RICHMOND, Calif. – Tucked away in a small warehouse on a dead-end street, an Internet pioneer is building a bunker to protect an endangered species: the printed word.

Brewster Kahle, 50, founded the nonprofit Internet Archive in 1996 to save a copy of every Web page ever posted. Now the MIT-trained computer scientist and entrepreneur is expanding his effort to safeguard and share knowledge by trying to preserve a physical copy of every book ever published.

“There is always going to be a role for books,” said Kahle as he perched on the edge of a shipping container soon to be tricked out as a climate-controlled storage unit. Each container can hold about 40,000 volumes, the size of a branch library. “We want to see books live forever.”

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SEOUL (Reuters) – North Korea said Monday it was prepared to resume six party nuclear disarmament talks without preconditions at an early date following a flurry of diplomatic activity to restart the stalled process.

“The DPRK remains unchanged in its stand to resume the six-party talks without preconditions at an early date and comprehensively implement the September 19 joint statement on the principle of simultaneous action,” North Korea’s foreign ministry said.

A top North Korean diplomat visited the United States last week in the first such contact between the sides in 19 months, a week after the two Koreas’ nuclear envoys met. The meetings have raised hopes for a resumption of six-party talks.

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WASHINGTON – Ending a perilous stalemate, President Barack Obama and congressional leaders announced historic agreement Sunday night on emergency legislation to avert the nation’s first-ever financial default. The dramatic resolution lifted a cloud that had threatened the still-fragile economic recovery and rattled global markets.

The agreement would slice at least $ 2.4 trillion from federal spending over a decade, a steep price for many Democrats, too little for many Republicans.

The deal, with scant time remaining before Tuesday’s deadline for paying government bills, “will allow us to avoid default and end the crisis that Washington imposed on the rest of America,” Obama said.

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BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s media are curbing combative reporting of a high-speed train disaster after what observers said were orders from the ruling Communist Party’s propaganda arm to stop criticism that has echoed public outrage over the tragedy.

For a week, many Chinese newspapers defied censorship orders and pursued unusually aggressive reporting of the crash on July 23 that killed at least 40 people on two high-speed trains — a technology the government has promoted as a shiny symbol of the nation’s growing technological prowess.

But censors have stepped up demands for news media to wind down often withering criticism over the train disaster near Wenzhou in eastern China, according to the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong.

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