Evening Edition

Medvedev, who liberals hoped would prove a major political reformer when he took power in 2008, told a meeting of international experts that Russia’s system of government was not in need of major change.

“Nothing needs to be radically changed. Not because it is not allowed, but because there is no need,” Medvedev told the meeting at a forum in the Volga city of Yaroslavl.

Obama also mounted a strident defense of American Muslims, paid tribute to believers fighting in US armed forces, and said US citizens must remember who their true enemies were — naming Al-Qaeda and “terrorists.”

The president has vowed to forge a “new beginning” with Islam, but global tensions have spiked over a plan to build a Muslim cultural center near the felled World Trade Center in New York and a US pastor’s threat to burn Korans.

“Right now, we have plans not to do it,” Terry Jones told ABC news, despite saying late Thursday he could go back on a pledge to call off the incendiary gesture.

Despite Jones’s assurances that the Koran burning would not go ahead as had been planned on Saturday’s anniversary of the September 11 attacks, fury built across the Muslim world.

Obama appeared at a White House news conference designed to showcase his recovery plans and shore up his political standing ahead of November’s mid-term elections in which his Democrats face a Republican wave.

The appearance also looked likely to feature questions about the implications of a on-hold threat by a Florida pastor to torch 200 Korans on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks on Saturday.

The Finnish telecommunications equipment giant chose relatively unknown Stephen Elop to replace Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, who had been sharply criticised for failing to bring Nokia up to speed in a changing mobile phone market.

“In late May of this year, we started a CEO search process…. We wanted to ask ourselves, and we did, who would be the best person to lead Nokia,” former chief executive and board chairman Jorma Ollila said at a press conference.

But the Red Bull driver was reluctant to make any declarations about his pace or prospects following a tight and competitive session at the famous old Autodromo in Monza’s former royal park.

“We learned our lesson last year after we got hammered quite badly here, so I think we did a step forward. But we need to be patient,” he said.

Regulators are poised to curb so-called high frequency trading that uses sophisticated algorithms to analyze equity markets and trigger trades at lightning speed.

The practice, also known as HFT, today accounts for more than half of daily US stock trade.

Karzai also called on his Western backers, the United States and NATO allies which now have 150,000 troops in the country, to focus on insurgent sanctuaries over the border in Pakistan rather than fighting in Afghan villages.

“We hope Mullah Mohammad Omar Akhund joins the peace process, gives up fratricide, gives up bombings and blasts, stops causing casualties to Afghanistan’s children, women and men,” he said, using Omar’s religious title.

The massive explosion and inferno ripped through a neighborhood in San Bruno near San Francisco, leaving residents shocked by the sudden devastation.

San Bruno fire chief Charlie Barringer told the Los Angeles Times at least six people were dead, and the toll was expected to rise. CNN television reported three people had been killed.

A suicide car bomber wounded more than 100 people Thursday at a busy central market in the city of Vladikavkaz in the mainly Christian Caucasus region of North Ossetia.

More people died of their injuries overnight, raising the death toll, said regional health minister Vladimir Selivanov, putting the toll at 17, while Maria Gatsoyeva, a spokeswoman for regional investigators, said there were 18 dead.

News of the plan has already outraged many Muslims around the world.

“This is a way of endangering our troops, our sons and daughters …. you don’t play games with that,” Obama told a Washington news conference in which he made an earnest appeal for the United States to preserve broad religious tolerance.

With opinion polls showing more Americans questioning his economic leadership, Obama used a rare news conference at the White House to hammer home a campaign-style message painting Republicans as obstructionist and the party for the rich.

Obama has been on the defensive as recession-weary Americans have grown skeptical about the steps he has taken to bring down an unemployment rate persistently near 10 percent.

The president said had chosen Austan Goolsbee as the new chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) because he was a skilled communicator who already knows the rest of Obama’s top team very well.

“He’s someone who has a deep appreciation of how the economy affects everyday people, and he talks about it in a way that’s easily understood,” Obama said during a news conference to explain how his policies would boost growth and jobs.

Whoever wins the September 14 vote faces the task of keeping a split Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) from unraveling while struggling with a strong yen, a fragile economy, huge public debt and a divided parliament that threatens more policy deadlock.

Markets are bracing for a shift toward a more stimulative fiscal policy if Ozawa, 68, wins.

At the start of the 20th century, before the era of ubiquitous gas stations, drivers did just that as they tested the limits of cars like the Ford Model T, which ran on gasoline, kerosene or ethanol and could, if driven carefully, travel more than 150 miles on a full tank.

Now a new generation of drivers is set to embark on a similar kind of experiment. Until recently, most electric vehicles, or EVs as they are often known, have had a range of just a few dozen miles, limiting their usefulness and appeal. That’s a big reason the long-talked-about era of electric vehicles has been, well, talked and talked about for so long with little real-world progress.

Crews with dogs went house to house and officials said there could be more casualties from the Thursday evening blast. Homes were left with just chimneys standing and smoke still rose from 15 acres of smoldering wreckage. Fire officials said the blaze is fully contained, but a quarter of the homes are still too hot to search.

“It was pretty devastating,” said San Bruno Fire Chief Dennis Haag. “It looks like a moonscape in some areas.”

This year’s commemoration of the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Shanksville, Pa., promises to be the most political and contentious ever because of a proposed Islamic center and mosque near ground zero and a Florida pastor’s plan to burn the Quran – and the debate those issues have engendered over religious freedom.

As in other years, official ceremonies are planned at the three locations the terrorists struck. President Barack Obama will attend a commemoration at the Pentagon, while Vice President Joe Biden will go to ground zero. First lady Michelle Obama and former first lady Laura Bush will travel to Shanksville to observe the ninth anniversary there.

Professor Peter Adriaenssens, chairman of the commission, said the abuse in Belgium may have been even more rampant than the 200-page report suggests.

“Reality is worse than what we present here today because not everyone shares such things automatically in a first contact with the commission,” he told reporters.

Friday marked Day 9 of an unusual coal miners’ protest, a sit-in staged 1,650 feet (500 meters) underground. No showers, no toilets, no Internet and soot-dusted mattresses are a small price to pay, the miners reason, in exchange for a more hopeful future for their beleaguered industry.

Their strike in northern Palencia province is the culmination of a long dispute over unpaid wages and the future of an antiquated industry struggling to survive as it competes with gas-fired electrical utility plants and heavily subsidized renewable energy projects. To make matters worse, all these sources of energy are seeking aid from a government grappling with a recession, high unemployment and a debt crisis.

The Federal Aviation Administration plan, months away from becoming final, would set different requirements based on the time of day, number of scheduled flight segments, flight types, and time zones. Pilots would get nine hours of rest between work days, an increase of an hour.

Pilots have complained that the current eight-hour rest period, which begins as soon as they leave the plane, often means only a few hours sleep.

The House voted in May to repeal the 17-year-old policy banning openly gay service members. Many majority Democrats in the Senate want to take up the matter in the remaining four weeks before the pre-election recess, but face opposition from Republican leaders.

National gay-rights groups, fearing possible Democratic losses on Nov. 2, urged their supporters Friday to flood senators’ offices with phone calls and e-mails asking that the Senate vote on the measure during the week of Sept. 20.

“Let’s work on that. Let’s do it,” he told a nationally broadcast White House news conference, his first since last May.

Obama said his economic programs were helping, but “the hole the recession left was huge and progress has been painfully slow.”

The report says U.S. authorities failed to realize that Somali-American youths traveling from Minnesota to Mogadishu in 2008 to join extremists was not an isolated issue. Instead, the movement was one among several instances of a broader, more diverse threat that has surfaced across the country.

“Our long-held belief that homegrown terrorism couldn’t happen here has thus created a situation where we are today stumbling blindly through the legal, operational and organizational minefield of countering terrorist radicalization and recruitment occurring in the United States,” said the report, which was obtained by The Associated Press.

The choice of a North American executive to lead a Finnish company reflects the increasing dominance of U.S. and Canadian companies in the evolution of the phone business.

Apple Inc.’s iPhone has set the standard for today’s smart phones, while Research In Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerrys are the favorite of the corporate set. More recently, Google Inc.’s Android software has emerged as the choice for phone makers that want to challenge the iPhone.

“It’s not a question of ‘Can you?’ It’s a question of ‘Should you?'” said Dan Fisher, pastor of the Trinity Baptist Church in Yukon. “It’s kind of like they’re poking a finger in your eye.”

Nick Singer, the coordinator of a local atheists’ group called “Coalition of Reason,” recently received $5,250 from its national counterpart to erect the billboard along Interstate 44 near the Oklahoma State Fair, which opens Wednesday. Its message reads, “Don’t believe in God? Join the club.”

It took the belated awarding of a Bronze Star to the upstate New York native to finally loosen the lips of the man credited with preventing former Japanese prime minister Hideki Tojo from committing suicide on Sept. 11, 1945, nine days after Japan officially surrendered. Tojo was eventually put on trial for war crimes and executed in 1948.

“I never wanted it in the first place,” Wilpers, 90, said of the attention he received after capturing Tojo and again earlier this year when he finally received the medal.

At 10.95 carats, the stone is the largest triangular-shaped fancy vivid blue diamond ever to come to auction, Christie’s told The Associated Press in advance of the Oct. 20 sale. It is paired with a 9.87-carat white diamond cut in the same shape.

“Vivid blue is the strongest and purest saturation in any colored diamond,” said Rahul Kadakia, Christie’s jewelry expert. “As a vivid, this is as good as it gets.”

That was fine with leaders of the Islamic Society of Greater Valley Forge. Amid a tense national climate for U.S. Muslims, they did not seek publicity for the happy occasion, only continued peace with their neighbors: a Jewish synagogue next door and Baptist church across the street.

The Muslims’ good relations with other faiths and the town at large offers a stark contrast to American communities torn by anti-Islamic acts, including arson at the site of a planned mosque in Tennessee and a threatened Quran burning in Florida.

About a hundred residents took to the streets for the fourth night in a row Thursday, but no violence erupted. Instead the crowd lit prayer candles in memory of Manuel Jaminez and dropped money in a collection box to help his family in Guatemala.

Some jeered at passing patrol cars, but there was no hurling of eggs, bottles and rocks that was seen earlier in the week.

“There will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a letter to the insurance lobby.

“Simply stated, we will not stand idly by as insurers blame their premium hikes and increased profits on the requirement that they provide consumers with basic protections,” Sebelius said. She warned that bad actors may be excluded from new health insurance markets that will open in 2014 under the law. They’d lose out on a big pool of customers, as many as 30 million people nationwide.

The offer, though, fell flat nearly instantly.

“This is just a cheap attempt to get publicity and get in the limelight,” said Wolodymyr Starosolsky, a lawyer for the investor, Hisham Elzanaty.

After a wildfire raged through her east side neighborhood this week, those same homes now are charred, some gutted.

“I just want to know, will they leave it like this?” she asked.

By the time officials arrested suspects months later, two more Afghans were dead.

And much to Christopher Winfield’s horror, his son Adam was among the five Fort Lewis-based soldiers charged in the killings.

If only the writers of the Quran and the Bible had logged on to Twitter accounts.

The world has always had its cranks and crackpots, its intolerance and religious bigots. But only in this wired generation has word of outrages against others’ beliefs flashed around the globe in an instant, to create instant crises.

The ACLU’s New Jersey chapter filed a petition Thursday asking the U.S. Department of Justice to provide an independent monitor for the 1,300-officer Newark Police Department.

In a 96-page filing, the civil rights advocacy group cited 407 instances of misconduct ranging from police officers breaking a man’s jaw and eye socket during an arrest to seven deaths attributed to Newark officers. The deaths included shootings or ignoring urgent health complaints, according to the report.

But other candidates have local power bases they’ve been cultivating for years, while Emanuel has been far away in Washington. So there are doubts about his ability to put a couple of hundred campaign workers on the street to begin drumming up votes.

Emanuel has to consider something else, too: The prospect of his name being dredged up at former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s second corruption trial – and maybe even being called to testify – just as he is trying to convince Chicagoans to vote for him.

He started the late-term abortions in New Jersey, where he wasn’t permitted to perform them, and finished them a day later in Maryland, where the law is more permissive, authorities said.

One of the abortions, however, didn’t go as planned, and Maryland officials ordered Brigham, 54, to stop practicing medicine in the state. Police raided his offices and yanked two of his colleagues’ licenses in Maryland, and New Jersey authorities are also seeking to take his license away.

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia said that Hazleton’s Illegal Immigration Relief Act usurped the federal government’s exclusive power to regulate immigration.

“It is … not our job to sit in judgment of whether state and local frustration about federal immigration policy is warranted. We are, however, required to intervene when states and localities directly undermine the federal objectives embodied in statutes enacted by Congress,” wrote Chief Judge Theodore McKee.