Evening Edition

The latest deaths came as security forces launched a long-feared crackdown in the northwest flashpoint town of Jisr al-Shughur near the border with Turkey.

Protesters poured on to the streets of main towns and cities after the weekly Muslim main prayers, many chanting slogans against Assad and in support of Jisr al-Shughur residents.

Intense NATO-led strikes sent up plumes of smoke in Tripoli, where the strongman has his residence and headquarters, a day after Libya’s rebels won a cash boost and crucial recognition from key powers.

The latest flare-up came as US Defence Secretary Robert Gates warned the Western alliance’s air war on forces loyal to Kadhafi could be in peril because of military shortcomings.

“Today is a historic day for Croatia and the European Union,” said Jose-Manuel Barroso, head of the EU executive, on announcing that Zagreb had finally made sufficient progress on meeting stringent conditions required to join the bloc.

After six years of tough talks to become the EU’s 28th member, Barroso recommended closing the final four of 35 legal chapters that aspiring members must negotiate to gain EU entry — political, economic, social and judicial reforms to bring a nation to the cusp of EU standards.

Hours ahead of the close of nominations to be managing director of the International Monetary Fund, dark horses Grigory Marchenko of Kazakhstan and Trevor Manuel of South Africa said they would not stand for the job.

“It’s more or less obvious that Christine Lagarde is going to be elected,” the Kazakh central bank chief told CNN.

After a weeks-long hunt for the elusive source of the contamination, German officials said they were confident they had found the origin.

“It’s the sprouts,” Reinhard Burger, the president of the Robert Koch Institute, the national disease centre, told a news conference on the outbreak of enterohaemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) in northern Germany.

The 29-year-old Spaniard said he suspected that, despite appearances to the contrary during Friday’s chaotic incident and crash-hit day, champions Red Bull would end up quickest in qualifying and once again be the team to beat.

“We also topped the practice in Monaco and then in qualifying (Sebastian) Vettel was one second quicker than us,” he said, issuing a warning to the legions of Ferrari fans who had packed the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve for the day.

But Muslim countries and the Vatican protested over the summit statement which encouraged the use of condoms and called for greater emphasis on help for homosexuals, prostitutes and drug addicts.

“We must win our battle against AIDS and we will,” said Joseph Deiss, president of the UN General Assembly, after the declaration was passed by consensus at the end of the summit marking the 30th anniversary of the discovery of AIDS.

The United States joined Australia and Spain in recognising the rebels’ National Transitional Council (NTC) as the legitimate representative of the Libyan people, following the example of several others countries including France, Italy and Britain.

Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade, meanwhile, urged Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi to step down, “the sooner the better,” as he became the first head of state to visit the rebels’ eastern bastion of Benghazi.

Saleh’s troops on Thursday killed two pro-protester gunmen in the southern protest hub of Taez while fighting intensified in the southern town of Zinjibar, held by suspected Al-Qaeda gunmen since last month.

The pro- and anti-regime camps, meanwhile, have called for mass protests on Friday.

Ahead of a convoy of troops and tanks reportedly converging on Jisr al-Shughur in northwest Syria, hundreds of the flashpoint town’s residents were fleeing to Turkey, the nearest foreign haven.

The number of Syrians who have fled to Turkey has increased to 2,500, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said on Thursday.

Nominations to lead the International Monetary Fund, after French head Dominique Strauss-Kahn resigned as managing director May 18 to fight sexual assault charges, were to close late Friday, with three names expected on the shortlist.

French Finance Minister Lagarde is a strong favorite for the job, after being solidly backed by Europe, which is struggling to keep the IMF-backed bailout of Greece on the rails.

The Fed said it will buy $50 billion of Treasuries, the final series of government bond purchases that marks the last phase of the $600 billion program it launched in November 2010 to prevent another recession.

As a result, once the purchases are concluded on June 30, the financial sector will receive only a fraction of the roughly $100 billion a month in easy money it has been getting from the Fed.

The monthly deficit was far below the $140 billion gap that economists surveyed by Reuters had forecast, and was down from $135.93 billion in May 2010.

Revenues have been relatively strong, given a relatively high rate of national unemployment, but lawmakers still face an urgent need to reach a deal on budget and debt issues to try to get the deficit onto a long-term downward trajectory.

The use of the aircraft came on a day of nationwide rallies against President Bashar al-Assad, as unrest showed no sign of abating despite the harsh crackdown by his authoritarian state.

The helicopters opened fire in a northwestern town after security forces on the ground killed five protesters, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Clinton arrived in Zambia to begin a five-day Africa trip that will also take her to Tanzania and Ethiopia to highlight the Obama administration’s drive to help African countries meet challenges ranging from HIV/AIDS to food security and accelerate often impressive economic growth.

She quickly zeroed in on the fast expanding clout of China, which pumped almost $10 billion dollars in investment into Africa in 2009 and has also seen trade soar as Beijing buys oil and other raw materials to fuel its booming economy.

Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble urged parliament to back additional aid for the heavily indebted euro zone country but said private creditor participation in a new package was “unavoidable” and reiterated he favored a bond swap that would push out Greek debt maturities by seven years.

The Bundestag lower house approved a non-binding resolution supporting extra emergency loans to Greece, but only on the condition that bondholders be made to share the burden.

In a final policy address before retiring at the end of the month, Gates said NATO-led operations in Afghanistan and Libya had exposed significant shortcomings in military capabilities and political will among the allies.

“The mightiest military alliance in history is only 11 weeks into an operation against a poorly armed regime in a sparsely populated country — yet many allies are beginning to run short of munitions, requiring the U.S., once more, to make up the difference,” he said.

And if another major spill occurs offshore the United States anytime soon, this is the most protection a community can expect should oil begin leaking from a ruptured well near its shores.

Oil companies since the BP accident have pledged more than $1 billion to develop systems to cap a leaking underwater well, and the government has imposed a raft of rules to prevent another major blowout.

Even Duncan Niederauer, whose NYSE Euronext is trying to seal the largest pending exchange deal, with Deutsche Boerse AG, said on Friday he thinks his company’s separate bid for European clearinghouse LCH.Clearnet is unlikely to win the day.

“I think LCH is likely to stand alone,” Niederauer, Chief Executive of the Big Board parent, said on the sidelines of an industry conference hosted by Sandler O’Neill. “But I thought it was an opportunity to work with the banks.”

“It’s the bean sprouts,” said Reinhard Burger, head of the German center for disease control, confirming that the salad vegetable was the common denominator among the thousands who had fallen sick.

Government scientists said traces of the deadly strain were detected in a packet of bean sprouts from the farm found in a family’s rubbish bin in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Two of the family fell ill after eating them.

Nearly eight months before the first contest, Monday’s nationally televised forum will give voters a chance to form early impressions of most of the top-tier contenders for the right to challenge President Barack Obama in 2012.

Seven White House hopefuls will participate, including three prominent candidates who skipped an early debate last month — Romney, Bachmann and Newt Gingrich, who promises to be there despite Thursday’s mass resignation of his senior staff.

Prime Minister George Papandreou’s plan almost doubles the belt-tightening measures for 2011 already agreed with the International Monetary Fund and the European Union, after the lenders judged that Athens had missed goals outlined under its bailout.

The ruling Socialist party has 156 deputies in the 300-seat house but growing numbers of its members are expressing unease at proposals including cutting spending and raising taxes to reduce the deficit by 6.5 billion euros more this year than first planned.

Emerging market powers like Russia, India and China have declared they want an end to Europe’s grip on the top job at the international lender, calling time on a pact that puts the IMF in European hands while the World Bank is run by an American.

Yet the only declared rival to Lagarde as the window for nominations draws to a close on Friday is Mexican Central Bank chief Agustin Carstens, whose policy views are seen as too conservative by many of his emerging market peers.

He is trying to explain one of the biggest but least reported failures of the financial crisis. This has split his family, one of Saudi Arabia’s richest, cost some of the world’s biggest banks billions of dollars and is now being slugged out in courts from London to the Cayman Islands.

Some family members face travel bans linked to the case so it has fallen to the 32-year old to defend the Algosaibi empire since the 2009 collapse of two Bahraini banks left more than 100 banks including Deutsche Bank, HSBC and Societe Generale owed an estimated $22 billion.

New arrivals mounted as the Syrian army swept into a town near the border where clashes raged earlier in the week and began to arrest what state television described as armed opponents.

“Overall arrival numbers are quickly increasing,” said Metin Corabatir, a spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

China’s sales to the United States and the European Union slumped to their weakest since late 2009, excluding Lunar New Year holidays, underlining the view that the world economy is stumbling.

Still, as an engine of growth, import figures suggested China’s economy is expanding at a healthy, if not stellar, pace. Crude imports stayed at elevated levels and coal volumes rose by more than a fifth from both April and a year earlier.

The justices unanimously agreed with a U.S. appeals court ruling that went against the world’s largest software company in its legal battle with Toronto-based i4i.

The high court refused to adopt Microsoft’s lower standard to replace the long-standing requirement that a defendant in a patent infringement case prove by clear and convincing evidence that a plaintiff’s patent is invalid.

Vice President Joe Biden and six leading Democratic and Republican lawmakers have now met a half-dozen times as they try to work out their differences and reach a deal to reduce trillion dollar budget deficits.

Thursday’s Capitol Hill meeting took place amid growing pressure at home and abroad for an agreement that would let Congress raise the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling before an August 2 deadline, when the Treasury Department has warned it will run out of money to pay the nation’s bills.