Pakistan initially said Friday that it had agreed to send its spy chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, on an unprecedented visit to India to share and obtain information from investigators there. Later Friday, however, Pakistani officials changed their minds and decided to send a less senior intelligence official in Pasha's place, according to a Pakistani source who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

It was unclear what prompted the reversal, but the Pakistani source said the Islamabad government was "already bending over backwards" to be cooperative and did not "want to create more opportunities for Pakistan-bashing." Pakistan's defense minister, Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar, told reporters in Islamabad, "I will say in very categoric terms that Pakistan is not involved in these gory incidents."

Meanwhile, Indian authorities ramped up their accusations that the plot had Pakistani connections. "Preliminary evidence, prima facie evidence, indicates elements with links to Pakistan are involved," Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee said at a news conference in New Delhi. Other Indian officials echoed the statement, but none provided details.

Evidence collected by police in Mumbai, along with intelligence gathered by U.S. and British officials, has led investigators to concentrate their focus on Islamist militants in Pakistan who have long sought to spark a war over the disputed province of Kashmir. India and Pakistan have already fought two wars over Kashmir, the battleground between Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan that each country claimed soon after India's partition in 1947.

A U.S. counterterrorism official said additional evidence has emerged in the past 24 hours that points toward a Kashmiri connection. "Some of what has been learned so far does fall in that direction," the official said, declining to offer specifics.

"We have to be careful here," said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "When you posit a Kashmiri connection, that puts Pakistan on the table. That is huge, enormous, but what does it mean? It can be anything from people who were [initially] in Pakistan, to maybe people who used to be associated with someone in the Pakistani government, to any gradation you could find."

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, who has sought a rapprochement with New Delhi, rejected widespread suspicions in India that Pakistani intelligence services may have supported the Mumbai gunmen. "The germs of terrorist elements were not produced in security agencies' labs in Pakistan," he said Friday.

Analysts said Pakistan's pledge to assist in the investigation and send its spy chief to India was a sign of the high stakes involved. When armed Kashmiri militants tried to take over the Indian Parliament in December 2001, the fallout was immediate, as both countries responded with a massive military buildup along their shared border.

"A Pakistani link here would be so utterly damaging, all the way around, to Indo-Pakistani relations," said Shaun Gregory, a professor of international security at the University of Bradford in England and a specialist on Pakistan. The decision to dispatch Pasha to India, he said, "does signal a determination on Pakistan's part to clarify that even if there's a Pakistani link here, that it had nothing to do with the government."

A senior Pakistani official said the idea for Pasha's visit came during a telephone conversation Friday between Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani. Singh, who had previously blamed the Mumbai attacks on groups "based outside the country," offered to provide evidence to Gillani.

"One way to ensure that" was to send Pakistan's intelligence chief, the Pakistani official said. "If there is evidence, share it."

Pakistani officials, responding to charges by Indian leaders that the attack was carried out by an organization with ties to Pakistan, said Friday that a senior intelligence officer would travel to India, in an apparent attempt to ease tensions between the two nuclear-armed states.

Indian officials said they believe that at least some of the gunmen reached Mumbai by sea. After an interrogation of one of the attackers, Indian intelligence officials said they suspected that a Pakistani Islamist group, Lashkar-i-Taiba, was responsible. An Indian intelligence document from 2006 obtained by The Washington Post said members of the group had been trained in maritime assault.

Authorities said that the death toll had risen to 195 as more bodies were discovered and that 295 people were wounded, in attacks on the hotels, the Jewish center and several other sites in Mumbai. Among the dead were two Americans from Virginia; the American rabbi who ran the city's Chabad-Lubavitch center and his Israeli wife; and three of their visitors, including an American man, an Israeli woman and a man with U.S. and Israeli citizenship. In all, at least 16 non-Indians have been reported killed.

Security forces killed the last gunmen holed up in the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel here early Saturday and clean-up operations around the sites that had been attacked continued through the day. 

The government used 350 security forces and 400 police officers to capture or kill the gunmen, officials announced at a news conference Saturday. On the basis of preliminary inquiry, we know that there were a total of 10 terrorists. Nine have been eliminated, one is caught," said Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of the state of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital. "They split into teams of two for action, and there were four at the Taj."

In Washington, the White House announced that President Bush would speak about the Mumbai attacks at 12:30 p.m. Eastern time.

President-elect Barack Obama spoke Friday evening by phone with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to offer his condolences for those killed, Obama's office announced Saturday.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke by telephone Friday with Obama for the third time since the attacks began to update him on information coming from India.

"These terrorists who targeted innocent civilians will not defeat India's great democracy, nor shake the will of a global coalition to defeat them," Obama said in a statement. "The United States must stand with India and all nations and people who are committed to destroying terrorist networks, and defeating their hate-filled ideology."

Deshmukh denied that there was any final statement to make about the nationality of the slain gunmen. But he said that the government was only certain that the one in their custody had confessed to being from Pakistan. He said Indian officials had no specific intelligence about an impending attack.

"The information that we get is always general, not specific. Mumbai is always on the target, it is a commercial city, it is an international city," he said. "It is a sensitive place, there is no denying that. But this kind of attack, not just on Mumbai but also on the nation, is something we did not anticipate."

New vulnerabilities in network services are disclosed daily to the security community and the underground alike through Internet mailing lists and various public forums. Proof-of-concept tools are often published for use by security consultants, whereas full-blown exploits are increasingly retained by hackers and not publicly disclosed in this fashion.

The following web sites are extremely useful for investigating potential vulnerabilities within network services:

SecurityFocus (http://www.securityfocus.com)

milw0rm (http://www.milw0rm.com)

Packet Storm (http://www.packetstormsecurity.org)

FrSIRT (http://www.frsirt.com)

MITRE Corporation CVE (http://cve.mitre.org)

NIST National Vulnerability Database (http://nvd.nist.gov)

ISS X-Force (http://xforce.iss.net)

CERT vulnerability notes (http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls)

Justice Department investigating American Express

American Express has received a request from the U.S. Department of Justice for information regarding the credit card company's policies related to merchant surcharging, according to a regulatory filing Friday.

The company said it received a Civil Investigative Demand on Oct. 14 from the Justice Department's antitrust division. The department can issue CIDs to anyone it believes may have information related to an investigation, the filing said. Receipt of such a request does not mean that a formal complaint will be filed.

American Express said it intends to cooperate with the department's request for documents and other information regarding the company's policies related to merchant surcharging and its "anti-steering" policies that prohibit merchants from discriminating against the American Express card in favor of other forms of payment.

Meanwhile, the New York-based credit card company painted a bleak picture of the current operating environment, saying in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it does not expect to meet its financial targets until economic conditions improve.

On Thursday, American Express said it would cut 7,000 jobs, or about 10 percent of its worldwide work force, in an effort to slash costs by $1.8 billion in 2009 as it prepares for an increasingly difficult economic environment.

Earlier this year, Steve Ribbing, who runs a family-style restaurant south of Buffalo, got fed up with the growing dent in his company's bottom line. The culprit? Egg prices, which have jumped nearly 50% over the past two years. Ribbing griped to his attorney, an act that ultimately led to a lawsuit against more than a dozen egg producers and the industry's trade group.

Critics say the price jump since 2006 was not particularly mysterious: egg producers, the plaintiffs contend, conspired to restrict supply as part of a broad scheme to boost prices. Ribbing's complaint moved from his lawyer to a large national firm, finally becoming a sweeping lawsuit that recently gained class-action status on behalf of restaurants, grocers, and other direct buyers nationwide. The litigation's targets include 13 of the nation's biggest egg producers, including Cal-Maine Foods (CALM), Pilgrim's Pride (PPC) and Rose Acre Farms, as well as a Georgia-based industry association, the United Egg Producers (UEP).

Justice Dept. Is Investigating

The average retail price of a dozen eggs, which had been stable for the better part of a decade, soared to $2.20 per dozen in March, after climbing from $1.63 in 2007 and $1.30 in 2006, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Egg producers blame the increase on surging feed and fuel costs, although prices have retreated 15% since March, to $1.85 per dozen. The restaurant lawsuit filed three weeks ago in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia is one of six separate suits facing the egg industry. Some name a handful of companies while others, like the T.K. Ribbing's restaurant suit, target 16 major producers and interest groups. The suits generally allege similar schemes to raise prices, but the detailed Ribbing suit delves deepest and covers the broadest part of the industry.

The swift rise in egg prices has also caught the attention of the Justice Dept., which is "investigating the possibility of price fixing in the egg products industry," says DOJ spokeswoman Gina Talamona, declining further comment. All of the major egg producers either refused comment or didn't respond to BusinessWeek's requests for comment.

The producers all belong to the United Egg Producers cooperative, which in 2000 enacted an Animal Care Certified Program to improve hens' conditions by giving them more space in cages. Plaintiffs say the program was designed solely to lift egg prices by curtailing egg supplies. The total U.S. supply, which grew steadily from 7.1 billion dozen eggs in 2000 to a peak of 7.6 billion dozen in 2006, is down to 7.5 billion dozen this year, according to the U.S. Agriculture Dept. "The only portion of the program which they enforce are the ones restricting the total number of hens and production," says Jonathan Lovvorn, vice-president and chief counsel of the Humane Society of the U.S. "You violate that, they kick you out immediately." He says the co-op ignores "all kinds of other things you can do to animals—not providing proper veterinary care, letting animals die without proper food or water. Those are things we've seen."

UEP spokesman Mitch Head calls allegations that the welfare program was aimed at trimming hen numbers "ludicrous." "There's no provision for any farmer to not build more houses, add more conventional cages, add cage-free or free-range [hens]; they could've added as many as they wanted to," Head says. The program results in fewer hen diseases and lower mortality, and improves food safety, he said. "This is not what was better for the farmer. It was better for the hens and for our consumers."