An unusual coalition of antiwar Democrats and angry Republicans in the House Thursday torpedoed a $162.5 billion proposal to continue funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan into next year, eliminating, for now, the one part of the controversial bill that had seemed certain to pass.

Instead, House members voted to demand troop withdrawals from Iraq, force the Iraqi government to shoulder more war costs and greatly expand the education benefits for returning veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflict.

The surprise on war-funding left antiwar activists on and off Capitol Hill exultant and Democratic leaders baffled. House leaders had broken the war-funding bill into three separate measures, the first to fund the wars, the second to impose strict military policy measures opposed by President Bush, and the third to fund domestic priorities, including expanded education benefits and flood control work around New Orleans.

That legislative legerdemain became the plan's undoing. Democratic leaders knew that many members of their caucus, who have vowed not to approve another penny for the Iraq war, would reject the supplemental appropriation for the conflicts, but they expected Republicans to push it through. Instead, 131 House Republicans voted "present" on the measure, incensed that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and a few of her lieutenants had drafted the war bill largely in secret.

Aliens from outer space have been visiting Britain for years and UFO sightings doubled after the film Close Encounters was released in 1977, according to secret files collating reports by members of the public.

The alien craft come in all shapes, sizes and colors but their occupants are uniformly green, the Ministry of Defence files show.

The archives (at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ufos) are the first batch of a four-year release program of all the ministry's UFO files from 1978 to the present day.

The ministry dismisses 90 per cent of the reports as having mundane explanations and leave 10 per cent with a question mark and the assurance they are no defense threat.

The Chinese government made an emergency appeal for cranes and heavy lifting equipment Thursday amid warnings that time is running out to rescue survivors from Monday's huge earthquake.

As the state media raised estimates of the final death toll to 50,000, troops, emergency personnel and volunteers continued to find people alive, trapped under collapsed buildings.

Dramatic footage broadcast by the state-run China Central Television network showed a young woman waving weakly from under slabs of concrete at the site of a devastated hospital in Dujiangyan. She was eventually freed by rescue workers - one of at least three people found alive three days after the 7.9 magnitude quake that churned up large swaths of Sichuan province in southwest China.

Far more bodies than survivors are being uncovered. The official death toll rose by almost a third Thursday to 19,509. About 30,000 others are believed to be buried under mountain landslides and collapsed structures.

President Bush's financial fortunes appear to have declined over the past seven years, with his family assets dropping as low as $6.5 million, according to disclosure forms released yesterday.

Oil prices have hit a record high above $127 a barrel on fresh worries about global supplies.

US light sweet crude jumped to $127.43 a barrel, ignoring a forecast from producers' cartel Opec this week that the world will need less oil in 2008.

London Brent crude also climbed, touching $125.82 a barrel.

Prices have surged about 25% since January, lifted by geopolitical worries and the weakening US dollar, which makes oil cheaper for foreign buyers.

The latest price rise comes as US President George W Bush flies into Saudi Arabia to urge the kingdom to pump more crude and help bring prices down.

Britain Prime Minister Gordon Brown's drive to recapture the political agenda with a program of new laws to create "an opportunity-rich Britain" was badly shaken Wednesday by a warning from the governor of the Bank of England that the British economy is heading towards a recession.

"The nice decade is behind us," Mervyn King declared in funereal tones, warning that the economy was "traveling along a bumpy road" as he predicted rising prices would put a squeeze on take-home pay for millions of workers.

"As those price increases feed through to household bills, they will lead to a squeeze on real take-home pay, which will slow consumer spending and output growth, perhaps sharply," said the governor.

Unveiling his draft legislative program of 18 bills offering people a greater say over schools, policing and health services in their area, the prime minister said Britain could avoid a recession. He even asked the public to "judge and test" him on the basis of his stewardship of the economy.

Brown promised: "We will see Britain through this difficult time. In the past we were first in and last out of a recession. In the last 11 years we have avoided recession and we will emerge from this world slowdown stronger and better, both as a country and a government."

The House voted 318 to 106 - well above the two-thirds needed to hand Bush the second veto override of his presidency - with 100 Republicans joining the Democratic majority in favor.

The Senate is expected to follow suit with wide bipartisan support on Thursday, sending Bush a bill that he described this week as bloated and expensive and said “resorts to a variety of gimmicks.”

The bill includes a $10.3 billion increase in spending on nutrition programs, including food stamps, that supporters called “historic,” as well as increases for rural development and land conservation programs.

The victory by Travis Childers, a conservative Democrat elected in a once-steadfast Republican district on Tuesday, was the third defeat of a Republican in a special Congressional race this year. In addition to foreshadowing more losses for the party in November, the outcome appeared to call into question the belief that Senator Barack Obama,  of Illinois, could be a heavy liability for his party’s down-ticket candidates in conservative regions.

Republicans had sought to link Childers to Obama in an advertising campaign there. Republican leaders said they were looking to Senator John McCain, of Arizona, the likely Republican nominee, as a model whose independent reputation appears to allow him to rise above party in a year when the Republican label seems tarnished.

McCain’s advisers said the Mississippi race underlined his intention to distance himself as much as possible from Congressional Republicans. McCain has already been openly critical of some of President Bush’s strategies.

Fears for the future of the world's biggest tropical rainforest grew Wednesday, after the sudden resignation of Brazil's environment minister, Marina Silva.

Environmentalists had seen Silva, 50, who was born in the Brazilian Amazon, as an important ally in the fight against the destruction of the country's rainforest, 20% of which they believe has been destroyed.

In her resignation letter to Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the president, on Tuesday, Silva said her decision was the result of difficulties she was facing in "pursuing the federal environmental agenda". She said her efforts to protect the environment had faced "growing resistance ... [from] important sectors of the government and society". Two other top environmental officials, including Bazileu Margarido, the president of Brazil's environmental agency, Ibama, also resigned.

Sergio Leitao, the director of public policy for Greenpeace in Brazil, said Silva had taken her decision because of pressure from within the government to relax laws outlawing bank loans to those who destroyed the rainforest.

Scientists Wednesday reported the discovery of the youngest supernova in the Milky Way, ending a 50-year search for the exploded stars that remain mysteriously difficult to spot in our galaxy.

The supernova, given the obscure name of G1.9+0.3, was detected via remnants from the powerful, element-rich blast it set off an estimated 140 years ago. The youngest previously known supernova, called Cassiopeia A, was 330 years old.

Astronomers have scoured the skies for supernovae since Cassiopeia surfaced in the 1950s. Only a half-dozen of the stellar explosions have been noted in the last millennium, but somewhere between 20 and 30 should be occurring in the Milky Way based on galactic evidence.

"It's clear that we've not been getting our share [of supernovae] … this lack is a significant puzzle," said North Carolina state university scientist Stephen Reynolds, who aided in the search.

The escalating casualty figures were released as soldiers, paramilitary police and civilian rescue workers continued a massive effort to clear debris from collapsed schools, hospitals and residences throughout Sichuan province, the area hardest hit by the 7.9 magnitude tremor.

The Associated Press reported that 2,000 Chinese soldiers rushed to repair a dam badly cracked by the earthquake, and damage was reported in hundreds of smaller dams as well.

In a news conference in the provincial capital of Chengdu, Sichuan Vice Governor Li Chengyun acknowledged that the latest figures of dead and missing were incomplete, the news agency reported. It is expected that the toll will rise as authorities continue clearing rubble in Mianyang and other towns and move deeper into Wenchuan county, the quake's epicenter. Roads into Wenchuan were severed by rocks and mudslides, according to the news agency, and efforts to airlift supplies by helicopter have been hampered by rain and fog.

The United States military’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center said there was a possibility that “a significant tropical cyclone” - a second big storm - would form within the next 24 hours and head across the Irrawaddy Delta, the region that suffered most from the first storm that struck on May 3.

In Yangon, the main commercial city, winds were already beginning to whip up Wednesday evening, but it was unclear how strong the storm would become.

Thailand’s prime minister, Samak Sundaravej, flew to Yangon on Wednesday to persuade Myanmar’s leaders to allow more foreign aid workers into the country. The members of the military junta told him they were in control of the relief operations and had no need for foreign experts, he told reporters after returning to Bangkok, the Associated Press reported.

However, a variety of accounting changes and other factors helped Freddie Mac's bottom line. The McLean firm said it lost $151 million (66 cents per share) during the three month period that ended March 31, compared with losses of $2.45 billion during the previous quarter and $133 million (35 cents) during the first quarter of 2007.

By one widely followed measure, Freddie Mac's financial condition deteriorated sharply during the first quarter. The so-called fair value of its assets, a snapshot of their value based on current estimates, fell to a negative $5.2 billion on March 31 from a positive $12.6 billion on Dec. 31. That was despite changes in valuation methods that increased the fair value by $4.6 billion. Freddie Mac said it plans to raise $5.5 billion of capital in the near future by selling more common and preferred stock. Issuing more common stock dilutes the value of current investors' shares.

The company is required to maintain a minimum level of capital as a cushion against losses. Freddie Mac could hold onto the added capital or use it to expand its business.

The rocket, which the police said was Iranian-made, crashed through the roof of a health clinic in Ashkelon, about 10 miles north of the Gaza Strip. It badly injured a woman and her 2-year-old daughter, both in the head, as well as their doctor at the clinic. A fourth person was also injured.

Maj. General Uriel Bar-Lev, police commander of Israel’s southern district, said bomb experts determined the rocket’s Iranian origin.

“It has Iranian fingerprints on it,” he said in an interview outside the mall, crushed glass underfoot, after visiting the third-floor clinic that took the hit.

The Bush administration is on the verge of implementing new air quality rules that would make it easier to build power plants near national parks and wilderness areas, according to rank-and-file agency scientists and park managers who oppose the plan.

The new regulations, which are likely to be finalized sometime this summer, rewrite a provision of the Clean Air Act that applies to "Class 1 areas," federal lands that currently have the highest level of protection under the law. Opponents predict the changes will worsen visibility at many of the nation's most prized tourist destinations, including Virginia's Shenandoah, Colorado's Mesa Verde and North Dakota's Theodore Roosevelt national parks.

Nearly a year ago, with little fanfare, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed changing the way the government measures air pollution near Class 1 areas on the grounds that the nation needed a more uniform way of regulating emissions near protected areas.

Jeffrey R. Holmstead, who now heads the environmental strategies group at the law firm of Bracewelll & Giuliani, helped initiate the rule change while leading EPA's air and radiation office. He said agency officials became concerned that EPA's scientific staff was taking "the most conservative approach" in predicting how much pollution new power plants would produce.

President Hugo Chavez was facing serious allegations over Venezuela's links to Colombian guerrillas last night after Interpol bolstered the credibility of intercepted rebel documents.

The international police organization announced that a two-month forensic investigation of laptops seized in a raid by Colombian security forces concluded they belonged to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Leaks from the trove of 16,000 files and photographs have suggested high-ranking Venezuelan officials plotted to help the Marxist group to obtain weapons and funding for its decades-long insurgency against the Colombian state.

Ronald Noble, Interpol secretary general, said his experts had found "no alteration of the data by Colombian officials". Internationally accepted methods for handling computers were not always followed, he said, but Bogota had not modified, altered or created files. Interpol said the amount of information - 37,872 word documents and 210,880 photographs - was much greater than previously thought.

The Burmese government's request for help in restoring farms in the disaster zone was made in closed-door meetings with relief officials in Burma, aid sources said Thursday.

The request came as Burma's state television claimed overwhelming public support for a controversial military-sponsored constitution in a May 10 referendum. It reported that 92.4 percent of voters endorsed the charter in areas that were not seriously affected by the storm. Polling in the cyclone-hit section of the country - including the Irrawaddy Delta and Rangoon, Burma's largest city - is scheduled for May 24.

The opposition National League for Democracy, the party of detained Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, promptly denounced the results as fraudulent.

A psychologist who helps lead the post-traumatic stress disorder program at a medical facility for veterans in Texas told staff members to refrain from diagnosing PTSD because so many veterans were seeking government disability payments for the condition.

"Given that we are having more and more compensation seeking veterans, I'd like to suggest that you refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out," Norma Perez wrote in a March 20 e-mail to mental-health specialists and social workers at the Department of Veterans Affairs' Olin E. Teague Veterans' Center in Temple, Tex. Instead, she recommended that they "consider a diagnosis of Adjustment Disorder."

VA staff members "really don't . . . have time to do the extensive testing that should be done to determine PTSD," Perez wrote.

Experts said that these dams were built around the well-recognized Longmen Shan fault. They warned that such dams might have sustained damage that could cause them to fail even weeks later.

Much depends on efforts to reduce the menacing pressure of water behind the dam walls. Two thousand soldiers were sent to a dam just three miles upriver from the devastated town of Dujiangyan, northwest of the provincial capital of Chengdu, to inspect a structure that has shown some cracks and is “in great danger,” according to state-controlled China National Radio.

Dams and their electric generators are only the most visible aspects of the infrastructure battered by the earthquake: The region also is the site of the cities of Guangyuan and Mianyang, which are home to plants that build Chinese nuclear arms and process plutonium for the weapons. It is not clear whether the plants suffered damage.

Global warming is disrupting wildlife and the environment on every continent, according to an unprecedented study that reveals the extent to which climate change is already affecting the world's ecosystems.

Scientists examined published reports dating back to 1970 and found that at least 90% of environmental damage and disruption around the world could be explained by rising temperatures driven by human activity.

Big falls in Antarctic penguin populations, fewer fish in African lakes, shifts in American river flows and earlier flowering and bird migrations in Europe are all likely to be driven by global warming, the study found.

The team of experts, including members of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from America, Europe, Australia and China, is the first to formally link some of the most dramatic changes to the world's wildlife and habitats with human-induced climate change.

In the study, which appears in the journal Nature, researchers analyzed reports highlighting changes in populations or behavior of 28,800 animal and plant species. They examined a further 829 reports that focused on different environmental effects, including surging rivers, retreating glaciers and shifting forests, across the seven continents.

Millions of historic sites, crumbling and collapsing in national forests around the country, are in danger of being lost forever, according to a study set to be released today by a prominent preservation group.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation estimates that only a small slice of about 2 million "cultural resources" that sit on 193 million acres managed by the U.S. Forest Service have been properly preserved.

Their deterioration has been accelerated by vandalism, theft, fire, damage from off-road vehicles and other recreation, as well as oil and gas extraction, mining, timber harvesting and grazing, the study found.

The resources include Native American archaeological sites, Civil War battlefields, ranger stations, fire lookout towers, cabins and camps built by the Civilian Conservation Corps.

"The reason I am here tonight," Edwards declared, "is the voters have made their choice, and so have I."

Edwards had been heavily courted by Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton since he quit the race three months ago. His decision to climb off the fence with just five contests remaining is likely to yield limited benefits, but it sends a strong signal that Edwards, at least, thinks the nomination battle is over.

Appearing with Obama at a rally here in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the former senator from North Carolina and 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee gave what sounded in places like a eulogy for Clinton's candidacy, praising her tenacity and describing her as "made of steel." But he emphasized that the party must now get behind Obama.

Food prices have risen 6.1 percent in the past three months on a seasonally adjusted annual basis. The one-month rise between March and April of 0.9 percent was the biggest since January 1990, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The rise in prices covered all categories of food but was most severe among such staple goods as grains and oils - goods where inflation has touched off food riots in some less developed countries and led to concerns about supply shortages.

The costs of cereal and bakery products increased 1.4 percent from March to April and have risen nearly 20 percent in the past three months on a seasonally adjusted basis. Prices for fats and oils jumped more than 5 percent in April, on a seasonally adjusted annual basis, and have increased more than 26 percent in the past three months. Prices for sugars and sweets increased more than 10 percent during that same period.

House Republicans struggled to regroup Wednesday in the aftermath of a devastating election loss in Mississippi, acknowledging that their party faced a significant challenge in November after the loss of three Republican seats in special elections this year.

“It was another wake-up call that we have to show Americans that we can fix the problems here in Washington and fix the problems they deal with every day,” said Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader.

Republicans said that the Democratic victor in Mississippi’s 1st District, Travis Childers, successfully co-opted a conservative Republican anti-tax, pro-gun, pro-life message.

“We know the message works,” said Representative Roy Blunt of Missouri, the No. 2 Republican. “We’ve got to do a better job connecting that with Republicans. And I personally think there’s a substantial and adequate time to do that.”

Republicans were clearly demoralized by the loss and the prospect of sinking deeper into the minority in November. No immediate personnel shake-ups were announced even though Boehner hinted at “changes that may be necessary to adopt to the environment we are living in.”

Thailand's Public Health Ministry confirmed that it is sending 30 doctors, along with medical supplies, on Friday to work in Burma for two weeks. U.N. officials said Burmese authorities also have asked India, China and Bangladesh to send teams of experienced disaster relief personnel.

Adding to the woes of the survivors, weather satellites spotted another powerful storm brewing in the waters off Burma. Meteorologists said its future path and strength are unclear, and there were conflicting accounts about whether it could become another cyclone.

The news came as five more U.S. military C-130 transport planes, carrying such desperately needed supplies as water, mosquito nets, plastic sheets, blankets and hygiene kits, flew into Burma's largest city, Rangoon, Wednesday in an acceleration of U.S. assistance.

Authorities said Brian Crowder set a small blaze that was quickly extinguished. They also planned to question the 31-year-old about larger wildfires that have found ample fuel in developments in the region, where the state has not held controlled burns to cut back vegetation.

A resident alerted police after seeing Crowder throw an object from his car that sparked the fire, Palm Bay Detective Ernie Diebel said. The object was a bottle containing a flammable liquid, said Palm Bay Police Chief Bill Berger.

The resident described a dark car, and officers stopped Crowder's vehicle shortly afterward. Crowder got out of his car and fled, said Diebel.