Evening Edition

The pressure rose on all fronts with United States again expressing great concern, with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner saying European states “now recognise they are going to have to do more” to resolve to the crisis.

Highlighting the threat to the global economy, Geithner is to exceptionally attend talks between European Union finance ministers and central bankers in Poland on Friday.

Moody’s cut the rating for Credit Agricole bank, one of the biggest in Europe, from Aa1 to Aa2 and Societe Generale’s from Aa2 to Aa3 because of fears over their exposure to Greek sovereign debt.

The rating agency left French banking major BNP Paribas on negative watch.

The package was adopted after deputies voted 314 in favour to 300 against.

A final evening ballot followed an earlier confidence vote aimed at speeding up implementation of the measures after investors’ reluctance to buy Italy’s debt drove interest rates to new highs.

Afghan and foreign troops battled insurgents who targeted the US embassy and NATO headquarters, sowing fear and confusion and raising fresh questions over the Kabul government’s ability to secure the country even after a 10-year war.

The standoff ended when troops finally killed the two last insurgents who had held out overnight in a high-rise building under construction just a few hundred metres from the heavily guarded US embassy.

British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicolas Sarkozy are planning to visit Libya on Thursday, sources said in Paris.

Both Cameron’s and Sarkozy’s offices declined to comment when asked about the trip, but the head of Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC) Mustafa Abdel Jalil confirmed to AFP that Sarkozy would visit.

France and Britain spearheaded the NATO air war against Kadhafi’s forces that helped the rebels slowly fight their way towards Tripoli and install the National Transitional Council (NTC) as the new government there.

The plans for the trip were confirmed by sources close to the NTC but no details were provided.

Two others were jailed for 19 years over a wave of deadly violence in July in the region, where the mainly Muslim Uighur minority has long chafed against Chinese rule, and authorities claim that Pakistan-trained terror cells operate.

The four were handed the death penalty Wednesday after being found guilty a day earlier of masterminding and engaging in terrorist organisations, illegally making explosives, murder and arson, the official Xinhua news agency said, citing the local tianshannet.com website, which is also state-run.

The case concerns Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a nephew of King Abdullah and one of world’s richest men, who is being asked to respond to a complaint of sexual assault against him in August 2008 by a model who was 20 at the time.

In a statement, Alwaleed’s Kingdom Holding Company denied the allegations and said he only heard of them on Tuesday.

“New Yorkers have delivered a strong warning to the Democrats who control the levers of power in our federal government,” House Speaker John Boehner said after a stunning win for Republican businessman Bob Turner against Democratic city legislator Dave Weprin in the 9th Congressional District.

Republicans have not held the district, home to many Orthodox Jews, since 1923 and they are outnumbered 3:1 there by registered Democrats. The seat came up when popular Democrat incumbent Anthony Weiner resigned over a sex scandal.

The report is expected to influence a criminal investigation being conducted by the US Justice Department and impact fines imposed upon the British energy giant. Regulators said they planned to issue seven new citations based upon the report’s conclusions.

It could also strengthen BP’s legal case for recovering some of the massive multi-billion dollar costs of the spill from Halliburton, which performed the cement job, rig owner Transocean and parts manufacturer Cameron, which supplied the faulty blowout preventer.

NASA chief Charles Bolden made the announcement of the design for the new Space Launch System, which the space agency touted as the most powerful rocket since the Saturn V rocket put US astronauts on the moon.

“The next chapter of America’s space exploration story is being written today,” said Bolden.

Former France international Elissalde has not played competitive rugby since June 2010, however the 33-year-old — now a coach with the southern club — has been called in to replace Jean-Marc Doussain.

Doussain has been called into the France squad, currently involved in the World Cup, to replace the injured David Skrela. With Toulouse’s two other scrum halves also in New Zealand, the club have been left with no choice.

In a report prepared for ministers meeting in Poland on Friday and Saturday, senior EU officials said the 17-nation currency area faces a “risk of a vicious circle between sovereign debt, bank funding and negative growth.”

“While tensions in sovereign debt markets have intensified and bank funding risks have increased over the summer, contagion has spread across markets and countries and the crisis has become systemic,” the influential Economic and Financial Committee said.

“Unless Europe, Japan, and the United states can also face up to responsibilities they will drag down not only themselves, but the global economy,” Zoellick said in speech at George Washington University.

“They have procrastinated for too long on taking the difficult decisions, narrowing what choices are now left to a painful few,” he said ahead of meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund next week.

The Institute of International Finance said a forced recapitalization of European banks was not necessary and that policymakers need to balance the needs of growth with those of safety and soundness in the banking system.

“Deleveraging was absolutely essential coming into this crisis, but we have to recognize when the time comes to say ‘Enough for now,'” IIF Managing Director Charles Dallara told a news conference to review policy recommendations ahead of next week’s Group of 20 finance ministers meeting in Washington.

Noyer, who is in charge of regulating the French banking system, said the downgrade left French banks with a similar credit rating to their European peers and he said even a Greek default would not drive French banks into full-year losses.

“French banks have an excellent rating, the same level as other major European banks, HSBC, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse,” he told RTL radio.

Counterparties and trading partners of Societe Generale, Credit Agricole and BNP Paribas told Reuters they were “watching developments” after credit downgrades for two of the banks and a negative outlook for the third.

In the Asian over-the-counter crude swaps market, SocGen and Credit Agricole have reduced activity levels this week compared to last week, having been active in that market for much of this year, the sources, who declined to be named, said.

The weak data puts more pressure on the Federal Reserve to try to boost growth, while a report showing flat wholesale prices in August could support arguments within the central bank to take action.

“The slowdown in the economy is real,” said Steven Ricchiuto, chief economist at Mizuho Securities in New York. “It’s a broad-based slowdown, and that’s pivotal.”

In budget parlance, it is a matter of which “baseline” or measuring stick the 12-member “super committee” will use to assess just how much deficit reduction it is achieving.

The question may be a bit arcane for the average person but the answer does not just matter to bean counters. It could significantly alter the amount of spending cuts or tax increases required for any deal.

Alarmed at the prospect of Congress dictating steep new reductions on top of more than $350 billion in cuts already in the pipeline from Pentagon streamlining, contractors based their urgent appeal on economic as well as national security grounds.

The industry is enlisting small business to spread the word and asking the general public to contact lawmakers directly in support of its position.

In a report that may be pivotal in the multibillion-dollar legal battles to come and could set the stage for criminal charges, the Coast Guard and the offshore oil regulator said BP was solely to blame for 21 of 35 contributing causes to the Macondo well blow-out that led to the leak, and shared blame for eight more.

After the most definitive look yet at the disaster, investigators said BP focused excessively on containing costs and speeding up operations, and made a series of decisions that complicated cementing operations, which they said were the central cause of the disaster.

“For the largest bankruptcy case in the world? Three years is not a particularly long period,” attorney Harvey Miller said in an interview with Reuters.

Lehman filed for bankruptcy with $639 billion in assets three years ago on Thursday. Its Chapter 11 drama may soon be drawing to a close. The company received court permission on August 30 to let creditors vote on its $65 billion payback plan, and it hopes to get the plan approved by a Manhattan federal bankruptcy court in December.

In the latest stop on what has become a “pass this bill” tour, Obama used a campaign-style rally to press his warning to Republicans not to let election politics delay action on his proposals to reduce chronically high U.S. unemployment.

“You need leaders who will put country before party,” Obama told a cheering crowd at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. “The time for gridlock and games is over. The time for action is now.”

For the first time in almost 50 years, the party’s leaders fear they do not have the power to anoint the candidate they believe has the best odds of beating the Democratic opponent, according to senior strategists, former Republican lawmakers and analysts.

Instead, the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party is driving the debate and ultimately the decision, they said, which could have consequences that reach far beyond 2012.

Only about a third of the Republican campaign cash raised four years ago has been committed so far for the upcoming election — a sluggish pace that is unlikely to pick up before next year.

“I haven’t seen any sort of huge swell of traditional Bush supporters going anywhere yet,” said Jan Baran, former general counsel to the Republican National Committee who advised President George H.W. Bush.

“We are not going to sugar coat it, this was a tough loss,” the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee wrote in an open memo on Wednesday, a day after Republican Bob Turner scored an 8-point victory over Democrat David Weprin.

Turner, a retired media executive, won 54 percent of the vote to Weprin’s 46 percent, handing the seat to Republicans for the first time since the 1920s in a heavily Jewish district where Democrats outnumber Republicans 3 to 1.

Washington has taken a back seat to France and Britain in NATO-led air strikes that helped the ragtag rebel coalition take Tripoli last month. And, wary of a backlash after their military takeovers in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. officials are at pains to avoid seeming to take control of oil-rich Libya.

But the visit of Jeffrey Feltman put an American accent firmly in the center of a Tripoli recovering from six months of civil war. The State Department’s top Middle East diplomat assured interim leader Mustafa Abdel Jalil of continued NATO support and played down fears of a hostile Islamist takeover.

Men who successfully stopped smoking improved on lab measurements of sexual health more than those who relapsed after a quit-smoking program. The findings show that smoking may be affecting the sexual health of men who consider themselves perfectly alright in the bedroom — and not just those with impotence, researchers say.

“With younger men, the risks of smoking in that population appear more far off. They think, ‘I don’t really need to worry about this until much farther down the road,'” said study author Christopher Harte, from the VA Boston Healthcare System.

As it stands, private and public health insurance plans in the U.S. generally limit how many months’ worth of birth control pills can be prescribed at a time. The practice was established years ago, when there were concerns about the Pill causing certain health problems, including high blood pressure.

The idea was that having women make more doctor visits could help in catching any ill effects.

While a 16-game regular season offers plenty of time for a recovery, an 0-2 start can ratchet up levels of fan discontent and media scrutiny to uncomfortable levels — and there are some surprisingly top teams and big-name quarterbacks among those in need of a win in Week Two.

The Super Bowl runner-up Pittsburgh Steelers were crushed by divisional rivals the Baltimore Ravens in their opening game with quarterback Ben Roethlisberger having a shaky start with three interceptions and two fumbles.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy also stressed to Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou “that it is more indispensable than ever to fully implement the decisions adopted July 21” by the eurozone leaders “to ensure the stability of the eurozone,” the French president’s office said in a statement.

Fears that Greece was heading rapidly towards a chaotic default – and the idea that it should potentially leave the euro and return to its own currency – have roiled markets for days, both across the 17-nation eurozone and globally.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is asking a judge to suppress his statements to agents at the University of Michigan hospital where he was being treated for second-degree burns to his groin on Christmas 2009. The government, however, said the right to stay silent doesn’t apply if authorities believe there could be an imminent threat to safety.

FBI agent Timothy Waters said al-Qaida often stages coordinated attacks, and Abdulmutallab had already succeeded at getting past airport security in Amsterdam.

“We’re not going to sugarcoat it, it was a tough loss,” conceded the House Democratic Campaign Committee. Yet party officials and the White House insisted the race was not a referendum on the president as he seeks re-election with the economy stagnant and unemployment stuck at 9.1 percent.

In New York, Rep.-elect Bob Turner, outpolled state Assemblyman David Weprin in a light-turnout election. He will replace former Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner, who resigned in disgrace earlier this year in a sexting scandal. Represented by Democrats since the 1920s, the district includes portions of Brooklyn and Queens, is home to three times as many registered Democrats as Republicans and is nearly 40 percent Jewish.

Senate rules don’t allow lawmakers to shift from the bill they’re currently working on, a disaster aid bill, to a stop-gap funding measure for the FAA and highway programs without the consent of all lawmakers, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Wednesday.

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., is refusing to give his consent. Coburn wants to change the highway portion of the stopgap transportation bill that the House passed on Tuesday by eliminating a requirement that states spend 10 percent of their highway program dollars on “transportation enhancements” like bike and walking paths and projects aimed at drawing tourists.

Part of President Barack Obama’s health care law, the program is in limbo as a congressional debt panel searches for budget savings and behind the scenes, administration officials scramble to find a viable financing formula.

A longstanding priority of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports program, or CLASS, was spliced into the health care law despite nagging budget worries. Administration emails and documents reveal that alarms were sounded earlier and more widely than previously thought. Congressional Republicans seeking repeal of the program provided the materials to The Associated Press.

U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke said it was important to emphasize “the free flow of truthful, non-misleading information within the doctor-patient relationship.”

“This case concerns one of our Constitution’s most precious rights – the freedom of speech,” said Cooke, appointed to the bench by Republican President George W. Bush. “A practitioner who counsels a patient on firearm safety, even when entirely irrelevant to medical care or safety, does not affect or interfere with the patient’s right to continue to own, possess or use firearms.”

Solyndra Inc. was a major presence in Washington and spent millions of dollars on lobbying there, particularly about the Energy Department’s loan guarantee program. And its executives raised thousands of dollars for Obama and Democrats in Congress.

The collapse of the Fremont, Calif.-based company once touted by President Barack Obama ultimately left taxpayers on the hook for $528 million, raising questions if the loan was rushed to accommodate a company event in September 2009 that featured Vice President Joe Biden.

The district stretches alongside Lake Erie from Kucinich’s hometown of Cleveland to Kaptur’s political base in Toledo.

The eight-term Kucinich announced his move in an email asking supporters to help his campaign in the new district, which he says favors him because 57 percent of registered Democrats come from his old district. Kucinich had toyed with the idea of running in Washington state.

Someone in the crowd yelled out, “I love you!”

“If you love me you got to help me pass this bill,” the president responded.

But with a price tag that some estimate at $35 billion, it may not fly with Congress.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and several members of Congress on Wednesday unveiled the Obama administration’s much-delayed general plans for its rocket design, called the Space Launch System. The multibillion-dollar program would carry astronauts in a capsule on top, and the first mission would be 10 years off if all goes as planned. Unmanned test launches are expected from Cape Canaveral, Fla., in six years.

Instead, the executive director of the players’ association isn’t even sure how he will answer all their questions.

No progress was made toward ending the 2½-month lockout during a meeting with owners Tuesday, and Hunter might have to tell players to look elsewhere if they want to be paid to play basketball anytime soon.

Maryland’s outfits look like somebody tore up the state flag and glued the pieces on a practice uniform.

Boise State’s gear could have been borrowed from “Power Rangers.”

Instead, it’s the worst scoreline for the Japanese in test rugby, the most points conceded in any World Cup match, and the equivalent of an anchor around their necks because that 1995 match in Bloemfontein has been the only official test they’ve played against New Zealand with no chance to make amends.

Until now.