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US economist Paul Krugman has won the 2008 Nobel Prize for economics, the prize committee announced here Monday.The prize - also called The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel - went to Krugman for his ‘analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity’.

The prize carries an award of $1.5 million and will be given to Krugman at the annual Nobel prize ceremonies December 10 in Stockholm.

Last year the Nobel was awarded to three US economists, Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson.

Nobel prizes are awarded annually in recognition of achievements in science, literature, economics and for peace, The prizes bearing the name of Alfred Nobel were first awarded in 1901 in accordance with the 1895 will of the Swedish scientist.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was quoted on Monday as saying it was time for British combat forces to leave the south of the country because they were no longer needed to maintain security and control.

Maliki told The Times newspaper in an interview there might still be a need for their experience in training Iraqi forces and on some technological issues, but the emphasis was now on business links.

He thanked U.S.-led forces for their “important help” but said “the page has been turned.”

“The Iraqi arena is open for British companies and British friendship, for economic exchange and positive cooperation in science and education,” he said.

Britain was U.S. President George W. Bush’s main ally in the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq that toppled Saddam Hussein from power.

British troops have helped train the Iraqi army and navy, while a special forces unit based in Baghdad has been used to strike at militants from al Qaeda and other groups. Britain has 4,100 troops in Iraq at present.

Maliki referred to what was widely seen as low point in Britain’s presence in Iraq when its forces left their base in the southern city of Basra last year for a base at the airport on the outskirts.

“They stayed away from the confrontation, which gave the gangs and militias the chance to control the city,” said Maliki.

“The situation deteriorated so badly that corrupted youths were carrying swords and cutting the throats of women and children,” he said.

“The citizens of Basra called out for our help … and (Iraqi forces) moved to regain the city.”

Opposition groups in the Philippines filed an impeachment complaint against President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo on Monday, but admitted they did not have the numbers in Congress to make it stick.Arroyo has fended off three impeachment complaints in each of the past three years with her domination of the House of Representatives.

The complaint accuses Arroyo of corruption, extra-judicial killings, torture and illegal arrests. One of the complainants is a woman whose activist son has been missing for 18 months and is widely suspected to have been abducted by security forces.

But opposition congressman Ronaldo Zamora said of the complaint: “I haven’t seen much interest from other congressmen other than from those in the minority. At this point, we may lack the numbers.”

Opinion polls say Arroyo is the most unpopular Philippine president since late dictator Ferdinand Marcos. But alongside her domination of Congress, she is supported by the army and the powerful Catholic church.

Arroyo’s term in office lasts until 2010 and she is not eligible to seek re-election. Analysts have said political heavyweights are unlikely to join any bid to have her removed by impeachment, preferring to conserve their energies for the 2010 election campaign.

The director of the White House war on drugs said on Monday that Internet videos that show people getting high pose a dangerous threat to teenagers by encouraging them to use drugs and alcohol. John Walters, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, spoke as his office released a study about drug-related videos on popular sites such as MySpace. He said in a Reuters interview that parents need to monitor their teens’ online activities.

The study, which was conducted in June, found that 5 percent of teens using the Internet saw at least one drug-related video that month. More than a third of the teens were under 16.

Walters said the often amateurish videos, posted by Internet users on video-sharing pages and social networking sites, play up everything from cocaine use to smoking marijuana with a device called a bong.

“Parents would be horrified to think that people are sneaking into their house to encourage their kids to build a bong or to chug on beer at age 13,” Walters said.

“The fact is those people are sneaking into your house through your Internet connection on your computer,” he said.

Walters said while the number of teens in the study who viewed drug-related videos was limited to 5 percent, he suspects the number of teens exposed to that content over the course of a year is higher.

DRUG EXPOSURE

The study was conducted for Walters’ agency, by the research firm Nielsen Online and 6,000 teens participated.

The study found 40 percent of the drug-related videos seen by teens in the study contained explicit use of drugs or footage of intoxicated users.

Videos the ONDCP found particularly troublesome included footage of teens driving while getting high or snapping pictures of other teens drunk or passed out.

“Kids already did stupid stuff, but what’s new is kids are recording what they’re doing and broadcasting it for the world in competition for a kind of celebrity,” said Peter Zollo, co-founder and chief executive officer of TRU, a market research firm that studies how teens use the Internet.

Walters said teens rely heavily on the Web for schoolwork, and parents cannot simply pull the plug.

Walters advised parents to check the browser history on their teens’ computer. Also, since the videos are posted on sites where teens meet other Internet users, Walters said parents should look at text messages and incoming and outgoing phone numbers on their teens’ cell phones.

“Nobody’s talking about censorship over the Internet here, what we’re talking about is legitimate parental supervision,” he said.

An Internet game in which players roam a school and kill kindergarten students with a shotgun has been pulled from a Finnish children’s gaming site one week after the country’s worst school shooting.

“We have removed pages from our site that are not necessarily appropriate for younger family members,” lastenpelit.fi said in a statement on its Web site.

The game, “Kindergarten Killer,” can be found widely on the Web.

Matti Saari, 22, last week killed 10 people at a vocational school in Kauhajoki, Finland, in the country’s second school shooting in less than a year. Saari prefaced his rampage with boastful video clips on Web sites such as YouTube.

Finnish student Pekka-Eric Auvinen did the same before shooting six fellow students, the school nurse and the principal to death at Jokela high school last November.

Both Saari and Auvinen shot themselves following their rampages and died later from their injuries.

The Cayman Islands announced plans Tuesday to scuttle a decommissioned U.S. Navy ship to create an underwater attraction for scuba divers and snorkelers.

Ownership of the USS Kittiwake, a 2,290-ton (2,077-metric ton) submarine rescue ship, will be transferred from the U.S. Maritime Administration to the Cayman Islands government as early as next month, project manager Nancy Easterbrook said.

Toxic materials must first be removed by contractors from the vessel built in 1945, before the ship is sunk next year in the Caribbean Sea as an artificial reef. It has been anchored for years among rusting hulks of the James River Reserve Fleet, commonly known as the “Ghost Fleet,” in St. Eustis, Virginia.

The 251-foot (76-meter) Kittiwake should attract large schools of fish to deserted cabins and halls, according to Charles Clifford, the islands’ minister of tourism.

“Our seafaring heritage, our strong interest in presenting varied tourism offerings and our belief in preserving the environment, all played a major role in the decision to acquire this,” Clifford said in a statement.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. A public affairs officer for the U.S. Maritime Administration did not return calls or e-mail.

The Cayman Islands, a British dependency and off-shore banking haven, already is well known among divers around the world.

In 1996, the Caribbean territory sunk a 330-foot (100-meter) Russian destroyer in 60 feet (18 meters) of water off Cayman Brac.

The wreck, now decorated with a thick coating of sponges and corals, has attracted an assortment of tourists and fish.

Former Nepalese Gurkha soldiers on Tuesday won a legal test case on their bid for the right to settle in Britain, their lawyers said.

“Today we have seen a tremendous and historic victory for the gallant Gurkha veterans of Nepal,” said one lawyer, after the High Court ruled in favour of the Gurkhas, some 2,000 of whom could be effected by the verdict.

The Sudanese army said it had killed the leader of a group that kidnapped 11 Western tourists and eight Egyptians on Sunday and said the hostages were now in Chad, the state-run SUNA news agency reported.

The agency quoted a statement from the army as saying one of its units killed five other gunmen and detained two in a gun battle near the Egyptian and Libyan border.

The army said “preliminary information” indicated the 19 hostages were inside Chad under the protection of 30 armed men. There was no comment from the Chadian government.

The army unit seized a white vehicle belonging to an Egyptian tourism company, along with papers linking the gunmen with the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA), a Darfur rebel group, the statement said, according to SUNA.

Several Darfur rebel groups fight under the name of SLA. It was not clear which faction the Sudanese army was referring to.

Khartoum and the Darfurian rebel groups routinely trade accusations of bombings and acts of aggression in Darfur, a war-ravaged area in western Sudan.

Egypt has identified the tourists as five Germans, five Italians and one Romanian. The eight Egyptians include the owner of the tour company whose German wife has been in contact with the kidnappers by satellite phone, according to Egyptian officials.

The Egyptian government and many political analysts have largely ruled out any political motivation behind the kidnapping. Egyptian officials say the kidnappers have demanded a ransom from the German government. One security official put the figure at $6 million euros.

Egypt said this month four masked kidnappers seized the hostages while they were on safari in a remote desert area and took them across the border into Sudan. An Egyptian government official said on Saturday the hostages were inside Sudan.

The Sudanese army, however, said its unit searched for the hostages in the border area with Egypt from Thursday to Sunday but only found empty food cans and “traces of their vehicles in the direction of the Libyan border,” the statement said.

On its way back inside Sudan, the army unit encountered a speeding white vehicle whose passengers refused to stop and opened fire at the Sudanese soldiers, the statement said.

“As a result of the clash, six of the (gunmen) were killed including Bakhit the leader of the kidnappers who is a Chadian national and the capture of two others, one of them Sudanese.”

The statement said the army unit also seized firearms and a rocket-propelled grenade.

A spokesman for the SLA-Unity faction Mahgoub Hussein denied any involvement in the kidnapping.

“The Unity movement emphasizes that it does not have any connection with the kidnapping and no individual members within the kidnapping cell,” he said in a statement. Another SLA faction, headed by Abdel Wahed al-Nur, also denied any involvement.

Hussein told Reuters Unity members in north Darfur, operating close to its borders with Libya and Chad, had reported no Sudanese army activity all day.

But he said two rival groups from another faction of the SLA, one led by Minni Arcua Minnawi, had been fighting each other around the same area on Saturday and Sunday.

Officials from the SLA faction headed by Minnawi, the only rebel leader to sign a peace deal with the Khartoum government in 2006, were not available for comment.

Thousands of Shiites rallied Friday against a proposed U.S.-Iraqi security pact, while one of Iran’s most influential politicians urged Iraq’s government and religious leaders to block the deal.

Followers of anti-U.S.cleric Muqtada al-Sadr have held weekly protests against the deal, which critics fear will extend American military, economic and political domination of the country. They got support Friday from former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

“Americans persistently want to impose the agreement, which surely does not support the interests of Iraq and is harmful to the future of Iraq,” Rafsanjani said during a sermon in Tehran. “God willing, the Iraqi nation — with the awareness and leadership of clerics and the awareness of the Iraqi government — will not allow such a miserable event to happen.”

Rafsanjani heads two of Iran’s most powerful clerical governing bodies, the Expediency Council and the Assembly of Experts.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari criticized Tehran for trying to interfere in the negotiations over the deal, which have stumbled over issues involving immunity and oversight for U.S. forces.

“The people who objected to the agreement right from the start were Hezbollah and the Mahdi Army and some officials in the Islamic Republic,” he told U.S.-funded Alhurra TV, referring to Iran and two Shiite groups it allegedly supports.

“They have expressed strong objections regarding this issue. But in Iraq, we say, and this is the government stance, that this is a sovereign decision,” he said, according to a transcript of the interview, which was held in New York.

Zebari also reiterated that Iraq has insisted as part of the deal that its territory would not be used “as a base or a launching pad for any aggressive actions against any neighboring country.”

The proposed agreement, which has been under negotiation for most of this year, would replace the U.N. mandate. Any agreement must be ratified by the Iraqi parliament.

The main sticking points include Iraqi objections to blanket immunity for U.S. troops and private contractors and demands for oversight over American forces during raids and detentions.

With time running out, a U.S. negotiating team led by top State Department adviser David Satterfield returned this week to Iraq to continue talks.

The deal faces fierce public opposition in Iraq led by the Sadrists, whose leader is believed to be in Iran.

Protesters emerged from Friday prayers in Baghdad’s main Shiite stronghold of Sadr City and the holy city of Kufa, chanting “No to the occupation” and “No to America” and raising pictures of al-Sadr and Iraqi flags.

Supporters believe the deal would help assure Iraq’s Arab neighbors that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite-led government would not become a satellite of Shiite-dominated Iran as the American military role here fades.

U.S. officials have accused Tehran of supporting violence in Iraq. Iran has denied the allegations.

Al-Sadr’s decision to order his militia fighters to cease fire has been cited by the U.S. military as a key factor in a steep drop in violence nationwide, along with a U.S. troop buildup and a Sunni revolt against al-Qaida in Iraq.

But attacks continue to strike U.S. forces as well as Iraqi civilians.

The U.S. military said a roadside bomb killed an American soldier Thursday during a combat patrol near Iskandariyah, south of Baghdad. It said the incident was under investigation.

At least 4,173 members of the U.S. military have died in the Iraq war since it began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

Prosecutors say two men carrying six tubes of a gel explosive have been arrested in central Mexico.

The Attorney General’s Office in Michoacan state says the men were detained outside the city of Morelia. They also had four AK-47 rifles and other guns.

The arrests came less than two weeks after a grenade attack in Morelia killed eight people during Independence Day celebrations.

But officials said there was no immediate indication that Wednesday’s arrests were linked to the attack. It was unclear whether the two men have ties to any drug cartel.

The government says one of two drug gangs may have been behind the grenade attack — La Familia or a group of Gulf Cartel hit men known as the Zetas.