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• "One month ago, President Bush may have expected to end his time in office highlighting the success of the surge in Iraq, a story of vindication. But in the past two weeks, the U.S. economy has teetered at least twice," the Washington Times reports. "Now, instead of an exit in which Iraq was a large part of the legacy conversation, Mr. Bush is confronted with a final 15 weeks full of questions about how much he is to blame for the economic crisis."

• "Bush flew to the family ranch over the weekend after weeks of bad news back in Washington, from the nation's ongoing financial crisis to polls showing his popularity hitting new lows," the Washington Post reports. "Yet, to the White House, the tide of negative headlines has obscured a series of significant legislative victories for a president wrongly written off as a lame duck."

• "The Supreme Court opens its new term" today "with arguments over limits on lawsuits against tobacco companies," AP reports. "The court will consider whether federal regulation of cigarettes prevents smokers from suing tobacco companies under state law for allegedly deceptive advertising of 'light' cigarettes."

• "For sheer drama, it's going to be difficult to top the last term of the Supreme Court. In 2007-08, the justices took on some of the most fundamental and complex legal issues of the moment, from gun rights to the death penalty to the plight of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba," the Chicago Tribune reports. "This term, which starts" today, "offers a more low-key slate, but the issues remain absorbing."

• "Home health care costs charged to Medicare in the Miami area have risen 20 times the national average in the past five years, prompting a federal investigation of suspected fraudulent billing," USA Today reports. "Miami-Dade County is on track to cost Medicare a projected $1.3 billion for home health care services this fiscal year, up 1,300% in just five years, government data show."

Congress: Jefferson In Primary Runoff

• "Sen. Ted Stevens's defense attorneys accused the Justice Department Sunday of 'intentionally' mishandling key evidence in their latest call for a full dismissal of the Alaska Republican's seven-count indictment," The Hill reports. "The accusation will be the focus of a status hearing scheduled for" this "morning that could determine whether the criminal case against the Senate's most senior Republican will proceed."

• "House Republicans defended 'deregulation' in advance of House Oversight and Government Reform hearings designed to assign blame for the financial market crisis that prompted Congress to pass a $700 billion rescue plan last week," The Hill reports. "'In the midst of the most serious financial crisis in a generation, some claim that deregulation is entirely to blame,' states the report, which was written by Republican staff on the oversight committee."

• "Richard Fuld, the chief executive officer of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., may tell legislators angry about Wall Street's excesses that eroding confidence in the financial system led to the demise of his firm," Bloomberg News reports. "Fuld's testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform later today will be his first public appearance since Sept. 10, five days before New York-based Lehman filed for bankruptcy."

• "Indicted U.S. Rep. William Jefferson had a quarter of voters on his side as he overcame scandal to come in first in Louisiana's Democratic primary," AP reports. "Now, as he faces a runoff against a former television journalist, Jefferson also has demographics and history on his side."

Iraq: Turkish Anger Mounts Over PKK Attacks

• "A suicide bomber detonated an explosives-laden vest inside a home in northern Iraq as U.S. forces were trading gunfire with its occupants, according to the American military," the Washington Post reports. "Eleven Iraqis were killed in the operation early Sunday."

• "Turkey staged retaliatory airstrikes against Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq on Sunday as thousands of Turks attended rain-lashed funerals for 15 soldiers killed by the rebels in a cross-border attack," the Post reports. "Public anger mounted in Turkey at the inability of civilian leaders to stop attacks by the rebel Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK."

• "Poland turned over control of an area south of Baghdad to American troops on Saturday, making it the latest in a string of countries to leave the dwindling U.S.-led coalition," the Los Angeles Times reports.

• "A ring of scaffolding around charred bricks is all that now stands in place of the golden dome that adorned one of Shi'ite Islam's holiest shrines. Militants bombed the al-Askari mosque in the Iraqi city of Samarra in February 2006, destroying the dome and setting off a wave of sectarian bloodshed that killed tens of thousands of people and nearly tipped the country into all-out civil war," Reuters reports. "Now, with violence sharply down and Iraq's coffers swollen with oil revenues, officials hope the mosque can be restored to its former majestic glory in a few years. That could help heal bitter divisions between majority Shi'ites and minority Sunnis, they say."

Nation: Bailout Measure Includes Increased Mental Health Coverage

• "Hurricane Ike's winds and massive waves destroyed oil platforms, tossed storage tanks and punctured pipelines. The environmental damage only now is becoming apparent: At least a half million gallons of crude oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico and the marshes, bayous and bays of Louisiana and Texas, according to an analysis of federal data by The Associated Press."

• "Great Lakes water cannot be diverted to thirsty areas elsewhere in the United States and abroad under an agreement approved Friday by President Bush," AP reports. "Approval of the Great Lakes Compact was the final step in a nearly decadelong quest to strengthen legal protections for the use of water from the five Great Lakes, their connecting channels and the St. Lawrence River."

• "More than one-third of all Americans will soon receive better insurance coverage for mental health treatments because of a new law that, for the first time, requires equal coverage of mental and physical illnesses," the New York Times reports. "The requirement, included in the economic bailout bill that President Bush signed on Friday, is the result of 12 years of passionate advocacy by friends and relatives of people with mental illness and addiction disorders."

• "This place was once no place, a secret military base northeast of Moscow that did not show up on maps." But "in two years Star City will be the only place to send astronauts from any nation to the International Space Station," the Times reports. "From 2010, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration shuts down the space shuttle program, to 2015, when the next generation of American spacecraft is scheduled to arrive, NASA expects to have no human flight capacity and will depend on Russia to get to the $100 billion station, buying seats on Soyuz craft as space tourists do."

• "This is strange territory. The Dow is down. Wall Street needs a bailout. But in the Washington area and across the country, there is still a bull market in environmental guilt," the Washington Post reports. "Sales of carbon offsets -- whose buyers pay hard cash to make amends for their sins against the climate -- are up. Still. In some cases, the prices have actually been climbing."

Economy: Consumers Close Wallets In Response To Crisis

• "Cowed by the financial crisis, American consumers are pulling back on their spending, all but guaranteeing that the economic situation will get worse before it gets better," the New York Times reports. "In response to the falling value of their homes and high gasoline prices, Americans have become more frugal all year. But in recent weeks, as the financial crisis reverberated from Wall Street to Washington, consumers appear to have cut back sharply."

• "The Treasury Department plans to tap Neel Kashkari, an assistant secretary of international affairs and a former Goldman Sachs banker, to oversee the government's $700 billion financial rescue program, sources familiar with the situation said" Sunday, the Washington Post reports. "Kashkari has been a close adviser to Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. on the credit crisis and helped draft the legislation for the massive rescue plan."

• "The Federal Reserve and US Treasury were on Sunday night under increasing pressure to follow passage of the $700bn financial rescue plan with further measures to shock the ailing credit markets back to life," the Financial Times reports. "Among the options available to policymakers are additional liquidity operations and an emergency rate cut -- possibly in co-ordination with other central banks. A combination of the two is also possible."

• "A decade ago, the U.S. directed the International Monetary Fund to put together bailout packages worth tens of billions of dollars each for Russia and Asian nations. With the U.S. now in the financial emergency ward, Washington doesn't need IMF money, but it could use the agency's help in other ways," the Wall Street Journal (subscription) reports. "This weekend, central bankers and finance ministers from around the globe will descend on Washington for the IMF and World Bank annual meetings."

• "A high-stakes battle over who will gain control of the nation's fourth-largest bank intensified over the weekend, with the Federal Reserve acting as a go-between in the pursuit of Wachovia by both Citigroup and Wells Fargo," the Washington Post reports. "Wachovia agreed Friday to be bought by Wells Fargo, spurning Citigroup, which had agreed to buy most of the troubled bank a few days earlier."

World: Saudi King Brokers Talks Between Taliban & Afghan Government

• "The financial storm that crossed the Atlantic into Europe is exposing limits of economic coordination within the 27-nation European Union that belie the bloc's history," the Washington Times reports. "The weekend failure of the region's four economic heavyweights -- France, Germany, Italy and Britain -- to follow the U.S. in crafting a unified financial bailout is raising alarm among officials and analysts, who worry that the European Union is also buffeted by Washington-style partisanship."

• "Taliban leaders are holding Saudi-brokered talks with the Afghan government to end the country's bloody conflict -- and are severing their ties with al Qaeda, sources close to the historic discussions have told CNN. The militia, which has been intensifying its attacks on the U.S.-led coalition that toppled it from power in 2001 for harboring Osama bin Laden's terrorist network, has been involved [in] four days of talks hosted by Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, says the source."

• "Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Sunday that America was not playing a 'zero-sum game' with the Kremlin to pry resource-rich former Communist states from Russia's influence," the New York Times reports. "Ms. Rice's statements came against a backdrop of heightened tension between the United States and Russia, along with growing indications that the balance of power among the former Soviet republics may be tilting toward the Kremlin."

• "Russian troops withdrew from a checkpoint outside the Georgian separatist region of South Ossetia, raising hopes that Moscow will complete its pullout by Oct. 10 as promised," the Wall Street Journal reports. "Russia's withdrawal from the buffer zones it occupied around South Ossetia and Abkhazia, another separatist region, is a vital element of the European-brokered peace deal that ended the five-day war with Georgia in August."

• "Fourteen years after the end of apartheid, South Africa -- the global pariah that became a global inspiration -- has lapsed into gloom and anxiety about its future, surely not the harmonious 'rainbow nation' so celebrated by Nelson Mandela on his inauguration day," the New York Times reports.

• In India, "44 bomb blasts in six cities have killed more than 150 people since May," the Washington Post reports. "Public outrage over the bombings has focused largely on poor police investigations and the government's inability to prevent attacks. But an equally pressing problem is the overburdened health system, according to surgeons, emergency response experts and others frustrated by India's trauma services."

• "The birthplace of one of Mexico's most infamous drug cartels looks more and more like its graveyard," the Los Angeles Times reports from Tijuana. "Gunmen and associates of the Arellano Felix cartel, rulers of the city's criminal underworld for two decades, are being massacred by the score."

• "A Tamil Tiger suicide bomber triggered a blast inside offices of the main opposition party in Sri Lanka" today, "killing at least 27 people, including a senior retired general, officials said," Agence France-Presse reports. "The attack in the northern town of Anuradhapura came as the Sri Lankan military appeared on the verge of capturing the Tigers' key headquarters as part of a major offensive in the drawn-out ethnic conflict."

Campaigns: Rivals Trade Sharp Jabs

• With Election Day less than a month away, the Keating Five scandal and '60s radical William Ayers are playing key roles in negative advertising. Earlybird's Campaign News section has more.

Commentary: All Quiet On The SCOTUS Front

• Editorialists foresee a less politically charged Supreme Court term in Earlybird's Pundits & Editorials section.