Evening Edition

The death toll was the highest for a single day since a wave of anti-India demonstrations began three months ago, with 84 civilians now killed in unrest in the disputed Muslim-majority region. One policeman also died Monday.

In New Delhi, the cabinet met to discuss steps to defuse the tension, but decided against heeding calls from some in the government to partially lift a 20-year-old emergency law that is despised by many in Kashmir.

But the plan unveiled by archbishop Andre-Joseph Leonard, the head of the Belgian church, disappointed groups representing victims three days after a report revealed an avalanche of abuse cases that led to 13 suicides.

Leonard told a news conference the church would act to grant victims of sexual abuse by priests or church workers “maximum” access to officials, but did not spell out how audiences would be obtained or what could be delivered.

Its head, archbishop Andre-Joseph Leonard, said the church would act to grant victims of sexual abuse by priests or church workers “maximum” access to officials, but did not spell out how audiences could be obtained or what could be delivered.

In fact, the only concrete initiative he announced to deal with complaints was vague plans to create a centre for “recognition, reconciliation and healing” within the church, with a target date for opening of Christmas.

The tougher rules unveiled late Sunday, called Basel III, would triple the minimum reserves that banks would have to hold against losses, thereby bolstering their resilience in the face of crises.

While hailing the reforms, central bankers said the package still did not address a “moral hazard problem” arising from the fact that some major banks are simply too big or too significant to the economy to be allowed to fail.

The new rules, called Basel III, would triple the minimum reserves that banks would have to hold against losses.

However, the financial institutions were given nine years to implement the new rules, far longer than the end-2012 deadline that regulators had suggested late last year.

The new “action-packed” format for the event is designed to appeal to “the Facebook generation, not the Flintstone generation,” Russell Coutts, the CEO of America’s Cup defenders Oracle, told a news conference here on Monday.

The 72-foot (22-metre) wing-sail catamarans will be “pretty special, very powerful and very demanding,” the four-time America’s Cup winning New Zealander added.

But imam Feisal Abdul Rauf did not rule out that developers would move the Islamic center, telling ABC: “The decisions that I will make — that we will make — will be predicated on what is best for everybody.”

Critics say building a mosque two blocks from Ground Zero is offensive to the memory of the nearly 2,800 people killed when Al-Qaeda hijackers steered two planes into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said provisional results showed that some 58 percent of the voters backed the amendments in the referendum, hailing the outcome as a “turning point” for Turkish democracy.

“We have passed a historic threshold on the way to advanced democracy and the supremacy of law… September 12 will go down in history as a turning point,” Erdogan told a crowd of jubilant supporters at his party’s office in Istanbul.

He was jealous that she won more than 14,000 votes in the country’s first parliamentary election in 2005, while he only polled 160.

“He hadn’t really beat me very often before then,” she told AFP of the man she was forced to marry at age 14.

Transport Minister Binali Yildirim hailed the outcome as a boost for democracy while AKP deputy chairman Huseyin Celik said the party’s agenda was to work on a new constitution after the 2011 elections.

Official provisional results showed 57.88 percent of the voters backed the amendments with 42.12 percent against, giving Erdogan’s Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) a better-than-expected margin of victory. Turnout was 73.7 percent.

Amid fears of fresh fuel shortages motorists formed long queues at petrol stations as a similar week-long protest in July nearly starved the country of fuel.

Protesters parked hundreds of trucks on hard shoulders at Athens motorway exits to northern Greece and the southwestern Peloponnese peninsula but did not block traffic, an AFP photographer said.

“We have a big resistance problem that has become a global health crisis,” said Doctor Ursula Theuretzbacher of the Austrian Center for Anti-Infective Agents.

She spoke at the 50th annual meeting of the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC), which opened in Boston on Sunday.

The diplomatic spat centres on a disputed island chain in the East China Sea, where Japan says the Chinese boat was fishing illegally last week and, when ordered to leave, rammed two Japanese coastguard vessels during a chase.

Since Tokyo arrested the skipper last Wednesday, Beijing has reacted angrily, repeatedly summoning Japan’s ambassador, cancelling talks on joint energy exploration and confronting two Japanese survey ships at sea.

The toll includes nine people killed in police clashes after Muslim protesters set fire to a Christian missionary school and government buildings in two districts to denounce reports that copies of the Koran had been damaged in the United States.

One policeman was also killed by stone-throwing protesters defying a curfew in the Muslim-majority Kashmir valley.

A senior U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he expected the Saudis to initially commit to $30 billion in purchases, but that could double.

The package would include 84 new Boeing Co F-15 fighter jets and upgrades to another 70 of them. It also involved 72 Black Hawk helicopters built by Sikorsky Aircraft, a unit of United Technologies Corp.

But the biggest international banks still face a capital surcharge on top of Basel III rules announced late on Sunday, to tackle concerns that banks deemed “too big to fail” may take risks that could derail the financial system.

“The (Basel) agreements certainly reduced probability of failure for systemically important banks, but it doesn’t resolve the moral hazard problem as these banks are too big or too interconnected to fail,” said Mario Draghi, governor of the Bank of Italy and head of the Financial Stability Board (FSB).

As lawmakers return from a month-long break this week, Democrats aim to pass their small-business bill out of the Senate by the end of the week and send it to the House of Representatives for final approval.

The House has backed a version of the bill previously.

“When NBC talked about the last combat troops are gone, they made it sound like everything is basically over,” he said, after escorting a 19-truck convoy through a part of northern Iraq where roadside bombs and mortar attacks are still a danger.

“To us it was like a slap in the face, because we are still here … we are still going in harm’s way every time we leave out of the gate,” Manuel said at a U.S. military base, Camp Speicher, near Saddam Hussein’s home town of Tikrit.

It shows kids who had been exposed as babies to high levels of the preservative — through vaccines they received or their mothers received while pregnant — were no more likely to develop autism, including two distinct subtypes of the condition.

“This study should reassure parents about following the recommended immunization schedule,” said Dr. Frank Destefano, director of the Immunization Safety Office at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, and the study’s senior author.

China demanded Japan release captain Zhan Qixiong after the 14 crew took a charter flight from the southern Japanese island of Ishigaki to the southeastern Chinese coastal city of Fuzhou, China’s official Xinhua news agency said. The fishing boat is also on its way back to China.

A spokesman at the prosecutors’ office on Ishigaki said Zhan was still being held after a court approved extending his detention on Friday. Prosecutors can hold him for up to 20 days while deciding whether to take legal action after his boat collided with two Japanese coast guard ships.

Representative John Boehner said President Barack Obama’s proposal to renew lower tax rates for families making less than $250,000 but let the lower rates for wealthier Americans expire was “bad policy” — but he will support it if he must.

“If the only option I have is to vote for some of those tax reductions, I’ll vote for it,” Boehner said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” program.

No sooner had Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan declared victory than he stoked hardline secularists’ worst fears by serving notice that his AK party, whose roots lie in political Islam, would start work on a brand new constitution.

The High Election Board is expected to announce the official results on Monday, but television news channels reported the government scored a “yes” vote of 58 percent versus 42 percent for the “no” camp. The turnout, among an electorate of just under 50 million, was put at 77 percent.

Reports of a Quran desecration in the United States intensified the anger, with activists chanting “Down with America” and burning an effigy of President Barack Obama in a rare anti-U.S. protest here.

The spasm of violence came even as Indian officials debated whether to make goodwill gestures to try to ease tensions in the war-wracked region, which is divided between India and Pakistan and claimed by both.

The U.S. cases and two others in Canada all involve people who had recently received medical care in India, where the problem is widespread. A British medical journal revealed the risk last month in an article describing dozens of cases in Britain in people who had gone to India for medical procedures.

How many deaths the gene may have caused is unknown; there is no central tracking of such cases. So far, the gene has mostly been found in bacteria that cause gut or urinary infections.

McConnell has said a bill extending the tax cuts for only low- and middle-income earners cannot pass the Senate. Forty-one senators can block a bill with a filibuster, but McConnell spokesman Don Stewart declined to say whether all 41 Republicans would support a filibuster.

At issue is a year-end deadline to renew a variety of tax cuts enacted in 2001 – when the federal government was running a surplus.

Making an ardent case for the compatibility of Islam and American values, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf reiterated that he is searching for a solution to the furor the project has created. But he left unanswered exactly what he had in mind.

If anything, Rauf only deepened the questions around the project’s future, telling an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank that he was “exploring all options” – but declining to specify them – while also arguing that a high-profile site is necessary to get across his message of moderate Islam.

Health reform director Nancy-Ann DeParle wrote on the White House blog last week that the same government report indicates spending per insured person will be more than $1,000 lower in 2019 because of the law – some 9 percent below previous projections.

“The act will make health care more affordable for Americans,” DeParle said.

Dr. Donald Berwick’s appointment earlier this summer without Senate confirmation was contentious because some Republicans accused him of being willing to deny care to save on costs. Since then, the administration has kept Berwick out of the limelight, turning the otherwise well-known medical innovation guru into something of a mystery man in Washington.

Berwick broke his silence Monday, telling an audience of health insurance industry representatives that pushing back against unsustainable costs cannot and should not involve “withholding from us, or our neighbors, any care that helps” or “harming one hair on anyone’s head.”

He was one of many residents who returned to the ruined hillsides of their suburban San Francisco neighborhood Sunday after Thursday’s pipeline blast and fire destroyed nearly 50 homes and damaged dozens of others.

The explosion prompted California regulators to order the utility, Pacific Gas and Electric, to survey all its natural gas lines in the state in hopes of heading off another disaster.

Georgia has complained to the International Court of Justice of the murder of thousands of ethnic Georgians and alleged displacement of some 300,000 people in a two-decade campaign of discrimination by Russian authorities and separatist militias in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Russian, however, portrayed itself as a mediator and peacemaker, and said Georgia had never complained of ethnic discrimination until it lost the 2008 war. The war broke out just before midnight Aug. 7, 2008, and ended in a European Union-brokered cease-fire Aug. 12. Georgia filed its complaint to the Hague-based court – the U.N.’s highest judicial body – on the same day.

Such collisions or close calls in disputed waters have frequently touched off nationalistic protests among the broader population about sovereignty and complicate efforts to improve ties between China and Japan – wary neighbors that are the world’s second- and third-largest economies and major trading partners. Beijing has said the confrontation could damage its relations with Japan, underlining the sensitivity of the territorial dispute in the East China Sea.

The dispute has sparked anti-Japanese activists in China and Taiwan, which also claims the islands in question, to sail to the area on their own protest missions – although both governments have sought to rein them in so as not to inflame tensions further.

The so-called Basel III rules, which will gradually require banks to hold greater capital buffers to absorb potential losses, are likely to affect the credit industry by imposing stricter discipline on credit cards, mortgages and other loans.

Requiring banks to keep more capital on hand will limit the amount of money they can lend, but it will make them better able to withstand the blow if many of those loans go sour.

The sexual orientation of the openly gay mayor doesn’t figure into her decision.

“That doesn’t bother me at all,” Rondeau says. “He’s been a good mayor of Providence, and I think he’d do well in Congress.”

The guidance, issued last week by Gen. David Petraeus and obtained Sunday by The Associated Press, was issued in response to concern that the military’s own contracting procedures could be, in some cases, running counter to efforts on the battlefield.

The changes are aimed, in large part, at addressing complaints that ordinary Afghans have seen little change in their daily lives despite billions poured into their country since 2001.

Since the Health Ministry announced the World Health Organization-backed measles vaccination plan last week, authorities have been flooded with queries and Internet bulletin boards have been plastered with worried messages. Conspiracy theories saying the vaccines are dangerous have spread by cell phone text messages.

The public skepticism has even been covered by state-run media, which noted the lack of trust was about more than vaccines.

Arthur Burton Schirmer, 62, was arraigned Monday in Tannersville on criminal homicide and evidence-tampering charges in the 2008 death of his 56-year-old wife, Betty. He did not enter a plea and was jailed without bail.

Schirmer’s attorney said his client denies foul play was involved in either of the deaths. Authorities “seem to have resurrected a prior tragedy to prosecute Mr. Schirmer for a current tragedy,” Brandon Reish told The Associated Press.

Michael Enright also suffers from chronic alcoholism and is in need of treatment, which he would get if he were allowed out on $250,000 bail, said attorney Lawrence Fisher.

The 21-year-old Enright is accused of telling the driver to “consider this a checkpoint” before stabbing him last month.

“They rev their engines with complete disregard for the people who live here,” complained neighborhood resident Tonia Aery. “It’s obnoxious.”

Aery’s wish for peace and quiet could come true after the state Senate passed a bill this month that would make it a motor vehicle violation to ride a roaring hog. The only catch is that the decision now falls to the state’s biker-in-chief, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, an avid motorcyclist.

Prosecutors charged the doctor with manslaughter, alleging that he failed to monitor her while she was under anesthesia, delayed calling 911 when she went into cardiopulmonary arrest, and later lied to try to cover up his actions.

Dr. Rapin Osathanondh, an obstetrician who was also a research associate at the Harvard School of Public Health, goes on trial Monday in Barnstable Superior Court. The trial begins on the third anniversary of Smith’s death.

A new state law creates a process for a Vermont commission to recommend tribal recognition, which the Abenaki hope will also allow them to seek federal funding for education and other benefits.

“It’s not just for us. It’s for kids, it’s for our grandkids,” said Dawn Macie, 51, of Rutland, a member of the Nulhegan band of the Abenaki.

“We have nothing to apologize for, we have nothing to fear, we have nothing to be ashamed of, we have nothing that we’re guilty of – but we need to be out there and we need to express this,” said Imam Mohammed Ibn Faqih in a sermon at the Islamic Institute of Orange County in Anaheim, Calif., the day before the 9/11 anniversary.

There is no simple way for American Muslims to move forward.

“They rev their engines with complete disregard for the people who live here,” complained neighborhood resident Tonia Aery. “It’s obnoxious.”

Aery’s wish for peace and quiet could come true after the state Senate passed a bill this month that would make it a motor vehicle violation to ride a roaring hog. The only catch is that the decision now falls to the state’s biker-in-chief, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, an avid motorcyclist.

Rallies also are being held in St. Louis and Washington, D.C.

Organizers say the events aim to call attention to what they describe as big government run amok and to recall the sense of national unity Americans felt the day after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.