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DETROIT (Reuters) - United Auto Workers bargaining teams are arriving this week in Detroit as the union gears up for negotiations with General Motors Corp and Chrysler LLC, which are mandated to cut labor costs under a $17.4 billion federal bailout. UAW leaders were converging for a series of internal meetings to prepare for talks with the automakers, who have until March 31 to wrangle stee ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Robert Gates has told Congress that a planned buildup of U.S. forces in Afghanistan could add $5.5 billion to U.S. war costs in the current federal fiscal year, officials said on Wednesday. The cost estimate is contained in an addendum to a letter dated December 31 that Gates sent to U.S. House of Representatives Defense Appropriations Subcommittee C ...

By Burton Frierson NEW YORK (Reuters) - Job losses and plans to lay off workers hammered the struggling U.S. economy in the final month of 2008, according to private reports that could foreshadow surprisingly grim labor market data from the government on Friday. U.S. private employers shed 693,000 jobs in December, up sharply from the revised 476,000 jobs lost in November and far mor ...

By Richard Cowan and Jeremy Pelofsky WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. budget deficit will swell to a record $1.186 trillion in fiscal 2009 as the global recession saps the economy, congressional forecasters said on Wednesday, presenting a daunting challenge to President-elect Barack Obama who has said tough choices will be necessary. The Congressional Budget Office also forecast the d ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In an abrupt switch, Senate Democratic leaders began talks on Wednesday about swearing in former Illinois attorney general Roland Burris, nominated by embattled Gov. Rod Blagojevich to replace President-elect Barack Obama in the Senate. The turnaround came a day after Burris was barred from the Senate chamber when he arrived to take the oath of office. Senate D ...

By Tabassum Zakaria WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President-elect Barack Obama should seek tougher sanctions against Iran, which will be his biggest Middle East challenge, outgoing White House national security adviser Stephen Hadley said on Wednesday. In a speech to be delivered at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Hadley also said the outgoing Bush administration had lai ...

PARIS (Reuters) - French President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Wednesday Israel and the Palestinian Authority had accepted a truce plan for Gaza announced by Egypt on Tuesday. "The president is delighted by the acceptance by Israel and the Palestinian Authority of the Franco-Egyptian plan presented last night in Sharm el-Sheikh by (Egyptian) President (Hosni) Mubarak," said a statement from Sar ...

By Ek Madra PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - Thousands of Cambodian survivors of the Khmer Rouge "Killing Fields" marked 30 years Wednesday since the fall of Pol Pot's ultra-Maoist regime, blamed for the deaths of 1.7 million people. Up to 80,000 people packed into the capital's Olympic stadium for a rally organized by the ruling Cambodian People's Party (CPP), descendant of the puppet governm ...

(Reuters) - Investors who lost money in Bernard Madoff's alleged $50 billion fraud might begin recovering some of their funds as soon as next month, Securities Investor Protection Corp, President Stephen Harbeck told Bloomberg in an interview. The first payouts from the investor protection fund could occur in "a month or two" if the cash isn't difficult to trace, Harbeck told the agency.  ...

BOSTON (Reuters) - Average rents for U.S. apartments fell in the fourth quarter, as a sharp economic downturn and rising unemployment left Americans unwilling to pay higher prices, according to data released on Wednesday. Rents fell 0.4 percent in the final quarter of 2008, the first decline since early 2003, the study by real estate research firm Reis Inc found. The vacancy rate ros ...