Evening Edition

I know, because I chased down the famous hockey trophy while behind the wheel of an Escalade ESV and got a picture of the two impressive symbols of success next to each other.

The biggest of Cadillac’s Escalade sport utility vehicles, with its audacious, shiny grille and huge, 22-inch wheels, the ESV tester made a perfect backdrop for an impromptu photo opportunity with hockey’s top prize as it traveled the country with Boston Bruins personnel.

Counterterrorism officials say there is no intelligence pointing to a specific plot, but officials fear that someone with terrorist sympathies might see Sept. 11 as the time to make a violent statement.

The security ramp-up around the country underscores a shift in policing focus since the attacks a decade ago. Officers and emergency responders have been trained in detecting suspicious activity that could uncover a terror plot, aware that the threat has changed in part from an organized large-scale attack using airliners as missiles to the potential for smaller, less sophisticated operations carried out by affiliated groups or individuals.

Ex-Rep. John M. Perzel entered the plea to two counts of conflict of interest, two counts of theft and four counts of conspiracy. He left the courthouse without commenting, but apologized in an e-mailed statement and said he bore responsibility for improprieties in spending public funds he controlled.

“It was up to me to see that taxpayer funds were spent only for the betterment of the people of Pennsylvania, and not for my political benefit (or) that of my party,” Perzel said in the news release.

A team from the United States and France made the findings after traveling to an archaeological site along the northwest shoreline of Kenya’s Lake Turkana. Two-faced blades and other large cutting tools had been previously excavated there along with primitive stone flakes.

Using a sophisticated technique to date the dirt, researchers calculated the age of the more advanced tools to be 1.76 million years old. That’s older than similar stone-age artifacts in Ethiopia and Tanzania estimated to be between 1.4 and 1.6 million years old.

As Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton prepared to attend an international conference in Paris on Thursday aimed at boosting aid to the rebels, the State Department said getting the money to the opposition is a higher initial priority than handling the case of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi. Al-Megrahi, a former Libyan intelligence agent, is the only person convicted in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. The ailing al-Megrahi was released from a prison two years ago and returned to a hero’s welcome in Libya where he is now reported near death.

Thursday’s conference will gather top officials from about 60 countries to hear from the rebels what they need to get Libya stabilized and governed. The Transitional National Council is expected to present a detailed list of requests, topped by access to the billions of dollars in assets of Moammar Gadhafi’s government that are frozen around the world. They may also seek short-term loans from the IMF and World Bank, according to U.S. officials. And, while they do not want international peacekeepers, the rebels may seek some kind of civilian U.N. police presence, the officials said.

The panel, newly created to provide Greek lawmakers an assessments independent from the government, warned the country’s primary deficit – a net budget loss excluding debt repayment – is increasing and has already exceeded the annual target in the first seven months of the year.

The warning came as international debt inspectors returned to Athens to monitor progress of the country’s austerity program agreed in exchange for two successive international bailout-loan deals totaling euro219 billion ($315 billion).

The program was known as the Demographics Unit and, though the NYPD denies its existence, the squad maintained a long list of “ancestries of interest” and received daily reports on life in Muslim neighborhoods, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

The documents offer a rare glimpse into an intelligence program shaped and steered by a CIA officer. It was an unusual partnership, one that occasionally blurred the line between domestic and foreign spying. The CIA is prohibited from gathering intelligence inside the U.S.

Then the people waited. And waited. But nothing happened and no land was gained.

Finally, something changed this year. Scientists say historic flooding on the river – coupled with recent work by the Army Corps to build artificial islands at the edge of the bay – have produced a hump of land in an area called West Bay. The new plug of terra firma measures about 4 acres.

Years of insurgent violence in Iraq are a warning to leaders at Thursday’s conference – including EU and Arab chiefs, rebel leaders and the U.S. secretary of state – of the potential for ongoing postwar bloodshed. They are likely to focus on unfreezing billions in Libyan funds held abroad and in reconciling diplomatic differences on the way ahead in a country led by an all-powerful dictator for four decades.

“We are going to turn the page of the dictatorship and the fighting, and open a new era of cooperation with democratic Libya,” French President Nicolas Sarkozy insisted in a speech Wednesday to French diplomats.

It is a one-of-a-kind place known for alligators, marshland and mangroves. But could it be known instead for tankers, rigs and oilmen?

A seemingly door-shut debate over expanding Everglades oil drilling was singlehandedly reignited by Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, when the Minnesota congresswoman said this week she’d be open to the idea. Though few expect her comments to amount to any actual U.S. policy shift and the amount of oil is not enormous, they have become the topic du jour among environmentalists and others who revere this place known as the “River of Grass.”

The court files of more than 1,700 pages shed new light on the U.S. government’s reliance on private contractors for flights between Washington, foreign capitals, the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and, at times, landing points near once-secret, CIA-run overseas prisons. The companies included DynCorp, a leading government contractor that secretly oversaw a fleet of luxury jets, and caterers that unwittingly stocked the planes with fruit platters and bottles of wine for the transoceanic routes, according to the court files and testimony.

The business dispute stems from an obscure four-year fight between a New York-based charter company, Richmor Aviation Inc., which supplied corporate jets and crews to the government, and a private aviation broker, SportsFlight Air, which organized flights for DynCorp. Both sides cited the government’s program of forced transport of detainees, or “extraordinary rendition,” in testimony, evidence and legal arguments. The companies are fighting over $874,000 awarded to Richmor by a New York state appeals court to cover unpaid costs for the secret flights.

One in 20 people drinks the equivalent of more than four cans of soda each day, even though health officials say sweetened beverages should be limited to less than half a can.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the figures Wednesday in a report said to be the government’s first to offer national statistics for both adults and kids.

The Wartime Contracting Commission urged Congress and the Obama administration to quickly put in place its recommendations to overhaul the contracting process and increase accountability. The commission even suggested that the joint House-Senate debt reduction committee take a close look at the proposals.

“What you’re asking for is more of the same,” said Dov Zakheim, a commission member and the Pentagon comptroller during President George W. Bush’s first term. “More waste. More fraud. More abuse.”

Seif al-Islam, Gadhafi’s longtime heir-apparent, said he was speaking from the suburbs of Tripoli and insisted his father was fine.

“We are going to die in our land,” he said in an audio statement broadcast on Syria’s Al-Rai television, claiming he was speaking for loyalist leaders who had met in the Gadhafi bastion of Bani Walid. “No one is going to surrender.”

Enough calcium ammonium nitrate fertilizer for at least 140,000 bombs was legally produced last year by Pakarab Fertilizers Ltd., then smuggled by militants and their suppliers across the porous border into southern and eastern Afghanistan, according to U.S. officials.

The U.S. military says around 80 percent of Afghan bombs are made with the fertilizer, which becomes a powerful explosive when mixed with fuel oil. The rest are made from military-grade munitions like mines or shells.

Now AT&T, the nation’s No. 2 wireless carrier, and No. 4 T-Mobile are plotting a legal response to challenge federal regulators.

In its civil antitrust lawsuit, the Justice Department said the merger would stifle competition in the wireless industry. The deal, which is still under review at the Federal Communications Commission, would catapult AT&T past Verizon Wireless to become the nation’s largest wireless carrier, leaving Sprint Nextel as a distant third-place player and certain to struggle.

Last October, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) declined to approve lorcaserin as an obesity treatment, citing research in rats that suggested there could be a cancer risk.

This latest study, reported in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, backs up earlier research showing that lorcaserin can shave off some extra pounds.

The review panel presented its recommendations on Tuesday to President Barack Obama’s commission on bioethics.

The presidential commission on Monday said government researchers must have known they were violating ethical standards by deliberately infecting Guatemalan prison inmates and mental patients with sexually transmitted diseases shortly after World War II.

Non-white people and Hispanics accounted for 98 percent of the population growth in metropolitan areas from 2000 to 2010, Brookings found in its analysis of the 2010 U.S. Census.

By 2010, minorities made up more than half the population in 22 of the 100 largest metro areas, it said. That compares with 14 areas in 2000 and five in 1990.

Concerned that Germany’s parliament has little control over the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), some members of Merkel’s center-right coalition are threatening to oppose boosting its powers when the Bundestag (lower house) votes on September 29.

If enough conservatives rebel and Merkel is forced to rely on opposition parties to pass the legislation, she could face pressure to dissolve parliament and call early elections, although the chances of that seem slim.

Famous for works critical of the darker side of German society in the 1920s, Dix’s paintings were discovered among the belongings of his wife, gallery owner Herbert Remmert told Reuters Wednesday.

The paintings were found in a portfolio untouched for decades on an estate in Bavaria owned by the ancestors of a Duesseldorf doctor and art collector who remained close to Dix even after his wife left him for the artist.

While investment over the last decade in health care for women and children has paid off in rapid declines in maternal death rates and deaths of children under five, improvement in the survival of babies in their first four weeks of life has been slower.

“Newborn survival is being left behind despite well-documented, cost-effective solutions to prevent these deaths,” said Flavia Bustreo, a WHO expert in family, women’s and children’s health who worked on the study.

Obama said it would be “inexcusable” for lawmakers to not act immediately on those measures when they return from their summer recess next week.

“At a time when a lot of people in Washington are talking about creating jobs, it’s time to stop political gamesmanship that could cost us hundreds of thousands of jobs,” Obama said at the White House.

Using data from a government health survey, researchers found that an estimated 4 percent of adults — or 8.3 million people — had gout in 2008. That compares with just over 1 percent between 1988 and 1994.

Rising rates of both obesity and high blood pressure appeared to account for most of the increase, said Dr. Hyon K. Choi, a professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine and the senior researcher on the study.

The groups spoke on Tuesday at a two-day Food and Drug Administration advisory panel meeting to discuss follow-up safety studies for silicone implants that have already been approved for sale. The FDA said the issue of product removal was not under consideration during the meeting.

But groups including the National Organization for Women Foundation and the National Research Center for Women and Families pressed the case.

The survey results from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show how far consumer habits must change to help fight the nation’s obesity epidemic, with nearly two-thirds of Americans either overweight or obese.

Coinciding with the data, city health departments from Los Angeles, Boston, Philadelphia, San Antonio and Seattle announced plans for a new campaign to encourage cutting down on sugary beverage consumption.

The self-taught American learned to play the game as a youngster by hitting wiffle balls around his house, swiftly developing the ability to cut and hook the ball at will.

Since his rookie season on the 2006 PGA Tour, left-hander Watson has steadily established himself as one of the top players on the circuit and yet it is his ability to conjure shots which gives him the greatest satisfaction.

The world’s No. 3 commercial planemaker burned through cash at a much higher rate than the market had expected in the second quarter as aircraft orders, and the accompanying customer deposits that top up Bombardier’s cash flow, dried up.

Bombardier said it may have to curb production of its CRJ fleet of regional commercial aircraft if orders do not pick up. It could make an announcement on output cuts in the fall. This follows a small cut to its Q400 turboprop output last quarter.

Among their concerns were a high price and features that suggested Sony Corp would remain an also-ran rather than a leader in the tablet market. Two versions of Sony’s main tablet cost $499 and $599, the same price as two lower-end Apple iPad models.

“Consumers want tablets, but they are not prepared to pay the same amount they’d pay for an iPad for something that’s not an iPad,” said Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi. “Despite the brand and different design, with its pricing so close to the iPad, it will be challenging for Sony.”

“I saw the ammunition around, and so I thought I’d make something nice with it,” the stout, bearded 63-year-old said as he sat sipping espresso outside a new art museum displaying his works near Benghazi’s port.

As with many of the exhibits at the museum, housed in a monarchy-era palace, Wakwak’s motifs revolve mostly around war, testament to the scars the six-month old uprising against Muammar Gaddafi has left on the North African country.

The fancy beach villas are testimony to the fact that the Gaddafis not only ruled Libya, they owned it, and treated its oil wealth as their personal patrimony.

Yet the cars now parked outside these gilded villas are no longer fleets of limousines, but the motley collection of jeeps and machine-gun mounted pick-up trucks belonging to the rag-tag army of civilians who rose up and overthrew the Gaddafis.

Republican presidential candidates are scheduled to hold a televised debate on the same evening at the same time.

In a letter to congressional leaders, Obama, a Democrat, asked for a joint session of the House of Representatives and Senate at 8:00 p.m. EDT on September 7 (midnight GMT Sept 8) to lay out his plan to create jobs and boost economic growth while reducing the U.S. deficit.

And among people already accustomed to getting the blood flowing, those who go above and beyond on physical activity seem to have the best heart outcomes, said researchers who analyzed past data on exercise and heart disease risks.

“Exercise is good, more exercise is better,” said David Swain, an exercise scientist at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, who was not involved in the new research.

Ireland is relying on its export sector to break a three-year cycle of shrinking economic output this year. But it needs consumers to start spending again if it is to make inroads into its huge debt pile and emerge from an EU-IMF bailout by the end of 2013.

A Reuters poll showed local economists cut their forecasts for gross domestic product growth to 0.5 percent this year from 0.7 percent previously, the first downgrade in five monthly surveys.

Three-quarters of people polled in the traditionally Catholic country backed the priests’ “Call to Disobedience,” a manifesto that Vienna Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn compares to a football team refusing to play by the rules.

The revolt, openly supported by 329 priests, threatens a split in the Austrian Church weeks before Pope Benedict’s Sept 22-25 visit to neighboring Germany. Benedict, 84, grew up in Bavarian villages close to the Austrian border.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is sorting through how to update its requirements for plants to withstand earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters — a detailed and involved process expected to take years.

The first changes likely will include requiring operators of the country’s 104 reactors to take a new look at the risks posed by earthquakes and floods.

Most of Irene’s damage was from flooding, which the government insures, instead of wind, which insurance companies cover, meaning insurers could pay out as little as $1.5 billion by some early estimates.

That’s just a fraction of the $10 billion to $12 billion of economic damage that Irene likely caused, according to estimates from catastrophe modelers and ratings agencies. Moody’s Analytics said the storm might take a tenth of a percentage point off third-quarter gross domestic product.

The conflicting messages were the latest evidence that the fallen leader was losing his grip on what remains of his entourage after a six-month uprising left his 42-year rule of the North African nation in tatters.

NATO warplanes struck at loyalist troops dug in around his besieged hometown of Sirte — his last stronghold along the heavily populated Mediterranean seaboard– and refugees streamed out fearing a bloody showdown.

Women in both groups saw an improvement in hormones related to pregnancy and ovulation, and tended to have more periods after going to the study sessions than before.

That’s a confusing finding, researchers said, because it’s not clear why women getting fake acupuncture treatments would improve.

He began gardening oysters as a way of bonding with his two daughters and, like hundreds of other Virginians, to help bring the ailing Chesapeake Bay back to life and rid it of dead zones where no sea creatures can survive.

“It’s fun to see them grow,” said Osborne, whose Norfolk, Virginia, home sits on the shore of the Lafayette River. “When we get them they’re very small, about half the size of your pinky fingernail. A year later, they’re two, three and occasionally even four inches long.”

AT&T, led by Chief Executive Randall Stephenson, plans to fight the government’s decision in court, and analysts say it might have to make big concessions — including selling major assets — to mollify regulators.

Shares of AT&T, the No. 2 U.S. carrier behind Verizon Wireless, fell as much as 5.4 percent. If AT&T’s purchase of the No. 4 carrier T-Mobile USA falls through, it may have to pay a huge break-up fee and benefits, such as spectrum grants, worth an estimated $6 billion to Deutsche Telekom.

James Fleishman “knew full well” he was facilitating insider trading by the hedge funds, which would pay his former employer Primary Global Research LLC tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for special access, Assistant U.S. Attorney Antonia Apps told a Manhattan federal jury.

“This is a case about stock traders on Wall Street getting an illegal edge,” Apps said. “If you know tomorrow’s news today, you can make money, big money.”

An administration official said Wednesday that the semi-annual review of President Barack Obama’s budget proposal for fiscal 2012 will revise estimates of the budget deficit, growth and unemployment until 2021.

“The midsession review will be a reality test to see if the president’s forecast matches the gloomy outlook of the private sector,” said Alex Brill, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

Two Canadian law firms, Koskie Minsky LLP and Siskinds LLP, said on Wednesday they served a statement of claim against Sino-Forest, once the biggest forestry company on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

The claim, outlined in an 85-page document, is part of C$7 billion proposed class-action suit filed in June against the Chinese forestry company that is suspected of fraud.

After months of staying above the Republican campaign fray and focusing his criticism on President Barack Obama, Romney threw his first subtle jab at Perry on Tuesday and changed his schedule to appear at two Tea Party-oriented events.

The moves followed the release of several opinion polls showing Perry, the Texas governor and Tea Party favorite, flying past former front-runner Romney to grab a solid lead in the 2012 Republican race to nominate a challenger to Obama.

The congressionally mandated Commission on Wartime Contracting, releasing its final report, said U.S. security forces are overly dependent on private contractors, whose employees in theater totaled 260,000 in 2010 and have sometimes outnumbered U.S. military and civilian personnel.

Contractors have been tapped to do work meant to be handled exclusively by federal employees, the panel said. The Defense Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development are so reliant on contractors that they have even lost the ability to perform some core missions themselves.

Commentators rarely mention nightmarish logistics, polar bears and steel-snapping cold when they confidently predict that as the Arctic warms up, melting sea ice and shorter winters will open up the expanse to exploration.

But the rosy words obscure the reality of working in an icy wasteland that stretches across Russia, Scandinavia, Alaska and Canada. And rather than making life easier, the warming of the Arctic and the thawing of its permafrost could make operating here even more complicated.

The raid, a day after ExxonMobil signed a deal giving it access to fields BP had hoped to develop, was ordered to let bailiffs search for documents in a legal battle over BP’s failed bid to partner Russia in the Arctic, a spokeswoman said.

But BP, which has a long history of problems in Russia, denounced the raid and said it feared the search could continue for the rest of this week.

The government is asking a federal judge in Washington, D.C., to stop the deal, and will have to prove that it would mean higher prices and less competition.

“This will be the Obama administration’s line in the sand. This will be their signature antitrust event,” said University of Baltimore law school professor Robert Lande.

The director told reporters ahead of a star-studded opening of the world’s oldest film festival that the work was ready to begin filming in 2008 when Barack Obama won the US presidential elections, but he was initially worried the climate of optimism was not right for his cynical tale.

“Everyone was in such a good mood! It only took about a year for that to all change,” he said. “At the moment, cynicism seems to be winning over idealism.”

Obama cranked up his rhetorical campaign on jobs and the economy a week before unveiling a major economic package which may represent his last genuine chance to impact the sluggish recovery before the 2012 election season revs up.

“At a time when a lot of people are talking about creating jobs, it’s time to stop the political gamesmanship that can actually costs us hundreds of thousands of jobs,” Obama said, prompting Republican complaints of “scare tactics.”

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 16 people were arrested in Houle, 20 kilometres (12 miles) from Homs, where the authorities sparked anger on Monday as they returned the bodies of 13 people arrested in early August.

The Local Coordination Committees, grouping activists on the ground, said security forces set fire to the homes of two men in Houle and threatened to arrest their wives and children if they did not surrender.

The streets ran red with slippery juice as nearly 40,000 people, many stripped to the waist and drunk with sangria, pelted each other in the Plaza Mayor square and nearby streets of Bunol, eastern Spain.

Five trucks unloaded the ammunition on participants from around the world, including tourists from the United States, Japan and Australia, before the battle commenced with a firework being set off.

The research, to be published Thursday in Nature, shows that people with surplus copies of certain genes are much more likely to be very skinny.

In one in 2,000 people part of chromosome 16 is duplicated, making men 23 times and women five times more likely to be seriously underweight, they found.

Huang Nubo, chairman of Beijing-based property developer Zhongkun Group, told the official Xinhua news agency that it was a private business project and there was no Chinese government backing.

“The project is a purely commercial move and has no connection with politics. I believe the project will benefit both my company and locals,” Huang said in the interview.

An International Monetary Fund delegation closed out a two-week visit to the small southern African kingdom with a harsh appraisal of the government’s progress on getting its finances in order — the IMF’s third negative assessment in a year.

“Expenditure overruns and lack of financing have led to the non-observance of several targets under the staff-monitored programme,” said the head of the IMF’s mission to Swaziland, Joannes Mongardini, in a statement.

The move comes after the US-funded news service posted an article and video on its website describing prosecution allegations of mass killings and other atrocities by three mid-level cadres during the regime’s 1975-79 rule.

The service cited a document obtained by a source close to the court.

As it filed a lawsuit to block the takeover on Wednesday, the US Department of Justice said the takeover bid — which would give AT&T a daunting 39-percent share of the US wireless market — was anti-competitive.

Shares of AT&T plunged 4.6 percent on Wall Street after the DoJ’s move was announced, even as the company vowed to contest it in court.

The feud, the latest in a running US political war over the role of government, flared up even as both sides agreed it was too early to set a price tag on rebuilding in the wake of the powerful storm and a preceding earthquake.

The dispute arose after Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said that disaster relief money should flow but be paid for with cuts to other programs with cash-strapped Washington’s debt now eclipsing $14.3 trillion.

Carrying rosaries, crosses and hiking poles, believers of every age, entire families, scouts, soldiers, even the disabled, trek hundreds of kilometres — some more than 600 — to venerate the Black Madonna of Czestochowa.

The tradition goes back to 1711 when the bubonic plague decimated Warsaw’s population. A brotherhood of knights trekked from the capital to Jasna Gora monastery in the southern city of Czestochowa when the epidemic suddenly ended to offer thanks to the Virgin Mary.

AT&T shares plunged nearly four percent on Wall Street after the Justice Department said it had filed a lawsuit in US District Court in Washington opposing the acquisition.

“We are seeking to block this deal in order to maintain a vibrant and competitive marketplace,” Deputy Attorney General James Cole said at a news conference.

Denting the festive mood as Libyans celebrated their first end of Ramadan feast in 42 years free of Kadhafi’s yoke, Seif al-Islam said his father was fine and was still fighting.

But his message of defiance, aired just hours before world powers were to open a major conference on Libya in Paris, came as another Kadhafi son, Saadi, expressed readiness to surrender and the rebels announced the capture of Kadhafi’s foreign minister Abdelati al-Obeidi.

Kicking off an extraordinary showdown, Obama asked for a rare joint session of Congress to unveil his new assault on 9.1 percent unemployment on September 7 — at the exact same time as a Republican presidential debate in California.

Keen not to be outmaneuvered, House Speaker John Boehner wrote a public letter back to the president within four hours, saying logistical issues meant his preferred date was not available and offered the following night.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 16 people were arrested in Houle, 20 kilometres (12 miles) from Homs, where the authorities sparked anger on Monday as they returned the bodies of 13 people arrested in early August.

The Local Coordination Committees, grouping activists on the ground, said security forces set fire to the homes of two men in Houle and threatened to arrest their wives and children if they did not surrender.

Australia had hoped to send up to 800 asylum-seekers to the Asian nation in exchange for resettling 4,000 of its refugees, and the decision leaves hundreds of boat people in legal limbo.

The nation’s top court found that under Australian law the government could not send asylum-seekers to be processed in another nation unless that country was compelled to adequately protect them.