Restoring the department's reputation also could give the administration more elbowroom to pursue its own agenda.

"The Justice Department needs to be depoliticized," said Guy Lewis, who oversaw the U.S. attorneys' offices under former Attorney General John Ashcroft. "Loyalty to the president is a wonderful thing, but it can't be the be-all and end-all."

For the most part, Justice Department lawyers said, the scandal did little to disrupt the day-to-day prosecution of cases. But Gonzales' handling of the firings of nine U.S. attorneys and his subsequent shifting testimony damaged morale and the public's perception of a politically impartial Justice Department.

The department's standing was especially hurt by revelations that Gonzales' aides had screened job applicants based on their political credentials and by allegations that they had pressured Justice Department lawyers who were overseeing politically sensitive cases, current and former officials said.

Adding to the concern about the department's ability to remain impartial, Gonzales changed policy in a way that allows White House officials unprecedented access to information about pending criminal and civil cases. When Congress confronted him about the change, he testified that he, too, was concerned when he realized the possible effect.

Gonzales appears to have had little sense of the inner workings of his own department, some lawyers said.

When he was told that budget cuts meant that U.S. attorneys would be filing fewer cases, Gonzales turned to aides and asked, "When were you going to tell me this?" people familiar with the meeting said.

Paul Charlton, one of the Republican-appointed U.S. attorneys whom Gonzales fired, recalled that the attorney general raised eyebrows when he spoke at an annual meeting with U.S. attorneys about what he saw as the department's mission.

"He told us to remember that we work for the president," Charlton said. "Many of us, particularly the career people, were taken aback by that. Yes, we serve at the pleasure of the president. But we work for the people, not just the president."

Gonzales attempted to exert tight control over the U.S. attorneys' offices, unlike prior Republican administrations, which had worked to ensure that their top prosecutors had greater independence.

The attorney general and his aides pushed department lawyers in the field to carry out the president's priorities, sometimes to the detriment of local needs.

"It's OK to tell a U.S. attorney that they're not cutting the mustard because they're not prosecuting immigration cases," said Bill Mateja, a former federal prosecutor in Texas and a former senior counsel under Ashcroft. "But it's not OK to bring politics to bear, and in some cases it appears there was more of a focus on the politics and less of a focus on actually fulfilling the president's initiatives."

In its UK 200 Annual Report, The Lawyer ranked Weil, Gotshal & Manges 8th on its list of the top 30 international firms in London by UK turnover. The publication also cited Weil Gotshal for its “growing number of roles on some of the biggest domestic deals in the market.” The firm was involved in seven of the top 40 deals in 2006 in which a US-based firm provided legal counsel. In 2007, Weil Gotshal acted as counsel in seven of the top 10 deals in the period between January and July, including advising Terra Firma on the £3.3 billion takeover of EMI. According to Mike Francies, the managing partner of Weil Gotshal’s London office, "our strategy is clear: we want to compete with the biggest UK firms for the best and biggest UK and European work. The EMI deal says, 'yes, we're doing that.' And clearly we need to be of a certain size and shape to advise on those deals."

Mr. Bush’s visit to Iraq — his third — was spent at this remote desert base in the restive Sunni province of Anbar, where he had summoned Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, and others to demonstrate that reconciliation among Iraq’s warring sectarian factions was at least conceivable, if not yet a fact.

After talks with Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, and Ryan C. Crocker, the ambassador to Iraq, Mr. Bush said that they “tell me that if the kind of success we are now seeing here continues it will be possible to maintain the same level of security with fewer American forces.”

Mr. Bush did not say how large a troop withdrawal was possible. Nor did he say whether he envisioned any forces being withdrawn sooner than next spring, when the first of the additional 30,000 troops Mr. Bush sent to Iraq this year are scheduled to come home anyway.

Still, his remarks were the clearest indication yet that a reduction would begin sometime in the months ahead, answering the growing opposition in Washington to an unpopular war while at the same time trying to argue that any change in strategy was not a failure.

“Those decisions will be based on a calm assessment by our military commanders on the conditions on the ground — not a nervous reaction by Washington politicians to poll results in the media,” Mr. Bush told a gathering of American troops, who responded with a rousing cheer. “In other words, when we begin to draw down troops from Iraq, it will be from a position of strength and success, not from a position of fear and failure. To do otherwise would embolden our enemies and make it more likely that they would attack us at home.”

To ensure security, the White House shrouded Mr. Bush’s visit to Iraq in secrecy.

Mr. Bush flew with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and his national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, an extraordinary gathering of top leaders in a war zone. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, flew to Iraq separately and joined them.

The Anbar region is a Sunni stronghold where in recent months there have been significant improvements in security. Administration officials have been touting the gains as evidence that the increase in American troops has proved a success — a word Mr. Bush used eight times in his public remarks on Monday.

Mr. Hadley, briefing reporters, recalled a military intelligence officer’s dire warning a year ago that Al Qaeda controlled the provincial capital, Ramadi, and other towns in the region. “Anbar Province is lost,” he quoted the analyst as saying then. Mr. Hadley was apparently referring to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown Sunni Arab extremist group that American intelligence agencies have concluded is foreign led. The extent of its links to Osama bin Laden’s network is not clear.

On Monday, after meeting with some of the local Sunni leaders who only months ago led the struggle against the American presence in the region, Mr. Bush held up Anbar as a model of the progress that was possible.

“When you stand on the ground here in Anbar and hear from the people who live here, you can see what the future of Iraq can look like,” he said, night having fallen at the base.

During his visit, Mr. Bush did not leave the base, a heavily fortified home to about 10,000 American troops about 120 miles west of Baghdad. Mr. Hadley said planning for the trip had started five or six weeks ago.

Administration officials rejected the notion that the trip was a publicity stunt. They said Mr. Bush wanted to meet face-to-face with General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker, who are to testify before Congress about progress in Iraq next week, and with Iraqi leaders he has been pressing from afar to take steps toward political reconciliation.

By summoning Mr. Maliki and other top officials to the Sunni heartland, a region the Shiite prime minister has rarely visited, Mr. Bush succeeded in forcing a public display of unity. The Iraqi officials there included President Jalal Talabani, Vice President Adel Abdul-Mehdi, Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih and Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan region.

Iraq’s foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, who was visiting neighboring Iran when Mr. Bush and the other top administration officials arrived, was conspicuously absent. Mr. Zebari, a Kurd, said he had been aware that high-level visitors from the United States were coming but that his trip to Iran had been planned long in advance and that the timing was strictly a coincidence.

In Washington, a spokesman for Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader, said the president’s visit and his assertions about progress would do little to persuade skeptics. “Despite this massive P.R. operation, the American people are still demanding a new strategy,” the spokesman, Jim Manley, said in a telephone interview.

Anthony H. Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the reversal in Anbar had less to do with American strategy than with local frustration over the extremism of Al Qaeda fighters trying to impose their doctrine. Mr. Cordesman suggested it was more of an anomaly than a model that could be applied elsewhere in Iraq, where sectarian divisions and strife appear to be worsening.

“We are spinning events that don’t really reflect the reality on the ground,” he said.

While some administration officials have recently described the Sunni shift in Anbar as serendipitous, they portrayed the improvements as an outgrowth, at least in part, of the decision to send nearly 4,000 additional marines to the province as part of the White House strategy to increase troops. “This is not serendipity,” Mr. Hadley told reporters.

Distrust remains deep between Sunnis in Anbar and the Maliki government — and it is clear that Mr. Maliki sees efforts by the American military to organize armed groups of Sunnis to assist American troops as a policy that amounts to assisting his enemies. Nor is it clear that the same model can be made to work in areas of Iraq where Sunnis and Shiites live together.

Sunnis, for their part, complain that the Maliki government has long failed to deliver services and to share oil revenue with Anbar. Describing the meeting Monday between the tribal sheiks and Iraqi officials from Baghdad, Mr. Gates said, “There was a sense of shared purpose among them and some good-natured jousting over resources.”

It remained unclear whether Mr. Bush planned to announce any specific troop withdrawals when he delivers the congressionally mandated report later this month.

Several administration officials say Mr. Bush and his commanders and military advisers have neared a consensus on beginning a reduction in American forces. Speaking to reporters traveling with him, Mr. Gates said Monday that he had formulated his opinion, though he declined to disclose it.

Asked about Mr. Bush’s comments on possible troop reductions, Mr. Gates added, “Clearly that is one of the central issues that everyone has been examining — what is the security situation, what do we expect the security situation to be in the months ahead?” He went on to say, “What opportunities does that provide in terms of maintaining the security situation while perhaps beginning to bring the troop level down?”

As he did in Washington late last week, Mr. Bush urged lawmakers to withhold judgment on the situation in Iraq until hearing first-hand reports next week from General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker. At the same time, though, he has used the White House’s considerable platform to assert his own views.

“The strategy we put into place earlier this year was designed to help the Iraqis improve their security so that political and economic progress could follow,” Mr. Bush said after meeting with Mr. Maliki and the other Iraqi leaders. “And that is exactly the effect it is having in places like Anbar.”

On Monday, at a news conference in Baghdad, Mr. Maliki made his own effort to underscore political progress his government had achieved in recent weeks. He said that a long-discussed law allowing former members of the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein to return to jobs in government had been submitted to Parliament.

“This law has been approved by the political leaders, and by the national political council,” Mr. Maliki said. “It is now before the parliament to discuss it and approve it.”

Agreement on the law, part of a package of requirements pressed by the Bush administration, would be an important milestone.

“We believe that this law represents the minimum accepted level of our ambitions,” said Salman al-Jumaili, a lawmaker from the main Sunni coalition.

An earlier agreement on a law broke down after Shiite leaders in southern Iraq voiced opposition.

Microsoft Corp. failed to win approval for its Office software file format to be considered an international standard, losing a closely watched vote that reflects the software giant's broader battles in Europe and around the world.

Voting on the file format, called Open XML, closed Sunday at the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO. To become a standard, Open XML needed to meet two criteria; it missed both -- albeit narrowly in one case. File formats are the rubrics used to turn bits of data into business letters, spreadsheets and presentations.

A spokesman at ISO, the primary international body that ratifies standards on everything from the size of nuts and bolts to the technical specifications of computer codes, declined to comment, saying the group was preparing an announcement about the vote.

The standards struggle -- which has pitted Microsoft against open-source advocates and traditional rival International Business Machines Corp. – is important because it speaks to the issue of who should control the digital codes used to store billions of documents. Microsoft sought to have its document formats adopted as a standard in part to allay concerns that it keeps rivals from developing competing office software.

The vote isn't the end of the line for Microsoft. The standards issue now enters another phase during which the company has a chance to convince disapproving countries to change their minds. In a statement, a Microsoft executive, Tom Robertson, said he was "extremely delighted" that 74% of the countries voted to support Open XML as a standard. Microsoft needed 75%. Microsoft fell shorter in the other requirement, that two-thirds of a key group of countries vote yes. According to people familiar with the matter, 53% in the key group did so.

The approval of the Open XML format has been a central plank in Microsoft's platform to convince governments and regulators that it is playing nice in the markets for computer software it dominates.

The ISO vote comes at a critical time for the Redmond, Wash., company, which is awaiting a ruling in a European antitrust case, due Sept. 17, that is expected to have broad ramifications for regulators' approach to the company. In Europe, authorities are also mulling a separate antitrust complaint alleging that Microsoft has used its Office file formats to block competitors from the market. Without knowing exactly how a Word document is formatted, for instance, a rival has a hard time selling software that works with Word documents.

Microsoft has also faced resistance from some government bodies worried that by storing documents in the Office format, they'll be forever locked in to buying Microsoft software to decode them. Microsoft has pressed for the new format's acceptance as a open standard in part to defuse these concerns.

Critics charge that standardization would put an international imprimatur on a format that, while nominally open, is still largely directed and controlled by Microsoft.

The balloting has been contentious. Opponents have charged Microsoft with packing national committees from Italy to Kenya with its allies in order to win votes at ISO. Microsoft accuses IBM of stirring up opposition. There are 104 countries at ISO; it appears many abstained in the vote.

Those opposed to Open XML say it isn't really open at all -- that it is actually so complex and so loaded with Microsoft-specific features that no one but Microsoft can use it fully. Critics also allege technical failings and say the format needlessly duplicates an existing format, called Open Document, used by IBM and many open-source programmers.

Microsoft says it has opened up the Office formats to encourage competition and interoperability, not squelch it. Open XML should be a standard in addition to Open Document, Microsoft argues, because Open XML allows for more features.

A Thai court issued arrest warrants yesterday for former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra and his wife over their alleged violations of stock-trading laws.

It is the second set of warrants issued in the past month against Thaksin, who has been living abroad since he was ousted in a bloodless coup almost a year ago. The other case involved conflict of interest related to the sale of Bangkok real estate.

Sunai Manomaiudom, director-general of the Department of Special Investigation, said the Bangkok Criminal Court had issued the warrant at his agency's request.

Thaksin has denied all allegations against him, and has said he will not return to Thailand until after new elections are held at the end of this year.

Thaksin was deposed last September after the country fell into a political crisis due to mass demonstrations demanding he step down because of alleged corruption and abuse of power.

He became a billionaire in the telecommunications sector before entering politics and serving as prime minister since 2001. A controversial business deal by his family, the sale early last year of its telecommunications company Shin Corp to a Singapore state investment company, was a major cause of public discontent.

The new warrants for Thaksin and his wife, Pojamarn, involve charges of violating regulations requiring disclosure of corporate information to the Stock Exchange of Thailand.

Pichit Chuenban, a lawyer for Thaksin's family, said he would inform the former prime minister of yesterday's court action, and advise him not to return to fight the case for the time being "because the situation in the country is not normal."

"We think he should return only after we have an elected government," Pichit said. Thailand is currently administered by an interim civilian government, but a military council exercises power behind the scenes and is intensely hostile toward Thaksin.

Sunai had earlier said Thaksin and other family members controlled nearly 80 percent of SC Asset, a real estate company, both directly and through nominee companies, and sold their interests to outside parties last year.

They are charged with violating disclosure rules, both by failing to report their ownership and failing to report the sale of shares.

Each violation of the exchange's regulations carries a maximum penalty of two years in prison and a fine of US$15,500.

Sunai said Thaksin is also suspected of violating a law on Cabinet members holding company shares, which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a US$31,000 fine.

The patent application covers a system that would allow consumers to pay for services via text message.

Dubbed 'GPay', the service would involve sending an SMS to Google which would then pay the retailer and charge the cost to the consumer.

"We file patent applications on a variety of ideas that our employees come up with. Some of those ideas later mature into real products or services, and some do not," a Google spokesperson told The Times.

The search firm has already worked with mobile phone providers, including LG, to ensure that its search page is included for mobile internet users.

There have been persistent rumours that Google is planning shortly to launch a cheap internet-enabled mobile phone.

Another law firm has filed an investor suit against Motorola Inc., claiming executives didn’t tell the market how bad things were last fall as sales began to slow.

Schiffrin Barroway Topaz & Kessler LLP filed suit last Wednesday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois on behalf of investors who bought Motorola shares between July 19, 2006, and Jan. 4.

Motorola’s shares peaked at $26.30 on Oct. 13. On Monday, the stock price was below $17 per share.

The suit claims Motorola did not disclose problems with its product line and geographic challenges in Europe that led it to miss its forecasts in the third and fourth quarters.

Named in the suit are CEO Edward Zander; Ron Garriques, former head of mobile devices; David Devonshire, former chief financial officer; Greg Brown, then-executive vice-president of networks; Daniel Moloney, president of connected home solutions; Richard Nottenburg, chief strategy officer; and Padmasree Warrior, chief technology officer.

“We will vigorously defend ourselves against these claims,” a Motorola spokeswoman said.

Executives, excluding Mr. Zander, sold more than $26 million worth of stock during the period, according to the suit.

The Schiffrin law firm is based in Radnor, Pa. Last month, the law offices of Bernard Gross, based in Philadelphia, and Brodsky & Smith of Bala Cynwyd, Pa., each filed suit, also seeking class-action status.