Evening Edition

A suicide bomber wearing a burqa, who some officials said was a woman, killed at least 43 people at a World Food Programme distribution point in a tribal area bordering Afghanistan.

The blast occurred in Khar, the main town of lawless Bajaur tribal district, once a stronghold of Taliban militants who have carried out several bombings and suicide attacks in the area.

The pair have been locked in a political stand-off for almost a month after both claimed to have won the November 28 presidential election, but mounting international pressure may have brought the crisis to a turning point.

Although Ouattara has been recognised as Ivory Coast’s leader by world powers, Gbagbo has clung grimly onto power, deploying his feared security forces to crush protest and blockade his rival’s hotel campaign headquarters.

Leaders from the 15-member ECOWAS regional bloc also warned Friday in a statement after their summit that those responsible for post-election deaths would face international prosecution.

Gbagbo’s internationally recognised rival in last month’s presidential vote, Alassane Ouattara, meanwhile urged the army to desert the incumbent leader.

While record crowds flocked to Bethlehem, the Palestinian town where Jesus Christ was believed to have been born, hundreds also defied Al-Qaeda threats to pack Our Lady of Salvation cathedral in Baghdad for Christmas mass.

Although there were no immediate reports of Christians being targeted in the Middle East, bombings in other parts of the world highlighted the threats facing believers.

Seven explosions went off in two different areas of the flashpoint city of Jos in central Nigeria, killing 32 people and injuring 74, many of them as they were doing their Christmas shopping, police said.

In the city of Maiduguri in northern Nigeria, suspected members of an Islamist sect that launched an uprising last year attacked three churches, leaving six people dead and one of the churches burnt, an army spokesman said.

The People’s Bank of China said in a brief one-line statement that it will raise the one-year lending and deposit rates by 25 basis points each. The move takes the rates to 5.81 percent and 2.75 percent respectively from Sunday.

In mid-October, policymakers raised rates for the first time in nearly three years as they resort to stronger measures to try to slow a flood of liquidity which has been fanning inflation and driving up property prices.

The attack in the Bajaur region on the Afghan border came a day after fierce clashes between Pakistani Taliban insurgents and security forces in the neighboring Mohmand region that left 11 soldiers and 24 militants dead.

“I myself have counted 40 bodies but the death toll could rise as several wounded people are in critical condition,” Dosti Rehman, an official at the main government hospital in Bajaur, told Reuters.

The People’s Bank of China said it will raise the benchmark lending rate by 25 basis points to 5.81 percent and lift the benchmark deposit rate by 25 basis points to 2.75 percent.

The central bank said in a statement on its website (www.pbc.gov.cn) that the latest rate rise would take effect on Sunday.

In the “Urbi et Orbi” (to the city and the world) message, he said the Christmas message of peace and hope was always new, surprising and daring and should spur everyone in the peaceful struggle for justice.

Speaking from the central balcony of St Peter’s Basilica to thousands of people braving the chill and drizzle in the square below, he delivered Christmas greetings in 65 languages, including those spoken in the world’s trouble spots.

Analysts have said oil producing countries are likely to raise output after crude rallied more than 30 percent from a low in May because they fear prices could damage economic growth in fuel importing countries.

European benchmark ICE Brent crude for February closed at $93.46 on Friday after hitting $94.74 a barrel, its highest level since October 2008.

Many of the troops left in Iraq can’t wait to get home.

“Back in 2003, we were extended repeatedly and we didn’t know if we would ever get home. Now we know we’re going home in a certain length of time,” Kittleson, a chaplain, said during a candlelight vigil with other soldiers to mark Christmas.

Still struggling to emerge from Vladimir Putin’s shadow less than 18 months before the end of his term, Medvedev has struck a softer, more liberal tone on issues ranging from jailed tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s trial to ties with the United States.

But in the latest appearance in what looks like a contest between the two leaders for public approval, he announced no major initiatives and lamented the pace of his trademark campaign to enliven Russia’s economy through innovation.

More than 700 foreign troops have been killed in Afghanistan so far this year — nearly a third of the total in over nine years of war.

While U.S.-led NATO forces have applied a surge strategy there is also a search on for ways to bring about a political solution as a countdown begins for the withdrawal of troops.

“I sing to ease my pain. If I think too much, I’ll die,” said Monfort, 38, one of over a million Haitians made homeless by a January earthquake that plunged the poor, French-speaking Caribbean nation into the most calamitous year of its history.

With a raging cholera epidemic and election turmoil heaping more death and hardship on top of the quake devastation, Haitians are facing an exceptionally bleak Christmas and New Year marked by the prospect of more suffering and uncertainty.

Police believed it was the first time Islamic militants have sent a woman to carry out a suicide attack in Pakistan, where the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan against al-Qaida and the Taliban insurgents continues to spill over despite Islamabad’s repeated claims of victory on its side of the porous border.

The bomber, dressed in the head-to-toe burqa robes that women commonly wear Pakistan and Afghanistan, was challenged by police at a check point, officials said.

Gen. David Petraeus started his visit by traveling in a C-130 cargo plane from the capital, Kabul, to the northern province of Kunduz, telling troops with the U.S. Army’s 1-87, 10th Mountain Division that on this day, there was “no place that (he) would rather be than here” where the “focus of our effort” was.

The northern part of the country has seen increased fighting, with the Taliban stepping up their attacks as NATO focuses its sights on the militant movement’s southern strongholds. Petraeus was briefed on the situation in the region by German Maj. Gen. Hans-Werner Fritz, the commander of NATO’s northern regional command.

Saturday’s grim news seemed to highlight the pope’s concern for his flock’s welfare.

In northern Nigeria, attacks on two churches by Muslim sect members claimed six lives, while bombings in central Nigeria, a region plagued by Christian-Muslim violence, killed 32 people, officials said.

The dispatch offered no hope to doomed Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton: Reinforcements are not on the way.

The encrypted, 6-line message was dated July 4, 1863, the date of Pemberton’s surrender to Union forces led by Ulysses S. Grant, ending the Siege of Vicksburg in what historians say was a turning point midway into the Civil War.

There were snow drifts outside the comfortable suburban home, and the warmth of a close-knit family inside, as his parents, Brian and Emily Fletcher, recounted how Sevil – his infancy spent in a faraway orphanage – came to be their son.

It’s a remarkable tale, all the more so because it is shared to a degree by hundreds of other American families who were seeking to adopt children from Haiti when the cataclysmic earthquake struck nearly a year ago, on Jan. 12.

The Oct. 31 attack on Our Lady of Salvation Church was the deadliest ever against Christians in Iraq, killing 68 people. It and a string of bombings that followed prompted thousands of Christians to flee to Iraq’s more peaceful Kurdish-run north – and renewed al-Qaida threats cast a shadow over Saturday’s celebrations.

But the 300 worshippers who gathered on Christmas morning insisted they would not be driven away.

Diplomatic pressure and sanctions have left Laurent Gbagbo increasingly isolated though he has been able to maintain his rule nearly a month after the disputed vote because of the loyalty of security forces and the military.

Even that, though, may disappear if he runs out of money to pay them.

Samuel Makoy is not interested in the bucolic scenery, though. He has an epidemic to quash.

Makoy points out to the women the fingernail-length worm-like creatures whose tails flick back and forth. Then a pond-side health lesson begins on a spaghetti-like worm that has haunted humans for centuries.

In the coming two years, that may become a more popular approach.

In a statement posted on its website late Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it is moving unilaterally to clamp down on power plant and oil refinery greenhouse emissions, announcing plans for developing new standards over the next year.

Now the Busch name is in the headlines again, this time after an aspiring young model was found dead in the gated home of August Busch IV, the former Anheuser-Busch CEO and heir to the Budweiser fortune. The death is under investigation.

The woman, Adrienne Nicole Martin, was Busch’s girlfriend and there was “absolutely nothing suspicious” about her death, said Busch’s attorney, Art Margulis.

Officials said the turnout was shaping up to be the largest since 2000. Unseasonably mild weather, a virtual halt in Israeli-Palestinian violence and a burgeoning economic revival in the West Bank all added to the holiday cheer.

By nightfall, a packed Manger Square was awash in red, blue, green and yellow Christmas lights.

Then the world’s best known action star, Schwarzenegger conveyed an image of invincibility, persuading Californians that anything was possible if only they had the right mindset.

“I know how to sell something,” he said then.

Relentlessly focused on the next election, politicians are usually loath to act against voter sentiment. Still, the post-election weeks of the 111th Congress saw battles in which Washington seemed oblivious to the direction most people wanted lawmakers to take, as measured by public opinion polls. These included:

Congress’ approval of a compromise between President Barack Obama and congressional GOP leaders renewing expiring tax cuts for everyone, despite broad public opposition to including people earning over DOLLARSIGN_SOAPBLOX250,000. An Associated Press-CNBC Poll in late November found only 34 percent wanted taxes reduced for the richest Americans.

With 1,800 businesses providing an annual tax base of $334 million to a town with no parks, one school and only one residential street to maintain, there is plenty of money to go around.

There is so much, in fact, that Vernon’s former city manager was paid $785,000 last year. The guy he replaced earned $1.65 million the year before and another city manager, who retired in 2005, pulls down an annual pension of $500,000.

There is even a tax break for people who buy race horses.

Millions of homeowners, however, might feel like they got a lump of coal. Homeowners who don’t itemize their deductions will lose a tax break for paying local property taxes.

Somehow, that horrible tragedy a year ago transformed a blissfully ordinary Chicago family into extraordinary activists. With zero experience but fueled by wrenching grief, their passionate advocacy has brought widespread attention to a rare, little-understood medical condition called Sudden Unexplained Death in Epilepsy, or SUDEP.

The Stantons want other families to know what they’d never been told – that epileptic seizures can be deadly.

But the Texas state board that licenses accountants sees Bass differently – as unfit to continue in his profession.

Nearly a decade after Enron collapsed and took Arthur Andersen with it, the work of Bass and another former Andersen partner, Thomas Bauer, as Enron auditors is still being debated in a highly contentious and costly proceeding.