Evening Edition

The head of Britain’s armed forces, meanwhile, said NATO should widen its bombing campaign to ensure Kadhafi is unable to cling to power, while Pope Benedict XVI called for negotiations to end the violence.

Prime Minister Baghdadi Mahmudi, quoted by JANA state news agency, said after meeting Khatib that Libya is keen for “an immediate ceasefire to coincide with a stop to the NATO bombardment and the acceptance of international observers.”

US President Barack Obama warned if no deal is brokered on raising the $14.29 trillion debt ceiling set by Congress then the United States risked plunging back into recession.

“If investors around the world thought that the full faith and credit of the United States was not being backed up, if they thought that we might renege on our IOUs, it could unravel the entire financial system,” Obama warned at a CBS town hall meeting broadcast on Sunday.

Yet thousands of organic farming advocates seeking to bar so-called “Frankenstein” foods from the continent made the journey here to help raise awareness about dangers to seed diversity.

The event was an annual seed exchange festival organised by the Peliti alternative community, a Mesohori-based non-government organisation working to preserve Greece’s vegetal wealth against an encroaching global economy.

Tradition dictates that Azerbaijani duo Ell and Nikki’s triumph in the annual pop extravaganza will bring the contest to Baku next year — one of the biggest events in the mainly Muslim country’s history since independence in 1991.

The win was portrayed as national triumph by the main television channels in the small, relatively young state wedged between Iran, Russia and Turkey that went through war and political conflict after the Soviet collapse.

Gunfire from Syria raked a crowd at Al-Boqayah crossing near the town of Wadi Khaled, killing the Syrian woman and wounding five people including a Lebanese soldier, a Lebanese security official and an AFP correspondent said.

The shooting came as hundreds of Syrians fled violence in their homeland on foot into Lebanon.

“Over the last two years, I too, received a great education, facing crises and making decisions — many of them very difficult,” Pandit told graduating business students at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School on Sunday.

He told the students the only way they could have learned more about the American economy and global economics over the last two years “is to have lived it — an experience, that I can assure you, was not full of pure enjoyment.”

The town, just a few miles (km) from Lebanon’s northern border, is the latest focus of an intensified crackdown by Syrian troops and tanks, sent to quell demonstrations against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad.

The shelling on Tel Telakh concentrated on al-Burj, Ghalioun, Souk and Mahata neighborhood, the Local Coordination Committees said in a statement, adding wounded people had little access to care because the main hospital in the town was sealed by security forces and the main road to Lebanon blocked.

NATO warplanes, acting under a U.N. mandate to protect civilians, have stopped government troops advancing on rebel strongholds but the collapse of Gaddafi’s rule, which many Western governments seek, has not materialized.

After a fresh series of air strikes on his Bab al-Aziziyah compound in Tripoli, Gaddafi taunted the Western military alliance, saying in an audio recording aired Friday that he was in a place where NATO could not reach him.

The Times said it obtained documents that showed the unit being formed by Erik Prince’s new company Reflex Responses with $529 million from the UAE would be used to thwart internal revolt, conduct special operations and defend oil pipelines and skyscrapers from attack.

The newspaper said the decision to hire the contingent of foreign troops was taken before a wave of popular unrest spread across the Arab world in recent months, including to the UAE’s Gulf neighbors Bahrain, Oman and Saudi Arabia.

The discovery has forced officials to abandon their original plan to bring under control the No. 1 reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi plant as they focus on how to deal with the rising pool that some experts see as a threat to groundwater and the Pacific coast.

Despite the setback, Japanese nuclear safety officials and the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO), plan to stick to a target of stabilizing the plant and bringing its reactors to a state of “cold shutdown” by January.

A bid from the Canadian financial institutions could represent a more palatable alternative for opponents of the LSE proposal, many of whom are concerned about control of the country’s largest stock market falling into foreign hands.

Legislators and other elected officials in Ontario, the province where Toronto is located, want assurances that the city will not lose its status as a world financial center. The latest proposal, announced by TMX in a statement on Saturday, could address those concerns.

U.S. counter-terrorism officials said Hassan Ghul is an al Qaeda operative who at one point carried messages between Iraqi insurgents who established an al Qaeda affiliate after U.S. troops overthrew the government of Saddam Hussein.

Precise details of the mysterious Ghul’s role in al Qaeda and the circumstances of his arrest are murky. But five U.S. officials familiar with Ghul’s role in the epic hunt for bin Laden said he gave up what turned out to be vital information about an al Qaeda courier who eventually led U.S. intelligence to bin Laden’s fortified hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan.