San Francisco - Anonymous hackers penetrated the private email account of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin and Wednesday posted screen shots of the account on the internet.

The intrusion came amid growing reports that Palin used her private email account to conduct official business in an effort to avoid public scrutiny.

It was strongly condemned by the McCain-Palin campaign as a "shocking invasion of privacy" and both the FBI and Secret Service launched investigations into the incident.

Washington - Texas was still picking up the pieces after Hurricane Ike on Wednesday as states across the Midwest tallied the number of dead and injured from the mammoth storm that cut a swath of devastation across the United States.

Houston Mayor Bill White proclaimed his city's water safe to drink, telling reporters he had tried it and urging other Houstonians to do the same.

The bottled water being brought in by state and federal rescue officials should be reserved for people truly in need, he said.

Washington - In a country that prides itself on free-market principles, US taxpayer dollars are are already on the hook for more than 300 billion dollars in financial industry bailouts, and, by some accounts, the government is just getting started.

The Federal Reserve's unprecedented, 85-billion-dollar loan and effective takeover of the largest US insurer, American International Group Inc, was only the latest in a string of emergency interventions this year on Wall Street.

Los Angeles - Hollywood royalty turned out in force to back Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama in two glittering events Monday night that raised a record 9 million dollars.

In the midst of the worst US financial crisis in decades, Obama kept television cameras away from the star-studded parties in a bid to minimize criticism that he was celebrating as the country suffered.

Berlin - The German government reacted with fury Wednesday to an admission by federal bank KfW that it passed 300 million euros (420 million dollars) to Lehman Brothers only hours before the US bank failed.

The sum was part of a swap arrangement, said a KfW spokesman in Frankfurt. He said there had been a "technical" blunder.

Critics said a prudent bank would have held on to the money, knowing from Sunday news reports that Lehman was broke. Swaps are often programmed in advance into computers so that they happen without human intervention.