News of the Taliban arrests emerged as the US special envoy to Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, met Pakistan’s prime minister, Yusuf Raza Gilani, in Islamabad Photograph: Faisal Mahmood/Reuters

Pakistan has arrested two more senior Afghan Taliban figures, it emerged yesterday, raising the possibility that ­Islamabad has begun a major strategic shift away from backing “good” militants.

Mullah Abdul Salam and Mullah Mir Muhammad, the “shadow governors” of the northern Afghan provinces of Kunduz and Baghlan respectively, were captured in recent days inside Pakistan.

In a stark illustration of the domestic terrorism problems facing Pakistan, a bomb blast yesterday at a mosque in the north-western tribal belt killed 29 people, including some militants, and injured about 50 others. The explosion tore through the mosque in the Aka Khel area of Khyber, a local official said.

Islamabad has always been viewed as a reluctant partner of the west in Afghanistan, as it was believed to be secretly continuing to support the Taliban and host its leadership on Pakistani soil, despite officially breaking with the militant movement after the 9/11 attacks.

But this week it was revealed that Pakistani authorities had arrested the deputy leader of the Taliban, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, in Karachi and, when news of the two other Taliban arrests emerged, many analysts argued that a new Islamabad policy could be crystallising.

A more cynical interpretation suggested that, instead of turning its back on the Taliban, Pakistan was simply pressuring them to the negotiating table.

By weakening the Taliban, Islamabad could force the militants into cutting a deal that would still give it some measure of power and a strong say in Afghanistan’s future. “I think it’s a bit early to call it a strategic shift, but clearly the political calculations in Pakistan are changing,” said Shuja Nawaz, an expert on the Pakistani military at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based thinktank. “The idea being they can play a role in getting the US to communicate [with the Taliban].”

The flurry of arrests does raise the question of why Pakistan’s military intelligence did not do this earlier. “They seem to have found their old address book,” quipped one senior US official in the region. Aside from the Taliban arrests, Pakistani officials also said that up to nine militants linked to al-Qaida were held in overnight raids in Karachi, with the help of intelligence provided by the US. One was identified as Ameer Muawiya, who officials said was in charge of foreign al-Qaida militants operating in Pakistan’s tribal area and was an associate of Osama bin Laden.

Pakistan’s powerful army and especially its military Inter-Services Intelligence agency, which runs policy towards neighbouring Afghanistan, had appeared to be keeping the Taliban going, in expectation of the day when western forces leave Afghanistan and the extremist movement could return to power, beholden to Islamabad, as it was before 2001.

“I think a shift is taking place inside the military,” said Khalid Aziz, head of the Regional Institute of Policy Research and Training, an independent thinktank based in the north-western city of Peshawar.

“At the end of it, if the old model had continued into a post-US withdrawal situation and Pakistan had continued supporting the good Taliban it would almost certainly end up as a civil war in Afghanistan.”

Renewed civil war in Afghanistan would blow over to Pakistan, especially its tribal area and North-West Frontier province, which is populated by Pashtuns, the biggest ethnic group in Afghanistan.

In a speech this month, Pakistan’s army chief, Ashfaq Kayani, claimed he had brushed aside the doctrine of “strategic depth”, which meant controlling Afghanistan to stop Indian influence there.

“If Afghanistan is peaceful, stable and friendly, we have our strategic depth because our western border is secure,” Kayani said.

Backing the Taliban in the past has also come at a massive domestic cost, as the movement spawned a copycat group in Pakistan that is even more violent and has squarely targeted the state. More civilians were killed in terrorist violence in Pakistan last year than in Afghanistan.

According to the official governor of Kunduz province, Mohammad Omar, the “shadow governors” were arrested in the Pakistani city of Quetta within the last two weeks. The so-called Quetta shura, or leadership council of the Taliban, is supposed to be based in that city. “This [the arrests] is because of the pressure of the world community on Pakistan, and the explosions happening inside Pakistan, the crisis in Pakistan,” said Omar.

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said the US was pleased with the recent arrests. He declined to say whether they were the result of better intelligence or an increased willingness by Pakistan.

“What I will say to you, yet again, is that we are enormously heartened by the fact that the Pakistani government and their military intelligence services increasingly recognise the threat within their midst and are doing something about it,” Morrell said.

The 67th Golden Globe Awards was telecast live from the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, California on Sunday, January 17, 2010 by NBC, from 5:00 PM - 8:00 PM (PST) and 8:00PM - 11:00 PM (EST) (01:00-04:00 Monday January 18 UTC). The ceremonies were hosted by Ricky Gervais,and were broadcast live for the first time.

Nominations were announced on December 15, 2009. Among films, Up in the Air led with six nominations, followed by Nine with five and Avatar and Inglourious Basterds with four each.Matt Damon, Sandra Bullock, Meryl Streep, and Anna Paquin were each nominated twice, Damon as Best Actor in the comedy category and as Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture, Bullock as Best Actress in both the comedy and drama categories, Streep competing against herself as Best Actress in the comedy category, and Paquin as Best Actress in a TV Drama Series and as Best Actress in a Television Film or Miniseries.

Television programs receiving multiple nominations include Glee, Dexter, Damages, Mad Men, House, and 30 Rock.

Martin Scorsese was presented with the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement in motion pictures.

Schedule

As of January 17 2009:

Nominations and winners

Winners in bold.

Cecil B. DeMille Award

Martin Scorsese

Film

^[6]

Television

Awards breakdown

Number of nominations

Actors

• 2: Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side, The Proposal)
• 2: Matt Damon (The Informant!, Invictus)
• 2: Anna Paquin (The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler, True Blood)
• 2: Meryl Streep (It’s Complicated, Julie & Julia)

Films

• 6: Up in the Air
• 5: Nine
• 4: Avatar, Inglourious Basterds
• 3: The Hurt Locker, It’s Complicated, Invictus, Precious, A Single Man
• 2: (500) Days of Summer, Brothers, Crazy Heart, The Informant!, Julie & Julia, The Last Station, Up

Television

• 4: Glee
• 3: 30 Rock, Big Love, Lost, Damages, Dexter, Georgia O’Keeffe, Grey Gardens, Into the Storm, Mad Men
• 2: Entourage, House, Hung, The Office, Taking Chance, True Blood

Number of wins

Films

• 2: Avatar, Up, Crazy Heart

• 1: Up In The Air, The Hangover, Precious, Julie & Julia, The Blind Side, Inglourious Basterds, Sherlock Holmes, The White Ribbon

Television

• 2: Dexter, Grey Gardens
• 1: Big Love, Taking Chance, 30 Rock, Glee, Mad Men, The Good Wife, The United States of Tara

Presenters

• Amy Adams
• Christina Aguilera
• Jennifer Aniston
• Justin Bartha
• Kristen Bell
• Halle Berry
• Josh Brolin
• Gerard Butler
• Cher
• Bradley Cooper
• Chace Crawford
• Robert De Niro
• Cameron Diaz
• Leonardo DiCaprio
• Colin Farrell
• Harrison Ford
• Jodie Foster
• Matthew Fox
• Jennifer Garner
• Mel Gibson
• Lauren Graham
• Tom Hanks
• Neil Patrick Harris
• Sally Hawkins
• Ed Helms
• Kate Hudson
• Felicity Huffman
• Samuel L. Jackson
• Nicole Kidman
• Jane Krakowski
• Ashton Kutcher
• Taylor Lautner
• Zachary Levi
• Sophia Loren
• Paul McCartney
• Helen Mirren
• Jim Parsons
• Amy Poehler
• Julia Roberts
• Mickey Rourke
• Zoe Saldana
• Arnold Schwarzenegger
• Steven Spielberg
• Kiefer Sutherland
• Mike Tyson
• Sofia Vergara
• Olivia Wilde
• Kate Winslet
• Reese Witherspoon
• Sam Worthington

CHARLOTTE, N.C. - Hendrick Motorsports has loaned an airplane and two flight crews to an organization that is participating in the Haitian earthquake relief efforts.

The NASCAR team loaned a 45-passenger plane to Missionary Flights International, which will send support teams in and out of Port-au-Prince. The first flight is scheduled to leave Fort Pierce, Fla., on Saturday morning and will take 30 passengers and medical supplies into Haiti.

The HMS aviation team is planning to fly at least one roundtrip per day, with no timeline set on how long the plane and personnel will be on loan. The eight-team crew consists of HMS aviation director Dave Dudley, four captain-level pilots, one mechanic and one flight attendant. All volunteered to participate.

HMS officials have a second plane on standby, and team owner Rick Hendrick is covering all costs associated with the flights.

Hendrick officials said Friday they received a special exemption from the FAA to fly the plane into Port-au-Prince.

The international Red Cross estimates 45,000 to 50,000 people were killed in the earthquake, which devastated the Caribbean nation on Tuesday.

KARACHI: On the directives of Minister for Environment Shaikh Mohammed Afzal, the Pakistan Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Waste Management Cell Karachi visited various industrial areas on Saturday. The cell members visited SITE Industrial Area, Keamari Town, Jinnah Bridge and Terhi Goth. Warning the concerned town administrations and industry managements, the Vehicular Emission Control Programme project director said action would be taken under EPA laws for dumping garbage and burning it. He also said all such industrial areas where garbage was being burnt were bound by the law to neither dump garbage there nor set it on fire. The cell members have served a notice to a paper mill for violating EPA laws and summoned the administration officials to the authority’s office.

MIRPUR/KARACHI: At least 15 people, including mourners and policemen, were killed and over 100 injured when a suicide bomber ripped through a Muharram procession near an imambargah in Muzaffarabad on Sunday as another explosion near a Muharram procession in Karachi injured 35 people, according to police.

In Muzaffarabad, a suicide bomber blew himself up when intercepted by security personnel guarding a Muharram procession. The procession was passing close to a police barricade in front of the imambargah on CMH Road at about 6.30pm when the bomber struck, a senior police officer told APP. At least 15 of those injured are in critical condition.

The gathering attracted about 1,000 people, said police officer Tahir Qayum. Those killed included two policemen, he said.

The AFP news agency quoted police as saying that the bomber was trying to enter the imambargah. Panic ensued the blast, which flung a severed leg and other body parts across the ground outside the imambargah as the power went off, said witnesses.
“The bomber came in front of me. He was accompanying the procession. Police searched everybody on the gate and the bomber blew himself during the body search,” said Atif Bashir, a medical storekeeper with a bandaged forehead. “All of a sudden the electricity cut. There was panic and people were crying for help,” he told AFP at the bomb site.

Security was put on high alert across Azad Jammu and Kashmir following the attack, and the army was called in to assist the civil administration in maintaining law and order.

Karachi bombing: In Karachi, police - on the basis of the bomb disposal squad’s findings - claimed that the explosion was triggered by a build up of gas in a manhole, but doctors who treated the blast victims said they found pellets in the bodies of the injured, suggesting that an explosive device was detonated.

The blast took place at around 6:30pm when the procession, which started from Orangi Town No 10, was on its way to Orangi No 2 1/2. staff report/agencies

International airports were scrambling yesterday to tighten security on U.S. flights, causing passenger chaos on the busiest travel day of the year, in the wake of Christmas Day’s foiled attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound airplane.

U.S. President Barack Obama, on vacation in Hawaii, ordered a review of security protocols and the no-fly list to determine how a man with explosives strapped to his body boarded a flight weeks after the man’s father contacted U.S. authorities to warn them of his son’s growing radicalism.

Jammed airports were a scene of bedlam yesterday as travellers were left waiting in line for hours and rushing to make alternative plans as a slate of ramped-up security measures disrupted connecting flights and slowed departures to a crawl.

But nothing better demonstrated the heightened anxiety in the skies than a case of airsickness that became a national security incident.

When a Nigerian man locked himself in the airplane’s bathroom for about an hour yesterday on the same Amsterdam-Detroit flight that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to blow up on Friday, staff on board asked for emergency assistance.

As it turned out, the “disruptive passenger” was a sick businessman who needed to use the washroom. Authorities said yesterday he posed no threat.

In the meantime, travellers in and out of the U.S. are facing stringent security screenings, pat-downs and restrictions on their on-board movement for the foreseeable future, after Friday’s close call was averted only by the adrenaline-driven bravery of passengers on the 278-person flight.

Although a Vancouver Airport spokeswoman said the new security measures, put in place this weekend, will last at least until 2 a.m. Dec. 30, neither Transport Canada nor the U.S. Transportation Security Administration would speculate on how long these new measures would be in place or what would replace them.

In the meantime, the emergency measures were causing pandemonium at airports across Canada yesterday. Passengers faced waits as long as seven hours as they went through lengthy body searches and painstaking checks of slimmed-down carry-on bags.

Reports from Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport that security protocol had been followed correctly raised further concerns that would-be terrorists are moving to exploit an overlooked gap in passenger-screening measures.

It’s reminiscent of Richard Reid’s attempt in 2001 to blow up a plane with the same explosives hidden in his shoes, and, more recently, of a 2006 transatlantic plot to blow up 10 flights from Britain to the U.S. and Canada using liquid explosives. Many of the heightened restrictions prompted by that incident have since been relaxed. But terrorism experts say this latest near-miss could force security authorities to re-examine the way they evaluate threats posed by passengers, and prompt even stricter incarnations of no-fly lists previously criticized for grounding innocent travellers.To simplify airport chaos yesterday, personnel were asking passengers to refrain from bringing carry-on bags with them at all, although few complied and departure lounges were scenes of chaos as harried travellers packed and re-packed their luggage.

A Canadian Air Transport Security Authority screener at Toronto’s Pearson airport said yesterday CATSA staff in the U.S. departures lounge was almost doubled yesterday, and staff were being paid overtime to go through hands-on screenings of tens of thousands of frustrated passengers.

Despite staffing increases to accommodate the confusion, dozens of flights were delayed and several airlines had to cancel flights simply because the new screenings meant travellers weren’t getting through the airport fast enough.

At 5 p.m. yesterday, American Airlines had cancelled 16 of its 36 flights scheduled for that day - largely due to the security measures that a spokesman said was forcing them to “thin out” the schedule.

Air Canada and its affiliate Air Canada Jazz cancelled several short-haul U.S. flights, most of them out of Toronto, due to security delays.

Mark Hansen, a Berkeley professor specializing in aviation security, said the pat-downs now being implemented are helpful but are likely a stop-gap measure, to be replaced with better high-tech ways of detecting non-metal weapons like the plastic explosive pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) that Mr. Abdulmutallab allegedly attempted to detonate on Friday.

But he noted it’s also possible this will prove a temporary flare-up in airport-security paranoia.

“The history is that these things do subside - there’s an immediate reaction and then, as time goes on, the memory fades and the reality of the invasiveness and the inconvenience of strict screening persists. And so we eventually move toward a system that is less stringent.”

NEW YORK - Irving Penn, whose photographs revealed a taste for stark simplicity whether he was shooting celebrity portraits, fashion, still life or remote places of the world, died Wednesday at his Manhattan home. He was 92.

The death was announced by his photo assistant, Roger Krueger.

“He never stopped working,” said Peter MacGill, a longtime friend whose Pace-MacGill Galleries in Manhattan represented Penn’s work. “He would go back to similar subjects and never see them the same way twice.”

Penn, who constantly explored the photographic medium and its boundaries, typically preferred to isolate his subjects _ from fashion models to Aborigine tribesmen _ from their natural settings to photograph them in a studio against a stark background. He believed the studio could most closely capture their true natures.

Between 1964 and 1971, he completed seven such projects, his subjects ranging from New Guinea mud men to San Francisco hippies.

Penn also had a fascination with still life and produced a dramatic range of images that challenged the traditional idea of beauty, giving dignity to such subjects as cigarette butts, decaying fruit and discarded clothing. A 1977 show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art presented prints of trash rescued from Manhattan streets and photographed, lovingly, against plain backgrounds.

“Photographing a cake can be art,” he said at the 1953 opening of his studio, where he continued to produce commercial and gallery work into the 21st century.

Penn’s most recent work was a series of still-life photos made of ceramics that he and his wife had collected in Europe. “They were as dynamic and as powerful as anything he had done in his 70-year career,” MacGill said.

Thirteen of Penn’s photographs are being auctioned Thursday at Christie’s, including “Guedras in the Wind,” a 1971 image of two Moroccan women, with an estimated pre-sale price of $40,000 to $60,000. A Penn photo, “Cuzco Children,” sold for $529,000 last year, including an auction house premium of 20 percent.

Penn’s career began in the 1940s as a fashion photographer for Vogue, and he continued to contribute to the magazine for decades thereafter.

He stumbled into the job almost by accident, when he abandoned his early ambition to become a painter and took a position as a designer in the magazine’s art department in 1943. Staff photographers balked at his unorthodox layout ideas, and a supervisor asked him to photograph a cover design.

The resulting image, on the Oct. 1, 1943, cover of Vogue, was a striking still-life showing a brown leather bag, a beige scarf, gloves, oranges and lemons arranged in the shape of a pyramid.

In subsequent photographs for the magazine, Penn further developed his austere style that placed models and fashion accessories against clean backdrops. It was a radical departure at a time when most fashion photographers posed their subjects with props and in busy settings that tended to draw attention from the clothes themselves.

The approach made him a star at the magazine, where his work eventually appeared on as many as 300 pages annually. Penn believed his success depended on keeping the reader _ rather than the model _ in mind.

“Many photographers feel their client is the subject,” he explained in a 1991 interview in The New York Times. “My client is a woman in Kansas who reads Vogue. I’m trying to intrigue, stimulate, feed her. … The severe portrait that is not the greatest joy in the world to the subject may be enormously interesting to the reader.”

He left the magazine in 1944 to join the military _ serving with the American Field Service in Italy and then as a photographer in India _ but returned to Vogue in 1946, taking travel assignments in addition to his fashion work.

Penn relished the chance to work in foreign locales, recalling in his 1974 book, “Worlds in a Small Room,” that he had often daydreamed “of being mysteriously deposited (with my ideal north-light studio) among the Aborigines in remote parts of the earth.”

In the 1950s, Penn moved into portraiture. He photographed not only the famous _ actors, musicians and politicians _ but also ordinary people. He published a series of pictures in 1950-1951 featuring plumbers, salesmen and cleaning women in New York City, Paris and London. The Getty Center in Los Angeles currently is exhibiting some of the photos.

His celebrity portraits included closely cropped images of Miles Davis, Spencer Tracy, Georgia O’Keeffe and Pablo Picasso, the last peering apprehensively from beneath a wide-brimmed hat. He once said that his formula for capturing meaningful portraits was to photograph his subjects relentlessly, often over a period of several hours, until they were forced to let down their guard.

A 2000 exhibit organized by the Art Institute of Chicago on his portraiture work said, “Penn’s manipulation of formal design elements such as light and shadow, and his ability to capture a significant gesture, expression, or mood, ultimately reveal something intriguing about his subjects.”

An exhibit of 14 large prints of cigarette and cigar butts at the Museum of Modern Art in 1975 was more controversial. It was lauded by some critics as a powerful elevation of the banal to the monumental, but criticized by others as self-indulgent.

“A beautiful print is a thing in itself, not just a halfway house on the way to the page,” he once said.

Accordingly, he spent countless hours in his studio creating prints with costly platinum salts _ a process that had been mostly abandoned at the turn of the 20th century, but favored by Penn because of its glowing results. (Most photographic prints use a solution of silver on the paper rather than platinum.) He would paint the platinum solution on the paper himself to create the effects he sought.

“Over the years I must have spent thousands of hours silently brushing on the liquid coatings, preparing each sheet in anticipation of reaching the perfect print,” Penn wrote in his 1991 book “Passage: A Work Record.”

Penn donated photographs to the National Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of American Art in Washington, and his archives are at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Born in Plainfield, N.J., in 1917, Penn studied at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art from 1934 to 1938, and worked as an assistant at Harper’s Bazaar in 1939.

Penn married fashion model Lisa Fonssagrives in 1950, and for decades afterward she remained one of his favorite subjects. She died in 1992. One of his 1950 photos of her sold at auction in 2004 for more than $57,000.

Penn was the older brother of filmmaker Arthur Penn, who directed “The Miracle Worker,” “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Night Moves.”

He had a son, Tom, with Fonssagrives. His wife also had a daughter, Mia, from a previous marriage.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - Mike Duvall’s second term as a member of the California Assembly was progressing pretty much like his first - in relative obscurity, with few notable legislative accomplishments.

The Orange County Republican is now a YouTube hit after KCAL-TV aired his racy comments about sexual conquests that were caught by an open microphone in a Capitol hearing room. Several media outlets said the comments referred to Duvall’s affairs with a female lobbyist and another woman. He resigned Wednesday.

California’s legislative leaders have been trying to focus on a number high-profile issues - from water policy to prisons to renewable energy - during the waning days of their legislative session. On Wednesday, they instead found themselves answering questions about a lawmaker who bragged about a spanking fetish, the type of underwear worn by a mistress and his apparent ability to carry on two extramarital affairs at once.

Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles, called it “a very sad day.”

“We have such big issues before the Legislature and to have this become a distraction, he felt his responsibility was to step aside,” she said.

Duvall, 54, lives in Yorba Linda with his wife when he is not in Sacramento, and has two adult children.

He made the comments about the affairs to Assemblyman Jeff Miller during a break in a committee meeting inside the Capitol on July 8, apparently unaware that the microphone at the desk was on.

“I’m getting into spanking her,” Duvall is heard saying on the videotape, which was made as a matter of routine by a legislative office.

Miller asks if she likes it too. Duvall responds: “She goes, ‘I know you like spanking me.’ I said, ‘Yeah, that’s ’cause you’re such a bad girl.’”

Duvall also describes the woman’s “eye-patch underwear” and the age difference between himself and his mistress, identified in some media reports as a lobbyist for an energy company. He tells Miller, a fellow Republican from Corona, that the woman’s birthday was two days earlier.

Duvall said he joked with the woman that she was getting old after turning 36 and told her, “I am going to have to trade you in.”

The lawmaker then brags about an affair he is having with another woman.

“Oh, she is hot! I talked to her yesterday. She goes, ‘So are we finished?’ I go, ‘No, we’re not finished.’ I go, ‘You know about the other one, but she doesn’t know about you!’” Duvall can be heard saying in an apparent reference to his affair with the lobbyist.

The unseemly remarks also raise questions about the relationship between lawmakers and lobbyists. The Assembly Ethics Committee is investigating Duvall’s comments, in part to determine whether the affair might have influenced his votes.

He was vice chairman of the Assembly Utilities Committee.

Several media outlets reported the woman Duvall refers to in his comments works as a lobbyist for Sempra Energy, a San Diego-based energy services company that operates San Diego Gas & Electric Co. and Southern California Gas Co. Sempra issued an e-mail statement saying it was investigating the claims.

“The employee has denied the speculative media reports. Our investigation will be conducted to ensure not only that our policies on employee conduct are strictly adhered to, but also that our employee is treated fairly,” the company said.

Duvall was elected in 2006 to represent an Orange County district that includes Fullerton, Anaheim, Placentia, Orange, Brea and Yorba Linda. Before that, he served six years on the Yorba Linda City Council. He also owns an insurance agency.

In stepping down, Duvall said it would not be fair to his family, constituents or friends to remain in office.

“I am deeply saddened that my inappropriate comments have become a major distraction for my colleagues in the Assembly, who are working hard on the very serious problems facing our state,” he said. “Therefore, I have decided to resign my office, effective immediately, so that the Assembly can get back to work.”

The lawmaker had received a 100 percent rating from Capitol Resource Institute, a conservative advocacy group, for his votes on legislation considered pro-family during the 2007-08 legislative session.

BERLIN/FRANKFURT (Reuters) - General Motors has decided to sell Opel to a group led by Canadian car parts maker Magna (MGa.TO), ending months of uncertainty over the European unit’s fate.

GM expects a definitive agreement to be ready to sign within a few weeks and predicted the deal could close in a few months, it said in a statement on Thursday.

Speaking at a news conference in Berlin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed the decision, saying it offered Opel a “new beginning” and that conditions attached to the sale were “manageable and negotiable.

“I am very happy about this decision,” said Merkel, who had backed the Russia-backed Magna bid over a rival offer from Belgium-listed financial investor RHJ International (RHJI.BR). “The government’s patience and purpose has paid off. It was not an easy path.”

Talks on a sale of Opel, which GM is selling as part of a U.S. government-orchestrated restructuring, have dragged on for months, fuelling anger among its 50,000 European workers, half of whom are in Germany.

Magna, backed by a Russian state-owned bank, had been competing against Brussels-listed financial investor RHJ International (RHJI.BR), but Germany had refused to back that bid with financing guarantees.

Merkel has promised 4.5 billion euros ($6.6 billion) in government guarantees if GM opted for Magna and its Russian backers.

GM’s decision represented a victory for Merkel only weeks before she tries to win a second term in a federal election.

“My analysis is that it helps Merkel,” said Gerd Langguth, political scientist at Bonn University.

BIG GERMAN PRESENCE

GM has controlled Opel, which traces its roots in Germany back to the 19th century, for the past 80 years.

It is based in the western city of Russelsheim and has four plants in Germany where it makes everything from three-door Corsa subcompacts to Zafira vans.

Opel has two factories producing automobiles under the Vauxhall badge in Britain as well as major sites in Belgium, Poland and Spain.

“It’s a relief that there is now a decision,” said Anke Rezac, who works in vehicle electronics at Opel’s development center in Ruesselsheim.

“We now have less uncertainty surrounding ownership although many questions remain. Among all the bad choices we had, Magna is the best option. They know about the auto industry and want to develop the business.”

GM was reported to have concerns about its ability to control its intellectual property and vehicle technology in the Russian partnership and some of its senior management had said the rival bid by RHJ would be easier to implement.

Detroit-based GM said on Thursday several key issues needed to be finalized to get the Opel deal with Magna done.

Magna wants to use plant capacity at Opel by tapping into its expertise in contract manufacturing and building rival models for outside carmakers. It forecasts high growth rates, particularly in Russia, home of consortium partners Sberbank (SBER03.MM) and GAZ (GAZA.RTS).

Under their proposal, Magna and Sberbank would each own 27.5 percent of the company, while Opel employees would hold 10 percent and GM the remaining 35 percent. Some 10,000 European jobs would be cut, a quarter of those in Germany.

(Reporting by Dave Graham in Berlin, Angelika Gruber and Christiaan Hetzner in Frankfurt, and Edward Taylor in Ruesselsheim; Writing by Noah Barkin; Editing by Dan Lalor) ($1 = 0.6898 euros)

WASHINGTON - The Census Bureau reports that the number of people lacking health insurance rose to 46.3 million in 2008.

That’s up from 45.7 million in 2007, due to a continuing erosion of employer-provided insurance. Still, the level remained just below the peak of 47 million who were uninsured in 2006, because of the growth of government insurance programs such as Medicaid for the poor.

The nation’s poverty rate increased to 13.2 percent, up from the 12.5 percent in 2007. That meant there were 39.8 million people living in poverty. It was the highest rate since 1997.

The statistics released Thursday cover the first full year of the current recession.

The median - or midpoint - household income declined slightly to $50,303.