Evening Edition

“I lead this battle without thinking of the political cost,” the prime minister, a socialist, told visitors to the Thessaloniki International Fair. “It is a battle for the survival of Greece.

“Either we fight it all together, or we sink,” he added.

Demonstrators answered the call to demonstrate against public spending cuts, just hours before Papandreou was due to set out his Socialist government’s economic priorities for 2011 in a speech to an international fair in the northern city.

Marchers carried placards and banners with slogans such as: “It’s capitalism that should pay for the crisis” and “Nationalise the banks”.

Moving remembrance ceremonies were held to honor the nearly 3,000 people killed when Islamist hijackers slammed airliners into New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon outside Washington and a field in Pennsylvania.

But with protests planned at a proposed mosque two blocks from Ground Zero and a Florida pastor triggering demonstrations across the Muslim world with his threat to burn the Koran, this was the most politicized 9/11 anniversary yet.

As fire crews doused “hot spots” and moved into dozens of burned-out homes, Lieutenant Governor Abel Maldonado said 52 other people had also been injured, three with critical burns.

In an update some 18 hours after the blaze erupted Thursday evening, San Bruno fire chief Dennis Haag said 75 percent of properties in the ravaged area had been searched, but 25 percent remained too hot to enter.

The violent protest at radical Florida preacher Terry Jones spearheaded worldwide outrage marring Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim feast marking the end of the Ramadan holy month.

As protestors besieged a small German base in the remote town of Fayzabad in northeast Afghanistan, Indonesian and other world leaders issued dire warnings against Jones’ provocation.

The nation’s first woman leader announced the appointment as she made sweeping changes to her cabinet, after last week ensuring her hold on power after elections failed to hand victory outright to her centre-left Labor Party.

Gillard, who leads a minority government supported by one Greens MP, two country independents and a former Iraq war whistleblower, had promised that Rudd would be a senior member of her ministry if she won re-election.

The figure marked the 10th straight month that the consumer price index, a key measure of inflation, has risen, but analysts said they did not think it would be enough to prompt policymakers to raise interest rates any time soon.

Other key data released by the National Bureau of Statistics showed the world’s second-largest economy remained robust last month, suggesting the Asian giant was not slowing as fast as many had feared.

The renewed protests in the war-torn country came after obscure Florida Pastor Terry Jones called off plans to burn copies of the Koran to mark the ninth anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the United States.

The plans triggered outrage in Afghanistan and across the Muslim world with President Barack Obama warning the action could deeply hurt the United States abroad and endanger the lives of U.S. troops.

Shortly before the start of ceremonies in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania to remember the day nearly 3,000 people lost their lives, Florida preacher Terry Jones confirmed he had backed off his plan to burn the Islamic holy book.

“We have decided to cancel the burning,” Jones, the head of the tiny Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida, told NBC’s “Today” show.

A laborer in his early 30s, Sadiq looks at the calamity that affected lives of over 20 millions people as God’s wrath to punish for “wrong-doings,” but he is certain the blessings of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan would bring new happiness.

“We have lost everything in the floods – our home, livestock and all our belongings – but we are alive today to celebrate Eid-ul-Fitr,” he said, referring to the Muslim festival that marks the end of a month of fasting, and was celebrated in most of Pakistan on Saturday.

Former heads of the 9/11 Commission that studied the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington presented the 43-page study, describing it as a wake-up call about the radicalization of Muslims in the United States and the changing strategy of al Qaeda and its allies.

“The threat that the U.S. is facing is different than it was nine years ago,” said the report, released by the Washington-based Bipartisan Policy Center.

Census figures for 2009 – the recession-ravaged first year of the Democrat’s presidency – are to be released in the coming week, and demographers expect grim findings.

It’s unfortunate timing for Obama and his party just seven weeks before important elections when control of Congress is at stake. The anticipated poverty rate increase – from 13.2 percent to about 15 percent – would be another blow to Democrats struggling to persuade voters to keep them in power.

Greece narrowly avoided bankruptcy in May when European countries and the International Monetary Fund gave it euro110 billion ($140 billion) through 2012 in emergency loans. The money came on condition Athens make deep cutbacks – moves that have angered unions.

Prime Minister George Papandreou said the tax rate on companies’ retained profits would be cut from 24 to 20 percent next year, providing what he called “a strong incentive for investments and competitiveness.”

Speaking at the Pentagon, where nine years ago a hijacked plane smashed into the west side of the building and killed 184 people, Obama conjured a solemn remembrance of that horrible day but also spoke strongly in defense of religious freedom.

“As Americans we are not – and never will be – at war with Islam,” the president said. “It was not a religion that attacked us that September day – it was al-Qaida, a sorry band of men which perverts religion.”

Under a flawless blue sky that called to mind the day itself, there were tears and song, chants and the waving of hundreds of American flags. Loved ones recited the names of the victims, as they have each year since the attacks. They looked up to add personal messages to the lost and down to place flowers in a reflecting pool in their honor.

For a few hours Saturday morning, the political and cultural furor over whether a proposed Islamic center and mosque belongs two blocks from the World Trade Center site mostly gave way to the somber anniversary ceremony and pleas from elected officials for religious tolerance.

In New Hampshire, as elsewhere, the economy, federal spending and the role of government are the issues, and the 42-year-old Ayotte, a former attorney general, campaigns as a conservative who wants to “eliminate agencies, eliminate earmarks” in first steps toward taming deficits.

With Tuesday’s primary approaching, she boasted to a few dozen supporters at a cocktail reception recently that she’s the only Republican who has been criticized by Rep. Paul Hodes, who will be the Democratic candidate this fall. “And the reason is he knows I can beat him,” she added.

That’s the hope behind a growing field of military-sponsored research into bioluminescence, a phenomenon that’s under the microscope in laboratories around the country.

For university scientists who specialize in bioluminescence, an organism’s ability to illuminate with its own body chemistry, military research grants are offering a chance to break ground.

This central Los Angeles neighborhood could almost be plucked right out of Guatemala City.

Long ago a well-heeled area of Los Angeles, in more recent decades the Westlake district surrounding MacArthur Park has become a densely packed enclave of Central American immigrants fleeing brutal civil wars and grinding poverty in their home countries.

But in the turmoil and persecution that followed the break between King Henry VIII and Rome, noble families such as the Stonors clung to their faith, “in spite of dungeon, fire and sword,” as the Victorian hymn “Faith of our Fathers” put it.

“We’re just stubborn, really,” says Ralph Thomas Campion Stonor, the seventh Lord Camoys, a title bestowed on an ancestor for valor in the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.

“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.”

He wouldn’t officially get the title for almost 30 years, but Richard M. Daley, son of the last big-city boss who ruled Chicago for more than two decades, followed his father’s footsteps to the fifth floor of City Hall. Over 21 years, he brushed aside all challengers and put his unique mark on the nation’s third-largest city.

Then, last week, he stunned the city the Daleys had made their own, declaring he’d leave at the end of his sixth term next spring. By then, he’ll have served about five months longer than his father, Richard J. Daley.

A federal judge in July declared that the government’s current plan for dropping retardant on fires is illegal, and he gave the U.S. Forest Service until the end of next year to find a more environmentally friendly alternative.

The aerial assaults have become a permanent fixture of television and media coverage of wildfires in recent years as planes and helicopters drop big loads of red chemicals over blazes. But environmentalists say the efforts are essentially public relations stunts that can send millions of gallons of hazardous chemicals into waterways while doing little to contain fires.

But a three-week culinary camp sponsored by the school this summer put Johnson on a different career path. He decided hot dishes suited him more than cool rhythms.

“I love jazz,” Johnson said. “But I just feel I’m more creative in the kitchen.”

The nonprofit foundation’s records show Rep. Sanford Bishop picked his stepdaughter, Aayesha Owens Reese, to receive the money in 2003.

Records also show Bishop awarded foundation scholarships in 2003 and 2005 to his niece, Emmaundia J. Whitaker. Another of his 2003 recipients, Sherletha A. Thomas, is now the wife of Bishop’s longtime district staff director, Kenneth Cutts.

Authorities increased security in some countries due to fears that violence could intrude on the celebrations, but for most Muslims it was a day of peace, family – and most important food.

Friends and relatives feasted on spicy lamb, kebabs and saffron rice, while smokers happily puffed on cigarettes in broad daylight as the three-day Eid al-Fitr festival got under way across the Muslim world.