Evening Edition

Obama and Saudi King Abdullah in a telephone call expressed their “shared, deep concerns about the Syrian government’s use of violence against its citizens,” the White House said.

“They agreed that the Syrian regime’s brutal campaign of violence against the Syrian people must end immediately.”

Anti-American tensions are at an all-time high in Pakistan after a covert US raid killed Osama bin Laden on May 2.

The US embassy named the man as Warren Weinstein, who Pakistani police said is a senior official at US-based consultancy J.E. Austin, which works on development projects in the frontline state in the war on Al-Qaeda.

The decision by Standard & Poor’s to strip Washington of its top triple-A rating has done little to diminish investors’ appetite for US Treasuries, which along with gold, the Swiss franc and the yen are considered among the safest of assets.

At first it may seem somewhat paradoxical, but with investors concerned about a slowdown in the global economy, they are piling into US bonds which are also attractive because of the dollar’s reserve currency status.

For the second year running, the house, situated off the beaten path in a poor part of Baltimore, in the eastern US state of Maryland, has received no funding from the city, which has its own financial woes.

Baltimore’s deficit snowballed to $120 million for the 2011 fiscal year, leading the city to tighten its belt and decide to fund only essential services.

A crowd made up mainly of women, which SlutWalk organizer Samantha Wright estimated at around 2,000-strong, marched from the White House to the Washington Monument brandishing signs with messages reading “This is what I was wearing when I was raped,” and, “Rape pre-dates the miniskirt.”

Twenty-three-month-old Virginia Warder sat in her stroller playing with a hot-pink feather boa and eating peaches. A sign on the stroller read “My body is mine” and the toddler’s T-shirt was emblazoned with the words “My mommy is a slut.”

But her victory was overshadowed by Texas Governor Rick Perry, a business-friendly social conservative who announced his candidacy hours earlier and could soon lead the crowded 2012 race to replace Barack Obama.

Bachmann took first in the Ames Straw Poll — seen as a key indicator of who will fare well in early nominating contests next year — with 4,823 votes, or around 28.5 percent of the 16,892 ballots cast.

Pawlenty made the announcement after finishing third with a disappointing 2,293 votes Saturday in Iowa’s Ames Straw Poll, over 2,500 votes behind winner Representative Michele Bachmann and second place finisher Ron Paul.

The nonbinding survey is seen as a key indicator of who is best positioned to win the first batch of early nominating contest next year, and Pawlenty had hoped a strong showing would breathe new life into his campaign.

Perry, a popular fiscal and social conservative, will pose a major challenge to both the ultraconservative Bachmann and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, a moderate who has until now led the polls.

Meanwhile Tim Pawlenty, a low-key former governor of Minnesota who was hoping for a crucial bump from Iowa’s Ames Straw Poll, dropped out after coming in a distant third behind Bachmann and libertarian congressman Ron Paul.

For months, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has led the polls despite conservative misgivings about his history of governing from the middle and his state health care overhaul that inspired “Obamacare.”

But now he faces a major challenge from ultraconservative congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who rode a Tea Party wave to victory in Iowa’s Ames Straw Poll — seen as a key test ahead of early nominating battles.

The fourth-term governor, supported by the Christian right, vowed to put Americans back to work and assailed Barack Obama on the economy, where the president is most vulnerable.

“We cannot and must not endure four more years of rising unemployment, rising taxes, rising debt, rising energy dependence on nations that intend us harm,” Perry said, as he announced his candidacy in South Carolina Saturday.

Obama will embark on a fabled ritual of American politics — a bus tour to rural areas of Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois, which have all felt the lash of the economic crisis and will be important to his 2012 reelection bid.

Hope is a commodity in short supply, as fears mount that the tepid recovery from the worst economic crisis since the 1930s will fizzle into a second recession and with unemployment stubbornly pegged at 9.1 percent.

A Reuters witness and others nearby reported hearing at least five explosions as Afghan security forces inside the compound of Parwan governor Abdul Basir Salangi fought back.

Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry said 22 people were killed and 34 wounded. The dead included 16 government employees and six police, it said in a statement.

Since the beginning of the fasting month of Ramadan on August 1, Assad’s forces have mounted operations across the country to try to suppress protests demanding political freedom and an end to 41 years of Assad family rule.

“I can see the silhouettes of two grey vessels. They are firing their guns and the impact is landing on al-Raml al-Filistini and al-Shaab neighborhoods,” one witness told Reuters by phone from Latakia, where tanks and armored vehicles were deployed three months ago to crush dissent against Assad in mainly Sunni neighborhoods of the mixed city.

The swift rebel advance on the town of Zawiyah, about 50 km (30 miles) west of Tripoli, will deal a psychological blow to Gaddafi’s supporters and severs the coastal highway to Tunisia that keeps the capital supplied with food and fuel.

There was no sign Tripoli was under immediate threat from a rebel attack: heavily armed pro-Gaddafi forces still lie between Zawiyah and the capital. Previous rebel advances have often been reversed, despite help from NATO warplanes.

The disclosure, if confirmed, is likely to further shake the U.S.-Pakistan relationship, which has been improving slightly after hitting its lowest point in decades following the killing of bin Laden.

During the raid, one of two modified Blackhawk helicopters, believed to employ unknown stealth capability, malfunctioned and crashed, forcing the commandos to abandon it.

Cameron, criticized by some in his party as being too liberal on crime and punishment, has taken a tough stance after four nights of looting and arson hit cities across England.

“We haven’t talked the language of zero tolerance enough, but the message is getting through,” Cameron said in an interview in the Sunday Telegraph.

Pawlenty, once seen as a strong contender for the Republican nomination to face Democratic President Barack Obama in the November 2012 election, dropped out a day after a disappointing showing in Iowa’s straw poll, a key early test of strength among his party’s candidates.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney is the early front-runner in the Republican race, but he must fend off a surging Bachmann — who won the poll — and Perry, the governor of Texas who announced his candidacy on Saturday in South Carolina.

Despite her victory on Saturday in the Iowa straw poll, the first big test of the 2012 Republican U.S. presidential campaign, Bachmann had to share the national stage with Perry’s public leap into the White House race.

It won’t be the last time the congresswoman from Minnesota and the governor of Texas step on each other’s toes.

But the three-day trip through Iowa, Minnesota and Illinois — three states seen as vital to his 2012 re-election campaign — could put him in front of voters who, polls show, are furious about political gridlock in the U.S. capital.

Iowa, which launched Obama’s historic journey to the White House in 2008, has recently been playing host to Republican presidential hopefuls who have aggressively slammed his record as they criss-cross the state.

The governor of Parwan, a relatively peaceful eastern province just 30 miles north of Kabul, survived. He said he picked up an assault rifle and shot at least one of the attackers dead from the waiting room of his office.

Two other insurgents detonated their vests, causing most of the deaths and burning part of the governor’s offices. Several cars were wrecked by shrapnel and bullets. Broken glass and body parts littered a charred lawn.

The coordinated attacks by gunboats and ground troops were the latest wave of a brutal offensive against anti-government protests launched at the beginning of the month. The assault showed Assad has no intention of scaling back the campaign even though it has brought international outrage and new U.S. and European sanctions.

“We are being targeted from the ground and the sea,” said a frightened resident of the al-Ramel district of Latakia, the hardest hit neighborhood. “The shooting is intense. We cannot go out. They are raiding and breaking into people’s homes,” he added, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

The six Republicans and six Democrats represent states where the biggest military contractors – Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics Corp., Raytheon Co. and Boeing Co. – build missiles, aircraft, jet fighters and tanks while employing tens of thousands of workers.

The potential for $500 billion more in defense cuts could force the Pentagon to cancel or scale back multibillion-dollar weapons programs. That could translate into significant layoffs in a fragile economy, generate millions less in tax revenues for local governments and upend lucrative company contracts with foreign nations.

Both have the backing of tea partyers and evangelical conservatives. Both already are making big plays for those two important constituencies in Iowa.

Perry was making his first campaign visit to Iowa since announcing his candidacy Saturday in South Carolina in a speech that emphasized his economic credentials and Texas’ job growth, as well as his conservative stances on social issues and his faith.

“We’ve still got a long way to go to get to where we need to be. We didn’t get into this mess overnight, and it’s going to take time to get out of it,” the president told the country over the weekend, all but pleading for people to stick with him.

A deeply unsettled political landscape, with voters in a fiercely anti-incumbent mood, is framing the 2012 presidential race 15 months before Americans decide whether to give Obama a second term or hand power to the Republicans. Trying to ride out what seems to be an unrelenting storm of economic anxiety, people in the United States increasingly are voicing disgust with most all of the men and women, Obama included, they sent to Washington to govern them.