Evening Edition

In a rare appearance via videolink from Myanmar — also known as Burma — to an international conference in New York, Suu Kyi said the political thaw needs close scrutiny by the outside world.

“What we really need is awareness of what is going on in our country,” she told the audience of political and business leaders at the Clinton Global Initiative.

The Gulf Cooperation Council chief left the Yemeni capital saying the country’s political rivals are not yet ready to reach an agreement, state news agency Saba said, as the death toll from four days of violence spiralled to 79.

“GCC Secretary General Abullatif al-Zayani and his accompanying convoy left Sanaa today,” Saba said.

The typhoon, which was packing winds of up to 180 kilometres (111 miles) per hour, has killed at least six people and a million were initially warned to leave their homes over fears torrential rains could cause widespread flooding.

At around 10:00pm (1300 GMT) Typhoon Roke was centred 280 kilometres northeast of Tokyo, moving through the area that was devastated by a record earthquake and tsunami on March 11 that sparked nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima.

Taiwanese and US officials insisted that the upgrade would improve the island’s defences as it faces a rising China, which has ramped up military spending and has widened its strategic edge over the self-governing territory.

“After the upgrade, the air force’s combat capability will be advanced hugely,” Taiwan’s defence minister Kao Hua-chu told a hastily called press conference in Taipei.

London’s Metropolitan Police Service announced on Tuesday that it had dropped an application for a court order against The Guardian, which broke the story of hacking at Rupert Murdoch’s now-closed News of the World.

But Deputy Assistant Commissioner Mark Simmons has now been summoned by parliament’s home affairs committee to give evidence in a private meeting on Friday, committee chairman Keith Vaz said.

Conversely, support to farmers in developed countries that are OECD members including the United States and the European Union, fell to a record low in 2010 as high commodity prices lessened the need for price subsidies.

In the United States, for instance, producer support reached just $25.5 billion, down from $31.4 billion a year ago, said the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

“The appeals court reverses the district court ruling and allows Saab … to reorganise,” the Appeals Court for Western Sweden said in its decision.

The ruling places on hold thousands of individual requests that Saab be declared bankrupt by company employees and union members who have yet to receive their August wages.

“Greece is and will for ever be a member of the eurozone,” Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos told parliament after EU and IMF auditors agreed overnight to resume work on whether to release rescue funds to avert Greek default next month.

“We will do anything, we will not place at risk the fate of the country and its place in the eurozone,” the minister said.

Moody’s said it believed that the US commitment to save “systemically important” banks had diminished since the 2008-2009 crisis when the government extended hundreds of billions of dollars to financial institutions to keep the banking system from collapse.

It cited the enactment of the Dodd-Frank Act, a sweeping package of financial system reforms, which “demonstrates clear intent” to let bondholders of a big bank take losses if it is close to collapse.

The Fed’s top policy panel unleashed the latest in a battery of tools to rekindle the troubled US economy, moving to make mortgages and borrowing cheaper by pushing down long-term interest rates.

In a plan dubbed “Operation Twist,” the Fed said it would switch bonds in its huge portfolio with a maturity of less than three years to bonds with a maturity of six to 30 years.

Attorneys for Davis cited new ballistics evidence and alleged misleading testimony had been used to convict him over the 1989 killing of an off-duty policeman, but experts predicted his death by lethal injection would go ahead.

Davis has escaped three previous dates with death in a racially-charged case in America’s Deep South that has dragged on for more than two decades and made him a poster child for the worldwide campaign to ban the death penalty.

The desert outpost of Sabha had been holding out along with Bani Walid southeast of Tripoli and Gaddafi’s hometown Sirte since the fall of the capital.

“We control most of Sabha apart from the al-Manshiya district. This is still resisting, but it will fall,” ruling National Transitional Council (NTC) military spokesman Ahmed Bani said.

In another sign of worsening conditions for a deal to end eight months of protests against President Ali Abdullah Saleh, Gulf Cooperation Council Secretary General Abdbullatif al-Zayani left Sanaa empty-handed after two days striving to get a transfer of power pact signed to defuse the crisis.

The state news agency SABA quoted him as saying he would have to wait until “conditions were favorable” to achieve this, suggesting the two sides were no closer to agreement.

China warned that the potential $5.3 billion U.S. arms sale will harm its “core interests” in Taiwan and damage China-U.S. military and security cooperation.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry said Taiwan was an “internal matter” that affected China’s territorial integrity and the national feelings of 1.3 billion Chinese people.

With public anger high over a belt-tightening campaign that is driving the country into a fourth year of recession, the powerful labor unions and public transport workers announced strikes starting on Thursday in opposition to the measures.

After the so-called troika of inspectors from the European Union and International Monetary Fund made clear it was losing patience over the failure by Athens to meet the fiscal targets of its bailout, the cabinet agreed to front-load the measures to comply with the program through 2014.

The U.S. central bank said it would launch a $400 billion program to weight its $2.85 trillion balance sheet more heavily toward longer-term securities by selling short-term government debt to purchase longer-dated Treasuries.

It also said it would reinvest proceeds from maturing mortgage and housing agency bonds it holds back into the mortgage market, an acknowledgment of just how weak housing remains.

Selling accelerated as volume spiked in the last hour of trading, with banks and insurers leading the decline, as the KBW Bank index <.BKX> slid 5.5 percent and the KBW Insurance index <.KIX> off 5.2 percent. Bank of America lost 7.5 percent to $6.38 and Prudential Financial Inc slid 6.6 percent to $45.73.

The Fed, as expected, said it would buy more long-term Treasury securities in an effort to lower borrowing rates. But investors worry that the Fed’s latest plan will have little effect on lending in an economy that appears to be stagnating, which the Fed also noted.

Wall Street in the past week has dimmed its view of MetLife, Prudential Financial and other big insurers, forecasting that they will have to cope with low rates and weak market returns through the end of 2011 and possibly well beyond.

The problem is that returns on insurers’ investment portfolios can’t keep pace with the obligations they have accumulated from torrid sales of annuities and life policies over the past few years.

Against what it called “the backdrop of the national housing crisis,” the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said on Wednesday a lower court erred in concluding the homeowners lacked standing to pursue their fraud claims.

The plaintiffs had bought houses from 2004 to 2006 in new developments built by Beazer Homes USA Inc, DR Horton Inc, Lennar Corp, MDC Holdings Inc, PulteGroup Inc’s Centex Homes, Ryland Group Inc, privately-held Shea Homes Inc and Standard Pacific Corp.

In a statement, Lehman said on Wednesday it will drop its challenge of Judge James Peck’s February ruling denying its attempt to overturn the sale, which was completed in the hectic days following Lehman’s $639 billion bankruptcy filing.

It also said it will not pursue an appeal of Peck’s follow-up decision earlier in September that Barclays had not improperly withheld $500 million in bonuses for employees it inherited in the takeover.

The board of directors — facing shareholder lawsuits and intensifying criticism from investors — is thrashing out a host of issues, including whether to name Whitman as the interim CEO, the source told Reuters,

HP is trying to contain a crisis of credibility on multiple fronts, starting with its leadership. No decisions have yet been made about leadership, the source said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel said on Wednesday that Google has evolved to become a dominant and potentially anti-competitive force on the Internet.

“Google is in a position to determine who will succeed and who will fail on the Internet,” said Republican Senator Mike Lee. “In the words of the head of the Google’s search ranking team, Google is the biggest kingmaker on Earth.”

Among his recommendations are slashing the corporate income tax rate, repealing a law that lets companies put off paying taxes on overseas income, and allowing a tax holiday for repatriation of foreign profits, he said in an interview.

After 15 years in the Senate and 16 years previously in the House of Representatives, Wyden is under no illusions about the difficulties ahead, but he also offers insight that might defy the many skeptics about tax reform’s prospects.

Republicans expect a split decision in the early voting states with neither Perry, the Tea Party favorite, nor Romney, the establishment candidate, able to land a knock-out blow for the Republican presidential nomination.

In a clear sign the front-runners are preparing for a prolonged race, Romney and Perry have speaking appearances soon in Indiana, a state that is usually an afterthought to the presidential candidates. Indiana Republicans do not vote until May 8 but Romney will be there this Friday, Perry on October 12.

Researchers determined that among more than 61,000 men who had their prostates removed to treat cancer, those with private insurance had fewer complications from surgery and were less likely to die in the hospital.

Men covered by Medicare or Medicaid were more likely to need a blood transfusion to treat blood loss: almost eight percent and 11 percent, respectively, had a transfusion, compared with just over five percent of men with private insurance.

Vocal support for capital punishment has long been viewed as a benchmark of toughness for politicians running for U.S. national or statewide office given public support for the so-called ultimate justice.

But advocates for Troy Davis say their coalition reached beyond civil rights leaders and opponents of the death penalty. It also included some Republican U.S. legal experts who support capital punishment but were troubled by the Davis case.