Evening Edition

Thousands of demonstrators besieged 30 Millbank, running riot through the 1960s office building near parliament, which houses the Conservative Party.

Vastly outnumbered, police were powerless to stop the protesters smashing their way through the entire three-sided glass frontage, storming in and wrecking the lobby.

The outbreak erupted in the Artibonite River valley in central Haiti in mid-October and initially seemed to have been contained, but the toll from the chronic diarrheal disease has since soared to 643 dead and just under 10,000 people being treated in hospital.

Some 115 cases and a first death have been confirmed in Port-au-Prince, while reports came in from northern Haiti of villagers on foot dying on the way to hospital and taxi drivers too scared to help.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner, who has spent most of the past two decades locked up, is due to be freed on Saturday, just days after a widely criticised election that her party boycotted.

“We haven’t got any instruction from superiors for her release yet. But we are preparing security plans for November 13,” a government official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

The US Commerce Department reported exports nudged up as foreign imports nudged down, narrowly reducing a deficit which has become a major source of the world’s escalating trade rows.

Leaders from the world’s 20 leading economies will meet in South Korea from Thursday where trade-linked currency squabbles are set to dominate.

“Since Tuesday evening, there have been 13 bombs and two mortar attacks on homes and shops of Christians in which a total of six people were killed and 33 injured,” a defence ministry official said. “A church was also damaged.”

The attacks come less than two weeks after 44 Christian worshippers, two priests and seven security personnel died in the seizure of the Baghdad church by Islamist gunmen and the ensuing shootout when it was stormed by troops.

“Two mortar shells and 10 homemade bombs targeted the homes of Christians in different neighbourhoods of Baghdad between 6 am and 8 am (0300 and 0500 GMT),” an interior ministry official told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“The toll is three dead and 26 wounded.”

At a news conference in Seattle, Washington, home of Boeing’s commercial airplane factory, spokeswoman Loretta Gunter said the fire was the most serious incident since the test flight program began on December 15, 2009.

“We really don’t know” whether the suspension of test flights will further set back the program, she said.

“We have decided to focus on ground testing and not fly the airplanes until we better understand the incident on ZA002,” Loretta Gunter, a Boeing spokeswoman, told AFP.

Smoke filled the cabin of the ZA002, one of Boeing’s six test 787s, on Tuesday, forcing an emergency landing in Laredo, Texas. The plane had departed Yuma, Arizona.

“I felt so strongly about the decisions I was making and I felt that history would understand,” Bush, who left office deeply unpopular at home and abroad, said during an hour-long interview with US talk show queen Oprah Winfrey.

The former president, who dubbed himself “the decider” during his eight years in the White House, takes readers of his 500-page “Decision Points” on a backstage tour of his administration and confronts his bitterest critics.

The 14-time major winner has endured a spectacular fall from grace since confessing late last year to committing adultery in a sex scandal that engulfed his personal and professional life.

Once seemingly unchallengeable, Woods lost his world number one ranking to Englishman Lee Westwood last week after a 281-week tenure at the top and is struggling to recapture past glories on the golf course.

The People’s Bank of China said in a one-line statement on its website that the reserve ratio would be raised by 50 basis points, effective next Tuesday. The hike is the fourth this year.

Chinese officials have signalled growing concern over rising inflation and a potential asset bubble in the property market as the world’s second-biggest economy continues its rapid growth.

Obama said Indonesia’s transformation had been mirrored in his own life, in the 40 years since he left the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, as a scruffy youth destined to become the president of the United States.

“Indonesia is a part of me,” Obama said, recalling how his late mother had married an Indonesian man and brought her son to then sleepy Jakarta, where he would fly kites, run in rice paddies and catch dragonflies.

Cameron said Chinese cooperation with the Group of 20 on trade and currency issues would “go a long way” to stabilising the world economy, but warned of a “dangerous tidal wave of money going from one side of the globe to the other”.

His speech at Peking University came on the eve of a leaders’ summit for the 20 biggest rich and emerging economies in Seoul set to be dominated by trade imbalances between China and the United States, plus a looming currency war.

Ill-tempered pre-summit talks in Seoul grew heated as senior Group of 20 officials laboured to grind out a leaders’ statement on fixing trade imbalances, a result of China’s dramatic expansion and America’s deficit woes.

Chinese President Hu Jintao, ahead of a meeting Thursday with US President Barack Obama in Seoul, called on other countries to “face their own problems” rather than casting blame for the chasm between debtor and creditor nations.

Taking aim at some of Washington’s most politically explosive fiscal issues, the draft proposals were portrayed as achieving $4 trillion in deficit reduction through 2020, but they got a mixed reception from other commission members.

With a final report due from the panel on December 1, Democratic Representative Jan Schakowsky, a commission member, told reporters: “It’s not a proposal I could support.”

The U.S. easy-money policy has been under fire since the Federal Reserve announced last week it would pump an additional $600 billion into the economy.

In an attempt to ease tensions, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said he was optimistic the Group of 20 rich and developing countries could reach a deal to limit trade imbalances during a two-day summit on Thursday and Friday.

“Relations between the United States and Muslim communities have frayed over many years … I have made it a priority to begin to repair these relations,” he told a crowd of thousands in Jakarta, capital of the world’s most populous Muslim nation.

“I have made it clear that America is not, and never will be, at war with Islam. Instead, all of us must defeat al Qaeda and its affiliates, who have no claim to be leaders of any religion — certainly not a great, world religion like Islam.”

Boeing shares were down 3.2 percent to $67.02 in afternoon trading on the New York Stock Exchange as investors pondered the likelihood of another setback to the 787 program, already nearly three years behind schedule.

“I would think that now you have to check everything,” Alex Hamilton, managing director at EarlyBird Capital, said. “You’ve got to isolate the problem and try to figure out what it was.”

In a draft statement to be issued at this weekend’s summit of the 21 members of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), the leaders will adopt what they called their first real effort to provide a framework for long-term growth in the region.

The group includes the world’s three biggest economy — China, Japan and the United States.

The quarterly profit was the largest for GM since it emerged from bankruptcy in July 2009 and provides the last piece of financial data for investors evaluating the automaker’s $13 billion IPO.

GM said it expected to post solidly profitable results for 2010, its first full-year profit since 2004.

Here’s a taster from Ellen Brown, author of “Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth about our Money System”, on huffingtonpost.com in June 2009. Pointing to the fact that the FSB’s secretariat is based at the Bank for International Settlements’ headquarters in Basel, Switzerland, Brown warned that “to the wary, this is not a comforting sign. The BIS has a dark and controversial history”, and was, according to one professor she quotes, created as the apex of “a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.”

The “coup”, she argued, quoting blogger Marilyn Barnewall, lies in the fact that the United States has only one vote of 20 in the FSB. “In other words, the group will be largely controlled by European central bankers. My guess is, they will represent themselves, not you and not me and certainly not America.”

Cameron told students at the elite Peking University that China had to act in the face of criticism that its currency was undervalued — one of the issues likely to cause tensions at the G20 summit that opens in South Korea on Thursday.

The United States and others have pressured China to allow its yuan currency to rise faster, and accuse Beijing of keeping it undervalued to gain a trade advantage.

The comments were more critical than Monday’s Commission statements that rig workers did not place cost cutting over safety.

“BP, Halliburton and Transocean are major respected companies operating throughout the Gulf and the evidence is they are in need of top-to-bottom reform,” said Commission co-chair Bill Reilly, a former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, at the start of the second session of commission’s two-day meeting on the root causes of the spill this week.

As lawmakers prepare to return to Washington next week for a post-election session, Republicans are considering backing a two-year extension of George W. Bush-era tax cuts, lawmakers and analysts say, which would postpone their bid to make permanent all of the rate cuts, including for wealthy that Obama and most other Democrats oppose.

Such a deal would ensure the debate will be revived in 2012 when Obama will be up for re-election and the parties struggling again for control of Congress.

They said 4 million more Americans went without insurance in the first part of 2010 than during the same time in 2008.

“Both adults and kids lost private coverage over the past decade,” Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told a news briefing.

Updating his speech on Wednesday on the far eastern fringe of that world, his upbeat remarks about Indonesia’s democracy, development and diversity spelled hope for the future.

But they were also veiled reference to autocratic Muslim countries. He held up Indonesia as an example for others to emulate, praising the progress it has made from dictatorship to a vibrant democracy tolerant of other religions.

Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, 36, a Tanzanian from Zanzibar, is accused of conspiring in the 1998 al Qaeda car bomb attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people.

His monthlong trial in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday has been seen as a test of U.S. President Barack Obama’s approach to prosecuting some of the 174 men held at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. military prison in Cuba, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

As part of a proposal to wrestle $1-trillion-plus deficits under control, their plan would also curb the growth of Medicare. It came a week after voters put Republicans back in charge of the House and told Washington that the government is too big.

However, the plan by Chairman Erskine Bowles and former Sen. Alan Simpson, the co-chairman, doesn’t look like it can win the support from 14 commission members that is needed to force a debate in Congress. Bowles is a Democrat and was former President Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff. Simpson is a Wyoming Republican.

The election, of course, is far away, and polls this early largely reflect name recognition and a snapshot of current popularity. A year before the last presidential election, the top names in public opinion polls were Rudy Giuliani for the Republicans and Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democrats. Neither won their party’s nomination.

But jockeying among the dozen-plus Republicans eyeing a chance to challenge President Barack Obama is under way. Soon, they will be slogging their way to living rooms in snowy Iowa, New Hampshire and other early primary states.

On the eve of an economic summit, Obama landed in Seoul hoping to close an elusive trade deal with South Korea, the kind that could potentially mean jobs and markets for frustrated businesses and workers back home. Yet the deal was still in the balance in the last hours, slowed by U.S. demands over South Korea’s auto trade and its market for American beef.

Obama was also to make his economic case directly to Chinese President Hu Jintao after lavishing attention on China’s rising rival, India, for three days. The U.S. and China enjoy an economic partnership but continue to clash over currency, with the U.S. contending that China’s undervalued yuan gives it an unfair edge in the flow of exports and imports.

Organizers said 50,000 students, lecturers and supporters demonstrated against plans to raise the cost of studying at a university to 9,000 pounds ($14,000) a year – three times the current rate – in the largest street protest yet against the government’s sweeping austerity measures.

As the march passed a high-rise building that houses Conservative headquarters, some protesters smashed windows as others lit a bonfire of placards outside the building.

The RNC must decide in January whether to keep Steele. Republicans, looking to oust President Barack Obama in 2012, are considering a chairman who would operate more behind the scenes and let Rep. John Boehner, likely the next speaker of the House, take the lead as the party’s main spokesman.

“I think we need to move to a nuts-and-bolts type of candidate who will get back to the fundamentals, who will make the trains run on time and raise money,” said Saul Anuzis, a committee member from Michigan and former state party chairman who is weighing a bid for chairman. “I’d rather have that than a talking head who wants to be the face of the party.”

Whether smokers addicted to nicotine will see them as a reason to quit remains a question.

The images are part of a new campaign announced by the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday to reduce tobacco use, which is responsible for about 443,000 deaths per year.

People are far more negative about the ultimate impact of the first big elections of Obama’s presidency – in which the GOP made huge gains across the country – than they were about the results two years ago when voters elected the Democrat and padded his party’s House and Senate majorities.

Hope?

The third-quarter earnings of $1.20 per share nearly match what GM made in the first two quarters of the year combined, aided by profits from overseas and healthy revenue from North America, the company said Wednesday. The earnings were boosted by higher prices from newly introduced models such as the Buick LaCrosse, a midsize luxury sedan.

“I think the results of the third quarter clearly point to the amount of progress that GM has made,” GM CEO Dan Akerson said in a conference call with analysts and media. He said GM is on track to make 2010 its first profitable year since 2004.

Academics, environmentalists and federal investigators have accused the administration since the April spill of downplaying scientific findings, misrepresenting data and most recently misconstruing the opinions of experts it solicited.

Meanwhile, the owner of the rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, Transocean Ltd., is renewing its argument that federal investigators are in danger of allowing the blowout preventer, a key piece of evidence, to corrode as it awaits forensic analysis. Testing had not begun as of last week, the company says, some two months after it was raised from the seafloor.

The oil on the Qantas and Singapore planes was discovered during tests prompted by the explosion of a Rolls-Royce engine on a Qantas A380 during a flight from Singapore to Sydney last week. The plane made a safe emergency landing in Singapore, but the Australian airline immediately grounded its entire fleet of A380s while it investigated the cause.

Singapore Airlines said it does not know whether the oil stains found in its engines have any connection to the engine oil leaks found on Qantas, but was temporarily pulling the planes from service as a precaution. The planes, in Melbourne, Sydney and London, will be flown to Singapore without passengers, where they’ll be fitted with new engines.

The unpopular French leader has raised France’s retirement age to 62, scoring a much-needed victory after a showdown with labor unions over a reform central to his presidency. The measure became law Wednesday, a day after he signed it.

France now becomes the latest country in Europe where protesters have largely failed to halt a drive for austerity by heavily indebted governments. Workers upset over austerity measures have repeatedly disrupted London’s Tube subway and also shut down highways, ferries and even the Acropolis in Greece, to no avail.

Hundreds of people were already suspected of having cholera, suffering the disease’s symptoms of fever and diarrhea while lying in hospital beds or inside shacks lining the putrid waste canals of Cite Soleil, Martissant and other slums.

“We expect transmission to be extensive and we have to be prepared for it, there’s no question,” Dr. Jon K. Andrus, deputy director of the Pan-American Health Organization, told reporters Tuesday. “We have to prepare for a large upsurge in numbers of cases and be prepared with supplies and human resources and everything that goes into a rapid response.”

Republicans retaking control of the House in January are getting lessons from veterans of the past two transitions of power on Capitol Hill – 1994, when the GOP last took control of Congress, and 2006, when Democrats grabbed it back. Lesson No. 1: They have a short window to convince the public they’re serious about changing the way Washington works.

“If we look like we’re doing business as usual,” says Rep.-elect Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., “then obviously the American people will say, ‘Well, what was that all about?'”

Her intention was announced a few hours before the first official results from Sunday’s election were released, showing that the country’s pro-military party was headed toward an expected sweeping election victory,

Critics said the vote was rigged and poll fraud was rampant.

The administration is scrambling to get enough Republican support in the Senate to ratify the New START treaty before the Democrats’ majority shrinks by six in January. But Republicans have little incentive to give Obama a big political boost after leaving him reeling from their strong gains in last week’s congressional elections.

A failure to win passage could trip up one of the administration’s top foreign policy goals: improving relations with Russia. The treaty, signed in April by Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, has been the most tangible sign of success, and failure to get it ratified could be viewed as a rebuke in Moscow. It also would leave Obama’s push for even greater restrictions on the world’s nuclear arsenal in doubt.

In her opening statement, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tracey Knight said Lt. Dwayne Scheuermann and Officer Gregory McRae burned the body of Henry Glover to destroy evidence in the shooting death of the 31-year-old man days after the hurricane devastated New Orleans. Knight also accused former Lt. Robert Italiano and Lt. Travis McCabe of falsifying a report to make it appear as if a former officer, David Warren, was justified in shooting Glover.

Knight suggested that Katrina, which smashed some of the city’s levees and stranded thousands of people in the flooded city for days, emboldened the officers.

This is their eighth funeral of the day. They have five more to go.

The men are members of a special fraternity of veterans. Two generations. Three wars. Survivors of places such as Khe Sanh, Chu Lai, Tokyo Bay, the Chosin Reservoir. Recipients of Purple Hearts and Bronze Stars. Now all together, offering a final salute to those who, like them, served long ago.

Pope made herself a promise that night, that if she could ever do something for disabled veterans, she would.

On Wednesday, Pope hosted the groundbreaking of The American Veterans Disabled for Life Memorial. It will be within view of the Capitol on a 2.4-acre plot, across from the U.S. Botanic Garden.

The five-passenger car that wears the well-known Regal name this year is nothing like the old Regals. Gone are the six-cylinder engines, the wallowy ride and the senior citizen styling.

The 2011 Regal – the first Regal in U.S. showrooms since 2004 – is attractive and modern, powered by four-cylinder engines, and it rides and handles with composure not traditionally expected of a Buick.

His neighbors balked, saying calling so much attention to his trade had to be against the law. “So I called Austin and said, ‘I think everything’s legal. I’ve got the paperwork. Can’t I put up a sign?'” Morales recalled.

Twenty years later, the sign still stands, but it’s harder than ever for Morales to make a living. The hallucinogenic cactus is becoming more difficult to find because many ranchers have stopped allowing peyote harvesters on their land, preferring to plow the grayish-green plant under so cattle can graze. Others now lease their property to deer hunters or oil and gas companies.

Some analysts view the rendezvous as a potentially ominous sign of China’s ability to carry out a hostile act or espionage against a rival satellite in space. Others say it could have been a test of docking skills.

China is not saying why it conducted the August maneuver, but it comes as the nation is ambitiously expanding its space program, including building a space station and conducting lunar missions. It is expected to launch the first module of its space station next year, followed by a manned spacecraft to dock with it.

Whether thanking his hosts for going to the trouble of making his favorite food or recalling the shouts of street vendors from his childhood, President Barack Obama’s every utterance in a speech Wednesday morning at the University of Indonesia was met with laughter, applause and a swelling feeling that he belonged to this nation of islands.

After two previously planned trips were canceled, Indonesians initially seemed reluctant to get excited about the visit. But all was forgiven once his plane touched down.

But the defense attorney for Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs said the government has no physical evidence against the 25-year-old from Billings, Mont. – only the statements of other soldiers, many of whom also are charged in the case.

Gibbs is the highest-ranking of five soldiers accused in the murders of three innocent Afghan civilians during patrols in Kandahar Province this year. He went before a military Article 32 hearing – similar to a civilian grand jury proceeding – at Joint Base Lewis-McChord south of Seattle to determine if there’s enough evidence to court-martial him. A decision is expected in the coming weeks.

Brunei’s notorious “Playboy Prince” Jefri Bolkiah looked on Tuesday as his legal fight with some former advisers went to trial, promising jurors a peek at the life of a royal renowned for surrounding himself with such luxuries as gilded toilet-paper holders.

They’ll peer into a palatial hotel, elaborate estates and multimillion-dollar deals – even if they may be the only people in town who can’t get a look at the life-sized, erotic statues once kept at one of his properties.

The suspected ringleader, Adam Gitschlag, who served in Iraq and was once based at Camp Pendleton, was arrested at his Orange County home Nov. 2 as part of an operation carried out by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, as well as military investigators and local police.

The arrests were announced a week after a Navy SEAL in San Diego and two others were charged with smuggling machine guns from Iraq for sale on the black market.

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara described the decade-long scheme at a news conference, saying the money was stolen in a “perverse and pervasive fraud” from the Conference on the Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, a not-for-profit group that disburses funds provided by the German government to individuals and organizations.

Six corrupt employees approved more than 5,500 fraudulent applications for aid, leading to millions of dollars being paid to people who did not qualify for help, Bharara said.

A shopping mall built in 1962, now dwarfed by glitzy high-rises, was the only building on Jakarta’s skyline he recognized, Obama said Tuesday.

The bicycle rickshaws that plied the streets when he lived here in the 1960s were nowhere to be seen as the president’s limousine hurried along routes cleared for his motorcade – though he still said “my understanding is that Jakarta traffic is pretty tough.” In fact, Jakarta has changed, even as Obama’s own circumstances have dramatically altered since the days he played and studied in a humble neighborhood here.

The lawsuits were filed in federal courts in Connecticut and New York and come just months after a federal judge in Boston struck down a key component of the federal Defense of Marriage Act.

The legal actions seek judicial declarations that the law enacted by Congress in 1996, when it appeared Hawaii would soon legalize same-sex marriage, was unconstitutional because it prevents the federal government from affording pension and other benefits to same-sex couples. Since 2004, five states – Connecticut, Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts – and the District of Columbia have legalized gay marriage.