Evening Edition

A surprise late-night communique from Group of 20 finance ministers and central bankers Thursday recognized the sense of urgency, after a day of intense warnings from leaders around the world, including a number of the elite group’s own members.

But it failed to quell worries that the stumbling US economy and the European debt crisis would return the advanced economies to recession and drag down economic growth around the world.

“Today, if there is no collective rapid action we run the risk of losing the battle for growth,” Lagarde said in a speech at the opening session of the IMF and World Bank annual meetings in Washington.

“There are dark clouds over Europe and there is huge uncertainty in the United States and, with that, we could risk the collapse in global demand.”

The US Federal Reserve on Wednesday warned of significant downside risks to the American economy, sparking a fierce selloff on global markets.

G20 leaders meanwhile urged the eurozone to tackle its debt crisis to prevent contagion spreading across the world, while similar warnings were sounded by the European Central Bank, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

The White House statement came a day after the top US military officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, directly accused Pakistan’s intelligence service of supporting the Haqqani network’s attack on the embassy and a truck bombing on a NATO outpost.

Pakistan reacted angrily, saying the humiliating public attack was “not acceptable” and warned that Washington stood to lose a vital ally.

Saleh’s surprise return was announced by state television. He arrived by plane in Sanaa at 5:00 am (0200 GMT), an airport source told AFP.

The 69-year-old Saleh, who has since January faced massive street protests demanding he step down, was hospitalised in Riyadh on June 4, a day after being badly wounded in a bomb attack on his Sanaa compound.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said in a statement that nine civilians were shot dead by security forces in the Homs area in the centre of the country.

“Nine civilians were killed in the Homs region: six in three districts of the city itself, a girl in Qusseir, a young man in Talbisseh and another in the village of Zaafaraniya,” the rights group said.

The plans have stoked concerns that the exploration could exacerbate tensions between fast-growing neighbours China and India, who fought a brief, bloody war in 1962 over their disputed Himalayan border.

China has repeatedly said it has “indisputable sovereignty” over essentially all of the South China Sea, a key trading route, and that Beijing is opposed to any country engaged in oil and gas exploration there without its permission.

The Democratic-held Senate voted 59-36 to table, or set aside, a measure passed 219-203 overnight by the Republican-led House of Representatives, angry that the bill pays for disaster aid with cuts to clean-energy jobs monies.

Both sides in the woefully unpopular US Congress vowed to stand their ground on the legislation, which includes monies to keep the US government open past the end of the fiscal year that ends October 1, through November 18.

An investigation by BBC’s Newsnight programme alleged that $9 million was paid by an Azeri national to organisers of the International Amateur Boxing Association (AIBA)’s World Series of Boxing (WSB).

The money was allegedly paid to secure gold medals for Azeri fighters competing at next year’s Olympics.

Rob Horne broke a cheekbone, Pat McCabe dislocated his shoulder and Anthony Fainga’a was knocked cold by a knee to the head. Wycliff Palu suffered a hamstring problem and Kurtley Beale was an early withdrawal after “tightening up”.

Coach Robbie Deans said he was considering calling up replacements after the savage injury toll, which comes just a week after defeat to Ireland complicated the team’s progress through the knock-out stages.

The 24-year-old German, who could become the youngest two-time champion in Formula One history this weekend, said he expected a tight contest ahead and suggested his early edge in speed meant little.

“I wouldn’t call it an advantage, I think it looked pretty tight. It depends where and when and who was out, we have to wait and see,” he said.

NASA stressed that the risk is “extremely small” that the 26 fragments expected to survive re-entry would hit any of the planet’s seven billion people.

As rumors of potential crash sites lit up the Internet, Italy took the unusual step of warning residents to stay indoors late Friday to avoid a 1.5 percent risk of the six-ton satellite hitting the northern part of the country.

Finance chiefs from around the world have turned up the heat on Europe to do more to prevent Greece’s debt crisis from infecting the world economy.

Concern now appeared to be turning toward safeguarding the banking system more than rescuing Greece, as international lenders were increasingly losing patience with Athens consistently missing fiscal and reform targets.

Parliament is likely to approve the moves, which include unpopular new taxes, to secure the next tranche of the heavily indebted nation’s EU and IMF bailout, avoiding a disorderly default that would rock the euro zone, political analysts said.

Popular resistance to the cutbacks is raging, however, reflected by strikes that brought the transport system to a standstill on Thursday, with unions arguing that Greece’s economy cannot cope with the terms of the deal imposed on it.

Under pressure from investors to show action, finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 economies said they would take all steps needed to calm the global financial system.

“We commit to take all necessary actions to preserve the stability of banking systems and financial markets as required,” the group, including the United States and China, said in a communique after a dinner meeting on Thursday.

The WTO said the move reflected the fact that trade had grown more slowly than expected in recent months “and the outlook for the global economy is increasingly uncertain.”

Since the April forecast, it said, “developed economies in particular have been buffeted by strong headwinds.”

Latvians, having suffered two years of a strict diet under IMF/EU orders, can attest to plenty of pain which was largely accepted with stoicism. With people starting to see the economy being brought back to health, they can now see the gain too.

In Greece, outrage among a public more used to the good life is already at fever pitch, testing the government’s ability to push through the stringent measures it needs to cut a mountainous debt and avoid default.

Over the 17 months since Greece was granted 110 billion euros of emergency loans by the IMF and European Union, five loan tranches have been paid out despite Athens’ patchy success in delivering on its goals.

The 6th tranche is due in mid-October and again looks likely to be paid, if only because the impact on the euro zone and global economy is too dangerously unquantifiable if not. Greece is falling far short on objectives but will again get its money.

Pressure on Europe to shore up its banks — if necessary with capital from taxpayers’ pockets — is building, as talk of a possible Greek default gains pace.

Banks could probably cope with a Greek default — analysts at Nomura put the damage to foreign banks at 40 billion euros ($54 billion ) — but markets are already focusing on bigger countries and debt writedowns right across the region.

Dovish central banker comments also increased analyst and market expectations of an impending interest rate cut, with some seeing a 50 basis point fall as soon as next month, although such a move remains far from certain.

ECB Governing Council member Jens Weidmann said on Friday the ECB had shown in the past that it can provide banks with long-term one-year liquidity when needed, with his colleagues from Austria and Belgium also talking up such a measure.

Trading was volatile, capping one of the most tumultuous weeks on record for world markets as fear of a Greek default and a gloomy Federal Reserve prognosis for the U.S. economy sparked a sell-off in stocks and commodities and drove investors to the safe-haven U.S. dollar and Treasuries.

A pledge by G20 policy makers that they will calm the global financial system failed to appease investors, who are concerned that authorities are unable to respond effectively to the mounting euro zone debt crisis and sluggish growth in major world economies.

Economists are increasingly anxious that the 9.1 percent jobless rate in the United States could become entrenched, as the skills of those out of work atrophy and their connections to the job market wane, sidelining them and chipping away at the U.S. economy’s capacity to produce.

“The Fed is doing all that it can to stimulate the demand side of the economy in an environment where ‘all that it can do’ is ‘not very much,'” said Mark Setterfield, an economics professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.

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.

Hit both by falling stock prices and falling bond yields, the 100 largest pension plans of public U.S. companies have assets covering only 79 percent of their liabilities as of the end of August, down from 86 percent at the end of 2010, according to consulting firm Milliman Inc.

Already approaching its all-time low of 70.1 percent in August, 2010, the funding ratio could fall below 60 percent within two years if equities stagnate and rates decline further, Milliman projected.

John Williams, president of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, defended the track record of the Fed’s large-scale bond purchases in lowering long-term borrowing costs, but he said it was unclear how much the purchases help the real economy.

“Specifically, does lowering Treasury yields through large-scale asset purchases have the same effect on the economy as an equivalent movement in the federal funds rate?” Williams said in a speech to the Swiss National Bank Research Conference in Zurich. “To what extent is it the size or the composition of the central bank’s balance sheet that matters?”

Pandit said that capital rules, such as the international Basel agreements, are not transparent and do not give investors a good idea of how much risk a bank is facing.

Pandit said that under the current capital rules it is difficult to tell whether two banks who claim to be meeting the same standard are “equally risky.”

“We’ve agreed on a number of portfolios and who would hold the most important ones. There will be 22 portfolios and one vice premier,” said Abdel Hafiz Ghoga, a spokesman for the National Transitional Council (NTC).

“It will be a compact government, a crisis government.”

“To describe it as a ferry would be very polite,” according to an executive at a London-based global engineering company, whose interests the two men represented. “I think it was a trawler.”

The men traveled to Libya at the invitation of the rebel administration. Britain, along with France and the United States, had given political and military support for the uprising against Gaddafi and sponsored the rebel leadership, the National Transitional Council (NTC). This was a chance to close some deals.

A U.S. lawsuit against News Corp’s directors could be a new embarrassment for the company as it tries to put the News of the World tabloid hacking scandal behind it. Civil claims damages in the United States, where News Corp is based, also tend to be much higher than in Britain.

Mark Lewis, who represents the family in the high-profile case of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, said on Friday he held talks with lawyers in New York about seeking depositions, potentially against the entire board, which he thought would include Rupert Murdoch and his son James.

The courtroom in the central Italian town of Perugia was packed for the final stages of Knox’s appeal trial in a sensational case that has grabbed headlines in Italy, Britain and the United States.

Knox, 24, looked pale and nervous as she was ushered into a courtroom besieged by television cameras and curious onlookers in the historic university town where Meredith Kercher’s half-naked body was found in a pool of blood in 2007.

Joe Oliver, the minister in charge of energy, said increasingly vocal critics opposing the project on environmental grounds may become a threat to his government’s plans to cement Canada as the dominant North American energy supplier.

“Criticism of the oil sands – and now the proposed Keystone XL pipeline – is a major concern for us, with implications for our energy industry, our economy and our energy security,” Oliver told a business audience in Toronto.

This time, the brinkmanship threatens to disrupt assistance to victims of floods, wildfires and other natural disasters in one of the most extreme years for weather in U.S. history.

That money could run out as soon as Tuesday, but Republicans and Democrats appeared no closer to a solution after a week of legislative maneuvering.

Texas Governor Perry attempted to change the narrative from two previous debates, where he came under fierce attack from former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and other candidates.

But his competitors accused Perry of coddling illegal immigrants with a Texas policy to allow their children to gain education tuition assistance.

The law, signed by President George W. Bush in 2002, was intended to hold schools and states accountable for students’ performance, as measured by annual testing.

But critics say the law is inflexible, requiring teachers to adhere to a narrow curriculum targeted mostly at ensuring that every student pass standardized tests. They also say it has placed too large a burden on states.

As already announced, they will go into effect on November 20.

The publication was greeted with praise, some of it tempered, from consumer advocacy groups, and outright derision by at least one Republican lawmaker.

The plan, filed with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, is BP’s first move to return to deepwater Gulf exploration since its Macondo well ruptured on April 20, 2010, and caused nearly 5 million barrels of oil to spew into the sea in what was the worst U.S. marine oil spill.

The supplemental exploration plan will be a key litmus test for how U.S. regulators treat BP, the biggest Gulf oil producer, in the post-Macondo world.

The Gates Foundation was tasked by current G20 chair, France, to look at how the governments of its member countries could raise new money for aid to developing nations, including plugging an estimated $80-100 billion funding gap to help the poor adapt to climate change.

With traditional Western donors in Europe and the United States under pressure to cut their budgets, developing nations are looking at news ways to raise resources to develop their growing economies.

It has been a rocky road for the Dreamliner program, which is more than three years behind schedule and several billion dollars over budget by some estimates.

But with Japan’s All Nippon Airways Co Ltd <9202.T> set to take delivery of the first 787 on Sunday, payday is almost at hand for the storied plane, which has been in development since 2003.

Amazon on Friday invited media to a press conference to be held in New York next Wednesday, declining to provide further details.

But analysts were confident that the world’s largest Internet retailer will introduce its long-awaited tablet computer this year to expand in mobile commerce and sell more digital goods and services.

The International Amateur Boxing Association (AIBA), under president Dr Ching-Kuo Wu of Taiwan, said in a statement they rejected the claims “in the strongest possible terms” but would set up an investigation committee.

The allegations, by an unnamed insider, were broadcast by the BBC on their Newsnight programme on Thursday and reported on the website www.bbc.co.uk.

Jeff Forshaw, a professor of particle physics at Britain’s Manchester University, said the results, if confirmed, would mean it would be possible in theory “to send information into the past.”

“In other words time travel into the past would become possible … (though) that does not mean we’ll be building time machines any time soon,” he told Reuters.