Evening Edition

“I think what we need to understand is there’s a lot of oil that’s been taken care of. There’s a lot of oil that’s still out there,” said Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen on CNN.

“You need to keep a steady hand at the tiller here, keep this cleanup going,” he said, describing it as a “catastrophe for the people of the Gulf” and calling for a close study of the damage done to the environment.

The bullet-riddled bodies of five men, all Americans, and three women, an American, a German and a Briton, were found in the northeastern province of Badakhshan on Friday, according to the provincial police chief.

Two Afghans were also killed in the attack and one survived.

Iconic buildings like the Kremlin towers and the city’s wedding-cake Stalin-era skyscrapers were obscured by the acrid smoke, while Saint Petersburg and neighbouring Finland were also starting to feel the effects.

The wildfires have sparked a major crisis in western Russia, killing 52 people and sending authorities scrambling to protect strategic sites, including the country’s main nuclear research facilities.

Both Mia Farrow and Carole White are liable to contradict Campbell when they take the stand at the “blood diamonds” trial of the former Liberian president at the Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague.

Court documents suggest that White will testify that Campbell knew in advance she would get diamonds from Taylor after a dinner in South Africa in 1997 — and that she seemed disappointed with the “pebbles” she had received.

“I really think we’re going to end up with three EVAs,” or extra vehicular activities, ISS manager Michael Suffredini said after US astronauts completed a first spacewalk in which they ran into trouble trying to unhook and remove the busted module that has caused the cooling problem.

A second spacewalk has already been scheduled for no earlier than Wednesday, but NASA said it was clear that a third walk was now needed.

Some Gulf Coast beaches and fisheries were reopening after the world’s worst offshore oil accident, as optimism grew for a final kill of the blown-out BP well this month, the top U.S. spill response official said on Sunday news shows.

But in comments aimed at reassuring anxious Gulf Coast residents worried about their future livelihoods, response chief retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, and White House Energy Adviser Carol Browner, acknowledged that much still remained to be done to restore the oil-hit coastal region.

The bodies of 10 medical aid workers, eight foreigners and two Afghans, were flown by helicopter from Badakshan province back to Kabul on Sunday, the U.S. embassy in the Afghan capital said, confirming that six of the dead were American.

The International Assistance Mission (IAM) had said the victims were members of its 12-strong eye care team that had been working in Badakshan and neighboring Nuristan.

Pressed by security authorities, the Saudi telecom regulator has given the kingdom’s three mobile carriers until Monday to fulfill unspecified requirements before it proceeds with a threat to shut down the BlackBerry’s Messenger.

The ban was meant to be enacted on Friday and would have affected some 700,000 users in the kingdom.

Siyamak Herawi, a spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai, said the push to scrap firms employing tens of thousands of private security guards was linked to Karzai’s 2014 timetable for Afghan forces to take over all security and operational responsibilities from U.S. and NATO-led forces.

“The government wants to deal thoroughly with the companies and now that the capacity of the Afghan government is gradually increasing those entities in need of security individuals can use organized and educated Afghan soldiers,” Herawi told Reuters.

The Gulf’s fisheries are beginning to reopen more than three months after the oil began gushing from the sea floor, but those in the seafood industry say that doesn’t mean everything has returned to normal.

“We have a huge perception problem,” said Ewell Smith, director of the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board. “We have lost markets across the country, and some of them may be lost for good.”

On the menu? Heaping trays of barbecued chicken, smoked sausage and potato salad – but no crabs or shrimp.

Blame the BP oil spill. The company has plugged the leak and announced Sunday that cement sealing the busted oil well in the Gulf of Mexico had hardened, clearing the path for the final phase of drilling a relief well.

The years of service ended in a hail of bullets in a remote valley of a land that members of the medical team had learned to love.

The bodies of the 10 slain volunteers – six Americans, two Afghans, a German and a Briton – were flown Sunday back to Kabul by helicopter, even as friends and family bitterly rejected Taliban claims the group had tried to convert Afghans to Christianity.

Dr. Thomas Grams, 51, quit his dental practice in Durango, Colo., four years ago to work full-time giving impoverished children free dental care in Nepal and Afghanistan, said Katy Shaw of Global Dental Relief, a Denver-based group that sends teams of dentists around the globe. He was killed Thursday, Shaw said, along with five other Americans, two Afghans, one German and a Briton.

“The kids had never seen toothbrushes, and Tom brought thousands of them,” said Khris Nedam, head of the Kids 4 Afghan Kids in Livonia, Mich., which builds schools and wells in Afghanistan. “He trained them how to brush their teeth, and you should’ve seen the way they smiled after they learned to brush their teeth.”

The harassment accusation set off a chain of events that led to the discovery of allegedly falsified expense reports for dinners Hurd had with the woman and culminated in Hurd’s forced resignation Friday from the world’s largest technology company.

The person familiar with the case told the AP late Satuday that Hurd agreed to pay the woman but would not reveal the size of the payment. The deal was reached Thursday, a day before Hurd’s resignation. The settlement was between Hurd and his accuser and did not involve a payment from HP, this person said.

“All I want to do is work,” said Skidmore, of Finksburg, Md., who was an insurance claims adjuster for 37 years before his company downsized and closed his office last year. “And nobody will hire me.”

It is one of the most striking fallouts from the bad economy: Social Security is facing its first-ever shortfall this year as a wave of people like Skidmore opt to collect payments before their full retirement age. Adding to the strain on the trust are reduced tax collections sapped by the country’s historic unemployment – still at 9.5 percent.

Foes of proposed mosques have deployed dogs to intimidate Muslims holding prayer services and spray painted “Not Welcome” on a construction sign, then later ripped it apart.

The 13-story, $100 million Islamic center that could soon rise two blocks from the site of the Sept. 11 attacks would dwarf the proposals elsewhere, yet the smaller projects in local communities are stoking a sharper kind of fear and anger than has showed up in New York.

Also Sunday, the bodies of 10 members of a medical team – six Americans, two Afghans, one German and a Briton – were flown to Kabul from the northern province of Badakhshan, where they were gunned down three days ago at the end of a humanitarian mission. The Taliban claimed responsibility and accused the group of spying and seeking to convert Muslims to Christianity.

The Taliban and their allies were responsible for 68 percent of the at least 1,325 civilian deaths recorded by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, the organization said in a report. Twenty-three percent were ascribed to NATO or Afghan government forces.

The visit comes 35 years after the Vietnam War as Washington and Hanoi are cozying up in a number of areas, from negotiating a controversial deal to share civilian nuclear fuel and technology to agreeing that China needs to work with its neighbors to resolve territorial claims in the South China Sea.

The USS George Washington’s stop is officially billed as a commemoration of last month’s 15th anniversary of normalized diplomatic relations between the former foes. But the timing also reflects Washington’s heightened interest in maintaining security and stability in the Asia-Pacific amid tensions following the sinking of a South Korean warship in March, which killed 46 sailors. North Korea has been blamed for the attack, but has vehemently denied any involvement.

According to congressional investigators, the exact average was 178 days. By that time, many cases go cold, making it difficult to catch perpetrators, much less recover money for taxpayers.

A recent inspector general report also raised questions about the contractors, who play an important role in Medicare’s overall effort to combat fraud.

“I can assure you that we will keep publishing documents – that’s what we do,” a WikiLeaks spokesman, who says he goes by the name Daniel Schmitt in order to protect his identity, told The Associated Press in an interview Saturday.

Schmitt said he could not comment on any specific documents but asserted that the publication of classified documents about the Afghanistan war directly contributed to the public’s understanding of the conflict.

No matter that Brooklyn-born Ginsburg and O’Connor, raised on a ranch in Arizona, look and sound nothing alike.

The confusion arose because, even at the dawn of the 21st century, women on the court were “one- or two-at-a-time curiosities,” Ginsburg said.

His comments come as device maker Research in Motion Ltd. is facing opposition by a number of countries around the world, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in the Gulf, to the way its encrypted e-mail and messenger services are managed.

Bahrain’s Sheik Khaled bin Ahmed Al Khalifa told The Associated Press the handheld devices raise legitimate concerns, but that his nation has decided that banning some of the phones’ features is “not a way of dealing with it.”

But underneath, Thornton seethed with a sense of racial injustice for years that culminated in a shooting rampage Tuesday in which the Connecticut man killed eight and wounded two others at his job at Hartford Distributors in Manchester before killing himself.

“I know what pushed him over the edge was all the racial stuff that was happening at work,” said his girlfriend, Kristi Hannah.

These eruptions of workplace violence often occur in similarly brutal ways. But experts say they rarely come with a warning, making them hard to stop.

Employers can reduce the risk of on-the-job attacks, especially in cases where employees are about to get axed; if there have been signs of distress or aggression, they can move the conversation away from the main work space or have security present. Patdown searches and the use of metal detectors are also options for some companies but have the drawback of raising tension.

Before long, she had a $13-an-hour job at Manchester’s Housing Authority in New Hampshire, her children were enrolled in Catholic school, and she was on her way to financing a comfortable American lifestyle through mortgages, loans and credit cards.

Now the 40-year-old mother sits behind bars, held without bond while she awaits trial on federal citizenship fraud charges for allegedly lying about involvement in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, when at least 500,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed.

All of that began to change in April, when she signed a tough new state law cracking down on illegal immigrants, which soon put Arizona at the heart of a rabid national debate on immigration. Now, with Arizona’s Aug. 24 GOP primary just two weeks away, not only she is riding high, but she can confidently boast of an enviable reputation among conservatives across the country.

“She essentially flipped the whole election,” said Matthew Jette, the only candidate still actively campaigning against Brewer. “She was pretty much dead last, except if you count me.”

So how come candidates keep getting tripped up by “trackers” who record their every move?

Trackers have been credited for spoiling campaigns from Virginia to Nevada. And this year, amateur video clips could make the difference in Colorado’s hotly contested GOP Senate primary on Tuesday.

However, Naval investigators said they have no physical evidence or eyewitnesses to corroborate Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach’s claims, and Laurean denied they ever had sexual contact. It will be up to a jury to decide what happened when Laurean goes on trial Tuesday in Goldsboro on first-degree murder and a litany of other charges.

Onslow County District Attorney Dewey Hudson has said the case is one of the most perplexing he’s seen in three decades as a prosecutor. And the accounts of how Lauterbach died aren’t any less tricky. Her charred remains were found in a fire pit behind Laurean’s white, ranch-style home, which remains a curiosity for passers-by.