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Tens of thousands of Egyptian demonstrators packed into Tahrir Square in Cairo on Friday to demand the prosecution of Hosni Mubarak, the ousted president, Buy nike running shoes onlineand to press the country’s military rulers to take action against entrenched corruption.

Youth activists who launched the popular uprising that toppled Mr Mubarak and his regime had called for the protest on what they named the “Friday of Purification and Trials”. The opposition Muslim Brotherhood also backed the calls and sent thousands of its supporters to Tahrir Square.

Activists also want the council to sack provincial governors, who are Mubarak appointees, nike mens acg sandals 2011 and to disband all local councils because they are dominated by the National Democratic party of the former president.

“We want the whole system to be purified, from Hosni Mubarak down to the lowliest policeman,” said Abdel Azim Morsi, a teacher. “The military council has been too slow, or it is covering up for Mubarak.”

Scores of businessmen are already being investigated for corruption and a handful of former ministers, some already detained, face profiteering charges.

Until this week, however, most of those named in corruption cases have been linked to Gamal Mubarak, the son of the former president who was widely seen as his anointed successor. Gamal is due to questioned by the Illegal Gains Agency in the next few days, according to reports in the state-owned al-Ahram newspaper.

It was only a few days ago – almost eight weeks after the resignation of Mr Mubarak – that the authorities moved against senior officials regarded as pillars of the former president’s regime.

Zakaria Azmi, Mr Mubarak’s private secretary, was on Thursday remanded in custody for two weeks after an appearance before prosecutors from the Illegal Gains Agency.

The agency had imposed a travel ban and asset freeze earlier in the week on Mr Azmi and on three other officials regarded as close to Mr Mubarak. They are Fathy Sorour, the former speaker of parliament, Safwat Sherif, secretary general of the former ruling party, buy Reebok ZigTech onlineand Mohamed Ibrahim Suleiman, a former housing minister, who was detained on Wednesday.

The military authorities also formed a judicial panel this week to look into the wealth of Mr Mubarak and his family.

Press reports citing unnamed judicial sources said on Friday that Mr Mubarak had presented a medical report, saying his health did not allow him to appear before investigators in Cairo. The authorities are reported to have signalled their readiness to send investigators to question Mr Mubarak in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, where he is under house arrest.

Artillery hit the residence of France's ambassador to Ivory Coast for the second time in two days, Buy nike running shoes online, Brand the French embassy said, a possible show of defiance from the country's strongman who has resisted international pressure to emerge from a bunker and cede power. The embassy said in a statement Friday that the residence was hit by two mortars and a rocket fired from positions held by forces supporting strongman Laurent Gbagbo, who is holed up in a bunker at his residence next door to the French compound. The statement did not say if there were casualties. The statement also noted that a U.N. Security Council resolution would permit them to destroy the weapons used to target the French compound. Gbagbo has for days resisted military and diplomatic pressure to emerge and step down. Forces first attempted to bomb him out. When that failed, % off, Find brand shoes to they tried a ground assault on the bunker. On Friday, internationally recognized president Alassane Ouattara imposed a blockade Friday around Gbagbo's presidential residence, and said he'll focus on normalizing life in the corpse-strewn, terrorized city. As the military standoff dragged on in Abidjan, there were new concerns Friday about tensions erupting into deadly violence in the country's west. The U.N. said more than 100 bodies have been found in the last 24 hours, and some of the victims had been burned alive. "All the incidents appear at least partly ethnically motivated," said Rupert Colville, % off, Find brand shoes to spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva. The International Rescue Committee is warning that chaos is permeating this West African nation once split in two by a 2002-2003 civil war.

Hennepin County Board ChairmanBuy nike running shoes online Mike Opat and a number of business leaders are pushing an area west of the Twins stadium in Minneapolis. The site would require expensive relocation of current occupants, and Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak does not support building there.

 

Rybak prefers tearing down the Metrodome and rebuilding on or near that site. However, that site appears to have no local funds, since Hennepin County doesn't support it and Rybak has said his city can't afford to pitch in. It's also possible that tearing down the dome would force the team to play at the University of Minnesota's stadium for several years, a prospect the team doesn't fancy.

 

Ramsey County has been negotiating with the team over a site near Interstate 35W and U.S. 10 at the shuttered Twin Cities Army Ammunitions Plant in Arden Hills. However, it's unclear how much progress those talks, which have been occurring in earnest for months, have made. Ramsey County officials have said they're growing impatient and are not interested in getting into a bidding war with Hennepin County.

Team officials have noted attributes and drawbacks for each site and have never been clear if they have a preference.  Reebok ZigTech

The $300 million state contribution outlined in the bill sets up the potential for a widely expected starting point for negotiations on a stadium expected to cost about $900 million: a third from the state, a third from a local government and a third from the team.

At a time when lawmakers are grappling with how to patch a projected two-year $5 billion budget hole, the notion of a tax-subsidized stadium has received mixed reviews from lawmakers from both parties. Republicans are opposed to increasing taxes, while many Democrats support tax hikes to fund state services and programs currently under threat and say it would be unseemly to raise taxes for a professional football team instead.

But that hasn't fazed Rosen and Lanning, who each emphasized that the bill is merely a "framework," given that no site and no local government plan exist yet.

"It's a good start to a situation where there is no site picked or local partner," Rosen said Thursday. "This has the state's share, and like many things, that's negotiable. This is just a start." Buy nike running shoes online, Brand shoes to trade, 2011 nike running shoes Buy

Lanning said he expected pushback from his colleagues.

"We know that not everybody is going to like everything," he said. "At the end of the day, the Vikings are going to have to make a substantial commitment and a local partner will have to make a substantial commitment."

Whether his changes are enough to get the bill, which already passed the Senate, a hearing in the HouseBuy nike running shoes online and a final vote in both chambers before the session ends April 29, though, is unclear.

Delph, R-Carmel, authored Senate Bill 590 to follow the example set by Arizona, which last year became the first state to put enforcement of federal immigration laws into the hands of state and local authorities.

The bill easily passed the Senate in February by a vote of 31-18. But it has been stalled so far in the House.

Rep. Bill Davis, R-Portland, chairman of the House Public Policy Committee, said he has not decided whether to give the bill a hearing when his committee holds its final meeting of this session Wednesday.

He had concerns, he said, that the bill might lead to profiling -- with people who are here legally singled out by police because they look or sound foreign.

House Speaker Brian Bosma, R-Indianapolis, said he expects it will get a hearing but also indicated he has reservations about the bill's impact.

He said he shares the frustration of many that the nation's borders are porous.

"This is Congress' job to fix that, and they haven't done it, Republican or Democrat," he said.

But, Bosma said, "I am uncomfortable after speaking with a student who is here on an education visa -- the fact that that person would have to have perhaps their passport on them 24-7 so they can prove who they were and why they were here."

And, he said, he's heard from some of Indiana's leading businesses -- Eli Lilly and Co., Guidant and Cummins -- which are concerned that their foreign-born employees could be harassed simply because they do not look or sound like Hoosiers.

"Putting these individuals in a position of having to, without committing any other crime, prove their legal residency here has given many folks concern," Bosma said.

The legislature, he said, has to find that cheap nike mens acg sandals 2011 "very delicate balance" to address illegal immigration while not hurting those who are in the country legally.

Delph said he's optimistic that the changes he's offering to SB 590, and which could be added to as the bill continues to be negotiated, will satisfy those concerns.

Among the changes: removing a section that would allow police to check someone's immigration status if they had "reasonable suspicion" that they were here legally. Under his new proposal, law enforcement would check whether a person was here legally only if they had probable cause -- a higher legal standard than mere suspicion -- to think they had committed some other crime.

"It's really a targeting toward the bad actors of the illegal immigrant community as opposed to the whole population," he said. "I never wanted or intended to burden any citizen. When I heard from legal residents and their fear of being drawn into the enforcement components, that concerned me, and we tried to alleviate that."

Other changes include removing a requirement that the state enter into an agreement with the federal government for training of State Police on federal immigration enforcement. The fiscal analysis of the bill said that could cost the state $1 million to $5 million, money the state can't afford right now.

Also gone, Delph said, would be the bill's requirement that only English be used in official documents and government meetings, though a similar provision has passed the House in another bill and is awaiting action in the Senate.

But Delph said his proposed compromise restores one of the bill's original provisions, which had been stripped in a Senate committee: requiring the state to calculate the cost of illegal immigration and submit a bill to Congress.

"It's still tough but fair," Delph said of his bill. "It's not the bill that I introduced, but the legislative process seldom allows you to have the introduced version be the version that's enacted into law."

Organizers of a coalition of business, education, religious and government leaders who are opposed to the bill -- buy Reebok ZigTechthe Alliance for Immigration Reform in Indiana -- said they need to see all the proposed changes before knowing whether the bill is something they could accept.

John Livengood, a co-chairman of the group and a lobbyist for hotel and restaurant interests, said there are "combinations that we could support and live with. Obviously, we want anything that even hints at profiling out of the bill."

There are so many "little pieces" of the bill, he said, that it's hard to give the proposed changes a thumbs up or down until he understands the full impact. The coalition remains concerned about anything that would make it more difficult or expensive for local government to operate.

"We've still got questions, but it sounds like they're trying," he said.

Livengood said he hopes that the legislature looks past Arizona to Utah, which this year passed legislation requiring police to investigate the immigration status only of those charged with serious crimes.

Portuguese government debt yields snapped an 11-day surge on Wednesday, Buy nike running shoes onlineled by a slide in Irish yields as some investors covered short positions before a European Central Bank rate decision on Thursday.

Traders and analysts said the fall in Portuguese yields was likely to be shortlived with investors increasingly convinced Lisbon will have to seek a bailout as the caretaker government's borrowing costs soared at an auction of short-term funds.

Irish 10-year yields fell by as much as half a percentage point to 9.399 percent, extending this week's falls as concerns about its ailing banks abated after stress tests, helping other peripheral euro zone bonds to outperform German benchmarks.

"There's quite a lot of shorts built up in the market over the course of the last year or so... It's too early to say whether it's a shift in sentiment or just a pause," a trader said. "There literally were no buyers in the market for the last couple of months so all it takes is for a few buyers to come in and people get squeezed up very quickly."

Some traders said investors were wary of holding short positions going into the ECB meeting on Thursday where the bank is widely expected to raise interest rates for the first time since October 2008. nike mens acg sandals 2011 Uncertainty remains on how aggressively it will tighten monetary policy for the rest of the year.

Following in the downdraft of Irish bond yields, Portuguese 10-year yields fell 24 bps to 8.76 percent, slipping for the first time since March 22, when the government in Lisbon collapsed after parliament rejected further austerity measures.

With its bond yields at euro-era highs, some investors took the opportunity to snap up Portugal's high-yielding short-term paper, but funding at those levels was seen as unsustainable and only a temporary option. [ID:nLDE7350HL], buy Reebok ZigTech online

At best, it could potentially buy Portugal time until after a June 5 election, when a new government is widely seen as facing the immediate task of negotiating a bailout.

"The interest was quite attractive for investors, because in the end there is the assumption that Portugal will not be forced to restructure until 2013 and any financing problem will be covered by the EFSF," said ING strategist Alessandro Giansanti.

"It is not risk-free. Portugal is reducing the length of its debt, while it can have the same rate for the loans from the EFSF. It is getting quite dangerous for the country."

Almost three-quarters of Irish companies expect to be hurt by higher European Central Bank interest rates, the first of which will likely be announced on Thursday, Buy nike running shoes onlinea survey of businesses showed.

The ECB's expected first interest rate hike in nearly three years couldn't come at a worse time for euro zone struggler Ireland, its crippled banks, and borrowers already stretched due to high unemployment and weak economic growth.

The KBC Bank/Chartered Accountants of Ireland's quarterly business sentiment survey showed that of the 73 percent of companies expecting to be stung by rate hikes, they were likely to be affected in a range of ways.

"The key channels include the negative consequences for demand, the increase in companies' financing costs and the more generalised damage to sentiment across the economy," Austin Hughes, chief economist at KBC Bank Ireland said.cheap nike mens acg sandals

The survey showed that business activity levels have improved marginally in the past three months, and that respondents expect markedly more positive conditions over the next quarter.

Businesses also reported a further fall in employment but with one in five firms reporting an increase in employment and one in four a reduction in headcount, the survey suggests the worst news on jobs is over, according to Hughes.

"The Spring 2011 survey suggests that there has been clear progress in the sense that conditions are notably less traumatic than those prevailing a year ago," Hughes wrote in a general commentary on the survey.Buy nike cheap mens acg sandals

"It is also clear that the Irish economy is finding it difficult to develop a strongly positive momentum across a broad array of businesses because many significant 'headwinds' to recovery remain in place."