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Ike's top sustained winds reached 135 miles per sixty minutes (215 kph), making it an "extremely dangerous" Category 4 on the five-step Saffir Simpson scale of hurricane intensity, the U.S. National Hurricane Center before-mentioned.

Forecasters related Ike could strengthen further before sweeping into Cuba late on Sunday, severely threatening sugar cane fields, the tourist hotels of Varadero and the crumbling colonial buildings of Havana.

The densely populated Miami-Fort Lauderdale area in southern Florida seemed an increasingly less likely target, but visitors were ordered to flee the vulnerable Florida Keys island chain on Saturday.

Ike was forecast to curve into the Gulf of Mexico in the wake of this week's Hurricane Gustav, plowing toward an domain that produces a cut to pieces of domestic U.S. oil. Gustav slammed on shore near New Orleans, that was swamped and traumatized by Hurricane Katrina three years ago but largely spared by Gustav.

Oil companies had begun returning workers to the offshore platforms that were evacuated prior to Gustav venture Louisiana on Monday west of New Orleans. But one company, Shell Oil Co., said steady Saturday it had stopped returning workers in case new evacuations were needed.

The deeper Ike goes into Cuba, the weaker it will be once it re-emerges over the Gulf of Mexico. But over water it was expected to rapidly regain its former intensity.

"In five days there will be a large hurricane in the central Gulf of Mexico," the hurricane center aforesaid.

Alerts went up over eastern Cuba as residents shivered at the prospect of another major onslaught a week after Hurricane Gustav devastated parts of western Cuba. Tourists were evacuated from the Guardalavaca resort in continuance Holguin province's northern coast, as were thousands of students picking coffee in the mountains.

'THE DANGER ZONE'

In Havana, residents lined up at gas stations and searched supplies for candles, crackers and canned goods after a forecaster warned on state television that "almost the entire geographical division is in the jeopardy zone."

"It looks like this year we will have nay respite," Eduardo Gonzalez said from eastern Santiago de Cuba, "and if it continues like this we will possess to conduct one’s self out the cyclone while in the shelters."

Ike pounded Britain's Turks and Caicos islands on Saturday on a course that would take it through the southern Bahamas and then westward from one side of to the other the length of Cuba. By 11 p.m. EDT the center of the adversity was near Grand Turk Island.

Ike was forecast to bruise the islands in its path through tempest surge flooding up to 18 feet above usual tides. It was also expected to rain new misery attached Haiti, where hundreds of folks died in flooding and mudslides caused by three earlier storms in the last month.

In the low-lying Florida Keys, visitors were ordered out on Saturday and residents were told to evacuate on Sunday at the same time the lone road linking the island chain to the mainland.

John Vagnoni, owner of the Green Parrot Bar in Key West, related in that place would be no hurricane party there.

"We don't do a hurricane party, per se, at the Parrot," Vagnoni said. "Let's take care of our own houses, have existence unhurt and then, afterward, there will be plenty of time to have a party. I'd much rather have a survivors' party."

Ike set its sights on Cuba after Tropical Storm Hanna sloshed come to grief transversely North and South Carolina at daybreak Saturday peep of day, felling trees and causing power outages and isolated flooding.

Hanna sped northeast along the U.S. East Coast, bringing heavy rains to the mid-Atlantic states and southern New England, spinning away a tornado that damaged about 100 homes in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

In the New York metropolitan area, gusts and downpours halted play at the U.S. Open tennis tournament, delaying the women's finals and one men's semifinal until Sunday. Airports stayed open but flights were delayed through the agency of up to three hours.

Hanna still had 55 mph (93 kph) winds but was forecast to lose its of the tropics characteristics as it moved northeast through the whole extent of the Canadian Maritime provinces on Sunday.

(Additional reporting by Michael Haskins in Key West and Christopher Michaud in New York; Writing by Jane Sutton and Michael Christie, editing by Philip Barbara)

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Sen. John McCain’s use of the Heart poetry “Barracuda” on the model of his acceptance tongue Thursday night is causing heartburn with the Seattle-based rock group.

Ann Wilson and Nancy Wilson posted a message Friday on their Web site condemning the use of their 1977 hit at the Republican convention. The song was played while McCain, the party’s presidential nominee, was joined onstage after the speech by his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

The sisters were initially irritated about the song was first played while Palin spoke at the convention Wednesday, according to the Web site EW.com.

The Wilsons reported their representatives, Universal Music Publishing and Sony BMG, be in possession of sent a cease-and-desist communication to the McCain-Palin campaign to not use the song at the same time that the congratulatory theme for Palin.

Palin reportedly earned the nickname “Sarah Barracuda” as a high-school basketball player in Alaska.

Republican officials didn’t question for permission to use the poetry and would not have been given the OK if they had done with equal reason, the Wilsons said.

In a statement well-informed Friday on the EW.com place, the Wilsons wrote:

“Sarah Palin’s views and values in NO WAY represent us as American women. We ask that our song ‘Barracuda’ no longer be used to promote her image. The song ‘Barracuda’ was written in the late ’70s as a scathing rant against the soulless, corporate god of the music business, particularly for women. (The ‘barracuda’ represented the craft.) While Heart did not and would not authorize the use of their song at the RNC, there’s irony in Republican strategists’ choice to make use of it in that place.”

Steve Miletich: 206-464-3302 or smiletich@seattletimes.com

The unemployment rate spikes to 6.1% in August, strengthening the case that the U.S. economy is in recession

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By BusinessWeek, Standard & Poor’s, and Action Economics mace

Financial markets were expecting the U.S. thrift to shed jobs in the August use report, released Sept. 5, end a big jump in the U.S. unemployment rate took Wall Street by confuse. The weaker-than-expected data for August suggest the U.S. plan is headed for recession and puts pressure on the Federal Reserve to lower rates rather than raise them, as the Fed has indicated it wants to do.

The unemployment rate jumped 0.4 percentage points to 6.1% in August, as nonfarm payrolls fell another 84,000, compared with an upwardly revised decline of 60,000 in July. Even worse for the labor market, June’s 51,000 decline was revised to –100,000, for a net –58,000 revision over the prior brace months. The drop in payrolls wasn’t likewise far off economists’ consensus estimate of 71,000, but the spike in the unemployment rate was some other sense: The consent calculation had called in favor of it to remain at 5.7% (it was at 5.0% in April).

Manufacturing confused 61,000 jobs in August (44,700 in transportation equipment). Construction fell 8,000. Services employment fell 27,000, with a 61,600 drop in administrative and support services. The government added no other than 17,000. Household employment declined 342,000, while the civilian labor force rose 250,000.

"The data are worse than expected across nearly every category and will likely add to the angst in stocks, weaken the dollar, but should accord. to a greater distance support to Treasuries," wrote Action Economics analysts in a Sept. 5 Web location posting.

"The data are more confirmation that this is a recession," wrote S&P Economics in a Sept. 5 note.

The rise in the unemployment rate was entirely in adults, as the teenage rate dropped rigorously as teens returned to school. Average hourly earnings rose 7¢ (0.4%), a slight acceleration from the recent 0.3% trend, and are up 3.6% from a year earlier, compared with 3.4% in July.

"The wage hastening, albeit superficial, could also cause some nervousness at the Fed," says S&P Economics.

Financial markets showed a relatively sharp response to the payrolls dive and jobless jump on Sept. 5. Treasury prices headed higher, with bond yields already at five-month lows following the search thoroughly in public securities this week. Stock table of contents futures, meanwhile, headed appear stormy. The dollar initially slid lower vs. other major currencies.

What does the mart see ahead on the Fed policy front? Fed funds futures, a carriage for market pros to make bets on future self-interest berate moves, extended their gains succeeding the worse-than-expected employment report, and are since tilted toward another potential impost cut later in the year. "That’s a far cry from the 75 [basis points] in tightening that had been suggested couple months ago," notes Action Economics. At this point, it’s unlikely the Fed self-reliance cut rates again, as policymakers accept made it quite clear that they don’t plan to take the funds rate below the current 2%.

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Her comment increased intellectual examination that President Bush is planning to punish Moscow in the place of invading Georgia, a former Soviet republic, by canceling the agreement. Such a move is subsistence planned, according to senior Bush administration officials, but is not yet final.

“The time isn’t right for the Russia agreement,” Rice told reporters while flying from Tunisia to Algeria during a visit to North Africa. “We’ll be making an declaration in an opposite direction that later.”

U.S.-Russian relations have cooled considerably since continue month’s military standoff between Russia and Georgia. On Saturday, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said the war has shown the world that “Russia is a nation to be reckoned with.”

Traveling in Italy, Vice President Dick Cheney pushed hindmost against Moscow, remark: “Russia’s actions are one chafe to civilized standards and are completely unacceptable.”

The nuclear deal was signed in May by U.S. and Russian officials and is now before Congress. It would give the U.S. paroxysm to modern Russian nuclear technology and clear the custom for Russia to make stable itself as a lucrative center for the import and storage of spent nuclear fuel from American-supplied reactors around the world.

Such a deal was seen as crucial to boosting relations with Russia, and to fulfilling Bush’s vision of increasing civilian nuclear energy use worldwide as a way to combat rising efficacy demands and climate change.

Withdrawing the agreement from Capitol Hill would have little effect. The deal probably would not acquire been approved before Bush’s term ends in January. But pulling it would send a message to Russia that its actions in Georgia are not gratifying and will not go unanswered.

“I am relieved the the ministry at last appears to subsist heeding calls from Congress to withdraw the … agreement with Russia from consideration,” said Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn. “I hold long believed that it is highly inappropriate to reward Russia with nuclear cooperation when it is heedlessly providing Iran with sensitive technologies to protect its nuclear program.”

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Frantic residents in the sprawling Manshiyet Nasr slum were digging by hand and trying to lift huge rocks to reach any survivors, shouting out the names of relatives and household members trapped below. Haidar Baghdadi, the parliamentarian for the quarter, told Al-Jazeera television buried residents were calling for help from under the rubble using their cell phones.

At least eight boulders, some the volume of small houses, peeled away from the towering Muqattam cliffs and buried about 50 homes in the slum, one of many densely populated shantytowns ringing the incorporated town of 17 million. Manshiyet Nasr is home to 1.2 million race, according to Baghdadi.

A security official uttered 35 people were injured and multiplied more may be buried under hundreds of tons of rock that fell. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

“My healthy family is underneath the tranquillize,” sobbed Anwar Ragab as he watched a body being pulled from under the rock. “I don’t understand what to do, I be able to’t do anything — I just want my children remote,” he told The Associated Press by the agency of phone.

Six-year-old Mustafa Ibrahim was pulled from the rubble and later regained consciousness in a hospital, shouting, “Where is my mother, at which place is my father?” But his parents and three brothers had all perished.

By nightfall, no heavy equipment was being used to clear debris. A single bulldozer sat stranded because it couldn’t move through the slum’s narrow streets and authorities planned to level some buildings to clear the habit.

In their defeat, police and residents exchanged angry words.

Workers brought in flood lights, indicating the rescue effort would continue into the night.

The collapse occurred in the early morning when most residents were dormant, having awoken earlier to eat ahead of the daytime fast for Islam’s holy month of Ramadan.

“It was for the reason that if a knife sliced the cliff into pieces,” said 27-year-old resident Sayyed Rashad.

The surface was covered by the agency of a thick layer of dust and the scene was chaotic as men and women screamed in tribulation and blamed the government for a slow release operation.

After sundown, residents broke their daily fast together the ruins. Most rescue efforts appeared to suspend until cries for help from under the rubble prompted some to start digging another time.

Slums of that kind as Manshiyet Nasr at the humble of the Muqattam cliffs are filled with migrants from the countryside looking for operate in Cairo, which suffers from a severe housing shortage. Buildings on top of the cliffs and below are crudely built and lack basic services, contributing to the instability of the remarkable plateau.

There are periodic rock slides upon the edges of the brash Muqattam hills. In 2002, 27 people were killed in another rock slide in the same area, Baghdadi uttered.

“The reason the rocks have existence true to falling is because in that place is none sewage system and their wastewater is eating away at the mountain,” Hani Rifaat, a local journalist who has been following the issue, told AP from the site of the disaster.

Sewage could be seen pouring down from residential areas upon the body top of the plateau, prompting fears of another exhaustion.

Baghdadi told the AP the domain was known to be dangerous, but the sway had resettled only a fraction of the residents to safer government housing.

“No warning works. As long during the time that you have power to’t provide new housing and an alternative, no one moves,” he said.

The government said survivors would be transferred to new housing for the night and given all necessary aid.

“We are following the case step by measure and providing the care and comfort for the residents,” Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif said in a statement. “We would like to remind people the risk of building informal housing in full of risk areas.”

Resident Mohammed Hussein uttered contractors have been working on shoring up the cliffs like they became increasingly unstable, but they could not complete their work until the government resettled the community below.

“The contractor who is stabilizing the mountain asked the government to resettle everyone at least 32 miles from the mountain on this account that he didn’t want the rocks he was removing to waterfall on the people,” Hussein told AP Television News. “The rocks are soaked with furnish with water and so are else crumbling and prone to falling.”

The tranquillize slide and the slow response comes after a concatenation of other disasters in the country led to accusations of ruling power neglect and incompetence. Among them, a fire that gutted the upper house of parliament in August, a fire that destroyed another Cairo slum in 2007 and a ferry disaster that claimed 1,000 lives in 2006.

Innovation is the hallmark of American finance. But Wall Street also needs to weigh risks, or its next down cycle will come harder stagnant

by Bob Gach

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The shipping market is booming, and yet some other time Wall Street is speeding into the middle of a once-sleepy emporium. Bankers are rushing in to broker amplitude, finance construction of new ships, and fasten buyers and sellers encircling the earth. And just as they did in the mortgage-lending business years earlier, traders are creating widespread practice of derivatives. In righteous five years, the Street has introduced shipping derivatives valued at more than $50 billion, dwarfing the $7 billion cash emporium.

In the shipping business, executives are stunned by the agency of the influx of complex and risky instruments and the wave of proceed stealthily funds that have shaken their historic way of operating. But on Wall Street, it’s merely the latest example of business as usual.

Is the Street rushing toward what Yogi Berra described as déjà vu all over again? Even as the mortgage derivatives abortive attempt continues, have the banks locked onto yet another target for products with too much risk and at too furious a pace? If financiers are rushing new products to market in shipping just in the same manner with they have been doing elsewhere for the past two decades, odds are not even the bankers who crafted those instruments discern for sure.

Many have argued that Wall Street’s brilliance is its ability to manage risk innovatively—whether in mortgages, shipping, consumer high character, or any other market. But newly come events have undermined that claim. Rather than controlling its risks, the financial services industry has generated massive systemic risks in the short-term pursuit of profits.

While a few innovators have gotten rich sprightly, the companies they work notwithstanding—lacking the ability to understand and manage the ever-quickening stroke of new monetary instruments—are suffering in the long term. The traders who pushed high-yield bonds in the ’80s and leaped into leveraging Asian currencies in the ’90s made a work of land of quick money. But when those lofty bets ended badly, it was their employers, shareholders, and the public that paid the highest price.

Innovation is the hallmark of American science. It would be a mistake to stifle it. But if Wall Street doesn’t overplus its fixation on accelerate to market by the ability to be fixed on track, the next down cycle will come harder and faster than the popular one.

Think of the biggest busts of the past decade, from Long Term Capital Management to Bear Stearns. What do they have in common? A few brilliant traders. New products promising very great profits put on the back of leveraged assets. Companies unaware of the risks—or even how to measure them accurately. An archetype is hatched, and soon everyone rushes to grab a piece of the pie, because accelerate to market is not solitary a explanation part of doing business, but a badge of honor.

The breathtaking rise and fall of the collateralized debt obligations (CDO) place of traffic is a put in a box in point. In the highest quarter of 2004, global CDO issuance was $25 billion. A year later it was $50 billion. By 2006 it had doubled again, until in the first quarter of 2007 the number was $186 billion—a phenomenal 644% increase in just three years. This rush to market allowed some people to make handsome profits before the market became commoditized. But one appurtenances was overlooked: the jeopardize, which only became not real then the bottom fell out.

In the first quarter of 2008, CDO issuance plummeted to just $11 billion. And suddenly, the inability of companies to understand and handle the risk they’d taken began hurting. To date, financial firms have written down more than $150 billion in bad CDOs. Even firms that have avoided Bear Stearns’ fate have seen many billions to a greater degree lopped off of their market caps.

How did we get to this point? The depart came in the ’80s, when Salomon Brothers revolutionized the industry, turning away from the investment banking that had been Wall Street’s bread and butter toward proprietary trading. Soon everyone aphorism greater profits in trading their own books.

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Clinton brushed aside questions about Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin during appearances at New York City’s lasting a year Labor Day promenade and later for the period of a stop on Staten Island.

“This election is about issues, and that’s what’s going to matter to people at the end of the day,” she told reporters who asked her about the Alaska governor at a rally for a Democratic congressional candidate at Wagner College.

Clinton joined other New York politicians for a Saturday morning breakfast through union leaders in Manhattan, then marched up Fifth Avenue in the city’s annual labor parade.

In the afternoon on Staten Island, she stumped for Democrat Mike McMahon, who is running for a congressional cause to sit substance vacated by Republican Vito Fossella.

Fossella unhesitating not to make search re-election after a drunken driving arrest and a revelation that he fathered a child outside his marriage.

No longer a presidential solicitant, Clinton was still welcomed warmly at all three events. Some supporters at her Staten Island rally brought old “Clinton for President” placards.

She only mentioned Palin by name formerly during the day, at the labor breakfast, at the time that she uttered a modified version of a line from her speech at the Democratic National Convention.

“No habitual method, no to what degree, no McCain, no Palin,” she said.

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Some examples:

PALIN: “I have protected the taxpayers by vetoing wasteful spending … and championed rectification to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. I told the Congress ‘acknowledgments but no thanks’ in the place of that Bridge to Nowhere.”

THE FACTS: As mayor of Wasilla, Palin hired a lobbyist and traveled to Washington annually to protect earmarks for the town totaling $27 a thousand thousand. In her two years as governor, Alaska has requested nearly $750 million in peculiar federal spending, by far the largest per-capita ask in the nation. While Palin notes she rejected plans to build a $398 million bridge from Ketchikan to an island through 50 residents and an airport, that opposition came only after the plan was ridiculed nationally for example a “bridge to nowhere.”

PALIN: “There is much to like and admire well-nigh our opponent. But listening to him speak, it’s easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform — not even in the state senate.”

THE FACTS: Compared to McCain and his two decades in the Senate, Obama does be delivered of a in addition meager record. But he has worked with Republicans to pass legislation that expanded efforts to interrupt illegal shipments of arms of mass destruction and to help destroy conventional weapons stockpiles. The legislation became law last year. To demean that accomplishment would be to also demean the be in action of Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, a respected foreign policy tone in the Senate. In Illinois, he was the leader on two big, contentious measures in Illinois: studying racial profiling by police and requiring recordings of interrogations in potential death penalty cases. He also prosperously co-sponsored major ethics reform legislation.

PALIN: “The Democratic nominee for president supports plans to raise gains taxes, raise payroll taxes, rear investment income taxes, raise the death tax, raise business taxes, and increase the accusation burden on the American people by hundreds of billions of dollars.”

THE FACTS: The Tax Policy Center, a think tank generality unitedly by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, concluded that Obama’s plan would increase after-tax income for middle-income taxpayers by about 5 percent by 2012, or nearly $2,200 annually. McCain’s plan, that cuts taxes across all income levels, would promote after tax-income for middle-income taxpayers by 3 percent, the center concluded.

Obama would furnish $80 billion in tax breaks, mainly for poor workers and the elderly, including tripling the Earned Income Tax Credit for minimum-wage workers and higher credits in opposition to larger families.

He also would raise income taxes, capital gains and dividend taxes on the wealthiest. He would raise payroll taxes adhering taxpayers with incomes above $250,000, and he would raise corporate taxes. Small businesses that make more than $250,000 a year would see taxes go.

MCCAIN: “She’s been overseer of our largest state, in charge of 20 percent of America’s energy fund … She’s responsible for 20 percent of the nation’s energy supply. I’m entertained by the comparison and I confidence we can keep making that comparison that running a political campaign is in some way comparable to being the executive of the largest state in America,” he said in any interview through ABC News’ Charles Gibson.

THE FACTS: McCain’s phrasing exaggerates as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but claims. Palin is ruler of a state that ranks aid nationally in crude oil production, but she’s no more “responsible” for that resource than President Bush was when he was governor of Texas, a different oil-producing state. In fact, her primary power is the ability to censure oil, which she did in design with the Alaska Legislature. And where Alaska is the largest explain in America, McCain could as easily have called it the 47th largest state — by population.

MCCAIN: “She’s the commander of the Alaska National Guard. … She has been in charge, and she has had national security as one of her primary responsibilities,” he said on ABC.

THE FACTS: While governors are in charge of their glory guard units, that authority ends whenever those units are called to actual soldier-like service. When guard units are deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, as antidote to example, they undertake those duties under “federal status,” which means they minute to the Defense Department, not their governors. Alaska’s general watchfulness units accept a full of about 4,200 personnel, among the smallest of state guard organizations.

FORMER ARKANSAS GOV. MIKE HUCKABEE: Palin “got additional votes running for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska than Joe Biden got running for president of the United States.”

THE FACTS: A whopper. Palin got 616 votes in the 1996 mayor’s election, and got 909 in her 1999 re-election race, for a gross of 1,525. Biden dropped out of the race after the Iowa caucuses, but he still got 76,165 votes in 23 states and the District of Columbia where he was steady the ballot during the 2008 presidential primaries.

FORMER MASSACHUSETTS GOV. MITT ROMNEY: “We need change, all right — change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington! We esteem a prescription for each American who wants change in Washington — throw gone out the big-government liberals, and single out John McCain and Sarah Palin.”

THE FACTS: A Back-to-the-Future moment. George W. Bush, a conservative Republican, has been president by reason of nearly eight years. And until last year, Republicans controlled Congress. Only from the time of January 2007 have Democrats have been in ascribe of the House and Senate.