Evening Edition

Though undoubtedly the best day since the disaster began more than 15 weeks ago, US officials cautioned that a great deal of clean-up work remained and that the long-term impact could be felt for years, even decades, to come.

BP’s long-awaited “static kill” was conducted overnight as heavy drilling fluid was rammed into the busted Macondo well for eight hours, forcing the oil back down into the reservoir miles beneath the seabed.

In a written opinion, Judge Vaughn Walker ruled in favor of rights activists who argued that a November 2008 referendum which barred gays and lesbians from tying the knot was discriminatory and therefore violated the US Constitution.

The referendum, known as Proposition 8, was passed by a 52 percent majority only six months after California’s Supreme Court overturned a previous ban on same-sex weddings triggering a flood of same-sex marriages.

Some 42,000 private-sector jobs were created following a revised June number of 19,000, ADP said ahead of a key government report Friday that is expected to show unemployment already at 9.5 percent ticking up.

Most economists had expected 25,000 private jobs to be established in July, the sixth consecutive monthly increase in hirings.

“Forty of the wealthiest families and individuals in the United States have committed to returning the majority of their wealth to charitable causes,” said a statement released by www.givingpledge.org.

The Giving Pledge, announced just six weeks ago, is the brainchild of Microsoft mogul Gates and investment guru Buffett who want to convince the richest people in the country to give 50 percent or more of their fortune to charity.

Saudi Arabia is to suspend Blackberry services on Friday after the Canadian manufacturers failed to meet its demands, while the United Arab Emirates announced at the weekend that its own ban will take effect from October 11.

India is also mulling a similar move.

During joint Afghan-NATO operations to hunt down a Taliban commander in a village in Nangarhar province, NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said troops came under fire and that civilians were killed in the ensuing fight.

“Following information received from provincial and local Nangarhar officials, it appears that between four and a dozen or more civilians were killed,” ISAF spokesman Rear Admiral Greg Smith said in an emailed statement.

Demurely but stylishly dressed, the catwalk queen told judges it was a “big inconvenience” to have to testify about a bag of “dirty-looking pebbles” in Charles Taylor’s trial at The Hague for murder, rape and enslavement.

“I really didn’t want to be here,” she said. “Obviously I just want to get this over with and get on with my life.”

Street parties were expected to welcome the superstar in the capital Port-au-Prince, which was devastated in the January quake that left 250,000 dead and 1.5 million homeless.

“The honorable Wyclef Jean, roving ambassador for Haiti, will be in the country Thursday, August 5. He will arrive aboard his private jet,” according to an official statement from his representatives in Port-au-Prince.

The Haitian-born Grammy award winner, who is to formally launch his campaign on CNN’s “Larry King Live” show later Thursday, meanwhile resigned as chairman of his NGO Yele Haiti ahead of his announcement.

“I always say that Wyclef Jean is not running for the presidency of Haiti, I’m being drafted by the people of Haiti,” Jean, founder of the hit 1990s group The Fugees, told the Wall Street Journal in comments published Thursday.

Wheat futures shot up to new two-year highs on commodities markets after the sudden announcement from Prime Minister Vladimir Putin raised concerns about global grain supplies.

The ban comes as Russia struggles to contain the worst wildfires in its modern history that have killed 50 people, with the blazes spreading to the country’s south and raising concerns about radiation levels.

A New York Times report said an ex-teammate of Armstrong, who wished to remain anonymous, had spoken with investigators detailing “some of his own drug use, as well as the widespread cheating that he said went on as part of the Postal Service team — all of which he said was done with Armstrong’s knowledge and encouragement.”

The report said the rider in question “has never tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs or methods” and “asked that his name not be used because investigators advised him not to speak publicly about the information he provided”.

With tallying still under way, the Interim Independent Electoral Commission stopped short of formally announcing a winner but its provisional results gave the constitution’s backers a clear lead and led the “no” camp to concede.

Kenya’s first new constitution since its 1963 independence will place checks on the president, remove the post of prime minister, devolve some degree of power to counties and generally consolidate democracy and human rights.

As founder of one of the world’s biggest agencies specialising in the rental and sale of private islands, Farhad Vladi is a connoisseur of sun-kissed slices of paradise.

“It’s like with painters: there are two categories of island in the world,” said Vladi, who has owned his own swatch of land off New Zealand for two decades.

The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), which is behind the giant annual party, said beer had fewer calories than wine, and switching from the grape to the grain could save as many calories as are burned in a half-hour jog.

And CAMRA hope the notion might help their push to get more women supping Britain’s national drink.

The cementing operation, to continue through Friday, followed earlier injections of heavy drilling mud this week that had subdued the upward pressure of the oil and gas. The deep-water Macondo well was provisionally capped in mid-July.

“This is not the end, but it will virtually assure us that no oil will be leaking into the environment,” retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, who oversees the U.S. oil spill response operation, said at a briefing in Washington.

It was the first time the top U.S. automaker has confirmed it was readying an IPO, an event that would mark its return as a public company and reduce the U.S. government’s majority ownership just over a year after GM’s bankruptcy and a controversial $50 billion bailout.

Whitacre, who was attending an auto industry event sponsored by the Center for Automotive Research, also said GM would detail second-quarter results next week showing that the restructured company is making money despite an anemic rebound in the U.S. economy.

With more than 30 years in the excavator-making business and six recessions under his belt, Harvell, the chief executive of LBX Company, thought he knew what to expect when he saw signs in late 2006 that another downturn was coming.

He was wrong. So now, like a lot of manufacturing executives surprised by the downturn’s speed and severity, he is being extra cautious, especially when it comes to expanding his pared-down payroll.

Weekly claims data are volatile and the figures released on Thursday by the Labor Department have little bearing on the government’s closely watched monthly employment report, due on Friday, as they fall outside the survey period.

Still, they are indicative of a slow expansion in the labor market which is putting a strain on economy’s recovery from its longest and deepest downturn since the Great Depression.

“We are asking them to do the right thing,” said Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell in asking WikiLeaks to hand over the U.S. documents and delete material it had put on the Internet.

“We hope they will honor our demands,” he told reporters, adding that the only rightful owner of all the classified material in WikiLeaks possession was the U.S. government.

General David Petraeus, who took command of the nine-year-old war in Afghanistan in July, did not rewrite the rules guiding the use of force in his new “tactical directive.”

But U.S. officials said he clarified them in a way that may address concerns that some troops — erring on the side of caution — had avoided calling in air power against Taliban insurgents, even when it was appropriate to do so.

Haji Mohammed Hassan, chief of Khogyani district in Nangahar province, said he had heard reports of dozens of civilians killed in two separate incidents on Thursday.

A statement from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said the alliance was aware of the reports.

Like thousands of others, he hopes to land a U.S. refugee visa to escape bombings, shootings and death threats in his homeland.

“Fundamentalists told me over the phone: if you don’t quit work we will either kill you or one of your children,” said Ahmed, a father of a son and two daughters who said he was afraid to give his full name.

Complaining that having to appear at the court in The Hague was an “inconvenience,” Campbell said two unidentified men came to her bedroom after she attended a charity dinner with Taylor and then-South African President Nelson Mandela in 1997.

“I was sleeping and had a knock at the door that woke me up. Two men were there and they gave me a pouch and said: ‘A gift for you’,” she told the U.N. Special Court for Sierra Leone.

However, prospects for another major entitlement program brightened significantly from last year as a result of cost cuts resulting from healthcare reform legislation, the report said.

The Medicare hospital trust fund is not projected to exhaust its funds until 2029, 12 years later than forecast last year, according to an annual report on the two programs.

Senator Jon Kyl denied setting a price to support the strategic arms reduction pact known as the “new START.” But he told reporters the commitment he was seeking could cost up to $10 billion more than the amount the administration has pledged to modernizing U.S. nuclear weapons.

Obama wants the treaty ratified this year but it needs 67 votes in the Senate, meaning it cannot pass without substantial Republican support.

The world’s No.1 search engine is hunting for new revenue opportunities as growth in its core Internet business slows and as new technologies like smartphones and social networking services transform the way consumers access the Web.

Schmidt expects revenue from search advertising on mobile phones to eventually exceed the revenue Google generates from searches on PCs. But he could not predict when.

The company said Thursday that its engineers finished pumping cement into the deep-sea well at 2:15 Central time.

On Wednesday they pumped enough mud into the well to push the oil back to its underground reservoir. Crews must now wait at least a day for the cement to dry.

The appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was expected, as lawyers on both sides of the legal battle repeatedly vowed to carry the fight to a higher court if they lost.

On Wednesday, a federal judge in San Francisco overturned California’s Proposition 8, which restricts a marriage to one man and one woman. U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker ruled the law violates federal equal protections and due process laws.

The vote was 63-37 for President Barack Obama’s nominee to succeed retired Justice John Paul Stevens.

Five Republicans joined all but one Democrat and the Senate’s two independents to support Kagan. In a rarely practiced ritual reserved for the most historic votes, senators sat at their desks and stood to cast their votes with “ayes” and “nays.”

In what amounted to a dissenting opinion, Medicare actuary Richard Foster warned that the report’s financial projections “do not represent a reasonable expectation.”

The conflicting renderings by federal officials centered on the annual report of the trustees for Medicare and Social Security, released Thursday. It found that the Medicare Hospital trust fund will not be exhausted until 2029, a dozen years longer than estimated last year.

Retailers around the country posted a sales increase of just 2.8 percent for July over a year earlier – and at that time, the economy looked much bleaker than it does today.

The July figure, released Thursday by the International Council of Shopping Centers based on results from 31 chains, was the fourth straight month of weak retail numbers. For the most part, economists were disappointed.

The famously petulant supermodel’s testimony did not provide the smoking gun prosecutors had sought to show Taylor traded in so-called “blood diamonds” to arm rebels in neighboring Sierra Leone. But her appearance drew attention to Africa’s deadly conflicts and the illegal use of resources to finance war.

Campbell was calm and composed as she denied knowingly receiving a gift of diamonds from Taylor after a celebrity-studded 1997 dinner at Nelson Mandela’s presidential mansion in South Africa.

Some $10 billion in aid to school districts is set to flow after a 61-39 Senate vote Thursday – to be followed quickly by a House vote next week – in hopes that it will come in time for many school districts to reconsider teacher layoffs.

Thursday’s vote was a hard-earned but partial victory for Democrats and President Barack Obama. Advocates said it could save the jobs of up to 300,000 teachers, police and other public workers.

The Texas Rangers exited federal bankruptcy protection on Thursday, about 14 hours after Hall of Fame pitcher Nolan Ryan’s group was awarded the team at a marathon auction showdown with billionaire Mark Cuban.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Stacey Jernigan’s approval of the team’s reorganization plan clears the way for Major League Baseball to formally approve Ryan and sports attorney Chuck Greenberg as the team’s owners next week, before the group’s financing guarantee expires Aug. 12.

A deal could be announced within days, said the person, who did not want to be identified because negotiations are still ongoing.

Any deal that is reached could form the basis for federal legislation and would likely shape efforts by the Federal Communications Commission to broker an agreement on the contentious issue, which has pitted the nation’s big phone and cable companies against many big Internet companies.

Except the disaster never happened.

Harare airport authorities tricked the public and the world’s media into believing a security drill Thursday was a crash to make the drill and the emergency response seem more real.

Speaking at a fundraiser for Democratic candidate Alexi Giannoulias, Obama said voters need to send the Illinois state treasurer to Capitol Hill to boost his administration’s policies, which Obama says have pulled the country from the brink of recession. Sticking to the script he’s followed throughout the election season, Obama said voters have a choice between Democrats who want to move the country forward, and Republicans who want to revert to the failed policies of the past.

“They promise to do the exact same things that got us into this mess,” Obama told the crowd in his hometown.

With Hispanic enrollment surging in schools, many Spanish-speaking parents are having trouble helping their children with homework or communicating with U.S. teachers as English-immersion classes proliferate in K-12.

An Associated Press-Univision poll highlights the language and cultural obstacles for the nation’s Latinos, who lag behind others when it comes to graduating from high school.

The state removed Heath and Deborah Campbell’s three small children from their home in January 2009.

A month earlier, the family drew attention when a supermarket refused to decorate a birthday cake for their son, Adolf Hitler Campbell. He and siblings JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell and Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell have been in foster care.

In a resolution adopted unanimously extending the U.N.’s civilian mission in Iraq for a year, the council said it recognized “the importance of Iraq achieving international standing equal to that which it held” before the first resolution was adopted immediately after Saddam Hussein’s invasion.

Iraq’s U.N. Ambassador Hamid al-Bayati told the council Wednesday that “the most important issue facing Iraq … remains to get rid of the burden” of resolutions adopted under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, which can be militarily enforced.

Three of Garrett’s grandchildren and two great-grandchildren met with New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and his staff Wednesday to voice their objections to a pardon for the Kid, who was born William Henry McCarty but also went by the name William Bonney.

Jarvis Patrick Garrett of Albuquerque asked Richardson to sign a petition in opposition to a pardon. The governor declined but told the Garretts he’s made no decision about a pardon.