Afternoon Edition

At the heart of their story is the bizarre fact that there are more fine fish swimming in the tiny tanks than there are in the surrounding sea.

Having overfished and polluted its own waters to the point where they are home mainly to great ghosts of the past, Hong Kong now imports up to 90 percent of its seafood.

“We have an agreement,” said Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, at the end of a two-day European summit in Brussels.

“The EU now has a strong negotiating position and the countdown to Copenhagen now has started,” he added, referring to international climate talks in Denmark in December.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton led international praise for the deal reached late Thursday, with a push from US envoys, amid a deep crisis set off by a June 28 military-backed coup.

The deal between Zelaya and de facto leader Roberto Micheletti includes a power-sharing government and a congressional decision on Zelaya’s brief reinstatement ahead of presidential polls next month.

More than 5,700 people have now died from the A(H1N1) since it broke out in April in Mexico and the United States in April, the WHO said.

The biggest rise in the past week was recorded in the Americas, were 636 more people were reported killed by swine flu, bringing the region’s death toll to 4,175, the UN agency said.

New data, to be released later in the day, provides the first solid evidence from employers on job creation spawned by the 787-billion-dollar Recovery Act passed in February despite stiff opposition from Obama’s Republican foes.

The latest measure of the economy’s struggle to emerge from the crisis comes a day after government statistics showed 3.5 percent GDP growth in the third quarter after a painful year of contraction.

“It’s the 40th year since the infant Internet first spoke,” said University of California, Los Angeles, professor Leonard Kleinrock, who headed the team that first linked computers online in 1969.

Kleinrock led an anniversary event at the UCLA campus that blended reminiscence of the Internet’s past with debate about its future.

Japan’s economy showed fresh signs of a recovery with the jobless rate falling to a four-month low in September and household spending rising.

But the improvement was overshadowed by fears of another long bout of deflation as seen after Japan’s economic bubble burst in the 1990s.

When the Wall was finally pulled down, city planners, suddenly presented with acres of prime building land in the heart of a top European capital, were rubbing their hands with glee.

Planners thought “the building boom would soon put Berlin back on a par with Paris and London” as it was during the glory years of the 1920s, said local architect Christoph Wessling.

Trading in several shares including Anhui Anke Biotechnology (Group) Ltd. was suspended after they tripped market circuit-breakers in place to curb rampant speculation.

Anhui Anke was the biggest gainer, up 204.71 percent from its initial public offering price of 17.00 yuan at 51.80.

The Commerce Department said on Friday that consumer spending fell 0.5 percent last month, the largest drop since December, after a 1.4 percent increase in August. The decline, which was in line with market expectations, followed the end of a government program to boost auto sales.

A separate report showed factory activity in the nation’s Midwest expanding for the first time in more than a year, but employment conditions deteriorated. A dismal job market appeared to weigh on consumers, with the Reuters/University of Michigan final index of sentiment for October slipping to 70.6, from 73.5 last month.

While no Pakistani officials were immediately prepared to answer, ordinary citizens told Washington’s top diplomat the country was living on a daily basis with the consequences of the September 11, 2001 attacks engineered by the militant Islamist group.

At a televised women’s forum on Friday, Clinton was pressed on U.S. attitudes toward Pakistan, questioned about the use of robot drones to attack suspected militants, and reminded of the costs the country faces as it battles its own insurgency.

Security is also a major concern ahead of the November 7 run-off, which the Taliban have vowed to disrupt, underlined by a suicide attack this week on a guest-house used by the United Nations in which five foreign U.N. staff were killed.

Western officials have already described as “disturbing” plans for the run-off, which both Kabul and Washington hope will end weeks of political uncertainty.

Merkel, who began a second term this week as leader of a new center-right coalition, is also expected to discuss climate change and Iran’s nuclear program in talks with Obama on Tuesday before addressing a joint session of Congress.

But the Afghanistan mission will be of central importance as NATO allies search for a new strategy in the face of rising public frustration with the eight-year conflict.

The breakthrough late on Thursday followed renewed pressure from senior U.S. officials who traveled to Honduras this week for a last-ditch effort to end a crisis that has given U.S. President Barack Obama a foreign policy headache.

“It is a triumph for Honduran democracy,” the leftist Zelaya said after the rival sides agreed to a deal that he said should see him restored to office in the coming days.

The government estimated that gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 3.5 percent from July through September. Still, Geithner said the government must be ready to reinforce growth if needed to avoid risks of a credit crunch.

In a one-hour question-and-answer session at the Economic Club of Chicago, Geithner said the United States can’t borrow-and-spend its way to health and pledged every effort to encourage an investment-led recovery.

The Commerce Department said spending fell 0.5 percent, the largest decline since December, after an upwardly revised 1.4 percent increase in August. Consumer spending in August was previously reported to have advanced 1.3 percent.

September’s decline was in line with market expectations. Consumer spending, which normally accounts for over two-thirds of U.S. economic activity, in August was bolstered by the popular “cash for clunkers” program that gave discounts on some new motor vehicle purchases.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner scrambled in a congressional hearing to defend the plan against critics who said it would give too much power to regulators and enshrine government bailouts for troubled financial firms in law.

Released by the Treasury Department and Democratic Representative Barney Frank on Tuesday, the plan is an bold attempt to make sure the Bush administration’s confused handling of last year’s financial crisis doesn’t happen again.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General James Cartwright will be joined at the White House meeting by leaders of the Army, Marine Corps., Navy and Air Force, a sign Obama was delving into details of troop readiness and availability before deciding on numbers.

“They will present those views to the president, collectively and individually,” an official said. “The chiefs’ views in regard to resources will be an important factor.”

Rajaratnam’s lead lawyer, John Dowd, said the hedge fund manager was being treated worse than epic swindler Bernard Madoff, who was released on $10 million bail last December after his initial confession to a multibillion-dollar fraud.

Dowd asked a Manhattan federal court magistrate judge to reduce his client’s bond to $25 million from $100 million and to modify his travel restrictions, arguing he had no incentive to flee because of strong family ties to the United States and $30 million in property.

Republicans, looking ahead to 2010 congressional elections, hope the races will show they have signs of life as they try to claw back from devastating 2006 and 2008 losses.

Democrats, attempting to keep Republicans in a deep political hole, have doubts that the results from two states will tell much at all about the mood of the country.

Should America continue its policy of working with warlords and disreputable power-brokers in an attempt to use their influence to advance US interests? Or should it instead focus on protecting the Afghan people – in many cases from the very warlords the US has supported in the past?

The answer is not as simple as such a bald statement might suggest, and it is precisely this question, in its many forms, that President Obama is now considering.

Similar efforts have stalled with legal challenges and Supreme Court decisions. But supporters say that the Military Commissions Act of 2009 balances the demands of fairness and due process against a real-world need for flexibility when seeking to prosecute accused Al Qaeda leaders and supporters.

Critics say that the 2009 act is an improvement over prior versions of military-commission regimes passed during the Bush administration. But they say it is still substandard, offering a second-class system of justice designed to obtain quick convictions.

While the government reported that the overall economy grew in the July-September period, signaling the end of the worst recession in seven decades, the weakness in spending and incomes as the quarter ended underscores the fragility of the recovery.

On Wall Street, investors pulled back and stocks erased all the previous day’s big gains. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped about 235 points in afternoon trading, and broader indexes also plunged. The biggest declines were among banks, energy and materials companies.

In a series of public appearances on the final day of a three-day visit, Clinton was pressed repeatedly by Pakistani civilians and journalists about the secret U.S. program that uses drones to launch missiles to kill terrorists.

But she refused to discuss the drone strikes along the porous border area with Afghanistan that have killed key terror leaders but also scores of civilians.

New job numbers from businesses, contractors, state and local governments, nonprofit groups and universities were scheduled to be released publicly later Friday. White House economic adviser Jared Bernstein said the figures will show that, when adding in jobs linked to $288 billion in tax cuts, the stimulus plan has created or saved more than 1 million jobs.

Government recovery plans – everything from the $787 billion stimulus to tax credits for buying new homes to government deals on new cars – are credited with helping the economy grow again after a record four straight losing quarters.

The power-sharing agreement reached late Thursday calls for Congress to decide whether to reinstate the leftist Zelaya. While the legislature backed his June 28 ouster, congressional leaders have since said they won’t stand in the way of an agreement that ends Honduras’ diplomatic isolation and legitimizes presidential elections planned for Nov. 29.

Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Thomas Shannon said Friday that the two sides finally made concessions after realizing the international community wouldn’t recognize the elections or restore aid without a compromise.

Sometimes they were healthy adults or senior citizens instead of kids, pregnant women and people with health problems.

Before Los Angeles County health officials stepped up screening at their flu clinics, Natalie Thompson sailed through the long line and got the vaccine along with her 8-year-old son, even though she’s not in one of the priority groups.

Revelations of the mostly preliminary inquiries by the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct – also known as the Ethics committee – and a panel that refers cases to it shook the chamber as lawmakers were immersed in a series of scheduled votes Thursday.

The panel announced that it was investigating two California Democrats – Reps. Maxine Waters and Laura Richardson – even as its embarrassed leaders took pains to explain that several other lawmakers’ names should not have been revealed and they may have done nothing wrong.

The board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers – or ICANN – voted to allow such scripts in so-called domain names at the conclusion of a weeklong meeting in Seoul, South Korea’s capital.

The decision by the board’s 15 voting members was unopposed and welcomed by applause and a standing ovation. It followed years of debate and testing.

In most cases, the pain has been meted out with an eye toward raising the money needed to finance President Barack Obama’s plan for reshaping the health system but also with careful regard for gaining the votes that will be needed to pass a final bill.

Democrats hope to vote next week on the measure, which would extend health coverage to tens of millions of Americans who don’t have it, impose sweeping new restrictions on private insurers and create a government-run insurance plan to compete with them.

Chirac is to be tried for embezzlement and breach of trust in a corruption case dating back to his tenure as mayor of Paris, a judicial official said Friday, speaking on condition of anonymity because the case is ongoing. A prosecutor can still appeal the judge’s decision, and if so, the ensuing judicial deliberations could last months.

Still, the judge’s bold pursuit of Chirac, who lost his presidential immunity when his 12-year presidency ended in 2007, stunned many observers. Judges chased Chirac unsuccessfully in various corruption scandals for years, and prosecutors had requested that this particular case be dropped.

Michele Pierre-Louis was removed when 18 of 29 senators voted for censure and dissolved the Cabinet.

Most of the votes against the prime minister came from President Rene Preval’s own Lespwa movement, which took control of the Senate after winning June elections.

The Japanese electronics and entertainment giant has been battered by the global slowdown, sliding prices of gadgets and its failure to produce new blockbuster consumer products. But Tokyo-based Sony Corp. said Friday it now expects a smaller flow of red ink for the full fiscal year through March 2010.

It’s forecasting a 95 billion yen ($1 billion) loss compared with the initial projection for a 120 billion yen ($1.3 billion) loss. The new forecast is marginally better than the 98.9 billion yen loss it suffered the previous fiscal year.

President Barack Obama greeted as “obviously welcome news” a government report showing the economy grew 3.5 percent from July through September after four quarters of declines. That’s unofficial confirmation that the long, harsh recession has ended.

But he had to serve it up with a dose of political reality. Even though the downturn that began in December 2007 may be technically over, a high level of joblessness will persist for months, perhaps years, to come.

The direction the Brotherhood takes could have wider implications. The group is the strongest opposition movement in Egypt, though officially banned. Moreover, it is highly influential beyond Egypt’s borders as the father of Islamic movements across the Arab and Muslim world – including the Palestinian militant group Hamas.

Egypt’s autocratic government has cracked down fiercely on the group, arresting many of its members and branding it a front for extremists. The United States has been reluctant to open up channels to the Brotherhood in deference to the government, a close Mideast ally.

The American Civil Liberties Union, in a federal lawsuit filed last week on behalf of the girls, argues that Churubusco High School violated the girls’ free speech rights when it banned them from extracurricular activities for a joke that didn’t involve the school. They say the district humiliated the girls by requiring them to apologize to an all-male coaches’ board and undergo counseling.

Some child advocates argue that schools should play a role in monitoring students’ behavior, especially when dealing with minors. And the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that students can be disciplined for activities that happen outside of school, so long as the school can prove the activities were disruptive or posed a danger and that it was foreseeable the activities would find their way to campus.

Some fishermen held signs reading “Let Fishermen Fish”; other signs pictured Adolf Hitler with the word “Nazi” replacing the first word in National Marine Fisheries Service.

One group marched toward the New England regional headquarters entrance chanting, “Down with NMFS! Down with NMFS!” while a man roamed the crowd dressed as the grim reaper, with NMFS printed on his scythe.

“It’s kind of a double whammy to be African-American and Muslim,” said Jackson, who studies the Navy at the National Academy of Science in Washington. “You’re going to be judged.”

Jackson’s struggle may have gotten harder when the FBI on Wednesday raided a Detroit-area warehouse used by a Muslim group. The FBI said the group’s leader preached hate against the government, trafficked in stolen goods and belonged to a radical group that wants to establish a Muslim state in America. The imam of the group’s mosque, a black American named Luqman Ameen Abdullah, was killed in a shootout with agents.

He wasn’t happy. “Things look bleak going forward,” Don Butler told America’s lawmakers.

Around the same time, the following events transpired:

• The usually beef-and-beany Taco Bell erected signs at the mouth of its drive-thru lanes, exhorting motorists around the republic: “TOP IT OFF WITH BACON.”

• Uncle Jack’s, one of New York City’s signature steakhouses, put out its sidewalk chalkboard of dinner specials. Getting top billing at the beef emporium, for $24,95, was not sirloin, not rib-eye, not filet mignon, but slow-roasted Berkshire pork shank.

• The brewmaster of Brooklyn Brewery, using an intricate process, crafted 25 experimental cases of – wait for it – bacon ale.

Russell is in his 55th year at the Wild Turkey Distillery, where he has been the master distiller in charge of plant operations since the late 1960s. Noe is a great-grandson of Jim Beam himself.

Both travel the world promoting their Kentucky brands to fans who want bottles autographed or pictures taken with the bourbon barons during promotional events in bars, restaurants and liquor stores from Singapore to Sweden.

Although the students are doing their work at a state school on Florida’s Gulf Coast, the center they are studying in is part of a global outreach by the government of China called the Confucius Institute. The cultural and language centers have sprung up around the world, hosted at universities eager to boost their Mandarin offerings as China’s economic influence grows.

The Confucius Institute at South Florida is one of nearly 60 such centers in the United States, and 396 globally in 87 countries. They fill language instruction needs at a time when many universities are grappling with budget cuts. Most receive initial funding and faculty from China.

In Afghanistan’s recent presidential election in August, one of the ripest areas for fraud was women’s voting. And the same is likely to be true again in the Nov. 7 runoff between President Hamid Karzai and former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah.

The stakes are high. The Obama administration, which pushed Karzai to accept the runoff vote, is hoping it will restore legitimacy to a government that has been undermined by blatant ballot-box stuffing and Karzai’s long delay in accepting fraud rulings that forced the runoff.

But just last week, Iranian leaders say, this shadowy group with reported connections to countries as diverse as the U.S., Pakistan and Saudi Arabia delivered a devastating attack on Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard. The Oct. 18 suicide bombing in an Iranian border village killed at least 42 people, including top Revolutionary Guard commanders.

The bombing suggests that ambitions by Jundallah – the Soldiers of God – have risen, and that the group is moving toward a wider uprising. Jundallah’s attack on a Shiite mosque in May and recent use of suicide bombers could point to the growing influence of militant Islamic groups seeking a Sunni revolt against Shiite control in Iran, experts say.

The 16-deck Oasis of the Seas spans 1,200 feet (360 meters) from bow to stern. Its 2,700 cabins can accommodate 6,300 passengers and 2,100 crew.

Commissioned by Royal Caribbean International, the ship cost euro1 billion ($1.5 billion) and took two and a half years to build at the STX Finland Oy shipyard in Turku, southwestern Finland.

On Friday a new U.N. Human Rights Committee report on Russia called for a series of sweeping legal reforms, saying the country is still struggling to guarantee some of the most basic rights, including to a fair trial, freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

Meanwhile a spate of killings has forced Memorial, one of Russia’s leading human rights organizations, and the crusading newspaper Novaya Gazeta, to pull out of the Russian region of Chechnya. Young people are now thinking twice before volunteering to work with rights groups, said Lev Ponomaryov, director of the group For Human Rights.

With China’s military growing at an “unprecedented rate,” the U.S. wants to ensure that expansion doesn’t destabilize the region, Rear Adm. Kevin Donegan told reporters on a visit to the Chinese territory of Hong Kong.

Donegan referred to China’s expanded weaponry. His remarks echoed the concerns of other U.S. military leaders who have said the growth in China’s military spending – up almost 15 percent in the 2009 budget – raises questions about how Beijing plans on deploying its new power.

Security is also a major concern ahead of the November 7 run-off, which the Taliban have vowed to disrupt, underlined by a suicide attack this week on a guest-house used by the United Nations in which five foreign U.N. staff were killed.

Western officials have already described as “disturbing” plans for the run-off, which both Kabul and Washington hope will end weeks of political uncertainty.

Magistrate Xaviere Simeoni gave the order over allegations that the Paris City Hall awarded contracts for non-existent jobs as favors to people who were politically useful to Chirac.

Chirac’s office said Friday that he and nine others had been ordered to stand trial over 21 contracts from the 1990s.

Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change said a fortnight ago it was “disengaging” from government over a dispute with rival President Robert Mugabe on the implementation of the fragile coalition’s power-sharing deal.

Friday Mugabe upped the rhetoric against the MDC.

Obama spoke movingly of his surprise, midnight trip to a Delaware air base, where he stood vigil as the remains of 18 personnel, in cases draped in US flags, were carried from the belly of a huge transport plane.

“It was a sobering reminder of the extraordinary sacrifices that our young men and women in uniform are engaging in every single day,” Obama said in the Oval Office, hours after attending the “dignified transfer” ceremony.

Millions of people were killed in purges and forced collectivization as Stalin asserted his power in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, actions seen by most historians as one of the worst crimes in human history.

Yet Stalin remains lauded in Russia for his role in leading the Soviet Union to victory in World War II, and last year even came a close third in a television poll for the greatest Russian ever.

Venturing where leading local politicians rarely go, she told university students in Lahore that Pakistan will have to fight the extremists unless “you want to see your territory shrink.”

She delighted her audience by emphasizing her opposition to former President George W. Bush , saying the difference with the current administration was “like daylight and dark.”

Many nations are watching to see whether the Senate will make progress on a climate and energy bill that would spell out the U.S. national emissions-reduction plan. Without an offer of such cuts from the largest source of emissions that are already in the atmosphere, there won’t be a global deal at the talks in Copenhagen, Denmark .

At the same time, other countries have started to put forward their own plans to cut emissions. If that momentum builds, it could put pressure on the Senate to pass the bill, possibly early in 2010, and open the way for another negotiating round on a global treaty next year.

U.N. officials had hoped to shut down polling centers where the worst fraud was documented in a recent audit, but the Independent Election Commission said it will open 6,322 polling centers — about 500 more than U.N. officials had proposed and 17 more than were open in the first round.

Commissioner Zekria Barakzai said that polling centers would be closed only if because of security concerns or weather, not because of past problems with fraud.

A measure before Breckenridge voters in Tuesday’s municipal election would legalize possession of up to 1 ounce of marijuana along with bongs, pipes and other pot paraphernalia. Supporters of the measure say it would inch the whole state closer to full legalization.

Other cities around the country have taken similar action in recent years, including a measure in Denver that decriminalized possession.

The latest count shows 114 children have been killed by the virus in the United States since April, during a time when there is usually virtually no influenza, said U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Thomas Frieden.

H1N1 is widespread, he said, and case counts continue to rise in most states.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in Boston.

It joins a related whistleblower lawsuit filed in the same court in 2006 and is one of many lawsuits accusing drugmakers of illegally marketing their products.

It was the latest in a series of actions taken by the US government over trading abuses and safety and environmental violations for which BP has paid more than 573 million dollars in various fines and settlements.

US Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said BP reneged on an agreement to address critical safety issues discovered after the 2005 blast and failed to correct hundreds of new violations discovered in subsequent inspections.