Assange says to stay in embassy until U.S. backs off: CNN

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(Reuters) - China's largely rubber stamp parliament has expelled disgraced former senior politician Bo Xilai, state news agency Xinhua said on Friday, paving the way for formal criminal charges to be laid against him.

The expulsion removes Bo's immunity from prosecution as a member of parliament. Xinhua said the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, China's parliament, "announced the termination of Bo Xilai's post" as the deputy to the parliament.

The announcement comes a fortnight before the Communist Party holds a key congress, which opens on November 8, that will unveil the country's new central leadership.

Bo's wife, Gu Kailai, and his former police chief, Wang Lijun, have both been jailed over the scandal, which stems from the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood while Bo was Communist Party chief of the southwestern city of Chongqing.

The government last month accused Bo of corruption and of bending the law to hush up the murder.

Before Bo is charged and tried, investigators must first complete an inquiry and indict him, but China's prosecutors and courts come under party control and are unlikely to challenge the accusations.

A lawyer for Bo, who has been employed by the family to represent him, said on Thursday he was unable to say whether the government would allow him to represent Bo when the case comes to trial.

"It's theatre," said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, a New York-based advocacy group, who spoke before Bo's expulsion was announced.

"The judiciary grinds into action only when the outcome has been determined. There is no indication we will see a genuine trial because Bo knows too much."

Bo, 63, was widely seen as pursuing a powerful spot in the new leadership before his career unraveled after Wang fled to a U.S. consulate for more than 24 hours in February and alleged that Bo's wife had poisoned Heywood.

DISAPPEARED FROM VIEW

An official account of Wang's trial in September said Wang fled to the U.S. consulate in Chengdu, southwest China, after Bo beat him and stripped him of his police job following Wang's decision to confront Bo with the murder allegations against Gu.

Bo, a former commerce minister, used his post as Communist Party chief of Chongqing in southwest China since 2007 to cast the sprawling, haze-covered municipality into a showcase for his mix of populist policies and bold spending plans that won support from leftists yearning for a charismatic leader.

Wang had spearheaded Bo's controversial campaign against organized crime, a prominent plank in Bo's barely concealed campaign to join the topmost ranks of the Communist Party.

Bo was dismissed from his Chongqing post in March, and suspended from the party's top ranks in April, when his wife Gu was named as an official suspect in the murder in November of Heywood, a long-time friend of the couple who also helped their son Bo Guagua settle into study in Britain.

Bo has disappeared from public view since he was dismissed and has not had a chance to respond publicly to the accusations against him.

The removal of Bo has disrupted the Communist Party's usually secretive and carefully choreographed process of settling on a new central leadership.

Sharply dressed and courting publicity, Bo stood out in a party of stolid conformists, and he promoted Chongqing as a bold egalitarian alternative to China's current pattern of growth.

But Bo's promotion of "red" culture inspired by Mao Zedong's era and his campaign-style crackdown on crime prompted fears that he was rekindling some of the arbitrary lawlessness of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s -- a criticism that Premier Wen Jiabao spelled out before the public in mid-March.

(Reporting by Sui-Lee Wee, Ben Blanchard and Michael Martina; Editing by Paul Tait)

U.S. knew too little to deploy troops to Benghazi: Pentagon

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(Reuters) - China's largely rubber stamp parliament has expelled disgraced former senior politician Bo Xilai, state news agency Xinhua said on Friday, paving the way for formal criminal charges to be laid against him.

The expulsion removes Bo's immunity from prosecution as a member of parliament. Xinhua said the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, China's parliament, "announced the termination of Bo Xilai's post" as the deputy to the parliament.

The announcement comes a fortnight before the Communist Party holds a key congress, which opens on November 8, that will unveil the country's new central leadership.

Bo's wife, Gu Kailai, and his former police chief, Wang Lijun, have both been jailed over the scandal, which stems from the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood while Bo was Communist Party chief of the southwestern city of Chongqing.

The government last month accused Bo of corruption and of bending the law to hush up the murder.

Before Bo is charged and tried, investigators must first complete an inquiry and indict him, but China's prosecutors and courts come under party control and are unlikely to challenge the accusations.

A lawyer for Bo, who has been employed by the family to represent him, said on Thursday he was unable to say whether the government would allow him to represent Bo when the case comes to trial.

"It's theatre," said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, a New York-based advocacy group, who spoke before Bo's expulsion was announced.

"The judiciary grinds into action only when the outcome has been determined. There is no indication we will see a genuine trial because Bo knows too much."

Bo, 63, was widely seen as pursuing a powerful spot in the new leadership before his career unraveled after Wang fled to a U.S. consulate for more than 24 hours in February and alleged that Bo's wife had poisoned Heywood.

DISAPPEARED FROM VIEW

An official account of Wang's trial in September said Wang fled to the U.S. consulate in Chengdu, southwest China, after Bo beat him and stripped him of his police job following Wang's decision to confront Bo with the murder allegations against Gu.

Bo, a former commerce minister, used his post as Communist Party chief of Chongqing in southwest China since 2007 to cast the sprawling, haze-covered municipality into a showcase for his mix of populist policies and bold spending plans that won support from leftists yearning for a charismatic leader.

Wang had spearheaded Bo's controversial campaign against organized crime, a prominent plank in Bo's barely concealed campaign to join the topmost ranks of the Communist Party.

Bo was dismissed from his Chongqing post in March, and suspended from the party's top ranks in April, when his wife Gu was named as an official suspect in the murder in November of Heywood, a long-time friend of the couple who also helped their son Bo Guagua settle into study in Britain.

Bo has disappeared from public view since he was dismissed and has not had a chance to respond publicly to the accusations against him.

The removal of Bo has disrupted the Communist Party's usually secretive and carefully choreographed process of settling on a new central leadership.

Sharply dressed and courting publicity, Bo stood out in a party of stolid conformists, and he promoted Chongqing as a bold egalitarian alternative to China's current pattern of growth.

But Bo's promotion of "red" culture inspired by Mao Zedong's era and his campaign-style crackdown on crime prompted fears that he was rekindling some of the arbitrary lawlessness of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s -- a criticism that Premier Wen Jiabao spelled out before the public in mid-March.

(Reporting by Sui-Lee Wee, Ben Blanchard and Michael Martina; Editing by Paul Tait)

Pussy Riot got what they deserved: Putin

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(Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin flatly rejected on Thursday Western criticism of the imprisonment of the Pussy Riot punk protest band, saying its three female members deserved their fate because they threatened the moral foundations of Russia.

During a two-hour dinner conversation with a group of foreign Russia experts, Putin spent most of his time carefully explaining how his country was trying to improve the business climate and diversify the economy away from its heavy dependence on oil and gas by promoting high-tech industries.

The Kremlin chief said he had "mixed feelings" about a $55 billion state-sponsored takeover of the country's number three private oil producer TNK-BP last week because it increased state-controlled Rosneft's domination of the energy sector.

But Putin said he acted to help BP and put an end to "fistfights" between the British oil major and its four Soviet-born oligarch partners. "We tried not to get involved, but when BP managers came to me and the government and said we want to cooperate with Rosneft, we could not say no," said Putin. Rosneft is run by a longtime close Putin ally, Igor Sechin, and the deal will give BP a stake of nearly 20 percent.

Putin said he was implementing new laws and reforming the courts to reach a target of moving Russia up from its 112th place in the annual World Bank rankings for ease of doing business - below Pakistan - to a top 20 place by 2018.

PUSSY RIOT

But the president, now in his 13th year running Russia, became animated only when asked about Pussy Riot during the seven-course meal with the Valdai Club of foreign journalists and academics at his Stalin-era residence in a wooded compound outside Moscow.

The Valdai members were kept waiting in a separate room for an hour and a half for the meeting, while Putin met a group of factory workers and teachers from the Volga region to discuss religious cults.

Two young women from Pussy Riot received two-year prison sentences for "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred" after performing a crude anti-Putin protest song in Moscow's main cathedral. A third band member was released on a suspended sentence.

At Thursday's dinner Putin raised his voice, looked straight at the questioner and asked why Westerners who criticized Russia for sending two of the young women to labor camps far from Moscow had not come out in support of a jailed American who made an anti-Muslim hate film.

"Do you want to support people with such views? If you do, then why do you not support the guy who is sitting in prison for the film about the Muslims?" the president shot back.

This was an apparent reference to "The Innocence of Muslims", a crude hate video that triggered violent protests across the Islamic world when it was aired on the Internet.

An actress in the film has identified an Egyptian-born Californian, Mark Basseley Youssef, as its author. Youssef is currently detained on suspicion of violating his probation terms for a bank fraud conviction.

"We have red lines beyond which starts the destruction of the moral foundations of our society," Putin went on. "If people cross this line they should be made responsible in line with the law." He described Pussy Riot's protest as "an act of group sex aimed at hurting religious feelings".

CLAMPDOWN ON DISSENT

Putin's comments came amid a wider clampdown on dissent in Russia, which has included arrests of opposition leaders on criminal charges and tighter controls on media.

This has led to fears that the political system, which is highly centralized under the Kremlin, is becoming increasingly ossified and intolerant.

Putin deflected a question about the possible stagnation of the system by saying Russia was re-introducing direct elections for state governors, making it easier for political parties to register and allowing citizens to petition the state Duma (parliament) directly with proposals.

Many of the same faces who worked with Putin when he was deputy mayor of St Petersburg in the early 1990s are still in senior positions in Moscow in the government and in state companies.

But Putin said around two-thirds of the members of the government had been changed when he returned to the Kremlin earlier this year, swapping places with his protégé Dmitry Medvedev, who is now prime minister.

"I prefer to choose qualified, experienced people who have proved they can do well," the president explained. He rejected suggestions that there were any disputes inside the government in the wake of the departure just over a year ago of long-time Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin.

TRADE GOALS

Putin insisted that Russia would continue to give a high priority to growing its trade with its top business partner China, aiming to boost bilateral business to $100 billion a year from current levels of $83.5 billion.

Beijing and Moscow were also keen to do as much trade as possible in their national currencies, he said, noting that the rouble was fully convertible and that it was a "matter of time" until the yuan was, too.

By contrast, he berated the European Union for its "ridiculous" slowness in agreeing a visa-free regime for Russia and attacked Brussels for not taking him up on an offer of cooperation on a new satellite navigation system between the European Galileo system and Russia's GLONASS project./p>

"The EU has a visa-free regime with certain Latin American countries, and I don't think their crime levels are any less than ours," he said. "I don't understand this approach."

Putin also had a ready answer for a questioner who enquired how he would stop an exodus of talented, qualified young people to the West. It was entirely normal, he said, for young people to study and work in other countries where there was more money or a good education on offer.

And what would the president want historians to highlight as the greatest achievement of his third term in the Kremlin?

&"You know, I am never guided by a possible assessment of my work," Putin said, before highlighting how the economy had doubled in size under his stewardship, average incomes had soared, gold reserves were the world's fourth biggest, the birth rate had increased - all what he termed "modest, positive changes ... but not enough".

"We need to create a democratic, effective system of governance so that people feel they are participating," he said. "We need to create an effective economy which is looking forward and to guarantee the country's security. I am sure we are capable of solving all these problems."/p>

(Additional reporting by Gleb Bryanski; Editing by Will Waterman)

In campaign money race, Romney wins October, Obama leads overall

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(Reuters) - Mitt Romney and his Republican allies raised more than President Barack Obama and the Democrats in the first 17 days of October as both presidential campaign efforts approached the $1 billion mark, with Obama in the lead, disclosures showed on Thursday.

The tight 2012 presidential race has become the costliest in U.S. history thanks to massive spending on advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts by the campaigns and by outside groups that have no fundraising limits.

After several months of lagging Obama in fundraising, Romney, the Republican National Committee and allied state parties overtook their Democratic rivals in October with $111.8 million raised from October 1 to 17, his campaign said, a period that included two of the three televised presidential debates.

Obama's campaign raised $90.5 million for itself and Democratic Party allies during that period, becoming the first in history to raise a total of more than $1 billion for an election effort together with his party.

Romney and the RNC were close behind, taking in a total of $919.4 million throughout the 2012 campaign so far.

Obama's campaign hedged on the $1 billion figure, saying the total was still short of that mark - at about $988 million - based on a tally of the cash raised since April 4, 2011, when Obama's team and the party officially became one campaign.

Reuters totals are based on a more commonly used calculation method that includes campaign funds starting on April 1, 2011, and party efforts dating back to January 1, 2011.

"As the Romney campaign and their super PAC allies continue to outspend us on the air, we're making every effort to expand our donor base heading into the final stretch," said Obama campaign spokesman Adam Fetcher.

Romney's campaign said it had $169 million left in its own and the party's bank accounts at the end of October 17 - a hefty sum for use in the last leg of campaigning before the November 6 election and more than the $123.9 million available to Obama and the Democrats.

"There are less than two weeks left, but we still have much hard work to do to ensure that Mitt Romney and (running mate) Paul Ryan win in November and bring real change to Washington," said Spencer Zwick, Romney's national financial chairman.

With the two men running neck and neck in polls, Thursday's money disclosures are the last glimpse into the campaigns' finances before Election Day.

"In an election this close, they're certainly going to try to put every dollar to use," said Anthony Corrado, campaign finance expert and government professor at Colby College in Maine. "They're building up cash because they want to have as much money as they can for the big final push."

Obama voted early in Chicago on Thursday to encourage other Democrats to do so as both campaigns were in a hectic last-minute dash through the handful of crucial states seen as determining this year's winner.

WAR OF THE AIRWAVES

In a record-breaking spending spree, both campaigns have devoted the bulk of their cash to blanketing the airwaves with advertising.

In the first three weeks of October, the latest tally by the academic Wesleyan Media Project found that Republicans - Romney, his party and outside "Super PAC" groups - spent more than Democrats on ads, but Obama and his allies actually ran more ads.

Only candidates themselves are promised the cheapest rates for ads, meaning parties and outside groups have to pay up. While Romney has held a cash-on-hand advantage over Obama in recent months, it is thanks to strong fundraising by the Republican Party. Obama's campaign on its own has dwarfed Romney's in the money stakes in recent months.

That has afforded special prominence to the deep-pocketed Republican "Super PACs," outside spending groups that can raise unlimited funds and buy ads on Romney's behalf as long as their work is formally uncoordinated with the campaign.

The main pro-Romney Super PAC Restore Our Future on Thursday reported raising $20.1 million in the first 17 days of October.

Of that, $10 million was a new infusion from billionaire Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and wife Miriam, financial disclosures showed on Thursday. Harold Simmons, who is a Dallas banker and another top donor, gave $1 million.

The "super" political action committee had $24.2 million sitting in the bank as of October 17, the filing showed.

The pro-Obama Super PAC Priorities USA Action raised $12.7 million and had $10.1 million left in the bank on October 17.

The group received last-minute help from Silicon Valley start-ups, getting $1 million donations from LinkedIn co-founder Reid Garrett Hoffman, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus and Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla. Prominent billionaire financier George Soros also gave $1 million.

Another strong outside money group on Romney's side is American Crossroads, a Super PAC that is part of the effort spearheaded by veteran Republican operative Karl Rove, a former top aide to George W. Bush.

The group brought in $11.7 million in the first 2-1/2 weeks of October and had $6.4 million in cash on hand at the end.

After months of staying on the campaign sidelines, natural gas advocate and billionaire CEO of BP Capital T. Boone Pickens gave his first $1 million to the group earlier this month.

Other notable October contributions came from top Republican givers and the group's perennial donors Simmons, who gave $4 million, and Texas home builder Bob Perry, who gave $1 million.

(Additional reporting by Patrick Temple-West; Editing by Alistair Bell and Eric Walsh)

Final presidential debate is set to be World War 3 between President Obama, Mitt Romney

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US President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney have battled over national security, in the third and final presidential debate.

The rivals tangled over the Arab Spring, Iran, China's rise and more in a feisty 90-minute head-to-head.

Mr Obama said his challenger was "all over the map" on foreign policy, while Mr Romney said the president had failed to uphold American global leadership.

The two candidates are running neck and neck with two weeks until the election.

Mr Romney highlighted civilian deaths in Syria, the Muslim Brotherhood taking power in Egypt, the rise of al-Qaeda affiliates in North Africa, Iran's nuclear programme, and last month's Libya US consulate attack as examples of the "tumult" that the Obama administration had allowed to overtake the region.

"I congratulate him on taking out Osama bin Laden and taking on the leadership of al-Qaeda," the former Massachusetts governor said.

"But we can't kill our way out of this... We must have a comprehensive strategy."