Evening Edition

President Barack Obama’s stern message led a chorus of similar calls from Western powers in a sharp escalation of pressure for Assad to halt a bloody five-month crackdown on a pro-democracy uprising inspired by the Arab Spring.

“We have consistently said that President Assad must lead a democratic transition or get out of the way. He has not led. For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside,” Obama said.

The government of Peru’s President Ollanta Humala announced Wednesday it was temporarily suspending a coca eradication program in the Upper Huallaga Valley in the east central part of the country while it evaluates the effort.

“We do not believe that the temporary suspension of eradication this week represents a permanent shift in the Peruvian government’s counternarcotics policy,” the State Department said.

Three dissidents who met with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton here two weeks ago told AFP that FBI agents raised concerns about their safety and asked who might be behind the campaign.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation declined to comment. “We just don?t comment on our investigations,” a spokesperson said.

All US troops must leave by December 31 unless Baghdad and Washington reach an accord to allow a training mission to stay on.

Without an extension, the three centres which mediate disputes in ethnically mixed areas patrolled by combined Kurdish and Arab Iraqi units will need to find a new way to fill the US role.

The flat denial that Bout — a former Soviet air force officer accused in the United States of trying to send a vast arsenal to Colombian guerrillas — had anything to do with weapons sales came in a pretrial hearing in New York federal court.

“Selling? Never. He never sold, he never brokered,” attorney Albert Dayan said.

Many twists will shape the race and no one will remember the last three days when America elects its next president in November 2012.

But in an explosive late summer flurry, Obama and leading Republicans Mitt Romney and Rick Perry tested attack lines, revealed their strengths, tried to hide their liabilities and made an early pitch for wavering voters.

Rupert Murdoch and his son James implicated the London-based law firm in the burgeoning scandal in July, saying Harbottle conducted an internal investigation into hacking at the News of the World in 2007, and absolved the company.

But that is not the line Harbottle presented in a 46-page submission to Parliament, dated August 11 and released with a host of related material on Tuesday.

With Rupert Murdoch’s younger son under increasing pressure from the phone-hacking scandal enveloping the company, News Corp executives want to be prepared if he wants to “take a breather,” one News Corp source said.

“The company is still trying to operate as if James isn’t going anywhere,” said another high-ranking insider. “But everyone is thinking about what will happen if he has to step aside.”

President Barack Obama made his appeal after five months of an increasingly brutal Syrian government crackdown against protesters seeking an end to the 41-year authoritarian reign by Assad and his late father, Hafez al-Assad.

The new sanctions would freeze Syrian government assets under U.S. jurisdiction, bar American individuals or companies from transactions with Assad’s government and ban U.S. imports of Syrian petroleum.

New worries about the health of European banks set the tone before the market’s open, and a dismal report on regional U.S. manufacturing fueled a downward spiral in which the Dow dropped as much as 528 points, spurring a flight to safe-haven assets like gold.

The Nasdaq ended more than 5 percent lower, the S&P 500 more than 4 percent and the blue-chip Dow off more than 3 percent. Thursday marks the sixth time in the last two weeks that the S&P has moved by 4 percent or more.

Other data on Thursday also pointed to a bit of inflation in the economy, which could make the Federal Reserve hesitant to ease monetary policy further to stimulate the economy.

Global stocks tumbled on the extremely weak regional manufacturing data that investors viewed as a sign the recovery was on the rocks. But economists cautioned against reading too much into the survey, which was conducted during a period of exceptional turmoil in financial markets.

Fears about bank funding contributed to another dismal trading day for bank stocks in Europe after heavy losses in the last two weeks, with the main bank stocks index falling 6.7 percent.

The Wall Street Journal said earlier that the Federal Reserve was asking for more information about whether European banks with U.S. units had reliable access to the funds needed to operate in the United States.

The candidates generally agree on a basic set of strongly conservative financial principles: they want to cut government spending, lower taxes, reduce regulation and balance the federal budget.

But while the contenders vying for the nomination to run against Democratic President Barack Obama next year are talking about their goals of limited government, they are not yet offering plans for how to achieve them and at times wield rhetoric that worries investors.

So far, Mitt Romney, the former governor of neighboring Massachusetts, is the easy front-runner in New Hampshire, which holds the country’s first primary election in 2012. He has an 18 point lead over Perry, his closest contender.

And Perry, voicing social views New Hampshire Republicans do not share, will find it hard to narrow that divide.

In the country’s east, a suicide car bomber attacked a coalition base Thursday, killing two Afghan security guards, officials said, and the Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack.

The minibus ran over a roadside bomb in Obe district in Herat province, setting off a blast that killed 21 passengers, said Gen. Zaiuddin Mamoodi, an Afghan National Police commander for four provinces of western Afghanistan. Twelve of the victims were children under the age of 5, three were women and six were men, he said. Eleven others were wounded, he said.

With opposition fighters steadily gaining ground in the six-month-old civil war, there are signs that Moammar Gadhafi’s 42-year-old rule may be unraveling. The rebels seized Libya’s last functioning oil refinery Thursday and claimed to have captured most of the nearby city of Zawiya, just 30 miles (50 kilometers) west of the capital along the Mediterranean coast.

A rebel victory in Zawiya could leave Gadhafi nearly cornered in his increasingly isolated stronghold of Tripoli. Rebel fighters are now closing in on the capital from the west and the south, while NATO controls the seas to the north. The opposition is in charge of most of the eastern half of the country.

The unified stance isolates Assad further as he presses a military campaign against major demonstrations. But the diplomacy left many questions unanswered, including how the demand for Assad’s ouster can be backed up in the absence of any appetite for military intervention, and who inside the Syrian government or among the country’s fragmented opposition might take his place.

The messages from Washington, London, Paris, Berlin and Brussels coincided with a U.N. report recommending that Syria be referred to the International Criminal Court for investigation of possible crimes against humanity, including summary executions, torturing prisoners and targeting children in the crackdown on demonstrations.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell 419 points – a return to the wild swings that gripped the stock market last week.

Stocks were only part of a dramatic day across the financial markets. The price of oil fell $5, gold set another record, the 10-year Treasury hit its lowest yield, and the average mortgage rate fell to its lowest in at least 40 years.

About 2,000 species examined are moving away from the equator at an average rate of more than 15 feet per day, about a mile per year, according to new research published Thursday in the journal Science which analyzed previous studies. Species are also moving up mountains to escape the heat, but more slowly, averaging about 4 feet a year.

The species – mostly from the Northern Hemisphere and including plants – moved in fits and starts, but over several decades it averages to about 8 inches an hour away from the equator.

The waterway had grown so putrid that it raised fears of a disease outbreak and concerns about hurting development. So in a first-of-its-kind feat, engineers reversed the river by digging a series of canals that not only carried the stinking mess away from the lake, but also created the only shipping route between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River.

Now a modern threat – a voracious fish that biologists are desperate to keep out of Lake Michigan – has spurred serious talk of undertaking another engineering feat almost as bold as the original: reversing the river again to restore its flow into the lake.

Archaeologists are still discovering unusual, and sometimes stunningly personal, artifacts a year after state officials revealed that a graduate student had pinpointed the location of the massive but short-lived Civil War camp in southeast Georgia.

Discoveries made as recently as a few weeks ago were being displayed Thursday at the Statesboro campus of Georgia Southern University. They include a soldier’s copper ring bearing the insignia of the Union army’s 3rd Corps, which fought bloody battles at Gettysburg and Manassas, and a payment token stamped with the still-legible name of a grocery store in Michigan.

The league announced Thursday that Pryor is eligible for its supplemental draft, but he won’t be allowed to practice for the team that selects him until Week 6. Pryor gave up his final season with the Buckeyes following an investigation into the team’s memorabilia-for-cash scandal.

He would’ve had to sit out five games had he chosen to return to Ohio State.