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Attacks against al-Qaida’s favorite targets in Iraq killed 14 people Monday as insurgents struck security forces, a government office and jewelry stores, demonstrating a continued threat from armed groups as the country prepares to host a meeting of the Arab world’s top leaders.

Security officials expect al-Qaida to ramp up violence over the next few weeks as Baghdad prepares to host the annual Arab League summit at the end of the month.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Monday’s strikes, and numerous armed groups in Iraq have mixed attacks on political targets with money-making criminal operations. But al-Qaida in Iraq for years has been believed to fund itself in part with cash and gold stolen from jewelry stores.

Militants struck first in a pre-dawn raid Monday in the city of Tarmiyah, 30 miles (50 kilometers) north of Baghdad, where police said gunmen in at least two cars attacked the local mayor’s office. Three policemen were killed, police and health officials said. The mayor was not in his office at the time.

A half hour later and a few miles (kilometers) away, gunmen targeted a police patrol in a drive-by shooting. Two policemen were killed, officials said, and it was not known if the gunmen were the same group who attacked the mayor’s office.

A few hours later, two carloads of robbers armed with grenades and guns killed nine people and wounded 14 in a coordinated strike on an eastern Baghdad gold market, officials said. The militants simultaneously attacked jewelry stores and a nearby checkpoint.

Baghdad officials said two policemen, two soldiers and two goldsmiths were among the dead at the small market in the Shiite neighborhood of Ur.

“At first we heard shootings from the other side of the market, near the police checkpoint,” said eyewitness Maitham Moussa, 30, who owns of a dairy shop about 50 yards (meters) from the jewelry stores payday advance low fees. “Then we heard shootings very close to us. When the women started to yell, they started to open fire into the air and set off sound bombs.”

He said people fled the area and huddled together in a nearby alley to escape the siege. “I saw a woman was lying on the ground with a toddler,” Moussa said. “There was blood near the woman, but I’m not sure if she was injured or if was the baby’s blood.”

A police officer said the gunmen stole gold and cash after the late-morning heist, which the insurgents pulled off despite a gunfight with nearby security forces. Iraqi Army Gen. Hassan al-Baydhani of Baghdad’s military command said one of the gunmen was arrested but the rest escaped.

A doctor in a nearby Baghdad hospital confirmed the police casualty figures. They all spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to release information. Al-Baydhani put the number of dead at six. Conflicting casualty totals are common in the immediate aftermath of attacks in Iraq.

Although violence has dropped significantly since the sectarian fighting that brought Iraq to the edge of civil war just five years ago, deadly attacks still happen almost every day.

U.S. officials as recently as September said jewelry robberies were a main source of funding for al-Qaida in Iraq as it grapples with dwindling financial support. The Sunni militant movement also frequently targets officials of the Shiite-led government in a campaign to undermine confidence in its authority.

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The solar storm that seemed to be more fizzle than fury got much stronger early Friday before fading again.

At its peak, it was the most potent solar storm since 2004, space weather forecasters said.

No power outages or other technological disturbances were reported from the solar storm that started to peter out late Friday morning.

Solar storms, which can’t hurt people, can disturb electric grids, GPS systems, and satellites. They can also spread colorful Northern Lights further south than usual, as the latest storm did early Friday.

And more storms are coming. The federal government’s Space Weather Prediction Center says the same area of the sun erupted again Thursday night, with a milder storm expected to reach Earth early Sunday.

The latest storm started with a flare on Tuesday, and had been forecast to be strong and direct, with one scientist predicting it would blast Earth directly like a punch in the nose. But it arrived Thursday morning at mild levels _ at the bottom of the government’s 1-5 scale of severity. It strengthened to a level 3 for several hours early Friday as the storm neared its end. Scientists say that’s because the magnetic part of the storm flipped direction.

“We were watching the boxer, expecting the punch. It didn’t come,” said physicist Terry Onsager at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s space weather center in Boulder, Colo. “It hit us with the back of the hand as it was retreating.”

Forecasters can predict a solar storm’s speed and strength, but not the direction of its magnetic field. If it is northward, like Earth’s, the jolt of energy flows harmlessly around the planet, Onsager said. A southerly direction can cause power outages and other problems.

Thursday’s storm came in northerly, but early Friday switched to the fierce southerly direction. The magnetic part of the storm spent several hours at that strong level, so combined with strong radiation and radio levels, it turned out to be the strongest solar storm since November 2004, said NOAA lead forecaster Bob Rutledge.

Skywatchers reported to NOAA shimmering colorful auroras in Michigan, Wisconsin and Seattle _ areas that don’t normally see the Northern Lights _ Rutledge said. Other space weather enthusiasts reported auroras in Alaska, Minnesota, and North Dakota and in the southern hemisphere in Australia and New Zealand.

“Up north, they got a great display,” said NASA solar physicist David Hathaway.

By late Friday morning the storm was essentially over, forecasters said. But they had a new flare from the same sunspot region to watch. Preliminary forecasts show it to be slightly weaker than the one that just hit, arriving somewhere around 1 a.m. EST Sunday.

The storms are part of the sun’s normal 11-year cycle, which is supposed to reach a peak next year.

“This is what we’re expecting as we approach solar maximum,”" Onsager said. “We should be seeing this for the next few years now.”

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Bank of America announced plans Thursday to freeze pension plans, effective in July, and increase its 401(k) contributions instead.

Eligible employees will keep the pension benefits that they’ve earned to date but will not receive additional benefits, Bank of America (, Fortune 500) spokesman Scott Silvestri said.

The company will instead begin making an additional 2-3% annual contribution to employees’ 401(k) accounts, on top of the existing program that matches employee contributions up to 5%.

"Making these changes simplifies our offerings, gives employees control in managing their retirement savings and ensures our retirement benefits remain competitive," Silvestri said in an email instant payday loan lenders.

U.S. companies are increasingly moving away from traditional pensions and toward 401(k) plans in an effort to save costs and minimize funding uncertainty. Last week, General Motors (, Fortune 500) announced that it had shifted its senior salaried workers away from a traditional pension plan to a 401(k) plan.

Bank of America had roughly 282,000 full-time employees as of December. In September, the bank announced plans to eliminate 30,000 positions over the next few years. 

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China is clamping down on overcapacity in the world

Iran is poised to greatly expand uranium enrichment at a fortified underground bunker to a point that would boost how quickly it could make nuclear warheads, diplomats tell The Associated Press.

They said Tehran has put finishing touches for the installation of thousands of new-generation centrifuges at the cavernous facility _ machines that can produce enriched uranium much more quickly and efficiently than its present machines.

While saying that the electrical circuitry, piping and supporting equipment for the new centrifuges was now in place, the diplomats emphasized that Tehran had not started installing the new machines at its Fordo facility and could not say whether it was planning to.

Still, the senior diplomats _ who asked for anonymity because their information was privileged _ suggested that Tehran would have little reason to prepare the ground for the better centrifuges unless it planned to operate them. They spoke in recent interviews _ the last one Saturday.

The reported work at Fordo appeared to reflect Iran’s determination to forge ahead with nuclear activity that could be used to make atomic arms despite rapidly escalating international sanctions and the latent threat of an Israeli military strike on its nuclear facilities.

Fordo could be used to make fissile warhead material even without such an upgrade, the diplomats said.

They said that although older than Iran’s new generation machines, the centrifuges now operating there can be reconfigured within days to make such material because they already are enriching to 20 percent _ a level that can be boosted quickly to weapons-grade quality.

Their comments appeared to represent the first time anyone had quantified the time it would take to reconfigure the Fordo centrifuges into machines making weapons-grade material.

In contrast, Iran’s older enrichment site at Natanz is producing uranium at 3.4 percent, a level normally used to power reactors. While that too could be turned into weapons-grade uranium, reassembling from low to weapons-grade production is complex, and retooling the thousands of centrifuges at Natanz would likely take weeks.

The diplomats’ recent comments came as International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors are scheduled to visit Tehran on Sunday. Their trip _ the second this month _ is another attempt to break more than three years of Iranian stonewalling about allegations that Tehran has _ or is _ secretly working on nuclear weapons that would be armed with uranium enriched to 90 percent or more.

Diplomats accredited to the IAEA expect little from that visit. They told the AP that _ as before _ Iran was refusing to allow the agency experts to visit Parchin, the suspected site of explosives testing for a nuclear weapon and had turned down other key requests made by the experts.

Iranian officials deny nuclear weapons aspirations, saying the claims are based on bogus intelligence from the U.S. and Israel.

But IAEA chief Yukiya Amano has said there are increasing indications of such activity. His concerns were outlined in 13-page summary late last year listing clandestine activities that either can be used in civilian or military nuclear programs, or “are specific to nuclear weapons.”

Among these were indications that Iran has conducted high explosives testing and detonator development to set off a nuclear charge, as well as computer modeling of a core of a nuclear warhead. The report also cited preparatory work for a nuclear weapons test and development of a nuclear payload for Iran’s Shahab 3 intermediate range missile _ a weapon that could reach Israel.

Iran says it is enriching only to make nuclear fuel. But because enrichment can also create fissile warhead material, the U.N. Security Council has imposed sanctions on Tehran in a failed attempt to force it to stop.

More recently, the U.S., the European Union and other Western allies have either tightened up their own sanctions or rapidly put new penalties in place striking at the heart of Iran’s oil exports lifeline and its financial system.

The most recent squeeze on Iran was announced Friday, when SWIFT, a financial clearinghouse used by virtually every country and major corporation in the world, agreed to shut out the Islamic Republic from its network.

Diplomats say the choke-holds are being applied in part to persuade Israel to hold off on potential military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities _ among them Fordo, a main Israeli concern because it is dug deep into a mountain and could be impervious to the most powerful bunker busting bombs.

Diplomats told the AP earlier this month that Iran had added two new series or cascades of old-generation IR-1 centrifuges to its Fordo operation, meaning 348 centrifuges were now operating in four cascades.

Olli Heinonen, who retired last year as the IAEA’s chief Iran inspector, recently estimated that these machines, and two other cascades at Natanz can produce around 15 kilograms (more than 30 pounds) of 20-percent enriched uranium a month, using Iran’s tons of low-enriched uranium as feedstock.

The low and higher enriched uranium now being produced “provides the basic material needed to produce four to five nuclear weapons,” Heinonen said.

But he suggested “an altogether different scenario” _ a much quicker pace of enrichment to levels easily turned into weapons-capable uranium if Iran starts using newer, more powerful centrifuges at Fordo. That, said the diplomats, is exactly what Iran appears to be on the verge of doing by finishing preparatory work recently for new centrifuge installations.

Fordo, which can house 3,000 centrifuges, was confidentially revealed to the IAEA by Iran in 2009, just days before the U.S. and Britain jointly announced its existence.

Iran announced last year that it would move its 20-percent uranium production to Fordo from Natanz and sharply boost capacity. It started making higher grade material two years ago saying it needed it to fuel a research reactor.

But the U.S. and others question the rationale, pointing out that Iran rejected offers of foreign fuel supplies for that reactor and is making more of the higher-enriched material than that small reactor needs.

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A few members of the Federal Open Market Committee meeting said the central bank may soon have to consider more asset purchases, while others said the economic outlook would have to deteriorate first.

A few members said economic conditions

Japan

A number of top Federal Reserve officials likely saw a need for additional monetary easing at the central bank’s meeting last month, although there are few signals the central bank will move soon.

Minutes from the Fed’s January meeting, which will be released on Wednesday, should offer more insight than usual into where officials stand on the question of whether more bond purchases are warranted to help a still-frail economy.

While the minutes always give a flavor of the policy debate, the central bank for the first time will provide “qualitative” details on officials’ views on the Fed’s near-record $2.9 trillion balance sheet.

This new information — a counterpart to the first-ever interest rate projections released last month — could suggest a greater willingness to ease further than was evidenced following the meeting. Last month, the Fed said it would likely leave rates near zero until at least late 2014, but offered no details on how it should handle its asset holdings.

The prospects for further easing appeared to be dampened by the latest employment figures, which showed a healthier job market than economists had expected. Still, many feel the economy is unlikely to gain enough vigor this year to satisfy the Fed, and they look for a third round of quantitative easing, probably through purchases of mortgage bonds.

“I doubt the qualitative information from participants on the balance sheet would sway decisively on the near-term prospect of QE3,” said Thomas Lam, an economist at OSK-DMG. “While the hurdle for QE3 seems lower, I don’t view this policy option as imminent at this time.”

Speaking before a group of home builders on Friday, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke stayed away from any explicit references to monetary policy, but made clear he still does not see the pace of economic growth as sufficient or satisfactory.

“The state of housing has been an impediment to a faster recovery,” he said. “We need to continue to develop and implement policies that will help the housing sector get back on its feet.”

The projections from Fed officials on when interest rates should rise off the floor were all over the place, ranging from this year to 2016. Given varying appetites within the Fed’s policy committee for expanding or shrinking the central bank’s portfolio, the minutes will likely put even more daylight between inflation hawks and doves.

Analysts are not expecting any hard data on balance sheet expectations but rather broad-brush descriptions of policymakers’ leanings. The minutes could say, for instance, that some members favor additional stimulus now, while others would rather take a wait-and-see approach.

There is also a risk that the markets could get a hawkish surprise, for instance, if some officials appear to be making the case for near-term asset sales.

“It will be an interesting trading day when this ‘qualitative information’ begins to include ruminations about when to start shrinking the nearly $3 trillion balance sheet and whether such shrinkage will happen through passive asset run-off or active asset sales,” said Dana Saporta, an economist at Credit Suisse.

Bernanke has said that when the Fed chooses to tighten policy it will first raise the interest it pays on bank reserves, currently at 0.25 percent, only later resorting to selling some of the assets it accumulated in response to the financial crisis.

But not all officials may agree.

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Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Friday issued a call to action to restore housing markets, saying depressed house prices and sales are a serious drag on the economic recovery.

“The state of housing has been an impediment to a faster recovery,” he told a home builders’ conference.

“We need to continue to develop and implement policies that will help the housing sector get back on its feet,” Bernanke said, laying out a few ideas from a recent Fed “white paper” on housing.

Bernanke’s recommendations for potential policy remedies fly in the face of complaints from some Republicans lawmakers that the Fed was making an unwarranted intrusion onto the turf of other policymakers.

The white paper, issued last month, was the result of several months of study by a Fed staff on a problem officials at the central bank have concluded is a key missing ingredient to a healthier economic recovery.

In his speech, Bernanke touched only on some of the less controversial ideas broached by the Fed in the paper.

He called on lenders and regulators to look at rules and practices that may hold back the origination of sound mortgages, pointing at overly tight credit as one reason the housing recovery has been slow.

An overhang of vacant homes and a glut of foreclosures is also weighing on housing activity, Bernanke added. He said it could make sense in some markets to turn some of the foreclosed homes into rental properties, a policy the Obama administration is already pursuing.

Another top Fed official - Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank President Sandra Pianalto - also pointed at housing on Friday as a key impediment to a stronger recovery, calling it “a significant headwind.”

Pianalto, who is a voter this year on the Fed’s policy-setting panel, said declines in housing wealth were keeping consumers away from stores and making harder for businesses to borrow. Bernanke said the loss of housing wealth may be chopping $200 billion to $375 billion off of consumer spending per year.

Several Fed officials have come forward since the white paper was released to push for action, although it has caused discomfort in some quarters of the central bank’s system.

Bernanke made the case that overly tight credit in mortgage markets had undercut the effectiveness of the Fed’s aggressive efforts to stimulate growth.

The Fed cut overnight interest rates to near zero in 2008 and has bought $2.3 trillion in bonds in a further effort to drive mortgage and other borrowing costs lower.

In a typical recovery, a rebound in housing fuels hiring and income gains, but that has not been the case this time, Bernanke said.

In the face of the congressional criticism of the white paper, Bernanke recently told lawmakers he was sorry if the central bank’s efforts were misunderstood as anything but a helpful effort to spell out policy options.

He defended the study again on Friday.

“One of our main objectives … was simply to make people aware how central to the recovery housing is,” Bernanke said in response to a question from the audience.

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Greek political leaders announced agreement on austerity measures, clearing the way for a deal to cut the nation