Evening Edition

But the insurgent leader who was the target of the original operation in which the Americans perished remained at large, said General John Allen, commander of NATO-led forces in Afghanistan.

“Did we get the leader that we were going after in the initial operation? No, we did not,” he told reporters by video link from Kabul.

World pressure mounted to end the crackdown that has claimed more than 2,000 lives since mid-March, with condemnations from Egypt, Iraq, Russia and the United States as the Turkish foreign minister handed Assad a stern message from Ankara.

“We will not waver in our pursuit of terrorist groups,” Assad told visiting Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, according to state news agency SANA.

A new round of stock market free-falls underscored fragile sentiment despite a US Federal Reserve statement that forecast low US credit rates for the next two years.

Central banks have a central role in dealing with the trans-Atlantic debt crises, and it was only after the European Central Bank resumed buying public debt, including Italian and Spanish bonds, that pressure eased on Rome and Madrid.

They closed on 84 without loss in reply to India’s modest first innings 224, a deficit of 140 runs, at Edgbaston here on Wednesday.

England captain Andrew Strauss was 52 not out and fellow left-handed opener Alastair Cook 27 not out in front of a sell-out 25,000 crowd at Warwickshire’s headquarters, redeveloped at a cost of £32 million.

Youths fought running battles with police in the northern cities of Manchester and Liverpool as well as in the Midlands overnight Tuesday.

They smashed shop windows, carted off televisions and designer clothes, and torched buildings as police armed with shields and batons struggled to contain the disturbances.

The poll reflected growing anxiety about the U.S. economy and frustration with Washington after a narrowly averted government default last week, a credit rating downgrade by Standard & Poor’s, a stock market dive and a stubbornly high 9.1 percent jobless rate.

President Barack Obama was politically bruised in the brutal, weeks-long debt debate, and negative views on the economy are worrisome signs for his 2012 re-election bid.

A few hours later 38 troops — 30 of them Americans — lay dead in a transport helicopter destroyed in the worst single incident suffered by foreign forces in 10 years of war in Afghanistan.

Little, if any, information was available soon after the crash, mainly because “a cone of silence had been ordered from the top,” one senior military official said.

The disclosure by General John Allen came during a briefing on the crash that killed 30 U.S. forces — most of them elite Navy SEALs — in the single deadliest incident for the U.S. military in the Afghan war. Eight Afghans were also killed in the crash in a remote valley southwest of Kabul.

Allen acknowledged that the main Taliban leader sought in the August 6 operation was still at large.

The United States said the world was watching Syria “in horror” and slapped sanctions on a Syrian bank and mobile phone company. Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, who sent his foreign minister to Damascus on Tuesday to urge an end to the bloodshed, said Syria “is pointing guns at its own people”.

At least 1,700 civilians have been killed since the uprising against Assad’s rule erupted in March, rights groups say. Syria says 500 soldiers and police have died.

S&P, which was accused by the Obama administration of making an error in its calculations leading to Friday’s downgrade, raised concern about the proposed new corrections policy and other issues in an 84-page letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, dated August 8.

The SEC is weighing sweeping new rules designed to improve the quality of ratings after their poor performance in the financial crisis.

Shares in French banks — among the most exposed to Italian and other peripheral euro zone government debt — tumbled in afternoon trade as fears about the currency bloc’s debt crisis moved back to the forefront of investor concerns.

Sarkozy, who played a leading role in frantic diplomacy over the weekend aimed at halting two weeks of market turmoil, had earlier summoned his top ministers and central bank chief to emergency talks, interrupting the summer recess.ial shock, which is now both feeding off and risks fueling another economic downturn, may well introduce a third phase of the four-year-old global credit crisis — the infection of the ultimate creditors.

Shares in French banks — among the most exposed to Italian and other peripheral euro zone government debt — tumbled in afternoon trade as fears about the currency bloc’s debt crisis moved back to the forefront of investor concerns.

Sarkozy, who played a leading role in frantic diplomacy over the weekend aimed at halting two weeks of market turmoil, had earlier summoned his top ministers and central bank chief to emergency talks, interrupting the summer recess.

A debate about whether U.S. power is waning has smoldered since at least the 1970s, when the Vietnam War, the Watergate political crisis, two oil shocks and stagflation combined to raise deep questions about the United States’ strength.

While such assessments are partly subjective, the spectacle of Washington waiting until the last moment last week to raise the debt ceiling and of Standard & Poors’ then taking away its coveted AAA credit rating have buttressed the case of those who argue that U.S. power, in relative terms, is declining.

In a move that could deadlock the 12-member panel over taxes, but perhaps set the stage for changes later, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell named Tea Party ally Patrick Toomey to the panel with Jon Kyl and Rob Portman.

The panel is known as the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction and was established to find $1.5 trillion in additional budget savings over 10 years, but markets have been looking for signs that it may be able to do more.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell 429 points, or 3.8 percent, to 10,811 in afternoon trading. The average plummeted more than 300 points within minutes of the opening bell and was down as many as 468 points by late morning. The S&P 500 fell 40, or 3.4 percent, to 1,132, and the Nasdaq fell 77, or 3.1 percent, to 2,405.

On Tuesday, the Dow gained 429 points after the Fed said it planned to keep interest rates extremely low at least through the middle of 2013. It was the first time the Fed announced such a timetable. But the day’s gains were likely just a blip caused by computerized trading based on programs that dictate when to buy or sell, some investors and analysts said.

Marine Corps Gen. John Allen told a Pentagon news conference that an F-16 airstrike Monday took out fewer than 10 insurgents involved in the attack on the Chinook helicopter.

In a separate statement Wednesday, the military said the Monday strike killed Taliban leader Mullah Mohibullah and the insurgent who fired the rocket-propelled grenade at the helicopter. The military said intelligence gained on the ground provided a high degree of confidence that the insurgent who fired the grenade was the person killed. It did not provide further details.

The claim of success comes amid fears that as U.S. troops begin to leave Afghanistan, the country is far from stable and remains deadly for those forces who remain. As U.S. troops thin out, special operations forces like those that died in Saturday’s helicopter crash are likely to make up a greater part of the American force in Afghanistan.

F-16 fighter jets killed the insurgents responsible on Monday, according to the top American commander in Afghanistan, Marine Corps Gen. John Allen.

Even as Prime Minister David Cameron promised not to let a “culture of fear” take hold, tensions flared in Birmingham, where a murder probe was opened after three men were killed in a hit-and-run reportedly as they took to the streets to deter potential rioters.

“We needed a fightback and a fightback is under way,” Cameron said in a somber televised statement outside his Downing Street office after a meeting of the nation’s crisis committee. As if to underline his resolve, he underlined “nothing is off the table” – including water cannon, commonly used in Northern Ireland but never deployed in mainland Britain.

Democrats succeeded in taking two Wisconsin state Senate seats away from Republican incumbents on Tuesday but fell one short of what they needed to seize majority control of the chamber.

Republicans saw it as a big win for Gov. Scott Walker and an affirmation of his conservative agenda, the hallmark of which has been his successful push to strip most collective bargaining rights from public workers.

The government, however, claimed it was ridding the city of “terrorists.”

Having blocked nearly all outside witnesses to the violence, President Bashar Assad is stubbornly insisting that terrorists and thugs – not pro-democracy protesters determined to bring him down – are driving the 5-month-old uprising.

Representatives for the former New York mayor have contacted veteran New Hampshire campaign strategists in recent days about joining a Giuliani campaign, according to several people with direct knowledge of the effort. These people spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to disclose the information.

They said Giuliani’s team is concerned that Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s all-but-certain campaign could scoop up the few remaining top operatives in the first-in-the-nation primary state, where a host of candidates already have dozens of people on the payroll. One person described Giuliani’s aides as having a sense of urgency.

They’ve only done it in three patients so far, but the results were striking: Two appear cancer-free up to a year after treatment, and the third patient is improved but still has some cancer. Scientists are already preparing to try the same gene therapy technique for other kinds of cancer.

“It worked great. We were surprised it worked as well as it did,” said Dr. Carl June, a gene therapy expert at the University of Pennsylvania. “We’re just a year out now. We need to find out how long these remissions last.”