Evening Edition

World police body Interpol called for the fugitive Kadhafi’s arrest for alleged crimes against humanity, following a request by the International Criminal Court.

“The battle of liberation is not finished,” Jibril said late Thursday after National Transitional Council troops inching towards Bani Walid southeast of Tripoli came under rocket fire from old regime loyalists inside the oasis town.

“Chad and Sudan are preparing a joint operation to attack JEM,” the Justice and Equality Movement’s spokesman Gibril Adam Adam told AFP by phone.

“Chad is massing troops in Abeche and there are three Mig fighter planes at the airport there,” he said, referring to a town in eastern Chad about 120 kilometres (75 miles) from Sudan’s Darfur region.

An interior ministry official said on Thursday that Hadi al-Mehdi was shot dead at about 6:30 pm in an apartment on Abu Nawas Street, with a silenced weapon. A medical source at Ibn al-Nafis hospital confirmed his death.

Dozens of people turned out on Friday to mourn Mehdi, marching from his home in Karrada in central Baghdad with a symbolic coffin covered in an Iraqi flag, towards Tahrir Square.

Shaker Aamer has been held at the US-run prison in Cuba for almost 10 years despite being cleared for release in 2007 when the administration of then-US president George W. Bush acknowledged it had no evidence against him.

He was captured in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, in December 2001 and taken to Guantanamo two months later.

The finance chiefs and central bank governors of the G7 group of industrialised nations began their talks a day after US President Barack Obama unveiled a $447 billion (322-billion-euro) jobs plan to energise the world’s largest economy.

The gloomy economic backdrop was underlined when US and European stocks dropped sharply after the sudden resignation of the top economist at the European Central Bank added to fears over the continent’s sovereign debt crisis.

Obama traveled to the key 2012 swing state of Virginia, the political turf of one of his top Republican foes Eric Cantor, at the start of an effort to sell his $447 billion American Jobs Act in every corner of the country.

The president dared his foes in Congress not to support his plans to cut in half payroll taxes for workers next year, exploiting the traditional Republican desire to reduce the money Americans pay to the government.

The battles at the two towns broke out a day before a deadline set by Libya’s interim National Transitional Council for Gaddafi holdout towns to surrender or face onslaughts.

NTC officials said the outbreaks of fighting meant the ceasefire had effectively been scrapped. That could pave the way for some of the final battles of a six-month civil war.

The ECB confirmed Executive Board Member Juergen Stark, the central bank’s chief economist, would leave “for personal reasons” by the end of the year once a replacement was found, after Reuters reported exclusively that he had quit.

The euro fell and shares tumbled in Europe and on Wall Street on the shock development, which laid bare a rift inside the central bank over the handling of the worsening debt crisis, and could undermine German public support for the euro.

The resignation of Juergen Stark from the ECB throws into question policymakers’ ability to deal with Europe’s debt crisis, a problem that could engulf a world economy already teetering on the brink of recession.

Investors’ rising fears were highlighted by a 12 percent jump in the market’s main measure of expected turbulence, the VIX volatility index <.VIX>. The VIX neared 40, close to its highest level this year, as it marked its biggest jump in three weeks.

“It is completely within the capacity of the stronger members of the euro area to absorb these costs,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said as G7 finance chiefs gathered in Marseille to discuss how to revive a stalling recovery.

“Those costs would be much, much greater for them and their economies if they sit here and do nothing, and they recognize that,” Geithner told Bloomberg Television in comments that appeared aimed primarily at EU economic powerhouse Germany.

Stocks plunged on Friday, losing over 2.5 percent and bolstering the safe-haven allure of U.S. government debt, with few investors looking to go into the weekend short Treasuries due to the uncertainty surrounding the European debt crisis.

The worries over Europe were sparked by the planned resignation of European Central Bank (ECB) Executive Board Member Juergen Stark. The ECB confirmed a Reuters report that said Stark was quitting because of a conflict over the central bank’s bond buying program.

A day after unveiling his proposals for tax cuts and public works spending on Capitol Hill, he pitched the plan directly to Americans with a speech in Virginia, kicking off a months-long campaign to promote it across the country.

“Everything in it will put more people back to work and more money in the pockets of those who are working. Everything in it will be paid for,” he told nearly 9,000 supporters at University of Richmond at an event dotted with “2012” signs.

Much of the new spending in the $447 billion plan unveiled on Thursday night will face stiff opposition from Republicans, leaving the payroll tax cuts as the main hope for common ground between two parties still scarred by a grueling battle over raising the U.S. debt limit earlier this summer.

Under Obama’s plan, businesses would get a holiday from payroll taxes for new hires and lower rates for existing employees, while workers would be spared the expiration of prior payroll tax cuts at year-end and receive a 1.1 percentage point reduction from current levels through 2012.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Obama’s American Jobs Act, which he announced to a rare joint session of Congress late Thursday, includes proposals for a $175 billion one-year extension and expansion of the employee payroll tax holiday that would halve the tax rate to 3.1 percent in 2012 as well as a $65 billion tax break to encourage small businesses to hire more workers. The Act also features $50 billion in spending to upgrade highways, transit, rail and aviation infrastructure.

Wall Street stocks tumbled on Friday as the surprise resignation of a European Central Bank executive board member and skepticism over President Obama’s economic stimulus spending plans weighed on sentiment.

When some look at all of the litigation arising from Bank of America’s big role in the U.S. mortgage mess, they start thinking of asbestos and how thousands of lawsuits arising from that cancer-causing product brought down many manufacturers more than a decade ago.

The solution back then to dealing with claims filed by more than 750,000 workers exposed to asbestos was the creation of dozens of “asbestos settlement trusts,” which have paid out tens of billions dollars in damages. Some of them are still going strong today.

As experts ponder these moves – which include the departure of Sallie Krawcheck, head of the bank’s wealth management unit and Merrill’s public face – they see a rocky period in the days ahead for the company’s shareholders, but not necessarily its clients.

At financial firms, however, trade secrets are typically more abstract concepts than they are in restaurant kitchens. The outcome of this case, a high-stakes fight between Gundlach and asset manager Trust Company of the West, may hinge on how the jury interprets the meaning of “proprietary information” involving client lists, interfaces and sprawling databases.

TCW contends that Gundlach and his inner circle stole trade secrets that they used to set up a rival company, allegations that Gundlach and his associates deny. TCW lawyer John Quinn told jurors that a printed list of all the secrets Gundlach took with him would measure 2-1/2 times the height of the Empire State Building.

The art world shook again weeks later when Artprice, the industry’s final word on such matters, announced that upon its review, China topped the United States as the No. 1 market.

What are Chinese investors buying?

Police heightened security in New York on Friday in response to a credible but unconfirmed threat of an al Qaeda plot to attack the city again on the anniversary of the downing of the World Trade Center towers by hijaked airplanes.

In Manhattan, police set up impromptu check points and searched vehicles, but New Yorkers took the security alerts in their stride as a normal part of their life.

It was less a boast than a statement of fact. Nearly 10 years after the September 11 attacks, Birnbaum was tapped by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to run the second 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund.

A first compensation fund handed out more than $7 billion to families of the nearly 3,000 people killed in the attacks.

Early voting in the September 13 Congressional special election, called after Heller was named to a vacant Senate seat, appeared to indicate a strong advantage for Republican Mark Amodei above Democratic state Treasurer Kate Marshall.

“The race appears to be over. It would take a miracle for Kate Marshall to win right now. My expectation is that she will lose and she will lose badly,” said Jon Ralston, a Nevada political analyst who publishes a daily political newsletter.

Researchers found that when they had sleep-related consultations with parents, kids tended to have fewer sleep problems and better bedtime habits than children whose parents didn’t get counseled.

The study was small and didn’t demonstrate that the sleep improvements led to changes in kids’ academic achievements later in the year.

Looking at 2,000 Finnish women ages 18 to 79, researchers found that smokers were three times as likely to say they frequently had to urinate — with fewer than two hours between trips to the bathroom.

They were also almost three times as likely to report “urgency.” That means frequently feeling that you need to get to a bathroom quickly — a problem often diagnosed as overactive bladder.