Evening Edition

Admiral Thad Allen, the US official overseeing the spill response, said that crews aboard two drilling rigs and a container ship were drawing up thousands of feet of pipes from beneath the sea, while non-essential personnel were being evacuated as Tropical Storm Bonnie took aim at the area.

Officials said a cap that has kept oil from escaping the well since last Thursday would stay in place, after a week of tests suggested pressure would not force oil out through new leaks.

The cap in place for a week on the ruptured well will remain in place, but efforts to complete the relief wells for a permanent fix were set back by the evacuation ordered as Tropical Storm Bonnie churned toward the area.

BP said in a statement early Friday it suspended work on its relief well drilling on consultation with government officials due to the storm.

“The court sentences Trafigura to a fine of one million euros”, equivalent to 1.3 million dollars, presiding judge Frans Bauduin said as he found the company guilty of breaking European waste export laws.

Switzerland-based Trafigura said it was disappointed by the ruling in the Amsterdam district court, its first court sanction for the events in Ivory Coast, and would consider an appeal.

At the moment, most only hear about Cabo Pulmo, where pristine beaches meet a turquoise sea, by word of mouth.

US tourist Lenny McCarl said he discovered the village thanks to his girlfriend’s family, during a visit in June.

“HRE is the only German bank to fall short of the six percent tier 1 capital ratio in the most severe stress scenario,” a joint statement issued by the German central bank and financial sector stabilization fund SoFFin said.

The test’s key indicator, tier 1 capital is core bank reserves that cover the risk of depositors demanding their money back and rendering a bank insolvent.

Many analysts had wondered how Greek banks, heavily dependent on central bank funding, would survive the EU-wide crash tests.

But the Bank of Greece said five out of six Greek credit institutions had passed the exam, a result which the Greek finance minister said showed the system’s resilience in an extreme-case simulation.

Alberto Contador retained his eight-second overall lead on Andy Schleck a day ahead of the final time trial over 52km that will decide whether the Spaniard wins the yellow jersey for the third time.

Met on the podium by Hollywood stars Cameron Diaz and Tom Cruise, who had spent the day watching the action, Astana rider Contador was all smiles.

Two rigs stopped drilling relief wells intended to halt the leak for good and prepared to move out of the path of the storm, which was projected to hit the spill area on Saturday with winds of 39 to 73 miles per hour.

Many non-essential workers already have abandoned the spill site, and officials said the key drilling ships were expected to pull out later on Friday and be gone about two days.

While the modest findings cast doubt on the credibility of the bank tests — released on Friday in a bid to restore investor confidence — with the European economy apparently improving fast, some analysts said that may not matter.

Five of Spain’s smaller regional lenders, known as cajas, failed the test and their recapitalization will almost complete a state-funded drive to consolidate the country’s network of its unlisted savings banks.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he plans to bring up a narrower energy bill next week that would revamp offshore oil drilling rules in the wake of the BP oil spill.

But he will put off consideration of broader legislation sought by Obama until September at the earliest.

The Obama administration is seeking a preliminary injunction blocking implementation of the law that requires state and local police, during lawful contact, to investigate the immigration status of anyone they reasonably suspect of being an illegal immigrant.

U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton peppered lawyers for both sides during a 90-minute hearing over whether the state law contravenes federal authority over immigration law, and if predictions by critics that it will lead to racial profiling were overstated and unwarranted.

The mechanical plug that’s throttled the oil for a week will be left closed, even if the undersea robots monitoring the well’s stability leave. The only way BP would know if the cap had failed would be satellite and aerial views of oil gushing to the surface.

But retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said he’s confident the cap will hold, despite a few leaks that raised concerns last week. Scientists say even a severe storm shouldn’t affect the plug, nearly a mile beneath the ocean surface 40 miles from the Louisiana coast.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said no Republican senator was willing to back a comprehensive energy and climate bill, a development he called “terribly disappointing” and even dangerous.

“It’s easy to count to 60,” Reid told reporters Thursday. “I could do it by the time I was in eighth grade. My point is this, we know where we are. We know we don’t have the votes.”

Bayou La Batre, population 2,313, has received $8.5 million in BP grant money, more than any other place on the Gulf Coast, but boat operators idled by the spill complain that some of the cash intended to keep them working has gone instead to recreational fishermen and the mayor’s brother.

The town that locals call “The Bayou” is in an uproar headed into a town-hall meeting Saturday by the administrator of a separate $20 billion BP claims fund. At the docks, hundreds have gathered for meetings and protests about how the grant money is being spent.

The BP-hired environmental consultant kneels as he has done many times on the Louisiana coast, assessing the damage in a task now taking on new importance as the world’s attention turns from the ubiquitous images of gushing oil to the daunting task of restoration.

He dips his hand, covered in a blue rubber glove, into the muddy ground. It comes up streaked brown with crude. “You’ve got sheen throughout,” he says, and calls out his findings to a government scientist: Oil covers about 95 percent of the grass, reaching about 15 feet inland.

The threat came hours after it was announced that the city manager, assistant city manager and police chief were stepping down following a public outcry over their salaries, which total more than $1.6 million a year.

In the wake of that scandal, residents have lost trust in Mayor Oscar Hernandez and three other council members, said Ali Saleh, co-founder of the Bell Association to Stop the Abuse.

It had been thought that some banks needed to fail for the exercise to be accepted as credible, and some analysts still argued that the results showed the tests weren’t rigorous enough – the euro was trading flat on the day after the release of the results at just below $1.29.

If financial markets take the view that the tests were not tough enough when European trading resumes Monday, then the exercise could make matters worse – and further expose the EU to charges that it has failed to rise to the debt crisis within its borders.

Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History on Thursday released photos of the reconstructed image of a woman who probably lived on Mexico’s Caribbean coast 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. She peeks out of the picture as a short, spry-looking woman with slightly graying hair.

Anthropologists had long believed humans migrated to the Americas in a relatively short period from a limited area in northeast Asia across a temporary land corridor that opened across the Bering Strait during an ice age.

The British rider captured the 18th stage of the Tour de France on Friday while Alberto Contador of Spain drew closer to victory. The defending champion leads Luxembourg’s Andy Schleck by eight seconds entering Saturday’s decisive time trial, a day before the three-week race ends in Paris.

Cavendish won a stage for the fourth time in this Tour and the 14th time in just three years of competing in cycling’s premier event.

Conservatives opposing New START, a replacement for a Cold War-era treaty, are trying to make it an issue in November’s congressional elections.

While they are unlikely to kill the agreement, they could force Democrats to delay a ratification vote until after the election. That could be damaging to President Barack Obama. A narrow victory after a lengthy, contentious debate could destroy his hopes for achieving more ambitious goals, including further reductions of nuclear weapons and ratification of a nuclear test ban treaty.

The blood testing becomes part of the Minor League Drug Prevention and Treatment Program, which commissioner Bud Selig introduced in 2001 to test for performance-enhancing drugs.

“The implementation of blood testing in the minor leagues represents a significant step in the detection of the illegal use of human growth hormone,” Selig said in a statement. “HGH testing provides an example for all of our drug policies in the future.”

The Senate rejected the House measure, passed earlier this month, by a 46-51 vote that fell short of a majority, much less the 60 votes required to defeat a filibuster.

Instead, the Senate on Thursday stripped out the $20 billion in House add-ons and returned to the House an almost $60 billion measure passed by a bipartisan vote in May. The Senate measure is limited chiefly to war funding, foreign aid, medical care for Vietnam War veterans exposed to Agent Orange, and replenishing almost empty disaster aid accounts.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said no Republican senator was willing to back a comprehensive energy and climate bill, a development he called “terribly disappointing” and even dangerous.

“It’s easy to count to 60,” Reid told reporters Thursday. “I could do it by the time I was in eighth grade. My point is this, we know where we are. We know we don’t have the votes.”

“Some proprietary schools have profited and prospered but their students haven’t, and this is a disservice to students and to taxpayers,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a briefing with reporters. “And it undermines the valuable work, the extraordinarily important work, being done by the for-profit industry as a whole.”

To qualify for federal student aid programs, career college programs must prepare students for “gainful employment.”

President Barack Obama on Thursday signed into law a restoration of benefits for people who have been out of work for six months or more. Congress approved the measure earlier in the day. The move ended an interruption that cut off payments averaging about $300 a week to 2 1/2 million people who have been unable to find work in the aftermath of the nation’s long and deep recession.

At stake are up to 73 weeks of federally financed benefits for people who have exhausted their 26 weeks of state jobless benefits. About half of the approximately 5 million people in the program have had their benefits cut off since its authorization expired June 2.

Speaking at a Southeast Asian regional security forum in Vietnam, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned North Korea that it must reverse a “campaign of provocative, dangerous behavior” if it wants improved relations with its neighbors and the United States.

She said that stability in the region, particularly on the Korean peninsula, depends in large part on convincing an “isolated and belligerent” North Korea to change course. The communist North has pulled out of nuclear disarmament talks and is blamed for the sinking of a South Korean warship in March that has ratcheted up tensions.

After telling Sherrod he regretted her forced resignation over racial remarks she made to an NAACP audience, Obama said in a nationally broadcast network interview he believes Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack “jumped the gun” in sacking the veteran Georgian federal worker.

A furor erupted this week over a conservative blogger’s posting of portions of a speech Sherrod gave in which she told of giving short shrift attention 24 years ago to the pleas for financial aid by a poor white farmer. Sherrod is black, and the operator of the website BigGovernment.com posted a portion of her speech. The blogger, Andrew Breitbart, said he did so to illustrate racism within the NAACP, which earlier accused the tea party of having racist elements.

“If I were a firm believer in ghosts and spirits and things of that nature, I don’t think I could do this,” said McGill, a preservationist who is working to preserve buildings that are part of a past that many prefer to forget.

One night he heard dogs in the distance – a sound that recalled the search for runaways during slavery. He awoke on Mother’s Day morning in a cabin thinking of children being sold from their mothers. Then he walked to the black graveyard on a plantation near Charleston.

Michael Conahan, 58, faces up to 20 years in prison after his plea in Scranton federal court. No sentencing date was set.

Court documents do not indicate if Conahan will testify against the other former Luzerne County judge charged in the case, Mark Ciavarella Jr. Conahan’s lawyer, Philip Gelso, declined to comment Friday.

A person familiar with the case identified the worker Thursday as Teresa Bassett, who works in the Utah Department of Workforce Services. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the individual was not authorized to release details about the investigation. The Salt Lake Tribune first reported Bassett’s identity.

Before joining the Department of Workforce Services, Bassett also worked for the Department of Technology Services and the Department of Corrections. She first began working for the state in November 1993.

She vowed the night her father died to commit herself to helping black people, who she would later say were “facing the devil.” By the 1970s she and her husband had led other black families in creating a sprawling communal farm, an effort that failed in part because of federal discrimination.

By the mid-1980s she was working for a group devoted to keeping black-owned farms afloat when a white farmer walked in seeking help. That moment marked the beginning of a change in her views about race, she said years later in a videotaped speech – a speech that caused the uproar this week after a conservative website posted a snippet with important context removed.