Evening Edition

As the fallout grew from its release of secret US diplomatic cables, the whistleblower site found new domain names in a string of European countries after its original wikileaks.org address was shut down by an American provider.

The elusive Assange, who is believed to be in hiding in Britain, faced fresh trouble as Swedish prosecutors sent out a new international arrest warrant for the 39-year-old Australian over sex assault allegations.

While the elusive whistleblower laid low, his British lawyer insisted police knew his whereabouts and it emerged that an initial warrant was defective.

After the Supreme Court in Stockholm refused to hear an appeal by Assange against the initial warrant over allegations of rape and molestation, Swedish police said they would issue a new one as a result of a procedural error.

The world’s largest economy created many fewer jobs than expected and the unemployment rate rose from 9.6 percent to its highest level since April, the Labor Department reported.

A measly 39,000 jobs were created during the month, well short of the 130,000 predicted by economists and well beneath the levels needed to dent unemployment rates.

Experts predict November’s report will show a jobless rate stuck at 9.6 percent for the fourth consecutive month, as millions of Americans struggled to get back to work.

With the employment market unable to untether itself from a long-ended recession, the jobless rate has stubbornly remained above nine percent for the last 18 months.

“This month’s ADP national employment report shows an acceleration of employment and suggests the nation’s employment situation is brightening somewhat,” the firm said.

The 10th consecutive month of gains offered hope that the job sector, still convalescing after a brutal economic recession, was on the mend.

“I think that we have to see that we have a currency that is credible,” Trichet told RTL radio a day after the ECB backed an extension of special measures to tackle eurozone debt pressures.

“There is no crisis for the euro as a currency … We have problems of financial instability that are the result of budget crises in certain European countries,” he said.

Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero pulled out of a Latin American summit in Argentina to attend a cabinet meeting Friday on the economic crisis, sending a powerful message about Spain’s determination to avoid a Greek-style debt debacle.

The Socialist government will approve on January 28 a plan, fiercely opposed by unions, to gradually raise the retirement age from 65 to 67, Deputy Prime Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said.

But even as the UN — and the European Union — endorsed Ouattara, Gbagbo’s camp remained defiant.

Fighting to cling to power amid allegations that he tried to rig the vote, Gbagbo was named winner by a supreme court run by his allies, amid fears of fresh unrest after at least 15 people were killed in vote-related fighting.

World powers sharpened their warnings to Ivorian leaders to settle the dispute peacefully, but the chaos in the west African state deepened after days of bloodshed and fraud allegations that have disrupted the landmark vote.

On Thursday the electoral commission (CEI) announced that provisional results showed opposition leader Alassane Ouattara had beaten Gbagbo in the disputed polls by 54 percent to 46.

After a bitter bidding war tainted by corruption claims, questions were asked over how Russia would pay for the tournament and how teams would fare in Qatar’s searing summertime heat.

As even President Barack Obama joined the backlash after the United States missed out on the 2022 tournament, the head of the English bid for 2018 said the current decision-making process was unsustainable.

The surprise results Thursday came after an acrimonious bidding war tainted by allegations of corruption.

In a historic conclusion to two years of frenzied lobbying, world football chief Sepp Blatter revealed the surprise winners following a secret ballot of 22 FIFA executive committee members in Zurich.

Not only do the bacteria survive, they grow by swapping phosphorus for arsenic in their DNA and cell membranes, said the study funded by the US space agency NASA and published Thursday in the journal Science.

The findings add a new dimension to what biologists consider the necessary elements for life, currently viewed as six elements: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur.

The president landed in Kabul under cover of darkness, with aides announcing nothing of the trip beforehand due to security concerns.

Obama, who has tripled US troop numbers in Afghanistan, spent a mere four hours in the country, all at Bagram Air Base.

The ruling Communist party’s politburo decided to shift its stance from “relatively loose” to “prudent” at a meeting chaired by President Hu Jintao, the Xinhua news agency reported.

The politburo said it should “implement an active fiscal policy and a prudent monetary policy, to increase the focus, flexibility and effectiveness of macro-economic adjustments,” the report said.

Australia got off to their worst Test start in 60 years at two for three in the opening three overs and then lost their last five wickets for 38 to hand England the inside running on a crucial early victory in the series.

It was a horror performance by Australia, coming off the drawn first Gabba Test and needing to finish ahead of holders England to reclaim the Ashes.

One of Assange’s lawyers said he would also fight any attempt to extradite his client to face questions over alleged sexual misconduct, adding that he believed foreign powers were influencing Sweden in the matter.

Washington is furious about the leak of hundreds of confidential diplomatic cables that have given unvarnished and sometimes embarrassing insights into the foreign policy of the United States and its allies.

The Internet publisher directed users to www.wikileaks.ch after the wikileaks.org site on which it had published classified U.S. government information vanished from view for about six hours.

A Dutch- and a German-based site, www.wikileaks.nl and www.wikileaks.de , were also giving readers access to the leaked documents.

Swedish police said earlier that technical problems hindering the arrest of the 39-year-old Australian had been ironed out, and a newspaper report said he was in Britain.

But in an interview with Reuters, his London lawyer, Mark Stephens, who would not divulge his whereabouts because of death threats against him, said no warrant valid under Swedish, European or international law had been issued.

Nonfarm payrolls rose 39,000, with private hiring gaining only 50,000, just a third of what economists had expected, a Labor Department report showed on Friday. The unemployment rate jumped to 9.8 percent from 9.6 percent in October.

The weak report was a surprise given the relative strength of some other recent economic signals, including robust retail sales. Economists had expected 140,000 new jobs and a steady unemployment rate.

Nonfarm payrolls rose 39,000, with private hiring gaining only 50,000, just a third of what economists had expected, a Labor Department report showed on Friday.

The unemployment rate in November jumped to 9.8 percent, a troubling sign for an economy many thought was strengthening. Economists had expected 140,000 new jobs last month with the jobless rate holding steady.

The government has said BP’s ruptured undersea well released between 53,400 and 60,000 barrels per day, but commission staff said BP orally told them those estimates were 20 percent to 50 percent too high.

“They rely on incomplete or inaccurate information, rest in large part on assumptions that have not been validated, and are subject to far greater uncertainties than have been acknowledged,” BP said in written comments submitted to the commission in October.

“This is a bad time, senator,” Marine Corps Commandant James Amos told a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“Based on what I know about the tough fight on the ground in Afghanistan … my recommendation is that we should not implement repeal at this time.”

He spent four hours at an airbase outside the Afghan capital and canceled a planned helicopter trip to Kabul to meet Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai because of bad weather. Instead the two leaders spoke briefly by telephone.

Obama’s second visit to Afghanistan as president came as the White House prepared to release a review of the war’s strategy in the week of December 13, and the day after leaked cables detailed concerns about Karzai’s abilities and widespread fraud.

Democratic Senate Leader Harry Reid had been set to schedule four votes on Friday on competing Republican and Democratic tax plans to renew some or all of the lower tax rates enacted under former President George W. Bush.

But the deal fell apart after at least one Republican objected, denying needed unanimous Senate consent, Reid said.

“That’s the dumbest idea you’ve ever had,” then-CEO Jack Brennan told him after a five minute discussion back in 1998.

Sauter persisted. Eventually he convinced Brennan that these newfangled ETFs — index-tracking funds that trade in real time at ever-changing prices on a stock exchange — were a natural fit for Vanguard, the largest manager of traditional mutual funds that mirror various indices.

Hard to imagine this brown, gooey stuff could become a new global currency worth billions a year, much less an important tool in the fight against climate change.

Yet this is a new frontier for business, says Bali-based consultant Rezal Kusumaatmadja, and a new way to pay for conservation efforts in a world facing ever more pressure on the land to grow food and extract timber, coal and other resources.

India’s environment minister Jairam Ramesh said a proposal that would require countries to report what actions they are taking to fight global warming could win critical support from the United States and increase chances that representatives at the U.N. climate talks could reach a broader agreement.

“It is basically meant to break the logjam and it is basically meant to bring the U.S. in because without some progress in (transparency) the U.S. is not going to come on board,” Ramesh said before traveling to the summit.

But the plan had won more backing, from Democrats and Republicans, than many expected in February when President Barack Obama set up the commission with the task of finding ways to cut the $1.3 trillion deficit and $13.8 trillion debt.

Although the plan drafted by panel co-chairmen Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson was unlikely to go to Congress, it will likely provide an abundance of ideas that could frame the politically explosive deficit debate in 2011 and 2012.

ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet said the bank had decided at its monthly policy meeting to keep interest rates on hold and it extended its liquidity safety net to support vulnerable euro zone banks.

He made no mention of increasing the ECB’s government bond buying program, despite calls to do so after an 85 billion euro ($110.7 billion) EU-IMF rescue of Ireland failed to dispel fears that Portugal or Spain may need a bailout.

The organization that has embarrassed Washington and foreign leaders by releasing a cache of secret – and brutally frank – U.S. diplomatic cables found a new home after an American company stopped directing traffic to wikileaks.org. Then French officials moved to oust it from its new site.

By late Friday, WikiLeaks was up in at least three new places.

The government called on controllers to resume work “immediately” or “defense will assume control of airspace,” it said in a statement.

The sickout on Friday, on the eve of a long national holiday weekend, caused travel chaos throughout the nation, forcing Spanish authorities to close eight airports, including the major European hub in Madrid and airspace above it.

Boehner, R-Ohio, made his comment as partisan wrangling in the Senate slowed attempts to pass legislation ensuring that tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 don’t expire.

The White House has signaled that President Barack Obama is prepared to sign a bill extending tax cuts at all levels, as Republicans want. At the same time, Democrats want the bill to include an extension of unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed, renewal of tax provisions benefiting college students, companies that hire the jobless and lower- and middle-income workers, even if they don’t make enough to pay federal taxes.

“You will succeed in your mission,” Obama told more than 3,500 cheering troops in a huge hangar. “We said we were going to break the Taliban’s momentum. That’s what you’re doing. You’re going on the offense, tired of playing defense.”

Obama had traveled to Afghanistan to thank the troops and to deal with frayed relations with Karzai. But after he flew 14 hours for the visit, the White House said Obama couldn’t make the short additional trip to meet with Karzai in Kabul because the weather was too bad for helicopter travel.

The generals publicly rebutted their own bosses and the White House, arguing that it is too risky to change the policy now. That gave political ammunition to congressional Republicans trying to retain the ban known as “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

“It’s important that we’re clear about the military risks,” said Gen. George Casey, the Army’s top officer. “Repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ would be a major cultural and policy change in the middle of a war.”

Commission members said that by winning over 11 of the 18 panelists, they had defied expectations. They said it showed that Washington is capable of having an “adult conversation” on a bipartisan basis about the painful choices required to avert a European-style debt crisis.

Devout Senate conservatives Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, and Tom Coburn, R-Okla., joined with close Obama allies Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Kent Conrad, D-N.D., in support of the plan. Panel members said the commission’s work has fundamentally changed the national debate on the deficit

Republicans, notably Sarah Palin, and public school organizations decry the bill as an unnecessary intrusion on a common practice often used to raise money.

“This could be a real train wreck for school districts,” Lucy Gettman of the National School Boards Association said Friday, a day after the House cleared the bill. “The federal government should not be in the business of regulating this kind of activity at the local level.”

The job market was weak all around: Stores, factories, construction companies and financial firms all cut positions. The unemployment rate nudged closer to double digits again – 9.8 percent, after three straight months at 9.6 percent.

Employers added 39,000 jobs for the month, the Labor Department said Friday. They added 172,000 in October – enough to qualify as a hiring spurt in this anemic post-recession economy.

The 28-year-old reliever had been charged with assault after he was accused of grabbing Carlos Pena, hauling him into a tunnel near the family lounge beneath the team’s ballpark and punching him in the face after an Aug. 11 game.

He tore a ligament in the thumb of his pitching hand and underwent season-ending surgery after the altercation.

An 18-year-old high school student from Duisburg, and his alleged accomplice, a 23-year-old unemployed man from Wesel, are under investigation for using a Trojan Horse to hack into the artists’ computers for about 12 months before being discovered, Duisburg chief prosecutor Rolf Haferkamp told The Associated Press.

During that time, they earned more than euro10,000 ($13,240) in illegal sales of tracks acquired from the stars’ computers. Haferkamp would not comment on specific songs that were stolen.

Texas will gain at least three and possibly four seats in Congress, as population trends continue to push people out of the rust and snow belts and into the sunbelt, demographers say. With strong GOP majorities in the Texas capitol and all statewide offices in their fold, Republicans are sure to use their new clout to cement their hold on power through the redistricting process and possibly increase their majority in the House.

Republican state Rep. Tommy Merritt, an outgoing member of the Legislature who sits on the House redistricting committee, predicted the Republicans would “go for the gusto.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will seek to list ringed seals found in the Arctic Basin and the North Atlantic and two populations of bearded seals in the Pacific Ocean as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

Ringed seals are the main prey of polar bears, which were listed as threatened by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2008. For ringed seals, the proposed listing also cites the threat of reduced snow cover.

The state purchases cars for lawmakers to drive around their districts and the capital under a decades-old program, spending more than $5 million for the latest suite of vehicles that includes a $55,000 Cadillac sedan and a $52,000 Lexus hybrid.

Lawmakers are enjoying the benefit at a time when the state is in a financial mess and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has called legislators into a special session next week to address a $6 billion deficit. Lawmakers already have cut programs such as adult dental care and health care programs for children from low-income families, and more cuts are likely on the way.

New York State Thruway Authority Executive Director Michael Fleischer said Friday the agency should have closed nearly two dozen non-toll entrance ramps to Interstate 90 much sooner after jackknifed tractor-trailers blocked traffic just east of Buffalo, a city that prides itself on soldiering on during snowstorms that would cripple other towns.

He also said officials should have done a better job alerting drivers that delays loomed ahead and shouldn’t have waited so long to get help to the stranded motorists, some stuck for 20 hours or more.

Before the midterm elections, President Barack Obama insisted that lower income-tax rates should be permanently extended only to those he called the “middle class.” People in the top two tax brackets would face higher rates. Now, with Republicans triumphant, the White House is trying to hash out a compromise so rates don’t automatically revert to their higher, pre-2001 levels for everyone in the new year.

One possible deal: extending all the lower rates for a yet-undetermined period of time, perhaps two or three years.

The 14-hour standoff came just days after the town’s first-ever homicide, unsettling residents who moved to the community for its safety and small-town values. Authorities said the two deaths were not connected.

Craig Foushee, 52, barricaded himself in his home Thursday for more than 14 hours, according to an Osceola County Sheriff’s Office report. He shot at deputies several times, but they never returned fire because they couldn’t get a clear shot. No deputies were injured.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White has again raised questions about the use of genetically modified crops and what will happen if growers aren’t allowed to plant GMO seeds.

About 95 percent of the sugar beet crop has been genetically modified to resist the weed killer Roundup. The crop provides roughly half of the nation’s sugar supply.

The Goliaths they’re taking on are companies building incinerators worldwide to burn waste from landfills, material generations of “waste pickers” have survived on. Many of the projects are supported by private funds raised under the U.N. climate treaty.

Bhadakwad had come 11,000 miles (18,000 kilometers) to the annual U.N. climate conference in Cancun on behalf of 6,000 organized landfill recyclers in her native Pune, India, to demand access to the waste now trucked instead to a new incinerator. Without their dump, they’re trying to survive by going door to door for trash in a community 12 miles (20 kilometers) away.

U.S. District Judge Robert Dow said the states had failed to show that closing the locks immediately was essential to block the huge, voracious carp’s path to Lake Michigan. He sided with opponents who argued that the locks are essential to commerce and flood control.

The decision does not end a lawsuit filed by Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that seeks lock closure and other measures to keep the unwanted invaders out of the lakes. But Dow’s refusal to issue a preliminary injunction appears to settle the lock issue for the foreseeable future.

Prosecutors allege John Graham, 55, shot Annie Mae Aquash and left her to die on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge reservation in 1975, in an incident that has become synonymous with AIM and its 1970s-era battles with federal agents. Graham is charged with first- and second-degree murder and could go to prison for life if convicted.

Prosecutors said Aquash was kidnapped from Denver by three AIM supporters and eventually taken to Pine Ridge because the group’s leaders thought she was a government spy.

In the rural courts near the YFZ ranch where Jeffs is considered a prophet, his followers have been reliably convicted by juries that barely deliberate two hours.

Jeffs, the ecclesiastical head of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, was quietly extradited to Texas this week from Utah. He remained jailed Thursday, charged with felony bigamy, aggravated sexual assault and assault.