Evening Edition

Four of the soldiers were killed in a single bomb attack in the south, where the Taliban have concentrated their nine-year fight against the Western-backed government and where Western troops are suffering the most casualties.

The US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said a fifth soldier was killed in another bomb attack in the south and a sixth while fighting rebels in eastern Afghanistan, another insurgent stronghold.

The Partnership, a coalition of governments, non-profits, companies and international organisations, said 47 billion dollars (34 billion euros) are needed to save five million lives between now and 2015, including two million women and children.

“We need a plan to stop these completely unnecessary deaths,” said Rifat Atun, chair of the Partnership’s coordinating board, at the launch of the coalition’s 2011-2015 “Global Plan to Stop TB”.

In 2007, Earth’s 6.8 billion humans were living 50 percent beyond the planet’s threshold of sustainability, according to its report, issued ahead of a UN biodiversity conference.

“Even with modest UN projections for population growth, consumption and climate change, by 2030 humanity will need the capacity of two Earths to absorb CO2 waste and keep up with natural resource consumption,” it warned.

Almost two-thirds of the men stuck in a collapsed gold and copper mine in the northern Atacama desert for more than two months had already been smoothly winched to the surface, greeted by cheers and tears of joy.

Stepping one by one from a special metal capsule dubbed the Phoenix, the miners pumped fists in triumph or dropped to their knees in prayer as they saw the sky above them for the first time in 69 days.

“We hope to see… at least one of the miners on the surface” before Tuesday is over, Mining Minister Laurence Golborne told reporters at the San Jose gold and copper mine in northern Chile.

The rescue was to continue over the next two days, until the last of the miners was winched up in a special metal cage from their tunnel 622 meter (2,041 feet) under a mountain.

Energized by hope, the women have redone their hair, received manicures and picked out racy lingerie as they seek to rekindle romance once the miners are finally brought to the surface, beginning late Tuesday, after an extraordinary 68 days underground.

“I have never done much with my hair, but now I got some blonde highlights and shortened it,” said 26-year-old Cristina Nunez, who was a bundle of nerves as she awaited her partner Claudio Yanez’s rescue.

“I have been with God and with the devil,” said the second miner to be saved, Mario Sepulveda, 40, summing up his ordeal and miraculous salvation.

“I seized the hand of God, it was the best hand. I always knew God would get us out of there,” he said.

“Yes, there is a consensus between members,” Ecuadorian Natural Resources Minister Wilson Pastor-Morris told reporters on the eve of Thursday’s ministerial meeting at OPEC’s Vienna headquarters.

“We are happy with current prices … (we are) not worried about oil rising above 80 dollars a barrel,” said Pastor-Morris, who is also president this year of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

European Union Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger announced moves to tighten the issuing of drilling permits to ensure there is no repeat of the devastating Gulf of Mexico disaster in the United States.

But a temporary moratorium on deepwater exploration, the centre-piece of proposals that officials in his department thought had been agreed as late as Tuesday, was missing.

Rani Yadav, who placed sixth in the women’s 20km walk, tested positive for the banned steroid nandrolone.

She became the third anti-doping violation of the Games after 110m hurdler Samuel Okon, and women’s 100m gold medallist Osayemi Oludamola, both Nigerians, tested positive for stimulants.

Set for release next month, “Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood” continues the Renaissance tale of betrayed nobleman Ezio Auditore Da Firenze, a descendent of the Altair character who starred in the original title.

“Brotherhood” casts the player as Ezio, a trained killer whose mission is to combat the Knights Templar in the Eternal City.

Sixteen people were hospitalised including a police officer with first degree burns and 17 arrests were made following the violence, which began before the scrapped match and continued late into the night, officials said.

“I have just received a phone call from Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic, who presented a formal apology from the government,” Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini told reporters.

In a High Court ruling which represented a crushing defeat for Tom Hicks and George Gillett, Justice Christopher Floyd ruled in favour of the club’s board, which had agreed a deal for the club with New England Sports Ventures (NESV).

Lawyers for Gillett and Hicks had argued for more time to find a better offer than the 300-million-pound (475-million-dollar) bid tabled by NESV, claiming the boardroom manoeuvring which led to the deal was illegal.

Liu Xia has been largely confined to her home since Friday when the Nobel Committee in Oslo awarded this year’s prize to her dissident husband for advocating political reform and respect for human rights in one-party China.

“I strongly protest against the government for my illegal house arrest,” Liu Xia said on her Twitter account, calling her situation “very hard to take”.

The female humpback was first photographed among a group of whales at a breeding ground on Abrolhos Bank, off Brazil’s southeastern coast, on August 7 1999.

By sheer chance, it was photographed more than two years later, on September 21 2001 by a commercial whale-watching tour at a breeding ground near the Ile Sainte Marie off the eastern coast of Madagascar.

One day after nationwide strikes and protests brought more than a million students and workers into the streets, both sides in the bitter debate over raising the minimum pension age remained locked in their positions.

Sarkozy’s work and pensions minister, Eric Woerth, insisted that the law would pass and that the government camp remained “calm, serene and determined” in the face of the mounting protests.

The country’s trade surplus fell to 16.88 billion dollars in September from 20.03 billion dollars in August, and was the lowest surplus in five months, customs authorities said.

The figures come as China set the yuan’s central parity rate — the middle of the currency’s allowed trading band — at 6.6693 to the dollar, its strongest since a June promise of limited currency reform.

The national poll found that Americans plan to vote for Republicans over Democratic candidates by 48 percent to 44 percent, an edge that will likely give Republicans dozens of seats in the House and big gains in the Senate.

The poll numbers suggest Republicans would win around 227 seats in the House to 208 for the Democrats, Ipsos pollster Cliff Young said. In the Senate, the poll indicates Democrats would retain control but with a smaller, 52-to-48 seat margin.

One by one, the miners climbed into a specially designed steel capsule barely wider than a man’s shoulders and took a 15-minute journey through 2,050 feet of rock to freedom.

With 20 of the 33 miners freed in a rescue operation that advanced rapidly without hitches, officials hoped to have the remaining men out by the end of the day instead of in 48 hours as originally estimated.

The state attorneys general are looking at allegations some banks used shoddy or fraudulent paperwork to remove struggling borrowers from their homes during a foreclosure crisis that is one of the most visible wounds of the 2007-2009 recession.

“We are in the fourth year of a housing and economic crisis that was brought on by lax practices of the mortgage lending industry,” Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson said in a statement. “The latest allegations of corner cutting and slipshod paperwork are troubling, but perhaps not surprising.”

The world’s biggest retailer also expects to keep capital spending in the United States flat in fiscal year 2012 at $7.5 billion to $8.0 billion as it shifts spending from remodeling existing units to building new stores, the head of the U.S. business said on Wednesday.

The company plans to build 185-205 U.S. discount stores in the fiscal year beginning February 1, 2011, from an estimated 153 this year, Wal-Mart U.S. CEO Bill Simon said at the company’s annual meeting with analysts and investors in Rogers, Arkansas.

In a case with broad implications for states with the death penalty, the court heard arguments on whether Texas inmate Henry Skinner can use civil rights law to examine DNA evidence rather than a more restrictive federal law under which he would have to prove his conviction invalid.

Skinner was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1993 New Year’s Eve slayings of his girlfriend, Twila Busby, and her two adult sons in the Pampa, Texas, home they all shared.

On the campaign trail and in television ads ahead of November 2 elections, dozens of Democrats have charged that Republicans support free-trade deals and tax breaks for corporations that cleared the way for the migration of U.S. jobs to foreign countries.

Republicans have countered with ads in 10 House of Representatives districts accusing Democrats of sponsoring jobs overseas by backing tax breaks for clean energy that mostly went to foreign companies in the $814 billion stimulus bill.

She could not have been more wrong. The process was as arduous as it was protracted. Eventually, Shipe had to move out of her old home and couch surf with friends while she waited, and waited, for approval.

“What I had thought would be a fairly straightforward loan application turned into the Inquisition,” she said in her office in downtown Chicago.

The alliance of largely Western nations who back President Hamid Karzai and have nearly 150,000 troops on Afghan soil have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on aid and infrastructure since they ousted the Taliban from power in late 2001.

However with violence spreading and the insurgency bloodier than ever, some construction firms and workers on development projects say they are having to hand over some of their earnings to insurgents to protect their personnel, projects or equipment.

But the official, who spoke to reporters in Brussels on condition of anonymity, said discussions were in their very early stages and could not yet be described as negotiations.

NATO allies including the United States have previously voiced their support for reconciliation efforts aimed at ending the nine-year-old war. But the extent of any Western involvement in contacts between the Taliban and President Hamid Karzai’s government had been unclear.

The trial of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani at Manhattan federal court is seen as a test of U.S. President Barack Obama’s approach to handling some of the 174 suspected extremists held at Guantanamo Bay military prison in Cuba, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accused mastermind of the September 11 attacks.

Ghailani, 36, is a Tanzanian charged with conspiring with Islamic militants to bomb the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya on August 7, 1998, in which 224 people were killed. He faces life in prison if convicted.

The remarks by Japan’s finance minister underscored deep divisions over currency policies, an issue that will dominate G20 meetings in South Korea this month and next after a weekend International Monetary Fund meeting failed to make headway.

“As chair of the G20, South Korea’s role will be seriously questioned,” Yoshihiko Noda told a parliamentary panel when asked about South Korea’s currency interventions.

U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips in California rejected the administration’s request to limit her ruling to only military personnel who are members of the Log Cabin Republicans, the organization that sued to overturn the policy.

Phillips said in a 15-page order that because she had ruled that the policy was unconstitutional, the only proper remedy was to grant the organization a broad injunction barring the U.S. military from enforcing its policy.

The Obama administration filed a notice of appeal with the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts in support of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, that barred gay marriages, even though Obama had previously opposed the law.

Although Obama opposes the law, a Justice Department spokeswoman said that the administration was defending the statute because it was obligated to defend federal laws when challenged in court.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs signaled on Tuesday the administration’s wariness of backing populist calls to halt evictions, which could undermine efforts to persuade skeptical voters that it rescued the economy from a complete meltdown.

“There are a series of unintended consequences to a broader moratorium,” Gibbs told reporters.

A day after the federal judge in California ordered the Pentagon to cease enforcement of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law, Gates told reporters traveling with him in Europe that repealing the law should be a question for Congress – and only after the Pentagon completes its study of the issue.

Allowing gays to serve openly “is an action that requires careful preparation and a lot of training,” Gates said. “It has enormous consequences for our troops.”

Forty-four percent of students approve of the job Obama is doing as president, while 27 percent are unhappy with his stewardship, according to the survey conducted late last month. That’s a significant drop from the 60 percent who gave the president high marks in a May 2009 poll. Only 15 percent had a negative opinion back then.

It’s not just students. Obama’s support from many groups has ebbed since his early months in office because of persistently high unemployment and opposition to his plans to revive the economy and overhaul the health care system. But his diminished backing from college students raises further questions about whether the Democrats’ efforts to rally them – and other loyal supporters such as blacks and union members – will be enough to prevent Republicans from winning control of Congress in the Nov. 2 elections.

Some seniors and their advocacy groups have raised the specter of millions of the elderly struggling to pay for food, utilities and health care under a benefit freeze. Struggle, many do, particularly those who rely on Social Security for most if not all of their income.

But beneficiaries received a whopping 5.8 percent cost-of-living increase in January 2009, when the actual cost of living had risen only a tiny fraction of 1 percent. In effect, they got a double boost.

By midafternoon, 24 of the 33 miners, including all the weakest and sickest, had been pulled to freedom, and officials said they might even be able to bring everyone to the surface by the end of the night.

After 69 days underjground, including two weeks during which they were feared dead, the men emerged to the cheers of exuberant Chileans and before the eyes of a transfixed globe.

Communications technology – including live video from within the mine – turned the entire world into a global village hoping for the safe release of men they did not know and would probably never meet. It was as if each of us could see ourselves in their place, wondering how we would cope with the sustained terror and then the sudden emergence into the light.

“It feels like we’re all there with them even though we’re so far away in London,” said Jose Torra, 34, early Wednesday morning as the rescue unfolded. “For once it is a story with a good ending.”

The report released Wednesday is the strongest evidence yet of what some experts call the “Hispanic paradox” – longevity for a population with a large share of poor, undereducated members. A leading theory is that Hispanics who manage to immigrate to the U.S. are among the healthiest from their countries.

A Hispanic born in 2006 could expect to live about 80 years and seven months, the government estimates. Life expectancy for a white is about 78, and for a black, just shy of 73 years.

While humpbacks normally migrate along a north-to-south axis to feed and mate, this one – affectionately called AHWC No. 1363 – made the unusual decision to check out a new continent thousands of miles to the east.

Marine ecologist Peter Stevick says it probably wasn’t love that motivated her – whales meet their partners at breeding sites, so it’s unlikely that this one was following a potential mate.

New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co., the first major bank to report third-quarter results, earned $4.42 billion, or $1.01 per share, in the three months ending in September, beating anlaysts’ expectations. It earned $3.59 billion, or 82 cents, during the same period last year. Revenues fell 15 percent to $24.3 billion.

JPMorgan Chase is the nation’s No. 2 bank by assets and holds a vast portfolio of consumer and business loans, making it a bellwether for the U.S. economy. A closer look at its results suggest that the degree of suffering is starting to abate for Americans struggling through the longest recession since the 1930s. In a positive sign, JPMorgan said fewer of its customers were late on payments on mortgages and credit cards.

One service member was killed in the east in an attack early in the day, and another died in the south in a separate roadside bombing – the weapon of choice for militants in countering a large-scale NATO-Afghan operation in the region.

NATO did not provide nationalities of the dead, or specific locations where the attacks occurred.

The Federal Communications Commission is expected to vote Thursday to seek public comment on such rules, which are on the table after a flood of consumer complaints about unexpected and costly overage fees.

The proposed regulations would require wireless companies to send voice or text alerts to customers as they approach monthly usage limits on their plans and when they reach those limits. The rules would also mandate that carriers notify customers who travel overseas if they will be charged extra to use their phones outside the U.S. or roam on a foreign carrier’s network.

In an open letter posted online, the retired officials state that although China’s 1982 constitution guarantees freedom of speech, the right is constrained by a host of laws and regulations that should be scrapped.

“This kind of false democracy of affirming in principle and denying in actuality is a scandal in the history of democracy,” said the letter, which was dated Monday and widely distributed by e-mail.

Thirty-three deep water operations were halted by the moratorium imposed as the BP oil disaster unfolded. Meeting new federal safety requirements imposed since then will take time for oil companies.

“Those big rigs that left the Gulf, it’s going to take them a while to come back,” said Ronnie Kennier, an Empire, La., fisherman working in BP’s vessel of opportunity oil clean-up program.

The Obama administration, under heavy pressure from the oil industry and Gulf states and with elections nearing, lifted the moratorium that it imposed last April in the wake of the disastrous BP oil spill.

The ban had been scheduled to expire Nov. 30, but Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Tuesday he was moving up the date because new rules imposed after the spill had reduced the risk of another catastrophic blowout. Industry leaders warily waited for details of those rules, saying the moratorium wouldn’t be truly lifted until then.

Attorney Dave Carlson said Wednesday that Lynwood police Officer Brian Dorian is the victim of a botched investigation. It is not the first time that accusation has been made against the Will County state’s attorney’s office.

“They were trying to put pieces of a puzzle together that didn’t fit,” Carlson said of the case against Dorian. “Their mindset was very close-minded. They thought he did this and they were going to do whatever it took to get him.”

The 2011 Z4 sDrive35is boasts the most horsepower – 335 – of new-model, regular-production convertibles with fewer than eight cylinders. The engine also generates quick low-end “oomph” with peak torque of 332 foot-pounds coming on by 1,500 rpm and continuing to 4,500 rpm – a significant range that makes this Z4 forceful in both city and highway traffic.

Zero to 60 miles per hour in a surprising 4.7 seconds, to be exact.

She still hasn’t entirely gotten over her experience of finding a drowned cockroach in a drink she bought at a truck 20 years ago.

Melissa Stevens, on the other hand, hardly goes anywhere these days but to a food truck when it’s time for lunch.

Their problems will be the focus of this week’s World Food Prize symposium, as agriculture officials from around the world gather to talk about what can be done to fight hunger. As many as 60 farmers are expected to join agriculture officials from the U.S., Afghanistan, Pakistan and Liberia, said Kenneth Quinn, president of the World Food Prize Foundation, which hosts the annual conference in Des Moines.

Former U.S. Secretary General Kofi Annan is scheduled to give the keynote address Thursday, when the foundation will give its World Food Prize to the presidents of Heifer International and the Christian advocacy group Bread for the World in recognition of their efforts to fight hunger. Heifer International provides families with food- and income-producing animals, such as sheep, while Bread for the World presses U.S. lawmakers to support anti-hunger policies.

But France fell to 46th place – a loss of 28 places – because it has fewer women in ministerial posts, the survey said. Many Arab and predominantly Muslim countries remain near the bottom of the list, including Egypt, Turkey, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Yemen.

The four Nordic countries – Iceland, Finland, Norway and Sweden – have topped the Global Gender Gap Index since it was first released in 2006 by the Geneva-based World Economic Forum, and Iceland remained in first place for the second straight year.

“I hit the third rail. You cannot criticize Israel in this country and survive,” Thomas told Ohio station WMRN-AM in a sometimes emotional 35-minute interview that aired Tuesday. It was recorded a week earlier by WMRN reporter Scott Spears at Thomas’ Washington, D.C., condominium.

Thomas, 90, stepped down from her job as a columnist for Hearst News Service in June after a rabbi and independent filmmaker videotaped her outside the White House calling on Israelis to get “out of Palestine.” She gave up her front row seat in the White House press room, where she had aimed often pointed questions at 10 presidents, going back to Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicholas Lewin said in his opening statement Tuesday that Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani – the first Guantanamo Bay detainee to face a civilian trial – bought the truck and gas tanks that were used in the bombing in Tanzania, one of two simultaneous embassy bombings in Africa that killed 224 people, including a dozen Americans.

“This man, Ahmed Ghailani, was a vital member of that cell,” Lewin said as he pointed at Ghailani, who stared straight ahead in the Manhattan courtroom.

The Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay civil rights organization, delivered a petition letter carrying 150,000 signatures to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ headquarters, asking leader Boyd K. Packer to retract his statements in an Oct. 3 sermon that same-sex relationships are unnatural and can be overcome.

Packer, 86, is the second-highest ranking Mormon church leader and the next in line for the presidency of the 13.5 million-member faith.

The special inspector general for the $700 billion financial bailout is looking into the improper foreclosures, which led GMAC Mortgage to halt foreclosures in 23 states, a spokeswoman for the watchdog said.

Special inspector general Neil Barofsky can investigate GMAC because its parent company received three bailouts from the Treasury Department totaling $16.3 billion – more than all but a handful of companies.

In two separate cases, U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro in July ruled the federal Defense of Marriage Act, known as DOMA, is unconstitutional because it interferes with a state’s right to define marriage and denies married gay couples an array of federal benefits given to heterosexual married couples, including the ability to file joint tax returns.

The notice of appeal filed Tuesday did not spell out any arguments in support of the law. The appeals eventually will be heard by the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston.

Sometimes Mann, who had known she was gay for about a year but dared not tell anyone, would cut herself on the arms with a razor blade. Her long sleeves hid the evidence of her misery from classmates and family.

“Everyone’s trying to figure out who they are in middle school,” says Mann, now 18 and a high school senior in Newport, R.I., where she is active in a gay students group.