Evening Edition

Almost 13 weeks after the disaster began with a deadly explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig, the end is finally in sight as engineers place the “Top Hat 10” device over the giant gusher a mile down on the sea floor.

BP chief operating officer said once the cap was connected and its valves closed to shut off the flow, critical pressure tests would be carried out to study the well’s integrity.

The twin attacks in the Ugandan capital dampened Africa’s post World Cup euphoria, drew a barrage of global condemnation and marked an unprecedented internationalisation of Somalia’s two-decade-old civil war.

“We are behind the attack because we are at war with them,” Ali Mohamoud Rage, the Shebab group’s top spokesman told reporters in Mogadishu.

“There are reasonable grounds to believe that (Omar al-Beshir) acted with specific intent to destroy in part the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups” in Darfur, said a new warrant issued Monday — the court’s first for genocide.

The Justice and Equality Movement rebel group called the development “a victory for the people of Darfur and the entire humanity.”

Belgian Finance Minister Didier Reynders, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency, said governments would “take the necessary measures” if the tests show that some banks appear vulnerable to a new economic crisis.

Finance ministers also defended the methodology of the tests and denied that standards had been watered down to ensure good scores for the 91 banks being examined.

Sarkozy backed Labour Minister Eric Woerth, accused of accepting 150,000 euros from L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt during the 2007 presidential race and of conflict of interest because his wife helped manage the billionaire’s wealth.

“France is not a corrupt country,” the president declared in a prime time interview on French television. “The political class, left and right alike, is in general honest. French public officials are people of great rigour.”

People chanted “Campeones! Campeones! Campeones!” and waved red and gold Spanish flags at the players as the black bus crawled along a roughly eight-kilometre (five-mile) route through the city’s main thoroughfares amid scorching temperatures.

Fans waved at the players from balconies while others climbed on trees to get a better view of the 23-man squad which won the World Cup on Sunday for the first time in Spain’s history with a 1-0 extra-time defeat of the Netherlands.

Just as it seemed a third World Cup final was destined to be settled by a penalty shoot-out, the Barcelona midfielder found himself in space in the Dutch box and hammered an unstoppable shot past goalkeeper Maarten Stekelenburg.

It was a cruel blow for a Dutch side that had hoped to eradicate memories of the country’s defeats in the 1974 and 1978 finals.

The centre of Madrid was a sea of the red and gold national colours as Spain celebrated its nailbiting 1-0 extra-time win over Holland Sunday.

The deafening sounds of cheering, klaxons, firecrackers and cars horns rang out as the World Cup’s perennial underachievers won the trophy in their first appearance in the final thanks to a late goal from Andres Iniesta.

Being a football goalkeeper can be a precarious and lonely business at times as shot-stoppers are far more often branded as villains than heroes.

But the international goalkeeping fraternity will have noted with delight the two vital interventions made by Spain captain Casillas.

The skies grew black in the middle of the day as the Moon slipped in front of the Sun and aligned with the Earth, blotting out the sunshine that just moments earlier had swathed the island’s silent, ancient stone guardians.

Applause erupted from thousands of stargazers who began gathering days ago on this remote Chilean outpost for the rare four-minute, 41-second eclipse.

The Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) on Sunday suffered a major setback at elections to the upper house of parliament that spell the loss of its slim majority and create obstacles for much-need fiscal reforms.

The head of the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Tadashi1 Okamura, warned after the result: “We cannot afford to delay the national policy even for a second.”

Senate Democrats have not yet abandoned their hope to give final congressional approval to the landmark measure this week and send it on to President Barack Obama to sign into law. They picked up an important Republican swing vote on Monday.

But with one Democratic seat vacant and other possible Republican allies tight-lipped after a weeklong break, backers remained short of the 60 votes needed to clear a procedural hurdle in the 100-seat chamber.

The explosions in the closing moments of Sunday’s match ripped through a crowded restaurant and a rugby club in the capital Kampala.

Al Shabaab militants in anarchic Somalia had already threatened to attack Uganda for sending peacekeeping troops to prop up its fragile, Western-backed government.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke underlined the necessity for companies — many still working their way back to health from the deep recession — to be able to get loans when they need them to expand and to hire.

“To support the recovery, we need to find ways to ensure that credit-worthy borrowers have access to needed loans,” he told a Fed-sponsored conference on small business financing.

Omar Khadr, now 23, was captured in a firefight in Afghanistan in 2002 and has spent more than a third of his life at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo in eastern Cuba. He is to go on trial on August 10 on charges of murdering a soldier with a grenade.

In a pre-trial hearing at the U.S. war crimes court at the base, he told a military judge that the deal would have seem him sentenced to 30 years in prison, with all but five years suspended, in return for an admission of guilt.

But the finale in Johannesburg of the first World Cup held in Africa was scarred by a horrific turn of events elsewhere on the continent when bombs ripped through two bars packed with fans in Uganda, killing 64 people.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but al Qaeda-inspired militants in Somalia have previously threatened to attack Uganda for sending peacekeepers there.

Video of the billowing brown oil leak showed glimpses of yellow equipment and swinging robot arms engaged in a project akin to building a giant Lego tower underwater.

BP officials said that the 18-foot-high, 150,000-pound metal cap should be attached on Monday but that they will have to test and monitor the equipment for two days to see if it can throttle the nation’s worst offshore oil spill. Late Monday afternoon, the cap was being lowered into place and was just 40 feet away from the top of the well.

There’s no way to know how many chicks have been killed by the oil, or starved because their parents were rescued or died struggling in a slick.

“There are plenty of oiled babies out there,” said Rebecca Dmytryk of the International Bird Rescue Research Center, one of the groups working to clean oiled animals.

Gingrich, 67, told The Associated Press that he would focus on helping Republican candidates through the midterm elections in November, then decide in February or March whether to seek the GOP nomination.

“I’ve never been this serious,” Gingrich said.

The claim by al-Shabab, whose fighters are trained by militant veterans of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, resets the security equation in East Africa and has broader implications worldwide. The group in the past has recruited Somali-Americans to carry out suicide bombings in Mogadishu.

Al-Shabab, an ultraconservative Islamic group that has drawn comparisons to the Taliban, has long threatened to attack outside of Somalia’s borders, but the bombings late Sunday are the first time the group has done so.

The gap helps explain why the economic rebound isn’t stronger and could even stall. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke stepped up pressure Monday on banks to break the logjam and lend more to smaller firms, which employ at least half of American workers.

Small business owners are relying on personal credit cards or raiding retirement accounts to stay afloat, the Fed chairman said.

The decision marked the first time the world’s first permanent war crimes tribunal has issued genocide charges.

An arrest warrant for al-Bashir said there were “reasonable grounds to believe” that since April 2003 Sudanese forces attempted genocide against the Darfur tribal groups Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa.

Hundreds of thousands of people – if not more – jammed Madrid’s historic avenues as an open air bus ferried the national team down stately avenues to cheers from Spaniards decked out in a sea of red and yellow, the colors of the Spanish flag.

The celebration in Madrid, where national unity is at its strongest, was expected. But there were striking examples of support from unlikely places: The well-off Catalonia region, which has long sought greater autonomy, and the separatist Basque region, where anything pro-Spain is often shunned.

A testy and often dirty match was won by Andres Iniesta’s goal late in extra time Sunday night. The 1-0 victory over the Netherlands before a shivering crowd at Soccer City Stadium gave Spain its first World Cup, and put the European champion Spaniards in elite company.

“I remember (Italy captain Fabio) Cannavaro told me that being world champion doesn’t happen every day,” captain Iker Casillas said. “This really is quite a cup. The European Championship was the most important moment of our lives, but today is much bigger than anything else.”

Several prominent counterterror experts are challenging the administration’s shift in its recently unveiled National Security Strategy, saying the terror threat should be defined in order to fight it.

The question of how to frame the conflict against al-Qaida and other terrorists poses a knotty problem. The U.S. is trying to mend fences with Muslim communities while toughening its strikes against militant groups.

There are better brain scans to spot Alzheimer’s disease. More genes that affect risk. Blood and spinal fluid tests that may help tell who will develop the mind-robbing illness and when.

But what is needed most – a treatment that does more than just ease symptoms – is not at hand.

With U.S. obesity rates nearing 35 percent of the adult population, expectations are high for the first new prescription drug therapies to emerge in more than a decade. Even a modestly effective drug has blockbuster potential.

None of the three medicines represents a breakthrough in research. Drugmakers have made little headway in understanding and treating the causes of overeating. Two of the drugs submitted for approval simply combine different existing drugs – one with worrying side effects. The third, a new medication, is safer but less effective.

Half of the 242 seats in the upper house of parliament were up for grabs Sunday. The ruling Democratic Party of Japan won only 44 seats – far below its stated goal of 54 – while opposition parties made major gains.

That leaves the Democrats and their tiny coalition partner with 110 seats, well below their majority of 122 before the vote. The conservative Liberal Democratic Party won 51 seats, bringing its total to 84.