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Nov. 27 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. consumers shopping over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend spent 19 percent more per person than they did last year as retailers slashed prices to attract customers.

According to ShopperTrak RCT Corp., which tracks total sales at more than 45,000 mall-based retail outlets, total sales rose 6 percent to $8.96 billion on Friday, the start of the holiday shopping season, compared to the same day a year ago. (AP)

Nov. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Europe, where worker anger over globalization sparks street protests, is surpassing the U.S. and Japan in the race to reap benefits from the explosion in world trade and investment.

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) -- An Australian inquiry on Monday recommended police pursue criminal charges against 12 business officials in connection with multimillion-dollar kickbacks that the country's monopoly wheat exporter paid under the U.N.'s Iraqi oil-for-food program.

Nov. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Crude oil rose after Saudi Arabia's oil minister said his country may support a second cut in OPEC's output in two months to prop up prices, which have fallen about 24 percent since July.

Detectives will fly to Moscow and Rome this week in an attempt to unravel the mysterious radioactive poisoning in London of Alexander Litvinenko, the Russian defector. (Telegraph UK)

LONDON — A dossier drawn up by Alexander Litvinenko on the Kremlin's takeover of the world’s richest energy giant will be given to Scotland Yard today as police investigate the former KGB spy's secret dealings with some of Russia's richest men.(FOX NEWS)

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Venezuela's leftist President Hugo Chavez on Sunday promised hundreds of thousands of supporters he would win a resounding victory in his December 3 reelection bid he describes as a challenge to Washington.

An investigation was under way last night into Russia's black market trade in radioactive materials amid concern that significant quantities of polonium 210, the substance that killed former spy Alexander Litvinenko, are being stolen from poorly protected Russian nuclear sites. (Observer UK)

POLICE and councils are considering monitoring conversations in the street using high-powered microphones attached to CCTV cameras, write Steven Swinford and Nicola Smith. (Times On Line)

BAGHDAD, Nov. 25 — The insurgency in Iraq is now self-sustaining financially, raising tens of millions of dollars a year from oil smuggling, kidnapping, counterfeiting, connivance by corrupt Islamic charities and other crimes that the Iraqi government and its American patrons have been largely unable to prevent, a classified United States government report has concluded. (NYT)

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) - Vice President Dick Cheney arrived Saturday in Saudi Arabia for talks with King Abdullah, apparently seeking the Sunni royal family's influence and tribal connections to calm Iraq after an especially violent week.

Russia has begun deliveries of the Tor-M1 air defence rocket system to Iran, Russian news agencies quoted military industry sources as saying, in the latest sign of a Russian-US rift over Iran. "Deliveries of the Tor-M1 have begun. The first systems have already been delivered to Tehran," ITAR-TASS quoted an unnamed, high-ranking source as saying Friday. (AFP)

The euro’s strength could put the European Central Bank under fresh political pressure not to raise interest rates again after the expected quarter percentage point rise to 3.5 per cent on December 7. (FT)