Tag: Evening Edition

But the insurgent leader who was the target of the original operation in which the Americans perished remained at large, said General John Allen, commander of NATO-led forces in Afghanistan.

“Did we get the leader that we were going after in the initial operation? No, we did not,” he told reporters by video link from Kabul.

Violence erupted in new areas from Manchester in northern England where youths set shops alight, to the industrial cities of Wolverhampton and West Bromwich in central England where people smashed into stores and torched cars, police said.

Police in London were bracing for more trouble after what they said was the worst night of disorder in living memory, and their numbers were ramped up from 6,000 to 16,000 on Tuesday night as Cameron vowed to do “everything necessary to restore order to the streets”.

Finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 industrialised and emerging economies pledged to “take all necessary initiatives in a coordinated way to support financial stability and to foster stronger economic growth in a spirit of cooperation and confidence.”

Their statement came after Asian stock markets suffered heavy losses after Friday’s unprecedented US ratings downgrade.

France and Germany called for full implementation of measures agreed at a eurozone summit in July to safeguard the single currency as markets braced for fresh turmoil this week.

“President (Nicolas) Sarkozy and Chancellor (Angela) Merkel reiterate their commitment to fully implement the decisions taken by the heads of state and government of the euro area and the EU institutions on July 21,” a joint statement said.

All were killed during an anti-Taliban operation late Friday when a rocket fired by the insurgents struck their Chinook aircraft as it began to take off shortly after a firefight in Wardak province, southwest of the capital Kabul.

A statement from Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s office said the US victims were special forces, and that 31 of them had been killed.

Rushing back to Brussels from vacation as European economic giants Italy and Spain came under intense market pressure, Economic Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn said a wide-ranging contingency plan to defend the euro, agreed at a special summit July 21, will be ready “in weeks, not months.”

Officials “are working night and day to put flesh on the bones” of the agreement struck at a summit called over fears the Greek debt crisis could spill over to the eurozone’s third- and fourth-largest economies.

The Dow closed down 512.76 points to 11,383.68. The broader S&P 500 lost 4.8 percent to 1,200.07, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite plunged 5.1 percent to 2,556.39.

More turmoil over sovereign debt problems in Europe and feeble US economic data are stoking “fear that the economy is heading for a double-dip recession,” said Peter Cardillo of Rockwell Global Capital.

The forces shaping the deal and the deal itself are multifaceted, and so is the right reaction to it. Mine has a number of elements.

Relief. There will be no first default in U.S. history; no economy-damaging short-run austerity; no attack on the nation’s core social protection programs or on universal health care; and no repeat of the last month’s shabby spectacle for at least 15 months. All of this was in doubt even a week ago as congressional intransigence threatened to make the problem of acceptably raising the debt limit insoluble.

The reports of new deaths came as the UN Security Council was to hold a second day of emergency talks on the deadly crackdown in Syria.

“Ten martyrs fell and several people were wounded by gunfire from security forces during protests in several Syrian towns after the ‘taraweeh’ evening prayers” on Monday’s first day of Ramadan, Syrian Observatory for Human Rights chief Rami Abdel Rahman said, adding that the day’s death toll was 24.

Nineteen people, five of them suspects, were killed in two separate incidents in the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar at the weekend in the latest wave of violence to hit the Xinjiang region, home to a mainly Muslim Uighur minority.

Two more suspects, both of them Uighurs, were “executed on the spot by police who were in the process of capturing them” on Monday, the Kashgar local government said in a statement.