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Madrid qualify top after easy win

MADRID, Spain — Real Madrid secured top spot in Champions League Group C with a 3-1 home win against a sorry Lazio side that failed to even secure a UEFA Cup place.

The game was over before half-time thanks to goals from Julio Baptista, Raul and Robinho.

Goran Pandev netted a late consolation for the visitors, who saw a stoppage-time Tommaso Rocchi penalty saved by Iker Casillas.

Real are joined in the knockout phase by Olympiakos, who beat Werder Bremen 3-0 in Athens.

Ieroklis Stoltidis netted twice, either side of a Darko Kovacevic header to give Olympiakos their first taste of the knockout phase for nine years. Bremen have the consolation of UEFA Cup football. E-mail to a friend

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Fed cuts key interest rate again

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Federal Reserve cut a key interest rate by one-quarter of a percentage point Tuesday, but Wall Street took a tumble.

The reduction in the federal funds rate to 4.25 percent marked the third rate cut in the past three months. Fed officials signaled that further cuts were possible if a severe housing downturn and mortgage lending crisis get worse.

But Wall Street was looking for a much stronger sign. The Dow Jones industrial average, which had been up about 40 points in afternoon trading, plunged by more than 200 points as investors deciphered the Fed’s comments.

They should have issued a statement that they were prepared to do what they needed to do to return the credit markets to more normal conditions and to protect the economy from the effects of the credit crisis, said David Jones, chief economist at DMJ Advisors.

David Wyss, chief economist at Standard Poor’s in New York, said he was still looking for three more rate cuts early next year, even though the language in the statement was not as forceful as some had expected.

Commercial banks quickly matched the Fed move by trimming their prime lending rate to 7.25 percent. That put the benchmark rate for millions of business and consumer loans at its lowest point in two years.

In addition to cutting the funds rate, the Fed announced it was reducing its discount rate, the interest it charges to make direct loans to banks, by a quarter-point as well to 4.75 percent.

This reduction was aimed at encouraging banks to borrow more freely from the Fed at a time when there are worries that a rising number of bad loans will prompt banks to tighten credit conditions too severely, adding another strain on the already fragile economy.

The Fed embarked on this round of rate cuts in September in response to severe turbulence in credit markets around the globe as investors reacted to various reports of mounting losses from defaults in subprime mortgages, the latest fallout from the worst slump in the U.S. housing market in more than two decades.

After cutting the funds rate by a half-point on September 11 and a quarter-point on October 31, the central bank indicated that those two reductions might be all that were needed to combat the threat of a recession given that financial markets appeared to be stabilizing.

However, increased market turbulence following the October meeting and growing fears of a recession caused the Fed to do an about-face.

In a brief statement explaining its action, the Fed said that recent economic data indicated that the economy is slowing, reflecting the intensification of the housing correction and some softening in business and consumer spending.

The Fed also noted that strains in financial markets have increased in recent weeks.

In its October 31 statement, the Fed said it viewed the risks from weak growth as roughly balanced with the risks of higher inflation.

However, that phrase was changed in the current statement to read, Recent developments, including the deterioration in financial market conditions, have increased the uncertainty surrounding the outlook for economic growth and inflation.

The Fed vote for the rate cut was 9 to 1 with Eric S. Rosengren dissenting, arguing for a bigger, half-point cut in the funds rate.

Many economists believe the housing slump and credit turmoil have raised the risks of a recession. Many analysts believe that economic growth, as measured by the gross domestic product, may have dipped to a barely perceptible 1 percent rate, raising the chance that some shock, such as another surge in energy prices, could push the country into a recession.

But many analysts still believe the Fed will be able to respond forcefully enough with rate cuts that it will keep the current expansion alive. These analysts believe that the economy will start to rebound to faster growth by the middle of next year, when they expect that lower mortgage rates will have spurred a rebound in home sales. E-mail to a friend

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Rescuers search for bomb survivors

ALGIERS, Algeria (CNN) — Rescuers are sifting through the rubble of the main United Nations headquarters in the Algerian capital looking for 14 U.N. staffers missing hours after a powerful bomb ripped off the building’s facade and leveled nearby U.N. offices Tuesday.

It was one of two suspected car bombs that struck Algiers within 10 minutes of each other.

The death toll is unclear: the official government count is at least 22, but hospital sources in Algiers told CNN affiliate BFM-TV that 62 people were killed in the two blasts. A statement from the United Nations said 45 people were reported killed.

Algerian Interior Minister Noureddine Yazid Zerhouni blamed a militant Islamic group with ties to al Qaeda for the attacks, which also targeted a building housing Algeria’s Constitutional Council and Supreme Court.

At least five U.N. staffers were among those killed, according to U.N. spokeswoman Marie Okabe.

The offices of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees — located across the street from the U.N. headquarters — were leveled by a blast that struck about 9:30 a.m. (3:30 a.m. ET). Two of the agency’s drivers were among those killed, spokesman Ron Redmond said from its Geneva headquarters.

Our offices are basically destroyed now, nothing works, he said. Watch his full interview

He said rescuers are working into the night trying to get to the trapped U.N. workers. It’s a very serious situation still with the U.N. in Algiers, he said.

In a strongly worded statement, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned what he called an abjectly cowardly strike against civilian officials serving humanity’s highest ideals under the U.N. banner.

The perpetrators of these crimes will not escape the strongest possible condemnation — and ultimate punishment — by Algerian authorities and the international community, Ban said in the written statement.

He said he has sent senior advisers and other top U.N. officials to head to Algiers to assist in the investigation and rescue effort.

Most of those killed in the coordinated attacks were victims of the first suspected car bombing near the Constitutional Council — which oversees elections — and Supreme Court in the Algiers neighborhood of Ben Aknoun, according to the state-run Algeria Press Agency.

That blast struck a bus outside the targeted building, killing many of those on board, the news agency reported.

One man said he heard the first blast then the second exploded in front of him. I saw the trees falling and the glass shattering in front of me. I had to run away from the car, he said.

Citing the official government death toll, Zerhouni said 12 people — including two policemen — were killed in the first blast near the courthouse and 10 were killed in the attack near the U.N. offices.

No one claimed responsibility for Tuesday’s attacks, but Zerhouni said it was the work of the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), the same group that took responsibility for an attack in April in downtown Algiers that killed 33 people.

That group also uses the name al Qaeda Islamic Maghreb after merging with al Qaeda earlier this year. It abandoned small-scale attacks in favor of headline-grabbing blasts after it joined with al Qaeda.

CNN International Security Correspondent Paula Newton said the merger combined the expertise of Algerian guerrillas with the operational ability of al Qaeda in North Africa, enabling the group to penetrate the usually extensive security in high-profile areas of Algiers.

She said the group’s goal is to destabilize countries like Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, which it sees as enemies of the Islamic state.

Zerhouni said police interrogations of GSPC members arrested in the wake of the April attack revealed that Algeria’s Constitutional Council and Supreme Court were on a list of GSPC targets.

Algeria, which has a population of 33 million, is still recovering from more than a decade of violence that began after the military government called a halt to elections which an Islamist party was poised to win.

Tens of thousands of people died in the unrest. Although the country has remained relatively peaceful, recent terrorist attacks have raised fears of a slide back to violence. E-mail to a friend

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Vegas honors the Whack Pack

LAS VEGAS, Nevada (AP) — Las Vegas is building a museum about some of its founding fathers and most influential figures — guys with names like Bugsy, Lefty and Lansky.

The mob museum will stand as frank acknowledgment of the major role mobsters played in developing Las Vegas into the gambling capital of America and giving the city its rakish glamour during the 1940s and ’50s.

Let’s be brutally honest, warts and all. This is more than legend. It’s fact, said Mayor Oscar Goodman, a former defense attorney whose clients once included mobsters Meyer Lansky and Anthony Tony the Ant Spilotro. This is something that differentiates us from other cities.

The project has gained the support of the FBI and is guided by a retired FBI agent. They say they are involved because you can’t tell the stories of Benjamin Bugsy Siegel, his banker, Lansky, casino boss Frank Lefty Rosenthal and others without telling the story of the lawmen who pursued them.

This is a way to connect with the public and show the results of our work, said Dan McCarron, a spokesman for the FBI in Washington.

Ellen Knowlton, who retired in 2006 as FBI agent in charge in Las Vegas and now heads the not-for-profit museum organization, said FBI officials have offered to share photographs, transcripts of wiretaps and histories of efforts to kneecap organized crime in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.

Despite the sort of edgy theme, this museum will be historically accurate and it will tell the true story of organized crime, Knowlton said. The plan is to give people a kind of gritty taste of what it would have been like to be not only a person involved or affiliated with organized crime, but also what it would have been like to be in law enforcement.

Officials expect to open the museum by 2010 in a brick federal building that was the centerpiece of this dusty town of 5,100 residents when it opened in 1933. In 1950, the three-story building hosted a hearing by Tennessee Sen. Estes Kefauver’s special investigating committee on the rackets.

Goodman, who showed his own willingness to play up Las Vegas’ mob past by making a cameo in the 1995 Robert De Niro-Joe Pesci movie Casino, has pushed the idea of a mob museum from the time he was elected mayor in 1999.

He brokered a deal for the city to buy the building in 2000 for $1, with the understanding it would be turned into a cultural center. Officials expect the final cost, including renovations, to reach almost $50 million.

About $15 million has been raised through grants, city funds, contributions and the sale of commemorative license plates that marked Las Vegas’ centennial in 2005.

It was Siegel who pioneered the transformation of this one-time desert stopover into a glittering tourist mecca, opening the $6 million Flamingo hotel on the fledgling Las Vegas Strip in 1946 with financial backing from Lansky.

The movie-star handsome Siegel was rubbed out six months later in Beverly Hills, California, perhaps because he angered the mob with cost overruns on the hotel.

Spilotro and Rosenthal were associates in the 1970s, when Rosenthal ran several casinos, including the Stardust. Spilotro was killed in 1986 and buried in an Indiana cornfield.

Organized crime eventually was driven out of Las Vegas in the 1970s and ’80s by the FBI, local police and prosecutors, state crackdowns and casino purchases by corporate interests.

Many of these stories have been dramatized by Hollywood in such movies as Bugsy, The Godfather and Casino. But documenting mob history isn’t going to be easy.

If anybody out there finds a memo saying: ‘To the boys, from Meyer. Re: Bugsy. Kill him,’ We’d love to have it, said Michael Green, a College of Southern Nevada history professor who is researching exhibits for the museum. But we doubt it’s there.

Because of that, you have to do a lot of reconstructing, inferring and implying, he said. There’s a lot of winking we’re going to have to do.

Green pointed to stories about Moe Dalitz, a Cleveland businessman who rescued the Desert Inn and Stardust casinos in the 1950s and ’60s and built a hospital, golf courses and shopping centers.

Was he tied to the mob or involved with the mob? Yes, Green said. A mobster? Harder to explain.

Dennis Barrie, who directed the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and the popular International Spy Museum in Washington, said he will design the as-yet-unnamed Las Vegas museum to show how organized crime and the fight against it shaped modern life.

Whether it’s running the casinos in Las Vegas, or controlling cigarette sales or numbers or trash collection in any city, organized crime is part of the American culture, Barrie said. Everybody has a mob story or a brush with the mob world. Or they at least say they do.

Organizers say paying visitors might be asked to decide as they arrive which side of the law they want to be on, and then be given a story line tracing the life of a famous lawman or mobster or a street cop or numbers runner.

Were you a hit man? Were you a prosecutor? What choices do you have to make? Green said. We’re telling a story of things that are multisided.

Organizers also hope to have an oral-history area where visitors can sit down in front of a camera and say, ‘I knew Bugsy,’ or ‘I saw Meyer,’ or whatever, he said.
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Vote may cut sentences for 19,500 crack inmates

WASHINGTON (AP) — Buoyed by a Supreme Court ruling, some 19,500 federal inmates and their families, most of them black, are hoping the U.S. Sentencing Commission is ready to make its recent easing of crack cocaine punishment guidelines retroactive.

The seven-member commission, which provides guidelines for sentencing federal convicts, meets Tuesday to discuss retroactivity, and a vote is likely.

Inmate family representatives and other advocates of retroactive easing said a Supreme Court decision Monday could only improve chances the commission would dismantle yet another portion of the long-criticized disparity in sentences for crack and powder cocaine offenses. Crack is predominantly used by blacks; powder cocaine, predominantly by whites.

Making the guidelines retroactive is opposed by the Bush administration. A senior Justice Department official warned Tuesday that retroactive guidelines could have a disastrous effect on crime-riddled communities that are not ready to receive crack offenders who could be released early from prison as a result.

Areas that already are seeing an increase in violent crime — this is going to affect those areas dramatically, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the commission had not formally acted.

The Justice Department previously opposed retroactive changes to sentences for LSD and marijuana offenders.

In two decisions Monday, the Supreme Court upheld judges who rejected federal sentencing guidelines as too harsh and imposed more lenient prison terms, including one for crack offenses.

In the crack case, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s majority opinion said Derrick Kimbrough’s 15-year sentence was acceptable, although guidelines called for 19 to 22 years. In making that determination, the judge may consider the disparity between the guidelines’ treatment of crack and powder cocaine offenses, Ginsburg said.

Kimbrough is black.

So are 86 percent of the 19,500 inmates who might see their prison terms for crack offenses reduced if the commission approves retroactive easing. By contrast, just over a quarter of those convicted of powder cocaine crimes last year were black.

The sentencing commission recently changed the guidelines to reduce the disparity in prison time for the two crimes. New guidelines took effect November 1.

Under the commission’s plan, retroactive sentence reductions would not be automatic. A judge would have to review each inmate to decide whether a reduction was merited.

The Kimbrough decision is a tremendous victory for all who believe that the crack and powder cocaine disparity is unjust, said Mary Price, vice president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums.

Kimbrough’s case, though, did not present the ultimate fairness question. Congress wrote the harsher treatment for crack into a law that sets a mandatory minimum of five years in prison for trafficking in 5 grams of crack cocaine or 100 times as much powder cocaine.

Seventy percent of crack defendants get the mandatory minimum.

Kimbrough is among the remaining 30 percent who, under the guidelines, are supposed to receive even more prison time for trafficking in more than 5 grams of crack.

Neither the court’s decision nor the commission’s guidelines affect the minimum sentences, which only Congress can alter.

Calling the court decision a minor fix, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton of Washington, said, The ultimate fix has to be done by Congress. Last month, Walton endorsed retroactive easing of the guidelines on behalf of the Criminal Law Committee of the federal judiciary.

In previous years, the sentencing commission reduced penalties for crimes involving marijuana, LSD and OxyContin, which are primarily committed by whites, and made those decisions retroactive.
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