Evening Edition

“At least 303 civilians were raped, in many cases multiple times,” said a statement issued by the UN Joint Human Rights Office in the country in a preliminary report outlining the violations which took place between July 30 and August 2.

“The known victims include 235 women, 52 girls, 13 men and three boys,” detailed the probe, following the team’s visit to 13 affected villages in the Walikale region in Nord-Kivu province.

Japanese prosecutors cited the deepening rift between Beijing and Tokyo in their decision to release the captain, who was arrested after his boat collided with two Japanese coastguard vessels in the East China Sea.

“Considering the impact on Japan’s people and the Japan-China relationship, we decided it would not be worth continuing detaining and investigating the captain,” said Naha district deputy chief prosecutor Toru Suzuki.

HSBC said Stuart Gulliver, head of its investment arm, would replace Michael Geoghegan as chief executive and chose finance director Douglas Flint as its new chairman following a reported boardroom struggle.

The announcements came after markets closed in London.

He will be replaced by Stuart Gulliver, head of the group’s investment bank, the Financial Times and BBC reported.

Finance director Douglas Flint will take over as chairman from Stephen Green, who announced this month he was leaving to become Britain’s trade minister at the start of next year, the reports said.

One day after President Barack Obama pressed Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on currency in a meeting in New York, Obama’s allies in Congress approved a measure that accuses Beijing of killing US manufacturing jobs with its yuan.

The House Ways and Means Committee, which writes tax laws, voted to expand the powers of the Commerce Department to allow it to impose tariffs when another nation is found to be manipulating its currency’s value.

The Commonwealth Games Federation signalled that conditions were finally improving, but that there was still work to do after the athletes’ village was described as “uninhabitable” earlier in the week.

The showpiece multi-sport event, set to begin in nine days, had teetered on the brink of collapse on Tuesday when some nations threatened to pull out amid worries about security, a bridge falling down and the state of the facilities.

The announcement came after the Commonwealth Games Federation signalled Delhi was succeeding in fixing the problems that have brought the event to the brink of disaster.

However, the news was not all good, as high profile athletes continued to announce their withdrawals.

The German tyro, who has slipped 24 points behind teammate Mark Webber in a tight championship race, convincingly outpaced his title rivals under floodlights with a best lap of one minute and 46.660 seconds.

It lifted him 0.627 clear of Webber in second as the Red Bulls set themselves up for Saturday’s decisive qualifying, with a good position on the grid crucial on a street circuit where overtaking opportunities are limited.

Gianfranco Ferre kept the colours simple — black, white and nude — but the textures rich with a collection exuding cool elegance for spring/summer 2011.

Stylists Tommaso Aquilano and Roberto Rimondi used wide bands around the midriff to show off macrame work or set off the poitrine or a flirty fan-pleated skirt for an empire effect, while white dresses bordered with black bands recalled the 1960s.

But Prada was having none of it, dictating stripes and solids in simple shapes cut from Japanese cotton for spring/summer 2011 in a collection full of eye-catching colour clashes.

Models for the quirky label came out on stripey platform tennis shoes, carrying faux furs — striped or white or both — with their hair slicked-down and wound into twin chiffons at the nape, some sporting striped sombreros slung behind them.

Aafia Siddiqui, 38, a neuroscientist who trained at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brandeis University, was found guilty in February of trying to kill American servicemen in Afghanistan.

“It is my judgment that Dr Siddiqui is sentenced to a period of incarceration of 86 years,” Judge Richard Berman said in the federal court.

Many schools closed, flights were cancelled, and only half of inter-city and Paris metro trains ran as hundreds of thousands marched for the second time in a month against the centrepiece of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s reforms.

Scuffles broke out in Paris after the main march, when police tear-gassed a few dozen anarchist youths throwing stones and bottles, but the protests were by and large good humoured, determined and well marshalled.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has called a high level meeting on Sudan amid fears that a delay could lead to a unilateral declaration of independence by South Sudan and a possible conflict.

Obama spoke with other world leaders about the January 9 referendums in South Sudan and the small region of Abyei, both key oil producers, for which preparations are seriously behind schedule, officials said.

Teresa Lewis, 41, convicted of masterminding the murders of her husband and step-son, was pronounced dead at 9:13 pm Thursday (0113 GMT Friday) at Greensville prison, prison official Larry Traylor said.

Death penalty abolitionists had championed Lewis’s case, insisting she had diminished mental faculties and that smarter accomplices had taken advantage of her.

“The American middle class will have a tax cut,” Pelosi said at her weekly news conference. “It will be done in this Congress.”

While not ruling out a pre-election vote, the comments strongly suggest a delay on the congressional vote until after the November midterm elections, where Democrats face steep losses in the House and possibly loss of one house of Congress.

“Democrats believe we must permanently extend tax cuts for the middle-class before they expire at the end of the year, and we will,” Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Reid said in an email. “Unfortunately, to this point we have received no cooperation from Republicans to do so.”

The Senate will come back after its recess for the November elections to address the issue, he said. The Senate had been expected to take the lead on the issue, though House leaders were still discussing whether to take their own vote, according to aides.

In a move likely to increase tension with China, the House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee sent the legislation to the full House for a vote next week. It may never become law, however, as it faces uncertain prospects in the Senate.

The vote was a first step to fulfilling long-standing threats to penalize Beijing for keeping its currency artificially weak, which critics claim creates an unfair trade advantage. It came one day after President Barack Obama pressed Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on the issue in talks on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly meeting.

Obama’s announcement on August 31 has not meant the end of fighting for some of the 50,000 U.S. military personnel remaining in Iraq 7-1/2 years after the invasion that removed Saddam Hussein.

“Our rules of engagement have not changed. Iraq does remain from time to time a dangerous place, so when our soldiers are attacked they will return fire,” said Brigadier General Jeffrey Buchanan, a U.S. military spokesman.

“This situation has never occurred before,” a spokeswoman at Russian Mission Control near Moscow said, as technicians and space officials tried to discover the cause. The descent was rescheduled for Saturday, roughly 24 hours after the initial attempt.

Latches holding a Soyuz capsule to a docking port failed to open, the spokeswoman said, preventing Russians Alexander Skvortsov and Mikhail Korniyenko, and NASA’s Tracy Caldwell Dyson from returning to Earth after nearly six months in orbit.

Experts meeting in Vienna this week agreed the two could eventually become “sister churches” that recognize the Roman pope as their titular head but retain many church structures, liturgy and customs that developed over the past millennium.

The delegation heads stressed unity was still far off, but their upbeat report reflected growing cooperation between Rome and the Orthodox churches traditionally centered in Russia, Greece, Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

The premium investors demand to hold 10-year Irish bonds rather than German Bunds rose to a new euro lifetime high of 451 bps on Friday, a day after a surprise fall in second quarter gross domestic product (GDP) posed a new threat to Dublin’s fiscal consolidation efforts.

Finance Minister Brian Lenihan said Ireland will do its utmost to defend the euro currency from the market attack which he said was manifested in “disturbingly” high yields demanded for its bonds at sales on Tuesday.

Democrats, however, are divided on whether forcing a recorded vote on the issue before congressional elections in November would be politically helpful as they fight to maintain control of Congress.

“We will retain the right to proceed as we choose,” Pelosi told reporters. “We’ll take it one day at a time.”

Yet Democrats trying to exploit the GOP’s unpopularity in hopes of hanging onto control of Congress face a problem: People who dislike Democrats seem ready to vote in greater numbers than those with little use for Republicans.

In an Associated Press-GfK Poll this month, 60 percent disapprove of the job congressional Democrats are doing – yet 68 percent frown on how Republicans are performing. While 59 percent are unhappy with how Democrats are handling the economy, 64 percent are upset by the GOP’s work on the country’s top issue. Just over half have unfavorable views of each party.

But a request for assistance from a government fund that provides subsidized heating to low-income Britons has caused a spot of bother for Queen Elizabeth II, long one of the world’s wealthiest women.

Her Majesty’s application in 2004 was politely turned down by the government – in part because of fear of adverse publicity – and quietly forgotten until The Independent newspaper published the correspondence Friday after obtaining it via a Freedom of Information request.

“It turns out – and I did not know this – most soil is at ground level,” Colbert testified Friday. Also, “It was hotter than I like to be.”

Still, Colbert expressed befuddlement that more Americans aren’t clamoring to “begin an exciting career” in the fields and instead are leaving the low-paid work to illegal immigrants.

Long himself, though, has been accused of contradicting those virtues. The bishop – who’s been an outspoken opponent of gay marriage in the past – is being sued by two young men who attended the LongFellows Youth Academy and say Long used the program to groom them for sexual relationships.

Two other men have also made similar accusations – including one who filed a lawsuit Friday. That lawsuit, provided to The Associated Press, said Long coerced him into a sexual relationship during a trip to Kenya, at one point telling the young man “I will be your dad.”

U.S. District Judge Ronald Leighton issued his highly anticipated ruling Friday in the case of former Maj. Margaret Witt. She was discharged under the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays serving in the military and sued to get her job back.

In 2008, a federal appeals court panel ruled in her case that the military can’t discharge people for being gay unless it proves their firing furthered military goals.

There are no fewer than four education documentaries slated for release by the end of this year, including “Waiting for ‘Superman,'” a poignant look at the lives of five children hoping to escape the dismal outcome of students at neighborhood public schools by winning entrance to a successful charter.

The film by Davis Guggenheim, the Oscar-winning director of “An Inconvenient Truth,” has already created a stir in education circles and opens in New York and Los Angeles Friday.

The district attorney’s office was trying to determine if Randy Adams broke the law by cutting a deal with Bell to support his disability retirement, the Los Angeles Times said.

If the state approves the pension application, Adams would have to pay taxes on only half his potential $400,000 annual pension.

The Office of Lawyer Regulation is restarting the probe into Calumet County District Attorney Ken Kratz because new information appears to show “a pattern of conduct” by Kratz, said the agency’s director, Keith Sellen.

“The OLR will investigate all the allegations that have been made against District Attorney Kratz,” Sellen said in a statement, after staying silent on the matter for more than a week.

Prospective candidates are lining up support around town, reaching out to business leaders, union officials, activists and others. Unlike Emanuel, who has not been seen in Chicago since Mayor Richard Daley announced he would not seek re-election and even canceled a trip to the city, some already are showing up at local events and drawing voters into their corners.

“I met with business leaders, I met with labor leaders, religious leaders, an individual who is a representative of the gay community,” said James Meeks, a state senator and one of the Chicago’s leading black clergymen, who is gathering signatures and widely expected to run.

With Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan at his side ahead of private talks on the sidelines of a United Nations global summit, Obama didn’t publicly mention the heated diplomatic clash over Japan’s arrest of a Chinese fishing boat captain near islands both Japan and China claim as their own.

But he made clear that the U.S.-Japan alliance is crucial to stability in Asia and to both U.S. and Japanese security.