As its peers in the region see their oil production slipping Brazil's state-controlled oil company Petrobras is entering a new era as the region's silent giant.
AP - Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is among the candidates that President-elect Barack Obama is considering for secretary of state, according to two Democratic officials in close contact with the Obama transition team.
AP - A Japanese journalist was wounded in an apparent kidnap attempt in the frontier city of Peshawar on Friday — the latest in a spate of attacks and abductions of foreigners in the city, police said.
AP - The federal government began the new budget year with a record deficit of $237.2 billion, reflecting the billions of dollars the government has started to pay out to rescue the financial system.
The first-ever pictures of planets outside our solar system have been released in two studies. Using the latest techniques in space technology, astronomers at NASA and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory used direct-imaging techniques to capture pictures of four newly discovered planets orbiting stars outside our solar system.
U.S. intelligence agencies believe Osama bin Laden is isolated from al Qaeda and spending much of his energy merely surviving, the head of the CIA said on Thursday. CIA Director Michael Hayden said hunting down bin Laden remains his agency's priority. "He is putting a lot of energy into his own survival -- a lot of energy into his own security," Hayden said.
The initial tip in an alleged Klan initiation slaying came when two suspects emerged from woods and asked a store clerk if he knew how to remove bloodstains from their clothes. The clerk called police. In custody are eight members of a Klan group in Louisiana. Dead is a 43-year-old woman -- shot to death, police say, because she wanted to go home to Oklahoma.
![[logo]](http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/img/bbc_news_120x60.gif "BBC News")
![[logo]](http://www.csmonitor.com/images/logo_88x31.gif "Christian Science Monitor"){kind=logo}
![[logo]](http://graphics.nytimes.com/images/section/NytSectionHeader.gif "NYT > NYTimes.com Home")
![[logo]](http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/us/nws/th/main_142b.gif "Yahoo! News")
![[logo]](http://a.abcnews.com/images/abc_news_rss.gif "ABC News")
![[logo]](http://image.guardian.co.uk/sitecrumbs/Guardian.gif "Guardian Unlimited")
![[logo]](http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.element/img/1.0/logo/cnn.logo.rss.gif "CNN.com"){kind=logo}
