Evening Edition

The leaders of Benin, Cape Verde and Sierra Leone held talks with Gbagbo at the presidential palace, warning that troops from around the region could be sent to topple Gbagbo from the helm of the world’s top cocoa producer if he remains defiant.

Presidents Boni Yayi of Benin, Ernest Koroma of Sierra Leone and Pedro Pires of Cape Verde also held talks with Ouattara at a hotel where he and his supporters have been holed up during the country’s political crisis.

Khodorkovsky is facing the prospect of an additional lengthy jail term after being found guilty in his second trial the day earlier in a verdict that provoked an angry reaction in the West.

The White House said it was “deeply concerned” about the “selective application of justice”. France called for rule of law in Russia, while Germany said the verdict was a step backward for Russia.

Liu, a writer and one-time professor, was sentenced to 11 years in prison on Christmas Day last year on subversion charges after co-authoring Charter 08, a bold petition calling for political reform in one-party Communist-ruled China.

He was named the peace prize winner in October, sparking fury in Beijing, which equated the Oslo-based Nobel committee’s decision with encouraging crime. A ceremony in Liu’s honour was held in the Norwegian capital on December 10.

PepsiCo’s intended purchase of Wimm-Bill-Dann is its biggest acquisition outside the United States and one of the most important deals ever struck outside the Russian energy sector.

The takeover earned a nod of approval from the head of Russia’s anti-monopoly service Monday and still further support from the country’s de facto leader Putin one day later.

The tourists left the Australians with the huge task of either scoring 415 runs to make England bat again or lasting out eight sessions to secure a draw but the home team showed little fight after their opponents had amassed 513 at the MCG.

Australia were facing probable defeat some time on Wednesday’s fourth day with no rain forecast over the last two scheduled days of the match.

Traditionally an emotional oratory duel between two men, zajal once drew crowds of tens of thousands who revered its artists as poets of the highest order. It also enraptured fans who sat glued to their black-and-white television sets for the shows.

In the years after the war, however, the art dwindled as more modern forms of entertainment gained popularity and the audience for zajal was relegated to a handful of nostalgic admirers.

The latest data was at odds with other signs suggesting the economic recovery is accelerating and a separate report last week showing consumer sentiment in December at its highest level since June.

Concern about the jobs market pushed an index of consumer attitudes to 52.5 in December from 54.3 in November, the Conference Board said on Tuesday. That was below the median of forecasts from analysts polled by Reuters for a reading of 56.0.

In the lawsuits seeking class action, filed in a federal court in California, the plaintiffs sought a ban on passing of user information without consent and monetary compensation, according to case documents.

At some point, both cases may be consolidated into one by the judges presiding over the cases, said Majed Nachawati, a partner at law firm Fears & Nachawati, one of the attorneys for the complainants.

The largest publicly-traded U.S. home and auto insurer alleged it suffered “significant losses” after Countrywide misled it into believing the securities were safe, and that the quality of residential home loans backing them was high.

Allstate said that starting in 2003, Countrywide quietly decided to boost market share by approving any mortgage product that a competitor was willing to offer, in a “proverbial race to the bottom.” It said Countrywide then passed on the added risks to investors who bought debt backed by the mortgages.

Moscow’s angry message came as Khodorkovsky, whose imprisonment has been a bone of contention between Russia and the West for years, awaited a new sentence that could keep him in jail until 2017 after being found guilty of theft.

Prosecutors are seeking an additional six-year prison term for Khodorkovsky, the former Yukos oil company CEO who is 10 months from the end of an eight-year sentence imposed after a previous trial during Vladimir Putin’s presidency.

But creeping rises in the yen kept policymakers on alert for risks to the export-reliant economy, with the finance minister repeating his warning that the government would take decisive action to stem any sharp yen rises that could hurt growth.

Industrial output rose 1.0 percent in November, matching a median market forecast and marking the first rise in six months, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said on Tuesday.

Zahara started weaving carpets when she was 10 and did not go to school, but the loan from non-profit development group BRAC allowed her to start her own business about 18 months ago and she has since taken out two more loans of $330 each.

“When I first got the money, the carpets I was making were small and now I can make bigger carpets,” said Zahara, who heard about microfinance loans from her neighbor in Kabul. “Before I made carpets for other people and now I make them for myself.”

It was the second attack this month on the compound, which houses the provincial council ands the police headquarters for Anbar province, and the third bombing there in the past year.

“The death toll is 17 killed and between 50 and 60 wounded,” Lieutenant General Hussein Kamal, a deputy interior minister, told Reuters.

Under the 2008 deal, Afghan authorities have to approve and lead all security operations in the capital. But the Ministry of Interior (MOI) has said that foreign forces ignored the security rules and it was unaware of Friday’s operation.

Raids by foreign forces, deeply unpopular among ordinary Afghans, are a source of friction between the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government.

The Sugarloaf resort in Carrabassett Valley, about 120 miles north of Portland, said about six people were taken to hospitals after five chairs fell. The resort’s ski patrol evacuated the lift.

The resort said the lift, which went into service in 1975 and recently passed an inspection, was set for improvements but wouldn’t say when.

Italian police said Tuesday that letter bombs were sent to three embassies in Rome by Italian anarchists in solidarity with jailed Greek anarchists, who had asked their comrades to organize and coordinate a global “revolutionary war.”

Identical package bombs exploded at the Swiss and Chilean embassies in Rome on Dec. 23, badly wounding the two people who opened them. A third bomb was safely defused at the Greek Embassy on Monday.

New elections could lead to the emergence of a government not as friendly to U.S. interests and less vocal in opposing the Taliban.

Still, even if the government changes – a prospect that is not at all certain – the country’s new leaders will be faced with the same seemingly intractable challenges as their predecessors: a feeble economy, chronic power shortages and rebuilding after this year’s horrendous flooding.

“It’s like a warm bathtub for them,” said Wendy Anastasiou, an environmental specialist at the power station’s manatee viewing center. “They come in here and hang out and loll around.”

Cold weather can weaken manatees’ immune systems and eventually kill them. State officials said 2010 has been a deadly year for the beloved animals: between Jan. 1 and Dec. 17, 246 manatees died from so-called “cold stress.” During the same time period in 2009, only 55 manatees died from the cold. In 2008, only 22 manatees succumbed to chilly temperatures.

Meanwhile, the U.N. mission said that a peacekeeper had been wounded with a machete when a large crowd encircled a convoy and set one of its vehicles on fire.

The regional delegation led by presidents from Sierra Leone, Cape Verde and Benin held meetings with both Gbagbo and internationally recognized winner Alassane Ouattara, then returned to meet with Gbagbo a second time late Tuesday.

This year is by far the deadliest for the coalition in the nearly decade-long war, as tens of thousands of additional international troops have poured into the country in an effort to suppress a virulent Taliban insurgency. But while NATO and the United States note progress has been made in the militants’ traditional strongholds in the south, they acknowledge gains made remain precarious.

Security has also deteriorated in the north, while many parts of eastern Afghanistan, along the border with Pakistan, remain violent and under militant control. NATO forces often engaging in heavy fighting there.

The latest survey from Conference Board showed a decline even after reports are showing that people increased their holiday spending at the biggest rate in four years and other indicators suggest the economy is brightening.

The private research group said Tuesday its Consumer Confidence Index fell to 52.5 in December, down from a revised 54.3 in November. Economists were expecting 55.8. The decline reverses two consecutive months of increases. It takes a reading of 90 to indicate a healthy economy, a level not approached since the recession began in 2007.

Obama is expected to announce a replacement for departing National Economic Council director Lawrence Summers early in the new year, soon after he returns to Washington from his Hawaiian vacation. The president’s choice is being closely watched for signs of where he wants to take his economic agenda in the second half of his term, and how he looks to bring down the almost double-digit unemployment rate.

Will he tap the business world with a figure such as Roger Altman, an investment banker and Clinton administration alumnus who might carry too much baggage from his association with Wall Street? Will he turn to academia instead, calling on a scholar such Yale President Richard Levin? Or will he go with deeply experienced insiders such as deficit hawk Gene Sperling at the Treasury Department or Jason Furman, the council’s deputy director?

Actually, many American companies are – just maybe not in your town. They’re hiring overseas, where sales are surging and the pipeline of orders is fat.

More than half of the 15,000 people that Caterpillar Inc. has hired this year were outside the U.S. UPS is also hiring at a faster clip overseas. For both companies, sales in international markets are growing at least twice as fast as domestically.

The boomers, who in their youth revolutionized everything from music to race relations, are set to redefine retirement. But a generation that made its mark in the tumultuous 1960s now faces a crisis as it hits its own mid-60s.

“The situation is extremely serious because baby boomers have not saved very effectively for retirement and are still retiring too early,” says Olivia Mitchell, director of the Boettner Center for Pensions and Retirement Research at the University of Pennsylvania.

Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty and other possible GOP candidates stumbled over health care, taxes and other issues in December, even as Obama coped with the harsh political reality stemming from his party’s “shellacking” in last month’s elections.

No serious contender has officially launched a 2012 campaign. But with the Iowa caucuses less than 13 months away, at least a dozen Republicans are jockeying for position, speaking to groups throughout the country, writing op-ed columns and taking potshots at one another.

“It’s not just for the Renaissance fair anymore,” says Becky Starr, co-owner of Starrlight Mead, which recently opened in an old woven label mill in this little North Carolina town.

In fact, this most ancient of alcoholic libations hasn’t been this hot since Beowulf slew Grendel’s dam and Geoffrey Chaucer fell in with the Canterbury pilgrims at the Tabard.

Visible above the horizon is what many plant specialists, environmentalists and scientists believe to be the culprit: the Fayette Power Project – a coal-fired power plant for nearly 30 years has operated mostly without equipment designed to decrease emissions of sulfur dioxide, a component of acid rain.

The plant’s operator and the state’s environmental regulator deny sulfur dioxide pollution is to blame for the swaths of plant devastation across Central Texas. But evidence collected from the Appalachian Mountains to New Mexico indicates sulfur dioxide pollution kills vegetation, especially pecan trees. Pecan growers in Albany, Ga., have received millions of dollars in an out-of-court settlement with a power plant whose sulfur dioxide emissions harmed their orchards.