Evening Edition

TRIPOLI (Reuters) – Muammar Gaddafi’s better armed and organized troops reversed the westward charge of rebels and world powers meeting in London piled pressure on the Libyan leader to end his 41-year rule.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, opening the London conference, accused Libyan troops of “murderous attacks,” while U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said military strikes would press on until Gaddafi loyalists ceased violence.

TOKYO (Reuters) – France and the United States are to help Japan in its battle to contain radiation from a crippled nuclear complex where plutonium finds have raised public alarm over the world’s worst atomic crisis since Chernobyl in 1986.

The high-stakes operation at the Fukushima plant has added to Japan’s unprecedented humanitarian disaster with 27,500 people dead or missing from a March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama told Americans on Monday that U.S. forces would not get bogged down trying to topple Muammar Gaddafi but stopped short of spelling out how the military campaign in Libya would end.

In a nationally televised address, Obama — accused by many lawmakers of failing to explain the U.S. role in the Western air assault on Gaddafi’s loyalists — said he had no choice but to act to avoid “violence on a horrific scale” against the Libyan people.

LONDON (Reuters) – An international coalition piled pressure on Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi on Tuesday to quit, resolving to continue military action against his forces until he complies with a U.N. resolution to protect civilians.

The United States, Britain and Qatar suggested that Gaddafi and his family could be allowed to go into exile if they took up the offer quickly to end six weeks of bloodshed.

LONDON – World powers agreed Tuesday that Moammar Gadhafi should step down after 42 years as Libya’s ruler but did not discuss arming the rebels who are seeking to oust him.

Top diplomats from up to 40 countries, the United Nations, NATO and the Arab League came to that conclusion Tuesday at crisis talks in London on the future of the North African nation.

BAGHDAD – Wearing military uniforms over explosives belts, gunmen held a local Iraqi government center hostage Tuesday in a grisly siege that ended with the deaths of at least 56 people, including three councilmen who were executed with gunshots to the head.

The five-hour standoff in Tikrit, former dictator Saddam Hussein’s home town, ended only when the attackers blew themselves up in one of the bloodiest days in Iraqi this year.

TOKYO – Japan’s government admitted Tuesday that its safeguards were insufficient to protect a nuclear plant against the earthquake and tsunami that crippled the facility and caused it to spew radiation, and it vowed to overhaul safety standards.

The struggle to contain radiation at the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex has unfolded with near-constant missteps – the latest including two workers drenched with radioactive water despite wearing supposedly waterproof suits.

WASHINGTON – Manslaughter and perjury are among possible charges that Justice Department investigators are exploring in the early stages of their probe into the Gulf oil spill, people familiar with the inquiry said Tuesday.

These people said the Justice Department is not ruling out the possibility of bringing manslaughter charges against companies or managers responsible for the explosion aboard the rig that killed 11 workers.

TOKYO (Reuters) – Over the past two weeks, Japanese government officials and Tokyo Electric Power executives have repeatedly described the deadly combination of the most powerful quake in Japan’s history and the massive tsunami that followed as “soteigai,” or beyond expectations.

When Tokyo Electric President Masataka Shimizu apologized to the people of Japan for the continuing crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant he called the double disaster “marvels of nature that we have never experienced before”.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Haitians will have to wait a few more days to learn the preliminary results of their presidential election.

An official with Haiti’s electoral council says preliminary results will be postponed to give poll workers more time to count ballots. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the decision had not yet been made public.

The preliminary results will now be released Monday. They had been scheduled for release Thursday.

KANO, Nigeria (AFP) – Police in northern Nigeria on Tuesday discovered two home-made bombs in a car carrying three suspected Islamists heading for a political rally ahead of general elections.

Police suspect the target of the bombs was a political meeting of the All Nigerian Peoples Party (ANPP) held in the city of Maiduguri, which has recently been the centre of attacks by an Islamist sect known as Boko Haram.

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Tuesday questioned a massive sex discrimination lawsuit on behalf of at least 500,000 women claiming that Wal-Mart favors men over women in pay and promotions.

The justices suggested that they are troubled by lower court decisions allowing the class-action lawsuit to proceed against the world’s largest retailer.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A legislative committee approved a measure Tuesday that would limit collective bargaining rights for 350,000 Ohio government workers, a key hurdle as the state moves closer to Wisconsin-style restrictions on public employee unions.

The Republican-controlled House Commerce and Labor Committee voted 9-6 along party lines to recommend the bill after making more than a dozen substantive changes to the legislation that was approved by the Senate.

PARIS (AFP) – Standard & Poor’s downgraded its credit ratings on struggling Greece and Portugal on Tuesday, saying that investors in their bonds could lose out under the terms of a new eurozone bailout system.

S&P cut Portugal by one notch to BBB-, having slashed its rating only last week on fears Lisbon would have to seek a bailout after the government fell when parliament rejected austerity plans aimed to balance the public books.

OTTAWA (Reuters) – The two main parties contesting Canada’s election have the same fundamental economic goals — cutting the budget deficit chief among them — but two very different approaches.

The May 2 election pits the incumbent right-of-center, tax-cutting Conservatives against the centrist Liberals, who say Canada can afford new spending programs if it scraps expensive programs favored by the government.

PHOENIX (Reuters) – A judge has ruled that he would select a psychiatrist to conduct a second, independent evaluation of Arizona shooting rampage suspect Jared Lee Loughner, reversing an earlier decision to leave the choice to defense lawyers.

Loughner, who has a widely publicized history of erratic, paranoid behavior, is charged with killing six people and wounding 13 others, including an Arizona congresswoman, during a January 8 shooting spree in Tucson.

ATLANTA (Reuters) – A U.S. court has ruled against Kuwaiti logistics company Agility on a key point of law, dealing a blow to the company’s fight against charges it defrauded the U.S. Army in multibillion-dollar contracts.

Agility was the largest supplier to the U.S. Army in the Middle East during the war in Iraq and the case is politically sensitive in both Washington and Kuwait.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday backed Iran in a dispute with Americans who demand that Persian antiquities in two Chicago museums be used to pay damages for victims of a 1997 suicide bombing in Israel.

The decision by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals overturns a lower court ruling allowing the U.S. plaintiffs to search for any and all Iranian assets in the United States to pay a $71.5 million judgment against Iran.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Johnson & Johnson said it was recalling more than 700,000 bottles or packages of Tylenol and other consumer medicines made at a now-closed plant, the latest in a litany of recalls by the company.

J&J’s McNeil Consumer Healthcare unit recalled one lot of Tylenol 8 Hour Extended Release Caplets, or 34,056 bottles, from retailers, the company said.

MIAMI (Reuters) – A Jamaican financier who ran a Ponzi scheme that defrauded thousands of investors in Florida and the Caribbean out of more than $220 million pleaded guilty on Tuesday to fraud and money laundering charges in a U.S. court.

David Smith was extradited last year from the Turks and Caicos Islands after being sentenced to six-and-a-half years in prison on similar charges.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – American Muslims face a rising tide of religious discrimination in U.S. communities, workplaces and schools nearly a decade after the September 11 attacks, a congressional committee heard on Tuesday.

Evidence of growing anti-Muslim bigotry, aired at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing, poses a challenge for President Barack Obama as his administration works to foster good relations with American Muslims and secure their help against the threat of home-grown terrorism.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States fell one spot to third place in clean-energy investment last year as the lack of a national energy policy hurt purchases in wind and solar power and other technologies, a report said on Tuesday.

China came in first and Germany second, according to the report “Who’s Winning the Clean Energy Race” by the Pew Charitable Trusts, an independent, nonprofit group.

MADISON, Wis (Reuters) – Opponents of Wisconsin’s new law curbing the union rights of public employees were back in court on Tuesday, pursuing one of several legal challenges to the Republican-backed measure.

Dane County Circuit Court Judge Maryann Sumi, who issued an injunction two weeks ago blocking the law’s implementation, ruled to proceed with testimony in the case filed by the Dane County district attorney, who alleges the Republican legislators who passed the measure broke the state’s strict Open Meetings Laws.

BEIJING (AFP) – Beijing on Tuesday dismissed calls by a United Nations human rights agency to free prominent rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, saying the body should respect China’s judicial sovereignty.

The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention demanded China release Gao, alleging his incarceration breached numerous UN conventions and China’s own law, according to a statement released by advocacy group Freedom Now.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – With time running short on a deal to keep the government operating, Democrats accused Republicans Tuesday of catering to a conservative base rather than working toward a compromise that would cut spending and avoid a shutdown.

The two sides are battling over spending levels for the current fiscal year, which is nearly halfway over. Republicans hope to keep a campaign promise to scale back the government, while Democrats say that sharp spending cuts would hurt the economic recovery.

Any lawmaker who so much as thinks about tinkering with Social Security anytime in the next decade will have to go through Harry Reid (and a few of his friends) first.

A handful of liberal Democratic senators pushed back against calls from Republicans and even fellow Democrats to reform the national pension system during a rally on Capitol Hill Monday.

WASHINGTON – The No. 2 Republican in the House said Tuesday that the chamber won’t pass another short-term federal funding bill to avert a government shutdown if talks between the GOP and the White House fail to produce a 2011 spending agreement by an April 8 deadline.

Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia said “time is up” and that it’s up to Democrats controlling the White House and the Senate to offer significant spending cuts as part of legislation to fund the government for the rest of the budget year.

If House Republican leaders are looking to tighten the nation’s fiscal belt, the budget hawks in the conservative Republican Study Committee want to apply it as a tourniquet.

Their tool: an ambitious fiscal 2012 alternative budget that will challenge the official GOP leadership’s spending plan and once again reveal divides within the Republican Party over how deep to cut the government.

NEW YORK – Home prices are falling in most major U.S. cities, and the average price in four of them is at an 11-year low. Analysts expect further prices declines in most cities in the coming months.

The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller index released Tuesday shows home prices dropped in 19 cities from December to January. Eleven of them are at their lowest level since the housing bust, in 2006 and 2007. The index fell for the sixth straight month.

WASHINGTON – The pain of rejection is more than just a figure of speech.

The regions of the brain that respond to physical pain overlap with those that react to social rejection, according to a new study that used brain imaging on people involved in romantic breakups.

“These results give new meaning to the idea that rejection `hurts,'” wrote psychology professor Ethan Kross of the University of Michigan and his colleagues. Their findings are reported in Tuesday’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.