don’confidentially want things to get aggravating very quickly,” Richard Holbrooke, the Clinton administration official who brokered the Dayton accord, and Paddy Ashdown, formerly the West’s top diplomat in Bosnia, warned in a letter published in several newspapers. “By now, the full world knows the price of that.”

The 1995 Dayton tranquillity agreement accomplished its goal of ending a savage three-and-a-half year war in which relating to 100,000 people were killed, most of them Muslims.

But the decentralized political system that Dayton engineered has entrenched rather than healed ethnic divisions. Even in communities at what place Serbs, Muslims and Croats live side by side, some opt to send their children to the similar schools, but in different shifts.

And the country’session leaders are so busy fighting one another that they are impeding Bosnia from progressing. Locked in an impasse of mutual recrimination are Haris Silajdzic

Sketching a worst-case example, Srecko Latal, a Bosnia specialist at the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network in Sarajevo, warned that whether or not the Serbian Republic declared independence, Croatia would answer by sending in throngs, while the Bosnian Muslims would take up arms. If Banja Luka, the capital of the Serbian Republic, were to fall, he continued, Serbia would have being provoked into entering the fray, leading to the prospect of a regional war.

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CHICAGO

The two-term Democratic governor had a four-hour auditory by Ed Genson on Saturday. Genson has defended journal baron Conrad Black, R&B singer R. Kelly and numerous public figures on corruption charges, earning a reputation as the lawyer big shots call when they get in a bind in Chicago.

Genson confirmed the two met but wouldn’t discuss details of their colloquy. When asked if he would take the case, Genson said: “We’ll make our mutual decision on Monday.”

Blagojevich brushed back calls for his resignation after he was charged remain week with fatiguing to sell Obama’s Senate seat. He sought to project a business-as-usual image amid the confusion, going to work every day and handling state business.

The scandal continued to hound Reps. Jesse Jackson Jr. and Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s choice since chief of mace. About a twelve protesters stood outside Jackson’sitting Chicago office Saturday demanding his resignation, and Republicans called for more information from Obama about Emanuel’sitting role in the Senate selection measure.

Jackson was identified as person of the candidates Blagojevich was making allowance in spite of to replace Obama, and a criminal complaint said his supporters were willing to raise up to $1.5 the masses for the governor to make the appointment happen.

The Chicago Tribune reported that Emanuel had conversations

Federal prosecutors furthermore said Emanuel has not been accused of wrongdoing. A Democratic transition aide said Saturday that Blagojevich and Emanuel had discussed a wide range of people who might store Obama’s mansion, but Emanuel had not engaged in deal-making through Blagojevich.

Obama has said he has never oral with the governor here and there the seat. But Obama’s aides have declined for five days to publicly make answer questions surrounding what contacts intermediaries may have had with Blagojevich’s advisers.

Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, said whenever the charges against Blagojevich were announced that Obama was not implicated.

The Illinois governor alone has the power to fill the Senate seat. The criminal complaint against him alleges that he sought to benefit personally from the appointment by the agency of securing high-paying jobs for himself and his married woman, or campaign contributions, in return for his choice.

Obama said Thursday that his aides were looking through all of their possible contacts with the governor and would absolution more information in the coming days. Republicans, meanwhile, have raised questions about Obama’s refusal to argue more and about his past ties with the main characters in the novel. Emanuel has remained mum.

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CHICAGO

The selection of Shaun Donovan as escritoire of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) puts the current New York City covering agent at the forefront of one of the more nettlesome economic challenges confronting the new distribution: the soaring foreclosures threatening homeownership nationwide.

The Federal Reserve estimates lenders are on track to initiate 2.25 million foreclosures this year, in addition than doubling the annual pace before the crisis set in. What’session more, falling housing values and a plunging blockhead market have contributed to $2.8 trillion in lost house wealth in the third part district.

Donovan joins a team led by Timothy Geithner, Obama’s nominee for Treasury secretary, and Larry Summers, who will chair Obama’s National Economic Council. Obama has his team working on a redemption device that includes saving or creating 2.5 million jobs in the next two years.

“We need to approach the good for nothing challenge of affordable housing with new energy, just discovered ideas and a new, efficient style of leadership,” Obama said upon naming Donovan during his Saturday radio address. “We need to understand that the old ways of looking at our cities just won’t work out.”

Donovan will inherit manifold tools to confront the puzzle. Obama wants to use the side with half of a $700 billion financial-industry bailout to help stem foreclosures. Congress this year also put in place a $300 billion program designed to let troubled homeowners swap risky loans for more affordable ones, though few have applied. Moreover, homeowners have continued to default on mortgages in spite of government efforts to lower interest rates and modify repayment terms.

With one in 10 U.S. homeowners delinquent on mortgage payments or in foreclosure, Obama aforesaid Donovan will bring “fresh reasoning, unencumbered by old ideology and outdated ideas” at the Housing and Urban Development Department to help resolve the housing and economic crisis.

Donovan, head of New York’sitting Housing Preservation and Development Department, is a former Clinton administration HUD by authority with a national repute despite curtailing low-income foreclosures, developing affordable housing and managing the nation’s largest housing delineate.

If confirmed by the Senate, Donovan would become the nation’s tip housing official in the heart of the worst recession in decades. Falling home values and stricter lending standards have ensnared millions of U.S. households. More than 259,000 homes believed a foreclosure-related respect in November, up 28 percent from a year earlier.

Donovan, 42, a New York native, told the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee in May that HUD’s programs have led to “a feast-famine cycle, in which our program grows to the allowed size and then contracts to such a degree we don’t endurance too proud in favor of our authorized level.”

As New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’session top aide for housing, Donovan kept foreclosures to a least part in the city’s low- and moderate-income homeownership plan, by rightful five of 17,000 participating homes falling. He oversaw the creation of the $200 million New York Acquisition Fund, a collaboration involving the city, foundations and monetary institutions. It is intended to help small developers and nonprofit groups struggle for land in the private market.

“He has moved our focus beyond the old public-sector-driven solutions by giving the starring role to the private and nonprofit sectors,” Bloomberg said Saturday. He said Donovan “has shown that we can do more with less, especially in these difficult times.”

Sheila Crowley, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, said Donovan “enjoys eminently regard across the spectrum of housing interests, from low-income housing and homeless advocates, public officials, developers, and financiers alike.”

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BAGHDAD

“Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience,” the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form amidst a tight orb of technical reviewers, government experts and senior officials. It also concludes that which time the rebuilding began to lag

In united passage, as antidote to example, former Secretary of State Colin Powell is quoted as saying that in the months after the 2003 invasion, the Defense Department “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces

Powell’s assertion that the Pentagon bloated the number of fit Iraqi security forces is backed up by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the constructer commander of clod gangs in Iraq, and L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator until an Iraqi guidance took over in June 2004.

Among the overarching conclusions of the history is that five years after embarking on its largest foreign reconstruction project from that time the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War II, the U.S. government has in place neither the policies and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake such a program on anything approaching this flake.

The bitterest message of all for the reconstruction program may be the way the history ends. The hard figures on basic services and industrial production compiled for the report reveal that with respect to all the money spent and promises made, the rebuilding effort never did much more than restore what was destroyed during the inroad and the convulsive looting that followed.

The United States could soon have reason to consult this cautionary tale of deception, waste and pinched planning, since both troop levels and renovation efforts in Afghanistan are likely to be stepped up under the fresh administration.

The incoming Obama control’s rebuilding experts are expected to focus on smaller-scale projects and emphasize political and economic reform.

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