Evening Edition

A leader of the ruling General People’s Congress (GPC) party told AFP that Saleh was “lightly wounded in the back of his head.”

In an audio statement broadcast late Friday on state television, Saleh who was being treated at the defence ministry hospital in Sanaa said, “I am well, in good health,” and added that the bombardment had killed seven people.

A leader of the ruling General People’s Congress (GPC) party told AFP that Saleh was “lightly wounded in the back of his head,” in an attack that also killed three officers of the elite Republican Guard.

Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Mujawar was also wounded, and medics later said he was suffering from burns to his face.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon expressed alarm at the heightened Syrian government crackdown on protests, while a US-based monitoring firm said two-thirds of networks in protest-wracked Syria were cut off from the Internet on Friday.

“At least 34 people were killed in Hama by security forces but the toll could rise as there are people who were gravely wounded,” said Rami Abdel Rahman who heads the London-based Syrian observatory for human rights.

The attacks came a day after a spate of coordinated bombings in west Iraq killed 10 people, raising questions over the capabilities of Iraqi security forces with just months to go before all US forces must pull out.

Friday’s violence in Tikrit, 160 kilometres (100 miles) north of Baghdad, also left 74 people wounded, including two members of Salaheddin provincial council, a senior policeman and a judge.

“I am General Ratko Mladic,” the markedly thinner, older, yet still defiant former military leader told the Yugoslav war crimes court in The Hague.

Mladic, 69, faces 11 charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes for his role in the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

“There is an agreement,” Prime Minister George Papandreou said as Europe rallied to avoid bankruptcy in Athens and a damaging exit from the euro currency area.

The plan hinged on a positive review by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund of Greek budgetary efforts despite a worse-than-expected national recession since last year’s 110-billion-euro rescue.

As authorities continued to hunt the elusive source of the killer bug, the latest death was of an 80-year-old woman in the northern German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.

But while German authorities were still warning consumers off raw vegetables, the EU’s Reference Laboratory for E. coli in Rome said scientific tests had failed to support a link to the outbreak.

“There is an agreement,” Prime Minister George Papandreou said as Europe rallied to avoid bankruptcy in Athens and a damaging exit from the euro currency area.

The plan hinged on a positive review by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund of Greek budgetary efforts despite a worse-than-expected national recession since last year’s 110-billion-euro rescue.

As Papandreou met Jean-Claude Juncker, the Luxembourg premier who heads the eurozone finance ministers, Athens announced that a four-week audit of its finances by EU and IMF experts had concluded satisfactorily.

“Today the Greek government’s talks with the representatives of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund concluded in a positive manner,” the Greek finance ministry said.

The economy added a paltry 54,000 new jobs last month, one-quarter of the February-April pace, while the unemployment rate edged up to 9.1 percent, figures from the Labor Department showed.

While the White House and economists cautioned that the poor data was likely a monthly blip, it fueled allegations that Obama’s economic policies are failing, 18 months ahead of the next presidential election.

Cook’s 96 was the centrepiece of England’s 342 for six at stumps here on Friday after Sri Lanka won the toss.

The left-handed opener had had to watch from the other end as England slumped to 22 for three.

The decision to hold the race in Manama on October 30 was taken by Formula One’s ruling body the FIA’s World Motor Sport Council at a meeting in Barcelona.

The green light was given after a visit by an FIA delegation to assess conditions in Bahrain this week.

Nonfarm payrolls increased 54,000 last month, the Labor Department said on Friday, just over a third of what economists had expected.

However, analysts saw little chance the economy would slide back into recession, given that temporary factors like high gasoline prices and supply chain disruptions from the earthquake in Japan were constraining growth.

“The recovery has not been aborted. The economy is not falling into a double-dip,” said Sung Won Sohn, an economics professor at California State University in the Channel Islands. “This weakness, however, is a warning shot across the bow of the economy.”

“One look at the jobs report should show the White House it’s time to get serious about cutting spending and dealing with our ailing economy,” House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner said after data showed jobs growth slowed sharply in May and the jobless rate rose to 9.1 percent.

Boehner said Obama needed to take a more active role in deficit-reduction talks if the president hopes for agreement between Republicans and Democrats by the end of June.

The European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, ending a month-long review of their 110 billion euro ($160 billion) bailout program, said Athens had made considerable progress toward repairing its finances but must step up fiscal and economic reforms.

“Once this process is concluded and following approval of the IMF’s Executive Board and the Eurogroup, the next tranche will become available, most likely, in early July,” they said.

This week, the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai submitted a counterproposal to a U.S. draft of the “strategic partnership” agreement, Afghan officials said.

The agreement, expected to be concluded in coming months, would outline the U.S. role in Afghanistan as President Barack Obama gradually withdraws the 100,000 U.S. soldiers now locked in a fierce battle with the Taliban and other militants.

Saleh, who is facing an unprecedented challenge to nearly 33 years of rule, said seven people were killed when a mosque in the presidential palace was shelled by his tribal foes.

“I salute our armed forces and the security forces for standing up firmly to confront this challenge by an outlaw gang that has nothing to do with the so-called youth revolution,” said Saleh, speaking only via audio in a televised speech.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, locked in a trade row with the European Union after banning imports of its raw fruit and vegetables, struck a dramatic note by saying he would not “poison” Russians by lifting the embargo.

Health authorities repeated warnings to avoid some raw vegetables in northern Germany — rattling farmers and stores in the high season for salad — and said 199 new cases of the rare strain of the bacteria had been reported in the past two days.

A week before Russia hosts EU leaders at a summit, Putin used his trademark earthy language to seek the upper hand in a dispute that erupted when Moscow slapped a blanket ban on imports of raw vegetables from the 27-nation union on Thursday.

The EU envoy to Russia urged Moscow to lift the embargo, saying it lacked sufficient scientific grounds and contradicted rules of the World Trade Organization, which Russia is seeking to join soon after 18 years of trying.

Finding the source of the infection that has killed 17 people will require laborious on-the-ground investigations by food safety and public health officials.

Armed only with fear, soap and water, consumers must watch and wait. And in the end, the answer may never be found.

Chinese scientists at the Beijing Genomics Institute, the world’s largest DNA sequencing center, announced late on Thursday that the E. coli spreading through Europe was “a new strain of bacteria that is highly infectious and toxic.”

The researchers, who obtained DNA samples of the bacteria from collaborating scientists in Germany, managed to fully sequence its genome in three days — becoming the first in the world to do so and lodge its full sequence on the Internet.

Formally charged by a U.N. tribunal which has waited 16 years to see him in the dock, he began with a wary appeal from a “very sick man” but ended with a defiant flourish of his old bravado, predicting he would be acquitted.

“The whole world knows who I am. I am General Ratko Mladic,” he said at the end of his first appearance, a tense 100 minutes.

LulzSec, a group that claims attacks on U.S. PBS television and Fox.com, said it broke into servers that run Sony Pictures Entertainment websites. It published the names, birth dates, addresses, emails, phone numbers and passwords of thousands of people who had entered contests promoted by Sony.

“From a single injection, we accessed EVERYTHING,” the hacking group said in a statement. “Why do you put such faith in a company that allows itself to become open to these simple attacks?”

Goldman Sachs Group Inc now faces probes by several government authorities into derivatives trades it executed in late 2006 and 2007. On Thursday, sources close to the matter said Goldman received a subpoena from the Manhattan district attorney, who joins the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission in examining Goldman’s actions.

Separately, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is investigating Goldman as part of a broader probe into the mortgage operations and securitization practices of seven banks. A source familiar with the situation said Schneiderman’s office met Goldman executives and attorneys in the past two weeks.

The proceeds of the deal include the sale of the government’s interest in a United Auto Workers healthcare trust fund, Treasury said in a mid-evening statement.

The Obama administration invested $12.5 billion in Chrysler under the Troubled Asset Relief Program in 2009 as part of an auto industry bailout that eventually brought both Chrysler and General Motors Corp through bankruptcy court.

“These allegations are very serious,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said.

“We take them seriously; we’re looking into them,” Clinton told reporters a day after the Internet giant said it had disrupted a campaign aimed at stealing passwords of hundreds of Google email account holders, including senior U.S. government officials, Chinese activists and journalists.

Most economists say job growth should strengthen later this year as gasoline prices drop further and the economy recovers from the effects of natural disasters in the U.S. and abroad. But the recovery is starting to weaken 17 months before the 2012 election, which could hurt President Barack Obama’s re-election prospects.

The unemployment rate in May inched up to 9.1 percent from 9 percent, the Labor Department said Friday; when Obama took office, it was 7.8 percent.

“Three years into his term, we have more news that unemployment has ticked up again,” Romney said at a town hall-style meeting, a day after he formally joined the GOP presidential contest.

Employers hired 54,000 new workers in May, the fewest in eight months, and the unemployment rate rose to 9.1 percent. The Labor Department report offered startling evidence that the U.S. economy is slowing, hampered by high gas prices and natural disasters in Japan that have hurt U.S. manufacturers.

Obama’s visit to a Chrysler plant in politically important Ohio came after the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that employers in May added the fewest jobs in eight months – a meager 54,000 – and the unemployment rate inched up to 9.1 percent.

Normally Obama talks about the monthly jobs numbers the day they’re released, but he never mentioned them directly Friday – an omission immediately noted by Republicans who see the economy as Obama’s greatest weakness heading into the 2012 campaign.

Failure to do so could potentially depress turnout by an important part of the Republican base. Not only are fiscal issues dominating the debate, but social and Christian conservatives have no obvious candidate to turn to, as they did in 2008 when Baptist minister Mike Huckabee ran.

Facing this vacuum, a host of presidential hopefuls are emphasizing their religious faith and opposition to abortion and gay marriage, even though they are better known as business-like managers of state governments and private companies.

But as his arraignment proceeded, his old bluster returned as he called his indictment “obnoxious” and told judges he doesn’t want help walking “as if I were a blind man.”

The capture and trial of the Bosnian Serb wartime commander on charges of genocide and war crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war closes the bloodiest chapter in European history since World War II and is nearly the final act of the Yugoslav tribunal, a court that launched a renewed era of international justice after the Nuremberg trials of Nazis war criminals.

Mevludin Oric lay for nine hours in one of the Srebrenica killing fields where Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic’s troops executed 8,000 Muslim men and boys in July 1995. He escaped in the dead of night, after the soldiers had satisfied themselves that everyone in the sea of bodies was dead.

On Thursday, Oric returned for the first time to the execution ground – a pretty V-shaped meadow surrounded by a forest – with Associated Press journalists to share his feelings about the capture of the man who orchestrated Europe’s worst carnage since World War II.

One of the rockets smashed into a mosque on the palace grounds where the president was praying along with his top leadership. It was a stunning hit on the regime’s most senior figures: Among the nine wounded were the prime minister, Saleh’s powerful top security adviser and the two heads of parliament, as well as the cleric leading prayers. Seven guards were killed.

Officials said Saleh had only slight injuries – Deputy Information Minister Abdu al-Janadi spoke only of “scratches to his face.” But there were indications the injuries may have been more severe. Saleh, in his late 60s, was taken to a Defense Ministry hospital, while officials promised repeatedly that he would soon appear in public. But by late Friday, state TV had aired only an audio message from the president, with an old still photo.

“Violence cannot resolve the issues that confront Yemen, and today’s events cannot be a justification for a new round of fighting,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said in a statement.

Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh was wounded when opposition tribesmen determined to topple him hammered his palace with rockets Friday in a major escalation of nearly two weeks of fighting with government forces. At least six guards were killed and eight top officials were also wounded, an official said.

However, lawmakers stopped short of a more draconian resolution to order an outright end to U.S. involvement in Libya. They rejected that measure, 265-148, with anti-war Democrat Dennis Kucinich of Ohio winning the votes of 87 Republicans and 61 Democrats.

Over White House objections, the House did adopt a resolution chastising Obama for failing to provide a “compelling rationale” for the Libyan mission and demanding answers in the next 14 days on the operation’s objective, its costs and its impact on the nation’s two other wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The resolution, though non-binding, says U.S. ground forces must not be used in the conflict except to rescue an American service member.

As that pile shrinks, so too does the chance of funding and sustaining a revolution to oust one of the world’s longest-serving dictators.

If the cash-flow problem “isn’t solved in the next few days, there’s going to be a problem here,” Albagrmi said, speaking from his office in Benghazi, the northeast Mediterranean port that has become the rebels’ de facto capital.

The twin attacks – as well as the fact that the bombers were able to infiltrate areas that were supposed to be secure – left people in Tikrit feeling under siege.

It was the third major attack in Tikrit this year, reflecting the difficulties Iraqi security forces face in protecting their own people from Sunni insurgents still intent on undermining the country’s post-Saddam leaders, many of whom are Shiite. Such violence is all the more troubling because of the approaching year-end deadline for American forces to leave.

The example is Timothy Ray Brown of San Francisco, the first person in the world apparently cured of AIDS. His treatment isn’t practical for wide use, but there are encouraging signs that other approaches might someday lead to a cure, or at least allow some people to control HIV without needing medication every day.

“I want to pull out all the stops to go for it,” though cure is still a very difficult goal, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

In a courtroom packed with some 200 people, including out-of-work players and retirees on folding chairs brought in to handle the crowd, attorneys on both sides of the bitter labor fight got roughly 30 minutes each to make their cases.

The appeal centers on the lockout that began hours after months of labor talks fell apart March 11, the players’ union dissolved and the fight ended up in federal court. The NFL contends the union decertification was a sham meant to gain leverage in the talks and the conflict remains subject to labor law.

They correctly rolled off 21 words in a row. Hard ones, like “abhinaya” and “capoeira” and “cheongsam” and “opodeldoc.” One of the spellers kept checking another one’s watch. It was past bedtime, and long past the time slot that had been allotted by ESPN.

“I was, like, what if they could declare five-way, co-champions?” said Joanna Ye. “I just didn’t want to be the first one to break the streak.”

So he put the ball there – torn-up finger and all – and hoisted the shot that gave the Dallas Mavericks new life in the NBA finals.

Nowitzki shook off an injury to his non-shooting hand and made the tie-breaking layup with 3.6 seconds left, and the Mavericks roared back from 15 points down in the fourth quarter to stun the Miami Heat 95-93 on Thursday night and tie the series at one game apiece.

Robert Burke, 43, the principal at Sageville Elementary School just north of Dubuque, was charged with one count of receiving child pornography. A criminal complaint says an FBI agent downloaded eight images child of pornography in April from a computer with an IP address that was traced to Burke’s residence in Dubuque.

At least three of the images involved boys who appeared to be between the ages of 8 and 10 performing oral sex, according to a court affidavit filed by Robert Larsen, a special agent for the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation.

The Clean Up Albany Act of 2011 would create what lawmakers call an independent commission with power to enforce ethics and other laws governing lawmakers, the executive branch and lobbying, the governor and lawmakers said in a press release. The governor would appoint six members to the Joint Commission on Public Ethics; eight others would be appointed by legislative leaders.

Any sanctions against a lawmaker, however, would be decided by the Legislative Ethics Commission, which has been criticized for lack of action during the years of scandal.

This is Chicago, after all, where the shadow of Al Capone still looms, federal corruption trials appear like television reruns, and the remnants of the mob are sure to try for a piece of the action.

Illinois lawmakers voted this week to allow legal gambling for the first time in Chicago. Backers envision a new casino and video poker machines across the nation’s third-largest city, from its two international airports to corner bars. It’s part of an ambitious statewide expansion of gambling lawmakers have sent to Gov. Pat Quinn.

Now, a legislator has requested that the head of the New Jersey State Police testify before a legislative committee examining Christie’s use of state police helicopters for transportation.

A letter was sent Friday from Assemblywoman Annette Quijano, D-Union, chairwoman of the Homeland Security Committee, to state police Superintendent Rick Fuentes.

The change, approved by the Republican-controlled budget committee on an 11-4 party line vote, would force some police and firefighters to make the same contributions toward their benefits as other public workers under a bill pushed by Gov. Scott Walker and passed by the Legislature in March.

Police and firefighters were exempt from that bill, which is now tied up in the courts.

U.S. District Judge Kenneth Marra’s 95-page ruling permits at least 4,000 Colombians to pursue claims for damages against Chiquita for torture, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the AUC, a Spanish acronym for the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia formed in 1997 to combat leftist anti-government guerrillas.

Chiquita paid the group $1.7 million over a seven-year period, even after it was designated by the U.S. as a foreign terrorist organization in 2001. Chiquita pleaded guilty in 2007 to U.S. criminal charges stemming from the payments and paid a $25 million fine, but attorneys for the Colombians suing the company say civil damages could reach many times that amount.

Miller said he’d prefer to send the cattle – about 150 to 250 head a year – to a local slaughterhouse so he could sell locally produced beef, save on transportation costs and avoid long rides for calves that lose weight during shipping. New England agriculture officials prefer that too, as they aim to increase food production to make the region more self-sufficient should disasters ranging from massive snow storms to terrorist attacks make impossible to bring in food.

But the stumbling blocks for farmers and meat processors are many: Setting up a slaughterhouse is a big investment, and local zoning rules bar such businesses. Meatpackers in New England say it’s hard to compete price-wise with slaughterhouses in other states, and they have trouble keeping skilled meat cutters and other workers. As a result, New England has only 28 slaughterhouses, said Chelsea Lewis, agriculture development coordinator for the Vermont Agency for Agriculture. In contrast, Wisconsin alone has about 285 small meat processors.