Busy day for the Congressional Budget Office. It's now reporting that the nation's budget deficit hit a record $1.4 trillion for the fiscal year just ended.

That's up $950 billion from the fiscal 2008 deficit and was equal to nearly 10% of gross domestic product — triple the 2008 percentage.

The budget hole is the largest — relative to the size of the economy — since 1945.

Get the details here (pdf).

This bit of research is sure to start a fight:

According to a study of 677 shooting victims in Philadelphia, people packing guns were far likelier to get shot — and killed — than the unarmed.

New Scientist reports that the University of Pennsylvania compared the victims with other residents of similar age, sex and ethnicity, and accounted for socioeconomic factors and other "potentially confounding differences."

The conclusions: "On average, guns did not protect those who possessed them from being shot in an assault. Although successful defensive gun uses occur each year, the probability of success may be low for civilian gun users in urban areas. Such users should reconsider their possession of guns or, at least, understand that regular possession necessitates careful safety countermeasures."

Study leader Charles Branas elaborates:

While it may be that the type of people who carry firearms are simply more likely to get shot, it may be that guns give a sense of empowerment that causes carriers to overreact in tense situations, or encourages them to visit neighbourhoods they probably shouldn't, Branas speculates. Supporters of the Second Amendment shouldn't worry that the right to bear arms is under threat, however. "We don't have an answer as to whether guns are protective or perilous," Branas says. "This study is a beginning."

The study appears in the American Journal of Public Health.

Now draw — and shoot your mouths off.

The Senate Finance Committee's health legislation would cost $829 billion over 10 years, reduce the federal deficit by $81 billion and provide coverage to an additional 29 million Americans, according to a preliminary analysis by the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation.

The bill, as amended, "would result in a net reduction in federal budget deficits of $81 billion over the 2010–2019 period. The estimate includes a projected net cost of $518 billion over 10 years for the proposed expansions in insurance coverage."

Here's some of what the CBO writes in a letter (pdf) to committee Chairman Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont.:

According to CBO and JCT’s assessment, enacting the Chairman’s mark, as amended, would result in a net reduction in federal budget deficits of $81 billion over the 2010–2019 period. The estimate includes a projected net cost of $518 billion over 10 years for the proposed expansions in insurance coverage. That net cost itself reflects a gross total of $829 billion in credits and subsidies provided through the exchanges, increased net outlays for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and tax credits for small employers; those costs are partly offset by $201 billion in revenues from the excise tax on high-premium insurance plans and $110 billion in net savings from other sources. The net cost of the coverage expansions would be more than offset by the combination of other spending changes that CBO estimates would save $404 billion over the 10 years and other provisions that JCT and CBO estimate would increase federal revenues by $196 billion over the same period. In subsequent years, the collective effect of those provisions would probably be continued reductions in federal budget deficits. Those estimates are all subject to substantial uncertainty.

By 2019, CBO and JCT estimate, the number of non-elderly people who are uninsured would be reduced by about 29 million, leaving about 25 million non-elderly residents uninsured (about one-third of whom would be unauthorized immigrants). Under the proposal, the share of legal non-elderly residents with insurance coverage would rise from about 83 percent currently to about 94 percent. Roughly 23 million people would purchase their own coverage through the new insurance exchanges, and there would be roughly 14 million more enrollees in Medicaid and CHIP than is projected under current law. Relative to currently projected levels, the number of people either purchasing individual coverage outside the exchanges or obtaining coverage through employers would decline by several million. ...

All told, the proposal would reduce the federal deficit by $12 billion in 2019, CBO and JCT estimate. After that, the added revenues and cost savings are projected to grow more rapidly than the cost of the coverage expansion. Consequently, CBO expects that the proposal, if enacted, would reduce federal budget deficits over the ensuing decade relative to those projected under current law — with a total effect during that decade that is in a broad range between one-quarter percent and one-half percent of GDP. The imprecision of that calculation reflects the even greater degree of uncertainty that attends to it, compared with CBO’s 10-year budget estimates.

One big "however," the CBO says. The projections "assume that the proposals are enacted and remain unchanged throughout the next two decades, which is often not the case for major legislation."

The CBO director's blog provides some of the deep details.

Noted portrait and fashion photographer Irving Penn has died at age 92 in his New York home, his assistant has told the Associated Press.

Here's an exhibit of platinum prints at the National Gallery, and a gallery of his photos.

Read the New York Times obituary.

Voting mostly along party lines, the U.S. House defeated a third Republican attempt to remove Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., as chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee because of ethical issues. The tally was 246-153.

The House ethics committee has been investigating Rangel's financial and fundraising activities for almost a year.

The Hill sums up Rangel's (and the Democrats') predicament:

Rangel initiated the ethics committee investigation when allegations first surfaced last summer that he failed to report $75,000 worth of rental income on a villa he owns in the Dominican Republic. Since then, other accusations have surfaced and the ethics panel has twice expanded its investigation.

Among other charges, the panel is looking into whether Rangel improperly used his congressional letterhead to solicit donations for an education center bearing his name, which would violate House rules, and whether he broke House rules against improper gifts by accepting an interest-free loan on the villa. During the August recess, Rangel amended his financial disclosure forms to show at least $600,000 in income previously unreported.

(Photo by Lauren Victoria Burke, AP)

Two big announcements just out from Dell:

• The Texas-based computer maker will close its plant in Winston-Salem, N.C., throwing more than 900 people out of work.

• Early next year the company intends to deliver its first cellphone, with AT&T, and it will use Google's Android software. That's according to the Wall Street Journal.

In its news release on the plant shut down, Dell said, in classic PR-speak, that the action is "part of an ongoing initiative to enhance the long-term value it delivers to customers by simplifying operations and improving efficiency."

About 600 of the roughly 905 workers will be let go next month and the remainder in January. All will receive severance.

The Winston-Salem Journal writes that the four-year-old plant "is considered as the largest and highest profile incentive project in Triad history, with Dell eligible for up to $315 million in local and state incentives."

For the seventh-straight month, Americans cut their outstanding debt in August by $12 billion, another sign that consumers are spending less and banks are tightening credit, the Federal Reserve just announced. Wall Street predicted a $10 billion decline.

Credit cards and other revolving debt accounted for most of the 5.8% drop.

Here are the numbers.

Some people fainted, some got into fights, others pushed and shoved as thousands of people turned out to get an application from the city of Detroit for housing and utility payment assistance, the Detroit Free Press reports.

The chaos erupted when officials from the Detroit Planning & Development Department found that the 5,000 applications they brought to the convention center were far too few for the lines of people snaking down Washington Boulevard and around the corner.

By 11:30 a.m., the mayor of Detroit had to plead with people not to come to the convention center where the applications were being handed out, the newspaper says.

“It’s a disaster here,” former assistant Detroit police chief and city council candidate Gary Brown said, handing out water. “This is dangerous. Very unorganized, very dangerous."

The Detroit Police Gang Unit was pressed into service to keep people in line and in check.

(Fire Lt. Robert Murray tries to control the crowd outside Cobo Hall as thousands of Detroit residents waited for applications to help pay for their housing and utilities. Photo by Andre J. Jackson, Detroit Free Press.)

A top Italian court has overturned an immunity law shielding Premier Silvio Berlusconi from a corruption trial in Milan, the Associated Press reports, quoting Italian news media.

The ruling could put pressure on Berlusconi to resign and hold an early election.

The law grants immunity from prosecution to the country’s four top office holders while in office. That includes the premier, the president of the republic and the two parliament speakers.

The ANSA and Apcom news agencies said the Constitutional Court’s 15 judges made the decision after two days of deliberations. The court’s ruling cannot be appealed.

Passing the immunity law was one of Berlusconi's first acts on winning a third term in power last year.

It stopped all cases against him, including one where he is accused of bribing British lawyer David Mills to give false testimony to protect his businesses, Reuters reports.

Two other cases, one accusing him of tax fraud and false accounting in the purchase of TV rights by his Mediaset group and another alleging he tried to corrupt opposition senators, have also been frozen.

Berlusconi denies any wrongdoing.

Update at 12:55 p.m. ET: A spokesman for Berlusconi calls the decision "politically motivated" and says the prime minister "will continue to govern."

Troy Lilly's photo of the grist mill at Glade Creek, W.Va., in Babcock State Park, is our first offering from readers' photographs of Autumn in America.

Lilly, who has a great selection of nature photos at ForestWander.com, says he waited until the sunlight Friday evening "was just right" to capture the red hue of autumn from "one of the most famous scenes from iconic West Virginia."

Send us your best fall picture and we will run as many as we can in On Deadline. We also plan to mount them online on an interactive map as we did for our My Town series a few months back.

A few guidelines:

    1. Please submit only one photo.

    2. It must be from this year, and it must be your original work on which you control all the rights.

    3. Include a sentence or two of description about where the photo was taken.

    4. Don't forget to send us your name, so we can give you a photo credit if your submission is selected. Also include your e-mail address and/or phone number (which we will NOT publish) in case we have any questions.

    5. Send the photo to OnDeadline@usatoday.com

The satellite program, which was seen in Saudi Arabia, where the public discussion of sex is a taboo, prompted some 200 people to file legal complaints against Abdul-Jawad, who has been dubbed a "sex braggart" and Casanova" by the media.

Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio says he will continue his controversial "crime suppression operations" despite a Department of Homeland Security decision to strip him of authority to arrest suspected illegal immigrants based solely on their immigration status, the East Valley Tribune reports.

Arpaio will still have the power to check the immigration status of people booked by his officers, but not the authority to conduct street patrols looking for illegal immigrants.

The Department of Justice and other federal agencies are investigating the sheriff’s office on accusations of racial profiling during the operations, the paper says.

Arpaio said he will be able to still conduct the crime sweeps under state human smuggling laws and an obscure federal law that allows local police to arrest illegal immigrants.

A spokesman for the Phoenix office of ICE declined to comment until after pending agreements with the country are signed.

(Photo by Ralph Freso, East Valley Tribune, via AP)

French military spokesman Admiral Christophe Prazuck says the pirates attacked at night about 300 miles off the Somalia coast.

But instead of a harmless cargo vessel, they tangled (briefly) with the Somme, a French navy command and supply ship.

For the first time in 25 years, Arlington National Cemetery has marked the burial of an unknown, Salon reports.

But the reason is not that the remains were too ravaged to identify, rather that paperwork pertaining to the plot has been lost in a "bureaucratic error."

The mistake was discovered in 2003 when workers went to bury a newly deceased servicemember in grave 449 in section 68 only to find unmarked remains in the plot that was listed as vacant, Salon says.

The unidentified burial likely occurred fairly recently because section 68 is an active part of the cemetery, Salon writes.

Arlington took no action for six years, Salon says, until it began making inquiries. The cemetery recently installed a headstone marked "unknown" at the site without any special ceremony.

The last "unknown" burial was in 1984 when the remains of a Vietnam veteran was placed in the Tomb of the Unknowns, with President Reagan in attendance.

Salon quotes an Army spokesman as saying the service is investigating how to identify the remains in grave 449, but would not provide any details.

Good morning. Here's what's happening:

A colossal new ring has been identified around Saturn. The dusty hoop extends some 8 million miles from the planet, about 50 times farther out into space than its more familiar rings. Scientists tell the journal Nature that the tenuous ring is probably made up of debris kicked off Saturn's moon Phoebe by small impacts. They think this dust then migrates towards the planet where it is picked up by another Saturnian moon, Iapetus.

A new Associated Press-GfK poll has found that opposition to President Obama's health care reform dropped dramatically in just a matter of weeks. Still, Americans remain divided over complex legislation that Democrats are advancing in Congress, the AP says. Meanwhile, Bloomberg News reports that Senate Democrats are facing another round of delays in their effort to expand Americans’ access to health care because of concern over the cost of the plan and demands that they disclose more about it. 

Americans Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz and Israeli Ada Yonath have won the 2009 Nobel Prize in chemistry for "studies of the structure of the ribosome." The ribosome -- the cell's protein factory -- translates genetic code into proteins, which are the building blocks of all living organisms, the BBC says.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Attorney General Eric Holder are in Chicago today to meet with local officials about teen violence. The White House dispatched the two Cabinet officials in response to the beating death of 16-year-old Derrion Albert in a wild street brawl almost two weeks ago.

A U.S. couple who prayed rather than seeking medical attention for their dying daughter have been sentenced to six months in jail. Dale and Leilani Neumann, of Wisconsin, could have received up to 25 years in prison over the 2008 death of Madeline Neumann, who was known as Kara. The 11-year-old died of an undiagnosed but treatable form of diabetes.

The Supreme Court is taking up a long-running legal fight over a cross honoring World War I soldiers that has stood for 75 years on public land in a remote part of California. The cross, on an outcrop known as Sunrise Rock in the Mojave National Preserve, has been covered in plywood for the past several years following federal court rulings that it violates the First Amendment prohibition against government endorsement of religion.

Diplomats from throughout the hemisphere are converging on Honduras today to resolve a standoff that has left the impoverished Central American country with two presidents, a capital scarred by protests and a bitterly divided population. Delegates from more than 10 Latin and North American countries will be on hand to mediate talks between representatives of President Manuel Zelaya who was ousted by the military three months ago, and the government of interim President Roberto Micheletti.

Also in the news ...

 -- Stock futures are pointing to another higher opening today.

-- Iran's president says "some countries" have offered to provide Iran with uranium enriched to 20% for use as nuclear fuel.

Trolling the websites: NPR reports that Apple is the latest U.S. corporation to quit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in protest of its climate policy. Salon writes that fast-food bans in poor areas don't work. CNN says that mountainous terrain and harsh weather in remote parts of Afghanistan have proven a deadly combination for the U.S. military in its effort to reduce growing violence.

Then there's the papers: Arizona's Gilbert Tribune, right, reports that the Department of Homeland Security has stripped controversial Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio of his authority to arrest suspected illegal immigrants based solely on their immigration status. The Los Angeles Times reports that constitutional experts, testifying before the Senate, say the president has the right to appoint independent advisers as long as the distinction between practical and legal authority is rigorously maintained. The Washington Post writes that U.S. marijuana growers are cutting into the profits of Mexican traffickers. The Chicago Sun-Times reports on a new survey from the University of Illinois at Chicago that finds that one in five Chicago cabdrivers has been physically attacked on the job.

(Photos: Top, artist's rendering by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, AP; Scanpix/Reuters; Corey Schjoth, Wausau Daily Herald, AP; 2002 photo by Stephen Medd, The Press-Enterprise, AP; Edgard Garrido, Reuters)

Coming Wednesday:

• On the eighth anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, President Obama and his national security team will discuss strategy. He'll also award the National Medal of Science and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

• Starry night: The first family hosts an astronomical party for 152 local students to mark the International Year of Astronomy and World Space Week. Skywatchers can peer through more than 20 telescopes on the White House lawn.

• The Federal Reserve releases consumer credit data for August.

• Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Attorney General Eric Holder will meet with Chicago school officials and students to discuss escalating violence among teens. The meeting comes in the wake of the fatal beating of a student that was captured on a cellphone camera.

• The Supreme Court hears arguments about the public display of a cross in the Mojave Desert.

• Congressional hearings: The Senate Judiciary Committee looks into whether the Supreme Court misinterpreted laws intended to protect workers from discrimination, while the House Small Business Committee takes up the first-time-home-buyer's $8,000 federal tax credit, which is set to expire at the end of November.

• The Commission on Climate and Tropical Forests releases its final report.

• Accused Craigslist killer Philip Markoff has a pretrial hearing in Boston.

• On the 160th anniversary of the death of Edgar Allan Poe, a replica of his corpse will be on view in Baltimore ahead of grand funeral services planned for Sunday. (See our item below.)

An attempt to recall the mayor of Portland, Ore., over a sex scandal has failed.

Organizers of the Community to Recall Sam Adams said they did not have the 32,000 valid signatures required to put a recall on the ballot, the AP says. The group plans to try again.

Soon after Adams took office in January he admitted he lied about his sexual relationship in 2005 with a former legislative intern who was a teenager. The state attorney general found no credible evidence the openly gay mayor began a sexual relationship with Beau Breedlove before the intern turned 18.

The Oregonian has details.

Nuclear warheads aren't the only things that might end up atop an Iranian rocket. Add astronauts to the possible payload.

“This project is currently under study and … (we) hope to be able to implement the project in the near future,” Communications and Information Technology Minister Reza Taqipour announced Saturday at a ceremony marking World Space Week, according to the state-run MEHR news agency. He added that it is "essential to adopt national strategies to successfully implement the project."

No details about exactly when or how this might happen, or whether the erstwhile astronauts would be brought back to Earth alive.

In February, Iran launched its first domestically made satellite atop a modified, Iran-built long-range missile. The Omid ("Hope") communication satellite circled the Earth in low orbit. Taqipour announced May 1 that the spacecraft had "accomplished its mission and entered the Earth’s atmosphere as it lost altitude."

Iran plans to try again to launch its Mesbah ("Lantern") satellite "in the near future," Taqipour said. A 2005 launch attempt from Russia failed, so the next attempt will be made from a pad inside Iran.

Read more about Iran's emerging space program here, here and here. If you read Farsi, here's the Iranian Space Agency site.

In San Jose, Calif., a dentist was indicted today for allegedly performing a breast examination on a 14-year-old girl.

Dr. Benva Oshana Lazar, 56, was also charged with sexual battery for performing the phony exam on a 40-year-old woman.

Friday, Lazar was sentenced to nine months in jail for touching the breasts of six female patients.

If convicted of the new charges, Lazar faces a maximum sentence of eight years in prison and would have to register as a sex offender, according to the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office. Trial is set for Nov. 9.

The San Jose Mercury News has more about the cases.

British author Hilary Mantel has won the prestigious Man Booker Prize for fiction for Wolf Hall, a historical novel about Thomas Cromwell, adviser to King Henry VIII.

Mantel, 57, takes home about $100,000.

The annual prize goes to the best work of fiction by an author from the British Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland.

The BBC has more.

Police north of the Golden Gate Bridge are reporting an unusual traffic stop in Marin County, Calif.

Seems that the driver was only 13 years old and that his two passengers had multiple drunken-driving arrests. The teen was brought along to be the designated driver after dinner Sunday.

Officers responding to a stalled vehicle discovered the underage driver, who said he was "freaked out" and refused to drive further, San Anselmo Police Sgt. Rob Schneider tells the Associated Press. He was chauffeuring the couple home so they could avoid another DUI.

Heather Choulos of Mill Valley was charged with child endangerment and contributing to the delinquency of a minor, both misdemeanors. Her boyfriend, who was not identified, was not charged.

Edgar Allan Poe is about to get a proper funeral, 160 years after his death and burial in Baltimore.

When the great Gothic poet and mystery writer was buried a pauper, only 10 mourners showed up. To rectify such a slight, several hundred people have snapped up tickets to two grand funeral services Sunday at the Westminster Burying Ground, where Poe rests, the Associated Press reports.

But don't expect a Halloween parade of his skeletal remains.

Tomorrow, the anniversary of Poe's death in 1849, a replica of his 40-year-old corpse will lie in repose at the Poe House for 12 hours, followed by an all-night vigil at his grave. All comers can deliver their tributes.

Come Sunday morning, a horse-drawn carriage will take the corpse from his former home to the graveyard for the two sold-out, 350-mourner services. The master of ceremonies is well known to a certain generation — Gomez Addams (a.k.a. John Astin), the patriarch of the creepy, kooky, ooky Addams Family TV show.

"It's sort of a way of saying, 'Well, Eddie, your first funeral wasn't a very good one, but we're going to try to make it up to you, because we have so much respect for you,'" said Astin, who performed a one-man Poe show for years.

(Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House and Museum, with a replica of the body of Edgar Allan Poe. Photo by Rob Carr, AP.)

A Nashville mother who was stabbed with a butcher knife by a woman who abducted her newborn son, will be reunited with him for the second time, The Tennessean reports.

After the boy, Yair Anthony Carillo,  was found safe at an Alabama woman's home, Tennessee authorities only briefly allowed a reunion with his mother, Maria Gurrolla, because of allegations that she had tried to sell him. Gurrolla also lost custody of her other three children.

But authorities now say that Gurrolla and the children's's father, Jose Carillo, have both been cleared of any wrongdoing. Officials would not disclose who made the allegations against Gurrolla.

The alleged abductor, 39-year-old Tammy Renee Silas, is in federal custody on kidnapping charges, the newspaper says. 

The kidnapper, posing as an immigration official, stabbed Gurrolla nine times then fled with the 4-day-old child on Sept. 29. He was found at Silas' Ardmore, Ala., home four days later.

(Photo by Mark Humphrey, AP)

The United States is ranked 13th.

Australia took second place and Iceland third, although the statistics date from 2007, before Iceland's economic meltdown. Afghanistan and Sierra Leone rounded out the bottom of the ranking.

The index shows that China, Iran and Nepal have made the greatest long-term improvements, mainly in education and health rather than income.

Click here for the full list.

(Photo of Lillehammer, Norway, by Norwegian Tourist Board)

Kathryn Winkfein, whose ordeal was videotaped and viewed nationwide, had sought more than $135,000 for pain and suffering, medical expenses and humiliation.

The 4-foot-11 woman was zapped by Deputy Constable Christopher Bieze after daring the officer to do so during a confrontation at a May traffic stop.

She was charged with resisting arrest, a charge that is still pending.

Precinct 3 Constable Richard McCain said an internal investigation found no violations by Bieze. He called the settlement "a miscarriage of justice," the paper says.

Travis County Judge Sam Biscoe said defending a lawsuit from Winkfein could have cost the county more than the $40,000 settlement.

Watch the video below of the incident or click here.

The British newspaper The Independent reports today that "secret meetings" have been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on a plan pushed by Gulf Arab states to stop using dollars for oil trading.

France is also involved in the alleged talks, the paper says.

The report says the Americans are aware that these meetings have taken place, but have not discovered the details, and are "sure to fight this international cabal."

Update at 1:15: p.m. ET: The Wall Street Journal reports that Arab officials in the Persian Gulf strongly denied the report. "We have never heard of this or discussed this, not even secretly," Qatar's oil minister Abdullah bin Hamad Al Attiyah told Zawya Dow Jones by telephone.

The AP quotes Kuwait's oil minister, Sheik Ahmed Al Abdullah Al Sabah, as saying there have been no talks on the topic among Gulf oil ministers. "At our level, no," he said. "I didn't even dream about it."

The head of the United Arab Emirates' central bank, Sultan Nasser al-Suweidi, tells the AP that the Gulf nation has no plans to stop pricing oil in dollars. "There has been no meeting ... whatsoever," he tells the news agency, adding that the dollar "will continue as the price for oil."

Meanwhile, the AP says the story is the key factor behind the soaring price of gold which has hit as high as $1,045 an ounce today.

(Photos: Top, Saudi oil installation by Bilal Qabalan, AFP; right, Dubai skyline by Kamran Jebreili, AP)

We have been watching with fascination the story out of Montana about a mysterious security company called American Police Force that was slated to take over operation of a never-used jail in the town of Hardin.

Click here for links to earlier stories.

Earlier postings noted some of the twists and turns, including word that one of the front men for the APF, MIchael Hilton, had a criminal record in California, that the company had changed its name to American Private Police Force, that one company SUV showed up bearing a decal that said "City of Hardin Police Department. "

Equally interesting, no one seemed to be able to say what the company would be doing at the jail or, where it would get prisoners to fill it. All of which was enough to prod the Montana attorney general to begin looking into the deal.

In another twist, the AP reports that an international security executive that local officials were told would run the jail, says that's not true, that he only had cursory conversations with Hilton about the position.

As for Hilton, the the San Jose Mercury News reports that a California judge has ordered him to appear in court later this month over an outstanding judgment in a fraud lawsuit. Stay tuned.

(Photo by Matthew Brown, AP)

Good morning. Here's what's happening:

Three American scientists who created the technology behind digital photography and helped link the world through fiber-optic networks shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in physics today. Charles Kao, who also holds British citizenship, was cited for his breakthrough involving the transmission of light in fiber optics while Willard Boyle, who is also Canadian, and George Smith were honored for inventing an imaging semiconductor circuit known as the CCD sensor.

The Pakistani Taliban have claimed responsibility for the deadly suicide bombing at the U.N. food agency's headquarters in Islamabad that killed five people. Taliban spokesman Azam Tariq said today that his group was behind the blast and planned more such attacks. The suicide bomber was dressed as a security officer and apparently bypassed normal security procedures by asking the guards outside if he could use the bathroom.

President Obama has invited more than 30 members of Congress to the White House today for a discussion of U.S. policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The group includes bipartisan congressional leaders, as well as chairs and ranking members of the relevant House and Senate committees.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il says Pyongyang could return to the six-party talks, depending on the progress of its bilateral meeting with the United States, The Korea Times reports. Kim's comments follow a highly publicized visit to North Korea by Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao. The BBC reports that North Korea's offer to return to nuclear talks "has been met with skepticism by regional and Western experts."

Trolling the websites: CNN reports that Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in the Middle East, has been treated for early-stage prostrate cancer. The Drudge Report highlights a story by the Daily Telegraph that President Obama canceled a meeting with the Dalai Lama "to curry favor with the Chinese." NPR says Western security forces are alarmed about a new terrorist tactic in which a suicide bomber hides the explosive inside his body.

Then there's the papers: The Chicago Tribune, right, offers an in-depth look at high school violence in the wake of a beating death of an area honor student. The newspaper says the violence sometimes is race-related, sometimes gang-related and sometimes is about defending neighborhoods. The Los Angeles Times reports that the recent firings and hirings of studio executives at Disney, Universal and elsewhere "point to a widespread corporate panic amid sharp declines in DVD sales." The Washington Post writes that in the area of preventable death, the United States "trails other industrialized nations and has been falling further behind over the past decade." The Dallas Morning News says  the corruption convictions of former Mayor Pro Tem Don Hill and his inner circle "exposed a pay-to-play subculture at Dallas City Hall that has long been whispered about but never before laid so bare for all the city to see."

(Photos: Top, left to right, Kao, Boyle, Smith, by Reuters; police commandos guarding U.N. building in Islamabad by Anjum Naveed, AP; Fan Runjun, Xinhua, AP)

Coming Tuesday:

• The Nobel Prize in physics will be announced.

• President Obama pays a visit to the National Counterterrorism Center.

• The Energy Department releases the annual winter fuels outlook.

• Gen. David Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, addresses the Association of the U.S. Army conference.

• Senate committees hold hearings on the legality of policy "czars" in the executive branch, and on possible economic sanctions against Iran.

• The World Monuments Fund announces its 2010 watch list of 100 endangered sites with historic, artistic and architectural value.

• The CEO of embattled ACORN speaks at the National Press Club.

• The Dalai Lama receives the Lantos Human Rights Prize.

• In Wisconsin, Dale and Leilani Neumann are to be sentenced for reckless homicide for praying for their dying daughter instead of getting her medical treatment.

On tonight's show, David Letterman talks at length about the revelations he made last week about sexual relations with staffers and an extortion attempt that police say followed, audience members told the Associated Press after the afternoon taping.

They said Letterman "led his monologue by speaking about the situation in tones both serious and comedic" and "joked frequently about it," including with guests Steve Martin and Martin Short, AP writes.

In the latest developments in the case, law enforcement officials say that the diary of Stephanie Birkitt, a staffer with whom Letterman had an affair, apparently led to the alleged $2 million blackmail attempt by CBS producer Robert "Joe" Halderman. Birkitt and Halderman lived together after her affair with Letterman ended.

Halderman pleaded not guilty last week to a count of attempted first-degree grand larceny, a felony. His lawyer wants to put Letterman on the stand, saying Letterman didn't tell the whole story.

"David Letterman didn't give his (Halderman's) side of the story, David Letterman gave what he wanted the public to know," attorney Gerald Shargel said on NBC's Today show. "He wanted to get out ahead of the story, and that's exactly what he did."

On ABC's Good Morning America, Shargel said, "In the history of extortions, I don't believe there has ever been a case where someone was paid by check."

(With Steve Martin looking on, comedian Martin Short gets tall to shake hands with host David Letterman during today's taping of The Late Show with David Letterman. CBS photo by John Paul Filo, via AP.)