Evening Edition

The bomber was among the 450-strong crowd and detonated on reaching the main square in the city, according to police.

The explosion triggered chaotic scenes, with an angry mob starting fires and shooting into the air while others fled or lay on the ground to avoid the gunfire, they added.

A two-day informal meeting of the biggest players in the world climate haggle indicated growing support for a “Green Fund” to help dispense up to 100 billion dollars annually by 2020, said several of those attending.

Mexican Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa said it was possible the fund could be okayed by the 194-nation UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in December.

Obama said he would outline a new package of stimulus measures next week, after a keenly awaited Labor Department report showed the economy lost 54,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate edged up to 9.6 percent.

Although the job losses were much less than the 120,000 slump expected by Wall Street economists, hiring was not substantial enough to return millions of crisis-hit Americans to work.

Robotic submarines recorded the delicate operation as engineers raised a failed blowout preventer from the ruptured well and began lifting it to the surface in order to hand it over to the US Justice Department.

The US government is conducting what could be a criminal investigation into the April 20 explosion and susbsequent oil spill and BP is hoping to shift some of the responsibility to its contractors.

French director Antony Cordier’s “Happy Few” provided enough sex for the festival’s entire 11-day run as a wife-swapping foursome asks the question, “Can one love two people at once?”

“The ultimate perversion in the film, the painful moment, is when they feel conjugal desire for the lover,” Cordier told a news conference.

Bowlers Mohammad Aamer and Mohammad Asif and Test captain Salman Butt arrived separately for questioning by detectives at a police station near the “home of cricket”, Lord’s in north London.

The International Cricket Council said meanwhile it had acted as soon as it could to charge the trio with “various offences” under its anti-corruption code and to suspend them pending a decision on those charges.

Gates spent the day in southern Kandahar province, one of the hottest spots of the intensifying war against the insurgents which is nearing the end of its ninth year.

“I come away from my visits down here this morning encouraged,” Gates told reporters after spending time on military bases in the province that the Islamists regard as the heartbeat of their fiefdom.

At the Quds (Jerusalem) Day Palestinian solidarity march in Tehran last year, supporters of Karroubi and fellow opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi staged demonstrations against hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his government.

“As of 8:00 am (0330 GMT) today, Basijis (militiamen) and Sepahi (Guards) gathered in front of Karroubi’s home,” the samahnews.org website said.

Pakistan’s Taliban claimed responsibility for the blast and said it would launch attacks in the United States and Europe “very soon,” repeating a threat to strike Western targets in response to drone attacks that have targeted its leadership.

The Quetta attack on a Shi’ite rally expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people came as the United States said the devastating floods were likely to hold up army offensives against Taliban insurgents.

In February 2009, a popular New York blogger attended a brunch with fellow “frazzled moms.” They took in tips from a style expert and listened to a nurse extol the virtues of Mirena, a birth control device sold by Bayer Healthcare.

The nurse was on Bayer’s payroll. In a series of events organized with the help of a women’s website, Mom Central, the pharmaceutical company gathered a captive audience of young mothers. It provided the nurse with a script and had the women fill out a survey before they left.

The fire on a Mariner Energy oil and gas platform in shallow waters of the U.S. Gulf on Thursday was a major setback for companies hoping for an early end to the government’s drilling moratorium and raised more questions about the safety of offshore drilling.

“This explosion will make it less likely that the moratorium on offshore drilling will be lifted,” said Rick Muller, senior analyst for Energy Security Analysis Inc in Boston.

The accident brought unwelcome attention to the offshore drilling industry as it is trying to roll back a six-month deepwater drilling moratorium imposed in the wake of the BP Plc Macondo well disaster, which killed 11 workers and poured 4.1 million barrels of oil into the Gulf.

As of late Thursday, there were no signs of a spill from the Mariner platform.

Companies added a net total of 67,000 new jobs last month and both July and June’s private-sector job figures were upwardly revised, the Labor Department said Friday.

Stocks surged after the report’s release. The Dow Jones industrial average rose more than 100 points in afternoon trading and broader indexes were all up.

To the northwest in Pakistan’s restive tribal regions, two suspected U.S. missile strikes killed at least seven people in an area controlled by one of the main groups battling Americans in neighboring Afghanistan, Pakistani intelligence officials said.

Two other militant bombings left at least two people dead and several wounded on a day convulsed by the violence that threatens the stability of Pakistan’s weak civilian government – an essential but problematic Western ally in the fight against Islamist militants.

The invasive Asian clam, Corbicula fluminea, is known as the “golden clam” in the aquarium trade and the “good luck clam” in its native southeast Asia. But in Lake George, scientists call it an unwelcome invader that could cause ecological and economic harm.

An intensive search launched after a few tiny clams were found at a sandy beach in August turned up no additional infestations, suggesting the invasion was discovered before it had a chance to spread across the 32-mile-long lake, a popular vacation spot.

Gates toured U.S. bases and met with troops in the thick of the fighting in Kandahar city and the Taliban haven of Zhari district, west of the city.

The birthplace of the Taliban, Kandahar is Afghanistan’s second-largest city and a linchpin of the retailored battle plan President Barack Obama announced last year. Even as the U.S. nears the full complement of the troop surge ordered last year by Obama, the region remains a battleground, still far from under full control of the U.S.-backed central government in Kabul.

The Mariner Energy-owned platform that erupted in flames Thursday was just 200 miles west of the spill site, but everything from the structures to the operations to the safety devices were different.

Yet when word of the latest mishap spread, residents along the coast could think only of the three-month spill that began after the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers.

The force of the eruption – the strongest so far – could be felt five miles (eight kilometers) away.

“This was a big one,” said 37-year-old Anto Sembiring, still shaken after abandoning his coffee shop in the middle of the danger zone. “We all ran as fast as we could. … Everyone was panicking.”

The USDA employees worked next to areas where roughly 7.7 million caged hens laid eggs at the two operations, but agency spokesman Caleb Weaver said their main duties are “grading” the eggs and they aren’t primarily responsible for looking for health problems.

In response to the outbreak that has led to a recall of about 550 million eggs, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration examined the Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms and noted in a report this week that inspectors found rodents, wild birds, seeping manure and maggots in the operations there.

The assault on Mahdi Karroubi’s five-story residence late Thursday – just hours before major state-backed rallies – displayed the growing tactics of trying to isolate and harass top opposition figures after relentless crackdowns appear to have driven protesters from the streets.

The 72-year-old Karroubi, a cleric and former parliament speaker, has been the most public protest leader in recent months – and has paid the price with repeated damage to his car and tense confrontations with backers of the Islamic state. But the latest backlash, described by a pro-reform website, was by far the most aggressive.

It took Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ campaign just hours to start hitting Kelly on the airwaves for his stance on Social Security. That’s because Giffords, like dozens of other Democrats around the country facing tough re-election bids in a political environment that favors the GOP, was trying to score a knockout punch against her rival before he had a chance to introduce himself to voters.

It’s a time-tested tactic in political campaigns, particularly when an incumbent is facing a lesser-known challenger, or when a seat is up for grabs after a lawmaker’s retirement or departure. And with Democrats at risk of losing their grip on Congress in the November elections, going negative early and often is regarded as a necessity.

Just when it seemed the Obama administration might be ready to lift the unpopular ban, the fire raises new questions about the dangers of offshore drilling, leaving the industry wondering when it can get back to work.

“Anything that casts any kind of shadow on the industry right now certainly complicates lifting the moratorium,” said Bruce Bullock, director of the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University in Texas. “It makes it difficult to continue to say that (the BP spill) is an aberration.”

Garcia is an illegal immigrant who crossed into the country about 14 years ago, before her children were born, and the citizenship granted to her children and millions others like them is at the center of a divisive national debate.

Republicans are pushing for congressional hearings to consider changing the nation’s 14th Amendment to deny such children the automatic citizenship the Constitution guarantees. They say women like Garcia are taking advantage of a constitutional amendment meant to guarantee the rights of freed slaves, and paint a picture of pregnant women rushing across the border to give birth. A recent Pew Hispanic Center study shows 8 percent of the 4.3 million babies born in the U.S. in 2008 had at least one illegal parent.

The Youth Promise Act would dole out money to organizations like Homeboy Industries, a gang rehabilitation center founded in 2001 under the motto “Nothing stops a bullet like a job.” The group’s founder Father Greg Boyle recently had to lay off more than 300 of his 427 workers, most of them former gang members, when expected revenues plummeted.

His organization isn’t the only one suffering. The recession has hit other nonprofits across the country hard and left some wondering how they will survive.

It’s the first time in decades a lawman has refused to cooperate in one of the agency’s probes, the department said.

The Arizona sheriff had been given until Aug. 17 to hand over documents the federal government first asked for 15 months ago, when it started investigating alleged discrimination, unconstitutional searches and seizures, and jail policies that discriminate against people with limited English skills.

Gov. Jan Brewer stumbled and stammered through her opening statement during a televised debate Wednesday night, suffering through an embarrassing, cringe-eliciting pause that lasted more than 10 seconds.

With her hands clasped in front of her, she looked at the camera, then down, possibly at notes, and back up at the camera. She smiled, let out a loud exhale, then resumed her statement with a pronouncement of her record as governor.