Evening Edition

Across nearly 400,000 pages of secret military field reports spanning five years, the largest military leak in history, a grisly picture emerges of years of blood and suffering following the 2003 US invasion to oust Saddam Hussein.

Many of the classified documents, which span from January 1 2004 to December 31 2009, chronicle claims of abuse by Iraqi security forces, while others appear to show that American troops did nothing to stop state-sanctioned torture.

The mass of documents from 2004 to 2009 offer a grim snapshot of the conflict, especially of the abuse of Iraqi civilians by Iraqi security forces.

“This disclosure is about the truth,” Assange told a news conference in London after the whistleblowing website published the logs on the Internet.

There were no casualties among UN workers, Delawar Shah Delawar, deputy police chief of Herat province, told AFP after the raid, which was claimed by the Taliban.

Delawar, who earlier said there were three attackers, said another had been found, shot and killed by police.

Joao Silva, 44, was evacuated to the main US military base in southern Kandahar after being wounded in the legs in the volatile Arghandab region of the province.

“A group of minesweepers and bomb-sniffing dogs had already moved over the area several steps ahead of Mr. Silva when the bomb went off,” the report on the newspaper’s website said.

“We have recorded more than 208 dead,” Gabriel Thimote, the ministry’s director general, said at a news conference.

He said most of the victims were in the rural Artibonite region of central Haiti, the focus of the first cholera outbreak the country has seen in over a century.

The United Nations said 138 people have died, while aid agencies are sending 300,000 doses of antibiotics and 10,000 boxes of water purification tablets to the impoverished Caribbean nation in a bid to prevent more deaths.

The outbreak of cholera, caused by a bacteria that can lead to fatal cases of diarrhea and dehydration, has not been seen in Haiti in over a century, further complicating containment efforts with at least 1,500 people already infected.

After all-night talks among their senior officials, G20 finance ministers forged an agreement in South Korea to “refrain from competitive devaluation of currencies” and aim for “more market-determined exchange rate systems”.

South Korean Finance Minister Yoon Jeung-Hyun said the two-day G20 meeting had laid to rest fears of a “currency war” between struggling debtors such as the United States and exporting powers such as China.

Unions showed no sign of giving up and have vowed more protests in their months-long struggle against the bill whose passage into law expected next week the government hopes will end protests that brought millions onto the streets.

The vote late Friday all but sealed the reform, the centrepiece of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s agenda, and government expects the text to be reconciled with a lower house version before being definitively adopted on Wednesday.

Unions showed no sign of giving up the fight and have vowed more days of action in their months-long struggle against the bill whose passage into law expected next week the government hopes will end protests that brought millions onto the streets.

The vote late Friday all but sealed the reform, the centrepiece of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s agenda, and government expects the text to be reconciled with a lower house version before being definitively adopted on Wednesday.

Two policemen and three carabinieri suffered slight injuries in a face-off lasting several hours with residents of Terzigno near Naples hurling stones and fireworks at them, local authorities said.

The police responded with tear gas and baton charges in the latest incidents in a week of protests that have seen local people block all access to the town’s existing waste dump.

G20 finance ministers clinched the deal after years of efforts to make the Washington-based Fund better reflect a shift in global power — with the result that China, India and others will gain more weight at Europe’s expense.

“It’s the biggest reform ever in the governance of the IMF,” IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn told reporters as the G20 bloc of advanced economies and emerging powers met in the South Korean city of Gyeongju.

People flocked to polling stations long after they opened at 8:00 am (0500 GMT) for 12 hours of voting, state television reported.

Some 292 observers from Bahraini non-governmental organisations are monitoring the ballot, while foreign observers were not allowed to oversee the election.

Branson and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson on Friday hosted a ceremony marking the completion of the main runway at Spaceport America, near the town of Las Cruces where the Virgin Galactic project is based.

“This is the beginning of the second space age and we are proud to have been supporters of this part of the story.

The 23-year-old German recorded his ninth pole of the 2010 season with a lap of 1 minute 35.585 seconds, edging teammate and world championship leader Mark Webber of Australia by 0.074secs in a thrilling hour-long session.

Vettel’s pole is the 14th of his career, and the front-row one-two is Red Bull’s eighth of the season.

Uploaded on the WikiLeaks’ website, the files detailed gruesome cases of prisoner abuse by Iraqi forces that the U.S. military knew about but did not seem to investigate.

In Baghdad, Iraqi officials responded to WikiLeaks’ move by pledging to probe any allegations that police or soldiers had committed crimes and any culprits would be prosecuted.

The flood of files mainly containing in-the-field action reports from lower level U.S. military officers detailed gruesome cases of prisoner abuse that were known to U.S. authorities but not investigated by them.

“The government will show no leniency when it comes to the rights of its citizens,” Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s office said, while also decrying the timing of the reports while Iraqi political groups are trying to negotiate a new government.

With more than 2,300 cholera cases reported and experts predicting the numbers will rise, Haitian and international medical teams are working desperately to isolate and contain the epidemic in the Artibonite and Central Plateau regions.

These are north of the sprawling and rubble-strewn capital Port-au-Prince, with its squalid slums and around 1.3 million survivors of the January 12 earthquake packed into tent and tarpaulin camps. All are highly vulnerable to a virulent diarrheal disease like cholera.

At a meeting in South Korea, G20 finance ministers recognized the quickening shift in economic power away from Western industrial nations by striking a surprise deal to give emerging nations a bigger voice in the International Monetary Fund.

A closing communique contained no major policy initiative after a U.S. proposal to limit current account imbalances to 4 percent of gross domestic product, a measure aimed squarely at shrinking China’s surplus, failed to win broad enough backing.

Bahrain, headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet which patrols the Gulf, has a Shi’ite Muslim majority population but is governed by the Sunni al-Khalifa dynasty. Allies Saudi Arabia and the United States see the country as a bulwark against the regional influence of Shi’ite power Iran.

Polling stations closed at 1700 GMT, and results were not expected until Sunday. The main Shi’ite opposition group Wefaq said it expected to win all 18 seats it had contested, based on its own exit polls. There are 40 seats in Bahrain’s parliament.

Despite weeks of protests and strikes that have hit railways and refineries hardest, the flagship reform of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s term is expected to be finally adopted by Wednesday.

On the first day of a 12-day, mid-term school holiday, Transport Minister Dominique Bussereau assured motorists highway service stations were well stocked but acknowledged shortages elsewhere and urged motorists not to overdo tank refills.

The attack with rockets, machine guns and bombers hit the U.N. compound in Herat, a commercial hub and the largest city in the country’s west where Taliban and other Islamist insurgents are usually less active than in other areas.

Afghan forces and U.N. security guards at the compound repelled the insurgents. Two attackers, including a car bomber, blew themselves up at the entrance and another detonated his bomb just inside, while a fourth was shot and killed, police, government and U.N. officials said.

On a five-day sprint through western states, he also entered the highest profile race of the November 2 congressional elections — a contest between Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid and Republican Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle.

Obama portrayed the embattled Reid as a champion for the middle class who stays awake at night worrying about people whose houses have been foreclosed.

The win gave them a 4-2 triumph in the best-of-seven series and put them into the Fall Classic against the winner of the National League Championship Series between the Philadelphia Phillies and San Francisco Giants, who lead it 3-2.

Rookie closer Neftali Feliz struck out former Ranger Alex Rodriguez for the final out, igniting wild celebrations on the diamond and among the crowd of more than 51,000 at Rangers Ballpark.

The disclosure comes just days after Canada’s privacy watchdog said Google had collected complete emails and accused Google of violating the rights of thousands of Canadians.

“If in fact laws were broken…then there’s some serious question of culpability and Google may need to face significant fines,” said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington DC-based privacy advocacy group.

The officials said the cut-off was required under U.S. law, which forbids funding of foreign military units that are singled out for gross human rights violations. They would not say how many units were affected.

“It’s a relatively small number. That’s all I can say,” State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters, adding he was constrained because the issue dealt with legal and intelligence matters.

The reports, covering early 2004 to Jan. 1, 2010, help explain why Iraq’s struggle to create a unified, independent state continues, despite a dramatic reduction in violence. They appear to support arguments by some experts that the U.S. should keep thousands of troops there beyond their scheduled departure in 2011, to buy more time for Iraq to become stable.

The threats described in the leaked documents come from outside, including next-door Iran, as well as inside, in the form of sectarian, political and even family rivalries that predate the 2003 American-led invasion and endure today.

The trove of nearly 400,000 WikiLeaks papers includes U.S. military reports of alleged abuse by Iraqi security forces – some of which happened after al-Maliki became prime minister in May 2006. They were released as al-Maliki scrambles to keep his job, nearly seven months after national elections failed to produce a clear winner.

The accusations of abuse of what were likely mostly Sunni detainees at the hands of the mostly Shiite Iraqi security forces has reignited Sunni fears of another four years under al-Maliki, who was known as a Shiite hard-liner before he became prime minister. Al-Maliki has more recently tried to portray himself as a national leader above sectarian divisions but the WikiLeaks reports threaten to once again rip open the country’s Sunni-Shiite divide.

By Saturday more than 200 were confirmed dead in the poor Caribbean nation’s worst health crisis since the Jan. 12 quake, and authorities said more than 2,000 were sick.

The cholera outbreak has been centered in the central Artibonite region, but at least five cases were confirmed in Arcahaie, a town closer to the quake-devastated capital, Port-au-Prince. Another four cases were reported in Limbe, a small northern municipality.

Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak has trailed Republican Pat Toomey for months, and a GOP victory always has seemed likely, given that it’s a Republican-trending year in this perpetually contested state. Yet recent polls suggest Sestak has closed the gap, and Republican leaders are imploring supporters not to panic even as they ask themselves: What’s going on?

The Sestak-Toomey race mirrors other Senate contests that are making this one of the most intriguing and unpredictable midterm elections in years.

Instead, he heads an organization that trails Democrats by $15 million in fundraising, is in debt and largely has been overshadowed by third-party groups that, in a few months, have raised almost as much as Republican National Committee has since January 2009.

Frustration with the chairman is evident in some states.

Different lineups could mean different fates for health care, taxation, government spending and regulation, energy and foreign policy, and President Barack Obama’s bid for a second term.

The newly elected, no matter how a big their freshman class, will have to wait for power. At most, they may get junior leadership seats in each chamber as a symbolic gesture to the populist wave they rode in on, lawmakers and congressional officials said.

The brazen attack began when four militants drove up to the U.N. compound in a car laden with explosives and fired a rocket toward the entrance, said Dilawar Shah Dilawar, deputy police chief of Herat province.

The militants tried unsuccessfully to blow up the gate with the rocket so they could drive the car inside the compound, he said. When that didn’t work, three of the militants got out of the car and the fourth blew up the vehicle, killing himself. The explosion destroyed the gate, allowing the three to get inside.

But what she hasn’t been is a wife. The 57-year-old career woman, who now serves as the state’s lieutenant governor, has never been married or had children. And as this historic race between two women candidates for the state’s top office nears its conclusion, that gap in her biography is attracting increasing attention.

At rallies and other appearances, opponent Rep. Mary Fallin, 55, a Republican congressman, regularly mentions her new husband and their combined six children. Fallin, who had two children from a previous marriage, married a divorced father of four in November. She says her family and her experience as a businesswoman and officeholder have made her most qualified to be governor.

The Group of 20 vowed to avoid potentially debilitating currency devaluations and reduce trade and current account imbalances, amid a growing recognition that restructuring the world economy is necessary to accommodate the greater role played by fast-growing China and other developing economies.

G-20 finance ministers and central bank governors met for two days in the South Korean city of Gyeongju ahead of a summit of their leaders in Seoul next month. Just two weeks ago, a G-20 meeting in Washington failed to resolve differences that had stoked worries a possible trade war could trigger another economic downturn.

Fireworks and confetti filled the Texas sky. A flag proclaiming the Rangers as the AL champions was raised high above the ballpark, whipping in the wind alongside more than three dozen Lone Star state flags.

And to make their first World Series berth even more satisfying, the Rangers earned it by beating the defending champion New York Yankees. The clincher was a 6-1 victory Friday night in Game 6 of the ALCS.

As the guest host Friday night of “The O’Reilly Factor,” Williams, who was axed for saying he gets nervous on a plane when he sees Muslims, mentioned several remarks made by other NPR commentators that didn’t result in firings.

“My comments about my feelings supposedly crossed this line, some line, somewhere. That crossed the line?” Williams said. “Let me tell you what you can say on National Public Radio without losing your job.”

They may get more than they’re wishing for.

The so-called individual mandate has provoked tea party conservatives, who see it as an example of big government interference in personal decisions. Now Republican candidates are running on platforms that include repealing the broader health care law. And attorneys general from some 20 states – mainly Republicans – are challenging the mandate as unconstitutional.

Michaels’ departure comes at a pivotal time for the troubled media company. After nearly two years operating under bankruptcy protection, Tribune Co. is drawing up a reorganization plan that it hopes a federal judge will approve before the end of the year.

Michaels, 58, joined Tribune Co. three years ago following an ill-fated $8.2 billion buyout engineered by real estate mogul Sam Zell in 2007. Michaels became Tribune Co.’s CEO late last year. Michaels, a former radio disc jockey, won Zell’s trust as CEO of a radio broadcast company that Zell owned, Jacor Communications.

If the Republican wave on Nov. 2 ends up a bit weaker than many now predict, at least some of the credit will have to go to the former president, the most sought-after surrogate for dozens of anxious Democratic congressional and gubernatorial nominees.

Always an intuitive campaigner who could slap backs and dissect policy with equal ease, Clinton has another appealing quality in these economic hard times: He left office amid high employment and a government surplus. Some people attending his rallies wear buttons saying “I miss peace, prosperity and Clinton.”

When temperatures soared to 115 degrees in the baking Coachella Valley and an electrical fire killed the power for a month, her family couldn’t take any more.

Beaza’s husband and four other residents sued their landlords in state court.

Voters will decide next month whether to shut them down.

Measure No. 2 on the Nov. 2 general election ballot seeks to abolish fenced preserves where people pay to shoot big game such as deer and elk. Supporters of the measure say the practice is unethical because the animals can’t escape. Opponents say it’s free enterprise.

The 42-year-old is one of dozens of volunteers – many of them illegal immigrants – canvassing neighborhoods in the Seattle area trying to get naturalized citizens to cast a ballot for candidates like Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, who is in a neck-to-neck race with Republican Dino Rossi.

Pramila Jayapal, head of OneAmerica Votes, says the campaign is about empowering immigrants who may not feel like they can contribute to a campaign because they can’t vote.