Hurricane warnings still on for coast from Mississippi to Florida as Ida weakens over Gulf

The first hurricane this year to threaten the U.S. Gulf Coast weakened early Monday but could still pack hurricane-strength winds and storm surges when it hits the shore overnight.

Warnings ahead of Hurricane Ida extended more than 200 miles across several states, although residents seemed to take the late-season storm in stride. Ida is the third hurricane of this year’s Atlantic season, which ends Dec. 1. The first two stayed far out to sea.

There were no immediate plans for mandatory evacuations. But authorities in some coastal area were opening shelters and encouraging people who live near the water or in mobile homes to leave.

“Even though we’re telling everybody to be prepared, my gut tells me it probably won’t be that bad,” said Steve Arndt, director of Bay Point Marina Co. in Panama City, Fla.

Transit System, Largest Union Reach a Deal 6 Days After Walk-Off, Just in Time for the Monday Rush

Gov. Ed Rendel, right and Mayor Michael Nutter, left, announce that the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority had reached an agreement with its largest labor union on new contract provisions to end the strike, Nov. 9, 2009, in Philadelphia.

Representatives of Philadelphia’s transit system and its largest union signed a contract early Monday, bringing an end to a strike that idled the city’s subways, buses and trolleys for six days.

“The strike is over,” Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell told reporters at a hastily called news conference in the lobby of a Philadelphia hotel. The governor said the transit system would be back up and running in time for Monday morning’s commute.

About 5,000 workers of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority walked off the job early last Tuesday in a dispute centered around pension benefits.

“This was a team effort, and that’s what it takes to get a deal done,” Mayor Michael Nutter said, crediting the intervention of the governor and U.S. Rep. Robert Brady, D-Pa.

Willie Brown, president of the Transport Workers Local 234, said a ratification vote will likely be held in about a week and a half, and he expects members to approve the contract.

Rendell and Brady had announced a tentative agreement late Friday, but it fell apart Saturday over the union’s call for an independent forensic audit of the pension fund and assurance that members would not be affected if the company’s costs increased with possible passage of a national health reform plan.

Brady said reports that negotiations had broken off were wrong.

“I never stopped talking to him, I never stopped talking to him, I never stopped talking to him,” he said, pointing to Brown, the governor and other officials.

The governor said changes to the language regarding national health care and another change on dental benefits cleared the way for a deal. On the union’s call for a forensic audit of pension funds, the governor said the union’s two members on the pension fund’s advisory board could call for such an audit “so that became a non-issue.”

The union had threatened to strike while the World Series was in town, but negotiators continued bargaining after Rendell threatened consequences if that happened. The union went on strike early Tuesday, hours after the series between the Phillies and Yankees shifted back to New York.

Regional SEPTA trains have continued to run because their workers are represented by a different union, but the system has seen packed trains and problems of its own. A railcar heading downtown caught fire Wednesday, causing delays and confusion but no serious injuries.

On Thursday, a train struck and killed a rail worker, stranding hundreds of riders during the morning rush hour. The agency said neither accident was related to increased volume due to the strike

U.S. Missile Strikes against Camps Force Militants to Rely Heavily on Local Pakistani Groups, Move More

Pakistani police officers sit next to weapons confiscated during a search operation in an area on display for media at a police station in Bannu, a town on the edge of Waziristan region

Under growing pressure from U.S. missile strikes, the al Qaeda terror network is relying more heavily on local insurgent groups along the Pakistan border to house training camps that are growing smaller and more mobile, according to counterterrorism officials and analysts.

The changes in the terror group’s training operations - often hidden inside walled compounds deep in Pakistan’s mountains - have made them increasingly difficult to target by U.S. intelligence forces as they have stepped up drone attacks over the past year.

While the training still includes forays into deserted hillsides to practice planting and detonating explosives, al Qaeda trainers are now also taking their instruction on the road, moving temporary training operations from compound to compound, where fellow insurgents welcome them.

The attacks on the camps, which have become an integral part of the Obama administration’s war against the terror group, also risk civilian casualties - which in turn have inflamed anti-American sentiment among the Pakistanis, critical allies in widening the anti-terror campaign.

The camps took on a heightened profile in recent months as U.S. investigators probed the case of accused New York terror suspect Najibullah Zazi. The Afghan emigre reportedly flew to Pakistan late last year and traveled to Peshawar, in the northwest frontier, where he received training on weapons and explosives.

Counterterrorism officials estimate that Zazi is one of 100 to 150 westerners who have gone to the Pakistan border region for terror training in the last year. Their ability to filter in and out of the isolated camps has fueled fears that “sleeper” operatives bearing U.S. or western passports are traveling back and forth with ease to train and plot attacks destined within America’s borders.

Several officials provided details about the camps on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters and other experts acknowledged the trends.

Counterterrorism officials and analysts say an exact number of camps along the border is impossible to pin down, but say they are easily in the dozens.

Vahid Brown, a researcher at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, said that recent trends suggest al Qaeda is now moving its trainers and resources around, operating within camps operated by a variety of militant groups, including some that have long-standing relationships with Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and military intelligence.

That indirect protection offers al Qaeda some degree of security it might not have on its own, he said.

Militant groups that have provided al Qaeda with training centers include Jaish-e-Mohammed, Lashkar-e-Janghvi, and Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan - factions that have connections to Taliban insurgents and have also been linked to brutal attacks against the government. Jaish-e-Mohammed was known for ties to the Pakistani military, but more has recently sided with Taliban militants to fight security forces along the border.

The groups have reportedly hosted al Qaeda training in compounds in Waziristan and Swat Valley, and officials have more recently started seeing similar activities in the Punjab province, where some militant groups have stronger ties to the Pakistani government.

“Al Qaeda doesn’t have local relationship that allow for these kinds of camps to be operated in more or less full view,” said Brown. “It makes more sense for al Qaeda strategy to not put their eggs into one stable basket and try to be its own training provider, but rather to use its portable training resources and assets as a means of extending the violence.”

Gone are the days, said officials and analysts, when al Qaeda leaders filled sprawling open-air training camps inside Afghanistan with terror recruits from around the world. Such bases as Tarnack Farms, a massive camp outside Kandahar’s airport where Osama bin Laden was believed to have plotted the Sept. 11 attacks, contained busy firing ranges and other facilities, but were also easy to detect.

Now, smaller temporary camps hidden inside stark stone buildings blend in with surrounding nondescript mountain compounds that can house innocent civilians.

“All you need is a shack or a house to learn how to fabricate explosives using homemade or commercially available ingredients,” said Bruce Hoffman, a counterterrorism expert at Georgetown University and a longtime government adviser.

Hoffman adds that in these harder-to-find camps, “they’re not training insurgents, they’re training terrorists for deployment to the west … Some of them may be deployed in the insurgency, but I think its obvious that their value to these groups is not fighting on the battlefield in South Asia but in being deployed back to their home or adopted countries as sleepers.”

In a recently released al Qaeda Internet video filmed inside one nameless camp, a camera pans across open laptop computers and lingers on a sleeping bag covered with explosives and electronic equipment. Shelves are filled with canisters holding unknown material, as well as electronic scales, often used to measure explosives.

Hanging from the walls are a panoply of automatic weapons and other guns, and outside, spread across a blanket, lay rocket propelled grenade launchers and an ammunition display.

According to the Washington-based Site Intelligence Group, which monitors militant Web sites and made the video available, the footage - posted on jihadist forums about a month ago - supposedly shows a training camp in Pakistan’s Waziristan region. The anonymous Web poster, according to Site, suggested the video showed a camp where slain al Qaeda chemical weapons expert Abu Khabab al-Masri trained militants.

Al-Masri was killed in a drone strike in July 2008 - one of as many as 50 such attacks in the last year conducted by the U.S. Most of the strikes have been coordinated by the CIA, but U.S. officials will not discuss or acknowledge details of the drone program.

Between 100 and 200 hard-core al Qaeda leaders and operatives filter in and out of these small bases near the border, U.S. intelligence officials have said. But for westerners such as Zazi, the path to the training camps often begins with a religious pilgrimage of sorts, linked inside Pakistan to a charitable organization, missionary or school known as a madrassa.

According to Brown, the madrassas, which are historically nonviolent organizations, have also had long-standing ties with jihadi groups.

“They can be used as a revolving door by folks from the west who want to make it to training camps,” said Brown. People within those nonviolent organizations, he said, will say, “if you want to be violent, you have to leave us, but here’s an address and a letter of introduction” for a recruiter from one of the militant groups.

Officials stress that even though the terror training is now far more mobile than it once was, it remains no less sophisticated or deadly.

“Certainly their ambition is to mount headline-grabbing attacks, visual spectaculars,” said Richard Barrett, coordinator of the monitoring team for the U.N.’s Al Qaeda and Taliban Sanctions Committee. “They are extremely suspicious of anyone coming in and are very careful of security, so it’s quite difficult to make these contacts and to develop them.”

The militants, he said, “are patient people. They will wait for the tide to turn or a lucky break.”

Shani Davis Sets Course Record in 1,500-Meter at Olympic Qualifiers in Berlin

Shani Davis of the U.S. skates on his way to win the men’s 1,500-meter at the Speed Skating World Cup in Berlin,

Shani Davis set a course record in winning the 1,500 meters in the speedskating World Cup.

Davis, the 1,000-meter Olympic champion, covered the distance in 1 minute, 44.47 seconds in the opening meet of the season.

Davis was more than a second faster than Havard Bokko of Norway, who took second in 1:45.56. Denny Morrison of Canada was third in 1:45.69.

American Tucker Fredricks upset the favored South Koreans to win the 500-meter race Sunday for his sixth career speedskating World Cup victory.

Fredericks clocked 35.06 seconds to edge Lee Kang-seok and Lee Kyou-hyuk, who were both timed in 35.10, with Lee Kang-seok getting second place on a photo finish.

Christine Nesbitt of Canada equaled the course record in winning the women’s 1,500 in 1:55.54. Martina Sablikova of the Czech Republic was second in 1:56.99 and another Canadian, Brittany Schussler, third in 1:57.26.

Jenny Wolf of Germany posted her 41st World Cup victory and broke the course record in winning the 500 in 37.52 seconds. Wang Beixing of China was second in 37.94 and Annette Gerritsen of the Netherlands took third in 38.27.

(AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

On Saturday, Katherine Reutter of the United States won the women’s 1,500 meters.

(Left: Christine Nesbitt from Canada skates winning the women’s 1,500-meter at the Speed Skating World Cup in Berlin, Nov. 8, 2009. In the bachground is Canada’s Cindy Klassen.)

Reutter finished in 2:23.275 seconds to beat Ha-Ri Cho of South Korea. Cho crossed in 2:23.349 and Liu Qiuhong of China was third in 2:23.371.

Wang Meng of China won the women’s 500 ahead of Kalyna Roberge of Canada. Zhao Nannan of China was third.

The skaters are working to secure spots in Olympic competition this February in Vancouver. The results from this week will be combined with rankings next weekend in Marquette, Michigan.

Disney’s animated version of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol has topped the North American box office chart in its first weekend on release.

However, its $31m (£18.5m) haul was less than some had expected it to make in cinemas in the US and Canada.

According to Disney, nearly three-quarters of A Christmas Carol’s sales came from cinemas showing it in 3D.

Jim Carrey plays the miserly Scrooge in the film, which uses a hi-tech form of animation called motion capture.

Last week’s top movie, Michael Jackson concert documentary This Is It, fell to second place in this week’s rundown.

According to studio estimates, the film - constructed from rehearsal footage shot shortly before the singer’s death in June - made $14m (£8.3m) between Friday and Sunday.

Urban drama

That put it narrowly ahead of George Clooney’s military comedy The Men Who Stare At Goats, whose $13.3m (£7.9m) takings saw it occupy third place in the chart.

Alien abduction thriller The Fourth Kind took a fitting fourth place with admissions totalling an estimated $12.5m (£7.4m).

That put it ahead of two other horror movies, Paranormal Activity at five and The Box at six.

Low-budget shocker Paranormal Activity continues to surprise the industry, its weekend takings of $8.6m (£5.1m) pushing its overall tally close to $100m (£59.6m).

But The Box, a supernatural thriller starring Cameron Diaz, performed disappointingly, making a lacklustre $7.9m (£4.7m) in its first weekend in cinemas.

The weekend’s most impressive performer was Precious, a hard-hitting urban drama about an abused high school student.

Despite opening in just 18 cinemas in four US cities, the film - which features singer Mariah Carey in a supporting role - took a promising $1.8m (£1m).