Evening Edition

The Tokyo District Court sentenced the trio to suspended prison terms of one to three years for filing false reports on political funds involving Ozawa.

Ozawa, 69, who helped the centre-left Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) to power in a 2009 electoral landslide, has also been indicted on charges of conspiring in the case and his trial is due to start on October 6.

Fighters loyal to Libya’s new government also pounded Kadhafi’s forces in the desert city of Bani Walid, southeast of Tripoli, as they sought to take the last two significant remaining bastions of his loyalists.

National Transitional Council (NTC) troops advancing from the east said they had pushed 10 kilometres (six miles) inside Sirte city limits but were still 15 kilometres from the centre of the sprawling city.

Tens of thousands of protesters marched in two demonstrations, one for men and another for women, from Change Square, epicentre of anti-regime protests which have rocked Yemen since late January.

Mohammed Qahtan, spokesman for the parliamentary Common Forum of opposition parties, said Saleh clearly had no intention of quitting.

“Tell him to kill some bad guys for me!” yelled Captain Michael Kolton, in charge at US Combat Outpost Monti in rural northeastern Afghanistan, to the interpreter on the phone to the Afghan captain.

It is not that Kolton could not help — “We could end it a little faster,” he said later — but with foreign troops pulling out by the end of 2014, the US priority now is making sure Afghan forces can deal with the enemy alone.

A cabinet minister resigned in protest, students marched in major cities, and the Organization of American States (OAS) weighed sending a monitoring team to look into Sunday’s clashes in a major crisis for the leftist government of President Evo Morales.

Riot police had fired tear gas to disperse a march on La Paz by Amazon Indians opposed to government plans for the highway. Police rounded up hundreds of marchers and forced them onto buses in an operation that left several people injured.

“We have checked the records,” Theo-Ben Gurirab, who is also speaker of the National Assembly of of Namibia, told AFP by phone from his home country.

“I don’t want to mention one country, but I can mention it because neither men nor women participate in politics — that is Brunei Darussalam, the oil-rich little kingdom in South East Asia,” he said.

As Greece languished without a date for the return of auditors blocking loans it needs to avoid default, European Union economic affairs commissioner Olli Rehn said the 440-billion-euro ($590 billion) European Financial Stability Facility should be given “greater strength.”

Rehn’s spokesman Amadeu Altafaj added that discussions among eurozone partners involved an “increase of the means at the EFSF’s disposal,” but German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said there was no plan to boost the fund’s actual size.

Barely two months after a debt-limit battle cost Washington its sterling debt rating and weighed the already stumbling US economy down with more doubts, the divided US Congress had just days to break its paralysis.

The Senate was to vote at 5:30 p.m. (2130 GMT) on a Democratic bill that would replenish a key disaster relief fund expected to run dry this week while keeping government agencies open past the October 1 dawn of fiscal year 2012.

More than three years behind schedule due to production and design problems, Boeing touts its all-new 787 as a game changer for the aviation industry.

It is the first mid-sized airplane capable of flying long-range routes, responding to passengers’ demands for non-stop travel, the Chicago-based company says.

Florida-based Odyssey Marine Exploration on Monday confirmed the identity and location of the Gairsoppa and cited official documents indicating the ship was carrying some 219 tons of silver coins and bullion when it sank in 1941 in the North Atlantic some 300 miles (490 kilometers) off the Irish coast.

That’s worth about $200 million today, which would make it history’s largest recovery of precious metals lost at sea, Odyssey said.

The British Foreign Office, however, said the investigation into the bombing “remains open.”

Scottish prosecutors had asked Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC) to give them access to papers or witnesses that could implicate more suspects, possibly including deposed leader Muammar Gaddafi.

Thick, black smoke billowed into the air as National Transitional Council (NTC) fighters battled loyalist troops at a roundabout about 2 km (1.2 mile) from the center of Gaddafi’s home town, Reuters journalists said.

The thud of large explosions could be heard as NATO aircraft roared overhead. NTC fighters said the jets were striking the positions of Gaddafi loyalists.

The military campaign has focused on towns and villages north of the city of Homs, where increasing numbers of defectors have been organizing and mounting guerrilla raids on roadblocks manned by troops and gunmen loyal to Assad.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, based in Britain, said the four soldiers were killed by military police when they tried to flee their post in the northern province of Idlib, which borders Turkey. Another seven soldiers were arrested.

The killing adds to a sense of insecurity already heightened by a 20-hour siege of the diplomatic district in mid-September, and the assassination a week later of the top government peace envoy, former President Burhanuddin Rabbani.

The CIA compound inside the Ariana hotel is one of the most heavily guarded in Kabul, and has been off-limits to the public — along with the road that runs beside it — for almost a decade.

Western investors regarded Kudrin as a guarantor of financial stability and said his departure would be a heavy blow to Russia’s economy, setting back prospects for reforms.

“I have resigned. My resignation was accepted,” Kudrin told Reuters after the sudden end to his more than 11-year tenure as finance minister, a departure from Putin’s script when he announced on Saturday he would run for president in March.

Kudrin brought Russia back from the trauma of default and devaluation in 1998, running a string of budget surpluses and building an oil-funded war chest of $200 billion that helped stave off the shock of the 2008 financial crisis.

In that time, the mild-mannered economist won the respect of financial markets while keeping the ear of Vladimir Putin, the man he helped bring into the Kremlin and who, in return, handed him the job of finance minister in May 2000.

Obama, saying the crisis “is scaring the world,” said the leaders of the 17-nation euro zone were not responding quickly enough.

The region has not fully healed from the 2007 financial crisis or fully addressed issues in its banking system, and its problems have been compounded by the Greek debt crisis, he said.

Greece said last week it would deepen pension cuts, extend the painful property tax and put tens of thousands of workers on notice to secure new aid and save the nation from bankruptcy, causing more pain for an increasingly embittered electorate.

“The drip-drip torture cannot continue,” Dimitris Lintzeris of the ruling socialist PASOK party said, adding he would vote for the change in the property tax on Tuesday but was not sure about approving further cuts.

A draft EU measure now being discussed by member states and the European Parliament puts into law the Basel III accord, the world’s core regulatory response to the financial crisis to make banks safer.

All the EU’s 8,000 lenders will have to comply when the requirements are phased in from 2013 over six years.

“Again: this business is not for sale,” UBS Chairman Kasper Villiger and interim CEO Sergio Ermotti wrote in an internal memo. Ermotti was installed as CEO over the weekend after the sudden departure of group chief executive Oswald Gruebel, a strong backer of the U.S. business.

Villiger and Ermotti also affirmed their support for the Wealth Management Americas CEO Robert McCann, a former Merrill Lynch executive hired two years ago to lead the U.S. unit’s turnaround.

One by one, senior executives of Swiss bank UBS entered the lobby, which is designed by Pritzker-winning architect Kevin Roche and features a soaring glass ceiling, and made their way to the gold-colored lifts that whisk guests up to rooms that overlook the Marina Bay street circuit.

As the bankers sped past works of art by the likes of Henry Moore, David Hockney and Frank Stella, some made their way straight to a lounge UBS had hired to entertain clients during the race weekend. At its entrance stood three Singaporean women wearing red and white polo shirts, each holding a sign emblazoned with the UBS logo and the slogan “Welcome, the race starts here”.

The possible action could be the first by the United States against one of the major credit rating agencies, which have been accused of enabling the lending excesses that led to the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008.

The disclosure follows S&P’s downgrade of the debt of the U.S. government in August, an unrelated move that was not followed by other rating agencies and that drew darts from the Obama administration and a bipartisan group of politicians.

In the last two months, signs of friction within the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission have spilled into public view: internal complaints by whistleblowers, and the surprise release last Thursday of a key position-limit rule by Reuters. The leak of confidential trading data has also caused waves.

The strains are not necessarily surprising for an agency that has been thrust from relative obscurity into the forefront of sweeping reforms, and is now undertaking an overhaul of derivatives trading without the big increase in funding and additional staff it is seeking.

In an order dated Friday and made public on Monday, U.S. District Judge Deborah Batts in Manhattan threw out 2008 lawsuits alleging fraud and misrepresentation by the Ascot Fund, the Gabriel Fund and the Ariel Fund. Another defendant was BDO Seidman LLP, the auditor of the Ascot Fund.

“No misrepresentation was made when defendants relied on Madoff, as a third-party manager, to follow the investment strategies that aligned with the stated investment strategies of the funds,” the judge’s order said.

In the South the number of people living below the poverty threshold grew by 3.3 million, the Joint Economic Committee found, comparing U.S. Census data from 2007 with the decennial statistics recently released. The South also still has the highest poverty rate, at 16.9 percent.

The number below the poverty line grew by 2.4 million people in the West and 1.6 million in the Midwest. In the Northeast, the ranks of the poor rose by 912,000 in those three years.

The Fed last week announced it would weight its $2.85 trillion portfolio more heavily with longer term securities in an effort to drive borrowing costs lower, warning of “significant” downside risks to the economy,

Fed Governor Sarah Raskin and the president of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, James Bullard, both defended that move as warranted given the U.S. 9.1 percent unemployment rate. Raskin hinted she would support more action.

Buffett long balked at a buyback, saying he preferred using spare cash to buy companies that would increase his own company’s profit margins.

Yet some long-time investors have said Berkshire shares were lately at their cheapest in a generation, and even analysts who were cautious on the stock said it was attractively priced.

The GPA, a voluntary agreement within the World Trade Organization, opens a wide spectrum of public contracts in member countries to bidders from other members, improving competition and efficiency as well as providing massive new markets in areas such as infrastructure and transport.

By upgrading the existing 1996 agreement, its members hope to bring their rules into the internet age, deepen market access and offer special treatment for developing countries, which could persuade China to join — as it has committed to do at some stage — and bring in a vast new pool of contracts.

Boeing’s departure from traditionally reliable aluminum construction was driven by airlines demanding a big plane that requires less fuel to operate and is less costly to maintain.

Common in military aircraft for some time and in a range of everyday products from soup ladles to golf clubs, composites are showing up more frequently on commercial planes.

Capitol Hill gridlock has threatened aid for thousands of Americans who have been hit by a spate of natural disasters and raised the possibility that the government may not have money to continue operating when the fiscal year ends on Friday.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency said it might have enough money to limp to the end of the fiscal year without needing an extra infusion of funds, meaning that Democrats and Republicans might be able to drop their fight over how to pay for the additional aid.

Fullerton police officer Manuel Ramos was charged last week with second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter in the death of 37-year-old Kelly Thomas, and the judge in the case refused on Monday to reduce his $1 million bail.

Corporal Jay Cicinelli, who was charged with involuntary manslaughter and excessive use of force in the same incident, pleaded not guilty last week and was free on $25,000 bail.

At a press conference in Tripoli, Mohammed al-Alagi, part of Libya’s new leadership after the ouster of Moammar Gadhafi, said he has signed a document to disband the bodies. The step still needs approval by the National Transitional Council that now runs the country.

“I am personally very happy to sign an approval to end the state security prosecution and court, and the state security appeals court,” al-Alagi said.

Officials of Libya’s transitional government are still awaiting U.N. action to unfreeze billions of dollars in assets. They say the funds unfrozen so far aren’t enough to significantly rebuild Libya’s health, education and other institutions after 42 years of languishing under Moammar Gadhafi’s regime.

Italian energy giant Eni said Monday it has resumed oil production in Libya after months of interruption due to the civil war that toppled Gadhafi’s rule. By Monday, 15 wells had been tapped, producing some 31,900 barrels of oil per day.

The incident marked the most recent in a growing number of attacks this year by Afghans working with international forces in the country. Some assailants have turned out to be Taliban sleeper agents, while others have been motivated by personal grievances.

The assailant in Sunday evening’s shooting was killed, and it was not yet clear if he acted alone or if he belonged to an insurgent group.

The southwest Iranian city of Ahvaz walked away with the unfortunate distinction of having the highest measured level of airborne particles smaller than 10 micrometers.

WHO released the list to highlight the need to reduce outdoor air pollution, which is estimated to cause 1.34 million premature deaths each year. The global body said investments to lower pollution levels quickly pay off due to lower disease rates and, therefore, lower healthcare costs.

Obama took questions on health care, Social Security, job-training programs, taxes and business regulations during an hour-long, town-hall-style meeting hosted by LinkedIn, the career-oriented social networking site.

Looking out over the enthusiastic, high-tech crowd at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Obama said, “what you see is … a belief that if you have a good idea, and you want to put in the sweat and blood and tears to make it happen, that not only can you succeed for yourself but grow the economy for everybody.”

“Would you please raise my taxes?” one man asked the president at a town hall here Monday, hosted by the social networking company LinkedIn.

The questioner described himself as unemployed by choice after succeeding at a search-engine startup company that did “quite well” – he was later identified as former Google executive Doug Edwards – and said he wants the nation to spend more on education, infrastructure and job training. That gave Obama a chance to promote his nearly $450 billion jobs plan that would be paid for by higher taxes opposed by Republicans but not, evidently, by some of Silicon Valley’s wealthiest.

All the major Republican presidential hopefuls have sought an audience with Trump, just months after President Barack Obama dismissed the TV reality show personality as a “carnival barker” for raising debunked questions about Obama’s citizenship.

Trump’s money and fame as host of “Celebrity Apprentice” are part of the draw for GOP candidates. But Republican strategists say candidates could also learn a lot politically from Trump, whose aggressive criticism of Obama and blunt portrait of the U.S. as a nation in decline have resonated with conservative voters looking for an in-your-face challenge to the president.

The breakthrough came hours after the Federal Emergency Management Agency indicated it had enough money for disaster relief efforts through Friday. That disclosure allowed lawmakers to jettison a $1 billion replenishment that had been included in the measure – and to crack the gridlock it had caused.

Senate passage of the legislation was expected within hours. There was no immediate comment from House Republican leaders, although their agreement seemed a formality after the party’s Senate leader signed off.

The administration’s decision makes it more likely that the U.S. Supreme Court would hear a case on the health care overhaul in the court’s term starting next month, and render its verdict on the law in the midst of the 2012 presidential election campaign.

Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler disclosed the administration’s decision. She declined to elaborate on next moves.

Federal prosecutors earlier this month accused Kinde Durkee of siphoning nearly $700,000 from a California assemblyman. She told authorities she had been misappropriating money from her many Democratic clients for years.

Her client list has several hundred names on it, including the California campaigns of Sen. Dianne Feinstein and U.S. Reps. Susan Davis, Loretta Sanchez, and Laura Richardson.

“They certainly did not do their job,” said attorney Steven Thomas, who represents those suing Deloitte. “This is one of those cases where the red flags are staring you in the face, and you’ve got to do a lot, and they did not.”

Deloitte spokesman Jonathan Gandal responded that the company rejects the claims, calling them “utterly without merit.”

The three major agencies – S&P, Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings – gave high ratings to mortgage investments that turned out to be worthless and contributed to the 2008 financial crisis.

If the SEC charges S&P with violating securities laws, it would mark the first time it’s brought an enforcement action against a top rating agency.

Persuading legislators to reopen the issue won’t be an easy sell: Many consumer and environmental advocates say the new guidelines weaken protection of children’s health.

While the voluntary rules have the support of federal regulators, states that passed much stricter limits over the past year would have to backtrack and allow higher levels of a metal that can cause cancer.

March through August are typically the peak buying months. But this time, Americans bought fewer new homes in that stretch than in any other six-month period since record-keeping began a half-century ago.

And sales of previously occupied homes didn’t fare much better. They nearly matched 2009’s total for the peak buying months. And that was the worst since 1997.

The move comes as cybersecurity officials warn of increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks against U.S. defense companies, including data related to critical Pentagon weapons systems and aircraft.

Officials at the Department of Homeland Security are reviewing the program, with an eye toward extending similar protections to power plants, the electric grid and other critical infrastructure.

Hoping to boost sagging revenue, the U.S. Postal Service on Monday abandoned its longstanding rule that stamps cannot feature people who are still alive and is asking the public for suggestions.

It’s a first that means living sports stars, writers, artists and other prominent – or not-so-prominent – people could take their places in postal history next to the likes of George Washington, Martin Luther King Jr., and Marilyn Monroe.

The study – by the AARP, the government and several universities – is the largest ever on male fertility and mortality, involving nearly 138,000 men. Although a study like this can’t prove that fatherhood and mortality are related, there are plenty of reasons to think they might be, several heart disease experts said.

Marriage, having lots of friends and even having a dog can lower the chance of heart problems and cardiac-related deaths, previous research suggests. Similarly, kids might help take care of you or give you a reason to take better care of yourself.