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The flow of blood may be ebbing, but the flood of money into the Iraq war is steadily rising, new analyses show. In 2008, its sixth year, the war will cost approximately $12 billion a month, triple the "burn" rate of its earliest years, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and co-author Linda J. Bilmes report in a new book.

Beyond 2008, working with "best-case" and "realistic-moderate" scenarios, they project the Iraq and Afghan wars, including long-term U.S. military occupations of those countries, will cost the U.S. budget between $1.7 trillion and $2.7 trillion — or more — by 2017.

Interest on money borrowed to pay those costs could alone add $816 billion to that bottom line, they say.

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MADRID, Spain - Spain's Socialist prime minister won re-election Sunday, as voters dismissed worries about a slumping economy, immigration and resurgent Basque militants to hand him a second term.

The results were a clear endorsement of Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's record, which includes reforms such as legalizing gay marriage and granting on-demand divorce, once thought unthinkable in this overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country.

Zapatero also withdrew Spanish troops from Iraq and launched a drive to cede more power to Spain's semiautonomous regions.

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CARACAS, Venezuela - Venezuela said Sunday that it was restoring full diplomatic ties with Colombia that were broken off in a regional crisis sparked by a cross-border Colombian attack on a leftist rebel camp in Ecuador.

The Venezuelan Foreign Ministry said it was reopening its embassy in Colombia and will allow back Colombian diplomats it expelled last week. It cited an easing of tensions at a summit in the Dominican Republic on Friday, where President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa shook hands with Colombia's U.S.-backed leader, Alvaro Uribe, after a tense debate.

Venezuela described the reconciliation as a "victory for peace and sovereignty."

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PARIS - Partial results showed President Nicolas Sarkozy's backers losing in Paris and other key French cities Sunday in the first round of municipal elections seen as a referendum on the increasingly unpopular conservative.

Official results of the total vote nationwide showed candidates from Sarkozy's UMP party and its allies with 45.5 percent and the Socialists and their allies with 47 percent.

The total was not broken down by city, but projections based on partial results by the polling agencies Ipsos and TNS-Sofres showed Socialists on track to take over key cities previously held by the right, including Strasbourg, Reims, Rouen and Caen.

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CHICAGO - Barack Obama would not be leading the Democratic presidential race without the enthusiasm and high turnout of black voters.

They spearheaded his comeback win in South Carolina, where Obama trounced Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards with the backing of four out of every five black voters. They provided his margin of victory in many other states, and will play a key role in Tuesday's primary in Mississippi, where Clinton is the underdog.

But Obama's campaign saw the limits of black support in last week's losses in Ohio and Texas, which kept Clinton's campaign alive. And the role black voters will play in the next big contest, Pennsylvania's April 22 primary, is unclear.