Evening Edition

“Some discussions” have begun on the details of a political transition in Egypt, Obama said, with details to be worked out by Egyptians themselves. He also warned that violence against demonstrators was unacceptable.

“We continue to be crystal clear that we oppose violence as a response to this crisis,” he said, as Egyptian authorities called for the protesters to go home but vowed not to use force.

The 82-year-old veteran president said he was “fed-up with being president and would like to leave office now, but cannot, he says, for fear that the country would sink into chaos,” ABC television’s Christiane Amanpour reported after an interview in Cairo.

Mubarak spoke as deadly clashes between his opponents and supporters raged for a second day and after his vice president urged protesters to go home, also criticising their demands for the president’s ouster as a “call for chaos.”

Tens of thousands filled Cairo’s central Tahrir (Liberation) Square, the epicentre of 11 straight days of protests that have shaken the pillars of Mubarak’s three-decade rule, on the Muslim day of rest and weekly prayers.

Mubarak said in an interview late on Thursday he would like to quit but feared that chaos would ensue.

Thein Sein, who shed his army uniform to contest controversial elections last year, received 408 votes out of a potential 659 from a committee of lawmakers.

The prime minister and former junta number four had been tipped for the post even before the vote, supporting fears that the regime has engineered the political process to hide military power behind a civilian facade.

One Cambodian soldier died in the skirmishes near the disputed ancient Preah Vihear temple, a Cambodian military commander on the scene who did not wish to be named told AFP by telephone.

A Thai villager was also killed by artillery shelling and five Thai soldiers were injured, Thai public health minister Jurin Laksanawisit said.

While plans to down wages provoked an immediate backlash at a European Union summit, a deal in principle to widen the scope of a permanent bailout fund, pending final approval of “concrete” measures in March, allowed the big two and the weakest eurozone states to find common ground.

In exchange for further aid to partner governments struggling to balance their books, Berlin and Paris want shared policy goals and restrictions imposed by all, which they say will make the eurozone a more competitive and efficient economy.

But Belgium for one announced it opposed aspects of the plan on entering a summit due to consider the proposal.

“We are going to discuss proposals that Germany and France are making for greater coordination of economic policy across the eurozone,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel on arrival for the summit of European Union leaders otherwise dominated by the crisis in Egypt.

After ending his three-year hiatus to return to racing with Mercedes GP last season, Schumacher could finish only ninth in the drivers’ championship in 2010.

Schumacher was ninth fastest in testing in Valencia, Spain last Thursday and Alonso, the world champion in 2005 and 2006, has backed the German to become one of the pacesetters when the 2011 season begins with the Bahrain Grand Prix on March 13.

Two converted tries from wing Chris Ashton and four penalties from fly-half Toby Flood and Jonny Wilkinson secured a nervy victory for Martin Johnson’s men at the Millennium Stadium in a see-saw battle between the arch-rivals.

Wales fought back from 23-9 down heading into the final quarter to go within four points of England at 23-19 with 10 minutes left before a late Wilkinson penalty saw the visitors home.

Ending months of deadlock since disputed first round polls in November, the decision was met with calm on the streets of the quake-hit Caribbean nation, which has endured decades of political upheaval, dictatorship and bloodshed.

Announcing definitive results, the commission said popular singer Michel Martelly — and not the ruling party’s Jude Celestin — would face off against former first lady Mirlande Manigat in a long-delayed run-off on March 20.

Rising food prices have been cited among the driving forces behind the recent popular revolts in north Africa, including the uprising in Egypt and the toppling of Tunisia’s long-time president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

And in its latest survey, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said its index, which monitors monthly price changes for a variety of staples, averaged 231 points in January — the highest since records began in 1990.

In exchange for further aid to partner governments struggling to balance their books, Berlin and Paris want common policy goals and restrictions imposed by all, which they say will make the eurozone a more competitive and efficient economy.

“We want to bring in a competitiveness pact and step by step bring about a more linear shared growth,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said alongside French President Nicolas Sarkozy at a European Union summit otherwise preoccupied with Egypt.

The charges relate to alleged incidents during a Test match against England at Lord’s last year, when Britain’s News of the World tabloid claimed the players were willing to deliberately bowl no-balls.

The newspaper alleged the players, who are currently provisionally suspended from international cricket, had colluded in a spot-fixing betting scam organised by British-based agent Mazhar Majeed.

The U.S. move comes after 10 days of anti-government protests in Egypt and ahead of a mass “Day of Departure” rally planned by protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on Friday to force Mubarak to quit.

The 82-year-old Egyptian leader, speaking in an interview with ABC on Thursday after bloodshed in Cairo that killed 10 people, said he believed his country still needed him.

The White House stopped short of calling for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to step down right away as hundreds of thousands of Egyptians marched peacefully in Cairo demanding an immediate end to his 30-year rule.

The White House sought to play down a New York Times report that it had talked to Egyptian officials about Mubarak resigning immediately and handing over to a transitional government led by Vice President Omar Suleiman, his intelligence chief.

In a sweeping 365-page complaint, Irving Picard, the court-appointed trustee recovering money for Madoff’s victims, said the Mets’ owners, including chairman Fred Wilpon, “consciously disregarded” years of red flags about Madoff, while enriching themselves with profits they did not deserve.

Picard said partners at Wilpon’s company Sterling Equities had 483 accounts with Madoff’s firm. He also said the Mets team had 16 Madoff accounts, from which it withdrew more than $90 million of bogus profits to fund day-to-day operations.

With Republicans in Congress threatening to restrain her budget, SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro said the agency faces severe challenges in doing its existing job and in taking on new duties mandated under 2010’s Dodd-Frank market reform law.

SEC enforcement head Robert Khuzami said budget constraints are hurting the agency, but nevertheless defended its record against critics who say too few Wall Street financiers have been held accountable for the 2007-2009 financial crisis.

At last week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the JPMorgan Chase chief executive once again lambasted the media and politicians for portraying all bankers as greedy evil-doers.

It was at least the 12th time since the start of the financial crisis that Dimon has complained about Wall Street critics painting all bankers as cut from the same cloth. But the timing of his latest outburst seemed odd.

While the carbohydrate-packed variety may damage their health, it is the wealth hit from the zero bonus known by the same name that investment bankers increasingly fear.

Anecdotal evidence from banking and headhunting sources suggests a combination of market and regulatory pressure has failed to curb the overall amount paid by investment banks.

Pork profits nearly tripled from a year earlier, helped by exports, to lead gains, while chicken profits more than doubled.

“Pork was unreal. They are generating unheard of margins in pork. Pork is what really drove it,” said Heather Jones, agribusiness analyst with BB&T Capital Markets, who said share prices of $20 to $21 were possible.

Paris and Berlin — the driving forces behind euro zone policy — set out a wish-list of measures they want euro zone and the wider EU to adopt to improve competitiveness and help tackle the year-long debt crisis. The proposals included:

• limits on debt levels written into national laws
• a higher retirement age, based on demography
• the abolition of wages indexed to inflation
• unified bank crisis-resolution mechanisms, and
• a minimum corporate tax rate

But there was almost immediate pushback against the proposals, with large and small EU states, from Belgium and Austria to Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Poland and Luxembourg expressing aggravation at France and Germany’s methods, as well as the substance of the six-point proposal.

Schapiro said on Friday the agency is looking at a variety of areas, from new market-making obligations for high-frequency traders to a new limit up/limit down trading parameters.

She also said the SEC is broadly looking into the rules surrounding securities offerings to see if the agency’s regulations may be out of date.

Robert Engle, a Nobel Prize-winning finance professor at New York University, said in an interview that the regulator-appointed panel has not yet decided on its final recommendations, though he expects them to be made public at a February 18 meeting.

The focus, he said, should be that buyers all but vanished during the May 6 market plunge, abandoning investors when liquidity was most needed.

“Beyond a certain point … the United States would be forced into a position of defaulting on its debt. And the implications of that on our financial system, our fiscal policy and our economy would be catastrophic,” he told the National Press Club.

Bernanke coupled his warning with a call for the Obama administration and Congress to put in place a credible plan to curb future budget deficits.

The mobile service provider is expected to benefit from strong pent-up demand for the device as it ends AT&T Inc’s more than three-year hold on U.S. iPhone sales.

During the first day of online sales of its new iPhone, the Verizon appeared initially to be facing heavy demand for the phone on its website, as some who tried to buy it were instead stymied by error messages. Verizon said its system ran smoothly and that the errors were user-specific.

Aides to House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan on Thursday outlined the savings that would become part of a bill to fund a range of federal programs through the current fiscal year that ends on September 30.

The legislation is a warm-up to a much bigger fight over spending priorities — and possibly tax policy — that will intensify on February 14 when President Barack Obama submits his fiscal 2012 budget proposal to Congress.

Two days of wild clashes between protesters and regime supporters that killed 11 people this week seemed to have pushed the United States to the conclusion that an Egypt with Mubarak at the helm is potentially more unstable than one without him.

For the first time in the 11-day wave of protests, varying scenarios were being put forward by two opposing camps in Egypt and by the United States on how to usher the country into a post-Mubarak era after nearly 30 years of his authoritarian rule.

“I believe that President Mubarak cares about his country. He is proud, but he’s also a patriot,” Obama said as Cairo remained a center of protest and upheaval.

The U.S. president said he had urged Mubarak to listen to those in his government and the pleading voices of his people, and decide if he’s willing to accept a serious transition out of power.

Al-Ahram says Ahmed Mohammed Mahmoud, 36, was taking pictures of clashes on the streets from the balcony of his home, not far from central Tahrir Square when he was “shot by a sniper” four days ago. It says in a report on its website that he died Friday in the hospital.

The paper says Mahmoud worked as a reporter for Al-Taawun, one of a number of newspapers put out by the Al-Ahram publishing house.

President Barack Obama sent word to National Intelligence Director James Clapper that he was “disappointed with the intelligence community” over its failure to predict the outbreak of demonstrations would lead to the ouster of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunis, according to one U.S. official familiar with the exchanges, which were expressed to Clapper through White House staff.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss matters of intelligence, said there was little warning before Egypt’s riots as well.

Space shuttle commander Mark Kelly refused to say whether the congresswoman took part in his decision and declined to go into details about her condition or whether she can communicate.

“I know her very well and she would be very comfortable with the decision that I made,” Kelly told reporters.

Hatch’s call is part of the broad legal and political maneuvering on both sides for the most favorable conditions surrounding court review of President Barack Obama’s signature domestic policy accomplishment.

His comments came the same week that Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli said he plans to file a motion to take the case directly to the Supreme Court, bypassing an appeals court, after he won a federal judge’s ruling in December against the law’s requirement that most Americans buy health insurance.

Roger Stockham, 63, standing in handcuffs and wearing an olive drab jail-issued jumpsuit in a Dearborn courtroom, rejected defense attorney Mark Haidar and was appointed a new attorney during a hearing to determine whether there is probable cause to try him. The hearing was then delayed until next Friday so that new attorney Matthew Evans could prepare.

Stockham, who has described himself as a Vietnam War vet-turned-Islamic holy warrior, has a history of violent run-ins with the law dating back to the 1970s. He faces charges of making a false report or threat of terrorism and one count of possessing explosives with an unlawful intent after being arrested Jan. 24 near the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn.

The Labor Department said the unemployment rate dropped to 9 percent in January, the lowest rate since April 2009 and a sharp fall from 9.4 percent in December. Economists had expected the rate would rise to 9.5 percent, in part because of harsh winter weather that affected much of the country.

At the same time, the government said that 36,000 new jobs were created last month, the fewest in four months. The slow job growth left some analysts doubting that the economic recovery is gathering momentum.

Just two days before the Super Bowl, a fresh blast of snow and ice canceled hundreds of flights, transformed highways into ribbons of white and caused dangerous sheets of ice to fall from Cowboys Stadium, sending at least six people to the hospital. It was enough to turn the biggest week in American sports into a Super Mess.

The six people hurt Friday were private contractors who had been hired by the NFL to prepare the stadium for the game. One man was hit in the head, another in the shoulder. None of the injuries was considered life-threatening.

Around the middle of this season, Erik Walden wasn’t good enough to be on the roster of an NFL team.

On Sunday, both will be starters in the Super Bowl.

The lawsuit claims the owners were so dependent on the disgraced financier’s too-good-to-be-true returns that it “faced a severe and immediate liquidity crisis” when Madoff’s crimes were revealed in 2009.

The searing allegations were made by Irving Picard, the trustee appointed to recover funds for investors burned by Madoff’s scheme. The suit filed by Picard in federal bankruptcy court in Manhattan names Sterling Equities, along with its partners and family members, including Mets owner Fred Wilpon, team president Saul Katz and chief operating Jeff Wilpon, the owner’s son. Picard said Sterling withdrew over $94 million in fictitious profits from Mets accounts with Madoff.

It’s allowed in emergency situations, and some officials staring at massive snow mountains in densely populated areas of the winter-walloped Northeast say that time is now, even as others warn dumping snow in water comes with big problems.

“There’s a lot of stuff in this snow that if I isolated it and threw it in the river, you’d have me arrested,” said John Lipscomb of the New York-based environmental group Riverkeeper.

“I was starting to get a little irritable,” he said. “And so she basically booted me and said, ‘Go figure this out.'”

So he drove four hours from his home in Deer Park, Texas, to his ranch near the Mexican border.

The measure sponsored by at least five Republican representatives underscored the impatience and skepticism that many lawmakers have expressed about the current process and a belief the state is no closer than it was several years ago to realizing the long-hoped-for line.

It sets up a potential political battle with House Democrats and Palin’s successor, Republican Gov. Sean Parnell. Both have expressed support for seeing the process now under way through.

The university developed the SweeTango as the successor to its hugely popular Honeycrisp apple, which earned the school more than $8 million in royalties before the U.S. patent expired. SweeTango, noted for its crisp juicyness and intense sweet-tart flavor with a note of spice, has sold out quickly in both seasons since its official release in 2009.

To ensure a steady revenue stream to support its fruit breeding programs and preserve the quality of SweeTango apples, the university granted an exclusive license to a select cooperative of growers led by Pepin Heights Orchard of Lake City, Minn. Several other apple growers, mostly in Minnesota, sued last summer, saying they were unfairly frozen out of a lucrative deal.

The agency’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service said it would partially deregulate so-called Roundup Ready beets, letting farmers plant them while it finished work on a full environmental impact statement.

Last summer, a federal judge in California issued an order last summer halting the planting of genetically modified sugar beets until the USDA completed an environmental impact study on how the beets could affect conventional crops. The ruling had a widespread impact since nearly all the nation’s sugar beets come from the genetically altered seed, and farmers had worried the USDA wouldn’t finish its work in time for spring planting.

By contrast, many other countries that supply oil are not stable or allied with U.S. interests, Harper said at a White House news conference following a meeting with President Barack Obama.

Pipeline supporters have singled out Venezuela, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Iran as among the oil-producing countries where the United States faces security threats or instability. Canada’s environment minister has used the term “ethical oil” to describe his country’s crude supplies, saying Canada respects human rights, workers’ rights and environmental responsibility. Pipeline opponents, though, say the project would bring “dirty oil” from a polluting source to the U.S.

The Poe House must become self-sustaining by the middle of next year or it will close, curator Jeff Jerome and city officials said Friday.

The museum hasn’t received any money from the city’s general fund since last summer, when Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake pushed through a package of spending cuts and tax increases to close a $121 million budget deficit. Instead, it’s been running on money that Jerome has raised over the years.

At most, only about $7 billion of the $814 billion in economic recovery money awarded under the 2009 federal law hasn’t already been spoken for, according to the latest White House estimates. And Republican leaders now acknowledge they would be lucky to identify as much as $5 billion in stimulus-related spending cuts as part of a plan to save taxpayers $2.5 trillion over 10 years.

Where did the money go?

The ruling could undermine some of the charges against Luis Posada Carriles, an anti-communist militant and public enemy No. 1 in his native Cuba. Prosecutors argued that the passport – and its stamps – indicate that Posada sneaked into the U.S. by sailing into Miami and not by crossing the Texas-Mexico border with a smuggler, as he claimed during citizenship hearings in 2005 in El Paso.

Posada, who turns 83 this month, also is accused of failing to acknowledge during those hearings his involvement in a series of hotel bombings in Cuba that killed an Italian tourist in 1997. He is charged with perjury, obstruction of justice and immigration fraud.

“My kids all grew up around the office and were all exposed to computers,” said Dr. Edward Zuckerberg, a dentist. “There are advantages to being exposed to computers early on. That certainly enriched Mark’s interest in technology.”

Zuckerberg said he computerized his offices in 1985. Mark was born in 1984 and was raised in the house where his father’s dental offices are located in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., in suburban Westchester.

Almost 400 of the animals were being held in corrals inside the park for testing to see if they have been exposed to the disease brucellosis.

Officials had planned to begin sending to slaughter this week those bison that test positive.