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An Iraqi police official says gunmen have attacked the house of a police officer near the northern oil-rich city of Kirkuk, killing one of his guards.

Kirkuk’s police commander Brig. Gen. Sarhad Qadir says the officer was unharmed in Saturday’s attack in the predominantly Sunni town of Hawija, a former insurgent stronghold located 150 miles (240 kilometers) north of Baghdad.

Suspected Sunni insurgents have frequently targeted Iraqi security forces to undermine the confidence in the Shiite-dominated government and its efforts to protect people from violence without American backup payday loans in one hour.

Attacks have surged amid an escalating political crisis in Iraq. At least 160 people have been killed since the beginning of the year, raising fears of civil war a month after U.S. soldiers left.

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Workers used white tarps Friday to cover the exterior signs of Shula’s 347 Grill, which abruptly closed last week at the Roberts Tower, the stylish but empty condo building in downtown St. Louis.

Taped to the front door was a sign that read, “We are closed to make exciting changes!”

How the street-level space will change could not be immediately determined, but Shula’s will not return. Robert Zarco, the lawyer for Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based Shula Steak Houses, said Friday that the company pulled its St. Louis franchise, which he said was held by a firm controlled by businessmen brothers Mike and Steve Roberts.

Zarco said Shula’s main concern in St. Louis was that employees of the local restaurant were not getting paid.

“The tension was between the employees and the franchisee arising from the employees’ claiming they were not paid their wages and salaries,” he said. “In our view it impairs the brand and corporate good will of our company when employees are not paid.”

Efforts to reach Roberts company officials were unsuccessful.

Zarco said the Roberts company did not fight the loss of its Shula 347 Grill franchise. The restaurant, on the ground floor of the Roberts Tower, opened last spring.

About 30 Shula restaurants in a chain begun by retired Miami Dolphins coach Don Shula operate in more than a dozen states.

The sleek glass-and-concrete Roberts Tower, at 411 North 8th Street, is a Roberts development that has no residents two years past what had been its expected opening.

The 25-story tower adjoins the Roberts Mayfair Hotel, where some hourly workers have said they sometimes do not get paid on time.

Pending against another Roberts entity, Roberts Hospitality Services II, are liens for unpaid state sales and use taxes. The largest is for nearly $1.3 million. Nearly all of that amount is for what the lien document describes as “addition to tax” to the $25,412 in taxes owed for June 2011.

Ted Farnen, spokesman for the Missouri Department of Revenue, said Friday that the lien would be ’significantly” altered but would not say whether the amount would be revised up or down.

Also owed by Roberts Hospitality Services are payments to vendors. Among them is a $19,294 judgment obtained by Middendorf Meat Co. Its lawyer, Vincent D. Vogler, said Middendorf sued to collect for food sold to the Mayfair and what had been the Roberts’ Indigo Hotel on Lindell Boulevard. The Indigo is now operated as a Comfort Inn.

In October, yet another Roberts company

A series of blasts in central Iraq apparently targeting street vendors and day laborers killed 10 people on Saturday, police officials said.

The first two bombs were planted in the early morning in a spot where day laborers gather in the mostly Sunni village of al-Zaidan, near the town of Abu Ghraib west of Baghdad. They killed seven people and wounded 11 others, the officials said.

Hours later, three bombs exploded near the kiosks of vendors selling CDs and military uniforms in central Baghdad, killing three people and wounding eight others.

Health officials at Abu Ghraib’s general hospital and at Ibin al-Nafis hospital in Baghdad confirmed the casualty figures. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they w not authorized to release the information.

Violence has ebbed across Iraq, but deadly bombings and shootings still occur almost daily as U.S. troops prepare to leave by the end of the year.

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Federal prosecutors are seeking a lenient prison sentence for a former Swiss banker convicted of tax fraud because of his assistance in uncovering other tax evasion cases.

A judge in Miami will sentence former UBS AG banker Renzo Gadola on Friday. He pleaded guilty in 2010 to tax fraud conspiracy and has been working extensively with prosecutors since then.

Prosecutors are asking the judge to sentence Gadola below the 10-month minimum recommended in sentencing guidelines. They say he helped build cases against former colleagues and bank customers who had secret Swiss accounts.

The case is the part of a broad IRS campaign to identify wealthy tax dodgers. UBS in 2009 agreed to disclose identities of thousands of U.S. clients and paid a $780 million fine for tax evasion.

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It looks like the United Auto Workers union and General Motors Co. are nearing an agreement on a new contract.

UAW Vice President Joe Ashton, the union’s chief negotiator, told workers in an email update Friday that bargainers are getting “very close” to the framework of a deal.

“I am optimistic that the negotiations process is entering its final stage,” Ashton wrote. “I truly believe that a settlement is within reach.”

But Ashton also cautioned that both sides still need to do more work, saying that agreements of this size undergo many revisions before they are final.

Contract talks between the union and GM, Chrysler Group LLC and Ford Motor Co. began in July and will determine wages and benefits for factory workers at all three companies. They will also set the bar for wages at auto parts companies, U.S. factories run by foreign automakers and other manufacturers, which employ hundreds of thousands of people. The talks are the first since GM and Chrysler needed government aid to make it through bankruptcy protection in 2009.

Workers at all three companies have stayed on the job under terms of a contract that expired Wednesday night. Workers at GM and Chrysler cannot strike over wages under the terms of the companies’ 2009 government bailouts. Ford workers can still strike. Each company negotiates with the union separately.

Negotiators with GM and the union bargained until around 9 p.m. Thursday and resumed talks on Friday morning.

“We continue to make progress in negotiations,” GM spokeswoman Kim Carpenter said, declining further comment.

The union is seeking bigger profit-sharing checks, guarantees of more jobs, signing bonuses and raises for entry-level workers. Ford and GM want to cut their hourly labor costs, which still are higher than Asian automakers with U.S. factories. Chrysler is trying to hold its costs steady.

Talks with Chrysler and Ford also are continuing, but have slowed as the union concentrates on GM. Any deal with GM would be used as a template for the other two companies, although unlike past years, there will be differences to match each company’s finances.

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QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“Encouraging people to remain on unemployment for 99 weeks can literally disable them psychologically for a lifetime. Two years of inactivity can be so debilitating as to render men and women psychologically crippled, and in need of extraordinary interventions to rekindle mood, confidence and motivation.”

Prime Minister Julia Gillard softened the impact of her unpopular carbon tax plans on Sunday by promising it will not increase Australian gasoline prices.

She said the tax would never be applied to gasoline despite transport being Australia’s third-largest and fastest-growing source of greenhouse gas emissions.

The government plans to tax big polluters for every ton of carbon gas they produce beginning July 1 next year in a bid to reduce Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. The plan is weighing the ruling center-left Labor Party down in disastrous opinion polling because of fears about how it will affect costs, particularly electricity costs.

Key issues including the tax rate and how compensation will be distributed to help industry and households make the transition to a lower-carbon economy are still being negotiated with the minor Greens party and independent lawmakers whose support is crucial to the plan becoming law.

Gillard on Sunday ended some of the most politically damaging speculation that the tax would increase pump prices.

“Petrol prices will not be touched by carbon pricing,” Gillard told Australian Broadcasting Corp. television. “The design of this scheme is that petrol will be out now and out for the future.”

Her promise will anger the Greens party, which wants the tax applied across the entire economy.

Gillard credited rural independent lawmaker Tony Windsor with swaying her to exclude gasoline. Gillard relies on Windsor’s support to maintain a fragile single-seat majority in the House of Representatives.

“He has put forward a powerful case for people in country Australia who have got no choice but to jump in their cars and get places,” she said, referring to a lack of public transport outside big cities.

The Australia Chamber of Commerce and Industry said in a statement the gasoline exemption would will simply shift the price burden of reducing the nation’s emissions to other areas of the economy.

The government has promised to slash Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 to at least 5 percent below 2000 levels. Australia is one of the world’s worst greenhouse gas emitters per capita, largely because it relies heavily on abundant reserves of cheap coal for electricity.

Conservative opposition leader Tony Abbott opposes polluters being forced to pay anything for the carbon gas that they create. His stance has helped his coalition lead in recent opinion polls.

Labor is hoping that public hostility toward the tax will have subsided before Australia’s next elections are due in 2013.

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Chinese railway authorities say all is ready for the opening of a showcase high-speed railway between Beijing and Shanghai later this month.

Railways Ministry Vice Minister Hu Yadong told reporters in Beijing on Monday that tickets for the rail link between the China’s top two cities would range from 410 yuan to 1,750 yuan ($63 to $270), depending on speed and class of train seat.

The fastest travel time on the 1,318-kilometer (813 mile) line will be five hours, or about half the current time, and the longest to just under eight hours, he said in a transcript posted on the ministry’s website.

Trial operations for the new rail line began May 11. Its formal inauguration coincides with the July 1st 90th anniversary of the founding of the ruling Communist Party.

“We can proudly say that the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway is China’s own, independent landmark project,” Hu said.

Hu said the railway was designed to ensure absolute security and safety. Earlier, the top operational speed for its trains was cut to 300 kilometers per hour (186 mph) from the originally planned 350 kph (217 mph), after questions were raised about safety.

China will continue to run 136 ordinary trains between the two cities, Hu said.

Overall, China aims to have 8,000 miles (13,000 kilometers) of high-speed rail in place by the year’s end and twice that length by 2020. Ticket prices now range from 179 yuan ($27.50) for a seat on the slowest trains to 730 yuan ($112) for a sleeper berth on the fastest ones.

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Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn hasn’t yet said how

Greece doesn’t need to restructure its debt for now and should only consider an extension of its international loans, said Herakles Polemarchakis, an economic adviser to Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou.

“The debt has to be addressed,” Polemarchakis said in an interview at an event late yesterday at the London School of Economics. “I think that the rescheduling — or re-profiling as it is called sometimes — of the 100 billion euros given by the International Monetary Fund and the European Union, that’s something that could easily be done.”

Greek bond yields and the cost of insuring the country’s debt against default rose to records last week, rekindling speculation that a debt write-off or extension of repayment timelines will be the way out of the country’s fiscal quagmire. Possible options open to Greece include rescheduling the loans with the EU and IMF, lengthening the payback period of private debt, and a restructuring, Polemarchakis said.

“For the moment we don’t need to talk about anything except possibly for the easiest, which is the rescheduling of the EU and IMF loan,” said Polemarchakis, who is a professor at the University of Warwick in England.

A rescheduling would mean “no nominal loss, but you pay over a longer period,” he said. “By restructuring, I mean some loss of face value.”

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The extra yield, or spread, investors demand to hold Greek 10-year bonds instead of similar-maturity German bunds widened to 1,221 basis points today from 1,199 points yesterday. That compares with a low this year of 754 basis points in February. A basis point is 0.01 percentage point.

Greece’s refinancing needs of 58 billion euros ($86 billion) are covered this year by the loan package from the EU and IMF. Under the aid plan, Greece is supposed to regain market access next year, refinance at least three-quarters of its maturing medium- and long-term debt, and then fully fund debt rollovers beginning in mid-2013.

Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou said this week in Athens that easier terms for 110 billion euros of international loans would help avoid a debt restructuring. A restructuring, causing losses for bondholders would lock the country out of markets for a decade or more, he also said.

“For the very short run, we all know that the funding required by the banks of Greece are covered for the next two to three years by the memorandum,” Polemarchakis said in a speech at the LSE organized by the college’s Hellenic Observatory.

“As far as restructuring pressure is concerned, there is no pressure right now,” he said. “For the medium run, I agree that calculations should be done, but as long as the IMF and the EU support the banks, they pay our debts. I do not think this is an issue to be concerned about.”

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