Evening Edition

The Vatican said the pope met the five victims in London and was “moved by what they had to say and expressed his deep sorrow over what victims and their families had suffered”.

Earlier, the pontiff expressed his “deep sorrow” to abuse sufferers in one of his clearest public statements yet on the abuse scandal which has sent shockwaves through Catholicism.

The pontiff said the “unspeakable crimes” had brought “shame and humiliation” on the church, in one of his clearest public statements yet on the scandal which has sent shockwaves through Catholicism.

British police are meanwhile continuing to question six men detained by counter-terrorism officers on suspicion of plotting an attack linked to the pope’s visit. But the Vatican said it had “never attributed much importance to these arrests.”

The new deaths came as thousands of Kashmiris poured on to the streets shouting “Go back India” and “We want freedom” as New Delhi grappled to find ways to end the escalating pro-independence demonstrations.

Women and children joined young men staging protests, defying curfews imposed across the mainly Muslim region to contain the spiralling unrest.

At least 14 civilians were killed and complaints of irregularities emerged, following UN and US warnings that security and fraud were concerns in the second parliamentary vote since the 2001 US-led invasion ousted the Taliban.

Insurgents fired rockets in several cities and set off bombs at a polling station and beside a convoy carrying the governor of Kandahar, the Taliban stronghold in the south, but officials said several more attacks were foiled.

Elizabeth Warren, 61, was appointed as Obama’s assistant and as a special adviser to the Treasury Department on the creation of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency whose creation she championed.

“Never again will folks be confused or misled by the pages of barely understandable fine print that you find in agreements for credit cards, mortgages, and student loans,” the president said.

A relief well successfully intersected a shaft at the bottom of the Macondo well some 2.5 miles (four kilometers) below the sea floor on Thursday, allowing the final injection procedure to go forward.

The delicate operation is supposed to permanently plug the well, bringing to a close a disaster that began nearly five months ago when an explosion ripped through the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, killing 11 workers.

The British energy giant began pumping cement into the busted well on Friday, after which “standard plugging and abandonment procedures for the relief well” will go ahead so it can be finally, completely sealed.

“It is expected that the MC252 well will be completely sealed on Saturday,” after a relief well successfully intersected the shaft this week, BP said earlier.

“Our army has killed 12 armed terrorists and wounded dozens” in the fighting that began Friday with militants of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), a senior Mauritanian officer said.

“We have five dead in our own ranks and nine wounded, most of them lightly,” he added.

As he has done on three other previous visits, the pope held private meeting with victims of sexual abuse hours after telling worshippers at a Mass that pedophile priests had brought “shame and humiliation” on him and the Roman Catholic Church.

“He was moved by what they had to say and expressed his deep sorrow and shame over what victims and their families had suffered,” a Vatican statement said after the meeting with five British adults who were abused as children.

Taliban attacks and attempts at vote-rigging were reported across the country. While there was less violence, attacks were more widespread than during a deeply flawed presidential vote last year and reached into once peaceful areas.

The election was being closely watched in Washington ahead of U.S. President Barack Obama’s planned war strategy review in December, which will likely examine the pace and scale of U.S. troop withdrawals after nine years of war.

At one voting station in the capital Kabul, suspected frauds included three middle-aged women who turned up to vote with the registration cards of women half their age. Three more had real voting cards but couldn’t give the names printed on them.

“I asked them what their names were and they said ‘I don’t know!'” said Fahima Noori, director of the polling center in Qalaye Fathullah, a residential area in Kabul.

“The time for unity is now,” said Palin.

Palin spoke at the Iowa Republican Party’s Ronald Reagan Dinner, her influence among “Tea Party” activists strong after conservative candidates she backed won in Delaware and New Hampshire Senate primary races on Tuesday.

Thousands of cheering supporters gathered in Abuja’s central Eagle Square to hear Jonathan proclaim his candidacy for the January election, shaping up to be the most fiercely contested since the end of military rule.

“Our country is at the threshold of a new era, an era that beckons for a new kind of leadership, a leadership that is uncontaminated by the prejudices of the past,” said Jonathan, in his trademark fedora and traditional kaftan-like attire.

Obama announced Warren as a special adviser to steer the new agency’s establishment, allowing him to avoid a bitter Senate confirmation fight if he had nominated her to be director. Republicans accused him of circumventing congressional oversight.

Calling Warren “one of the country’s fiercest advocates for the middle class,” Obama made clear the outspoken Harvard University professor would take the lead in shaping the powerful new watchdog, a centerpiece of the sweeping regulatory overhaul he signed into law in July.

Benedict met for about 30-40 minutes with the victims – four women and a man from Scotland, England and Wales – at the Vatican’s ambassador’s residence in Wimbledon and expressed “his deep sorrow and shame over what the victims and their families suffered,” according to the Vatican.

“He prayed with them and assured them that the Catholic Church is continuing to implement effective measures designed to safeguard young people, and that it is doing all in its power to investigate allegations, to collaborate with civil authorities and to bring to justice clergy and religious accused of these egregious crimes,” it said.

As officials tally votes over the next few days, the real test begins: Afghans will have to decide whether to accept the results as legitimate despite a modest turnout and early evidence of fraud.

The Taliban had pledged to disrupt the vote and launched attacks starting with a rocket fired into the capital before dawn. The insurgent group followed with a series of morning rocket strikes that hit major cities just as people were going to the polls – or weighing whether to risk it.

This, though, is an important milestone for the still-weary residents of the Gulf Coast: an assurance that not so much as a trickle of oil will ever seep from the well that already has ruined so much since the catastrophe first started. The disaster began April 20, when an explosion killed 11 workers, sank a drilling rig and led to the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

Crews had already pumped in cement to seal the well from the bottom, and officials said Saturday it had set. Once a pressure and weight test was finished, officials expected to confirm that the well is permanently plugged. That was expected to occur late Saturday, but an announcement may not come until Sunday.

The July death has tested this area’s tradition of beach driving. Along with a 4-year-old British girl who was struck and killed on Daytona Beach a few months earlier, residents are now torn between outlawing cars on the beach and persevering a deep-rooted ritual that helped form the Daytona 500 stock car race.

“It’s an extremely divisive issue that people get very emotional about,” said Volusia County Councilman Josh Wagner.

“The company is really about Sri Lanka, the Philippines, wherever we could find the best talent,” Altschuler is shown saying in the commercial, while ominous music plays in the background. In case viewers miss the point, an announcer adds that Altschuler “made millions outsourcing jobs.”

The 39-year-old first-time political candidate stands out for having spoken candidly on camera about the benefit of foreign workers. But with Democrats struggling for political traction on the economy in midterm elections, candidates in all regions of the country are accusing Republicans of having personally sent jobs overseas or at least protecting companies that do.

The party adopted an official platform in June that keeps a long-held position in support of making homosexual acts illegal, a policy adopted after the Montana Supreme Court struck down such laws in 1997.

The fact that it’s still the official party policy more than 12 years later, despite a tidal shift in public attitudes since then and the party’s own pledge of support for individual freedoms, has exasperated some GOP members.

Representatives from 192 countries will be in town in the upcoming week for a United Nations anti-poverty summit and the opening of the U.N. General Assembly’s annual ministerial meeting. For New Yorkers that will mean gridlocked traffic and a chance to spot the leader of Bhutan or Andorra at a local eatery.

Antonio and Mario Cerra, the father-and-son owners of a U.N.-area Italian steakhouse called Padre Figlio, were busy last week booking tables for countries such as East Timor. The Asian nation won independence from Indonesia in 2002 and has a population of about 1 million. It has a reservation for 35 at Padre Figlio, which in the past has hosted events for Nigeria and Grenada.

A summit of U.S. Muslim organizations is scheduled to begin Sunday in New York City to address both the project and a rise in anti-Muslim sentiments and rhetoric that has accompanied the nationwide debate over the project.

It has yet to be seen whether the groups will emerge with a firm stand on the proposed community center, dubbed Park51. The primary purpose of the meeting is to talk about ways to combat religious bigotry.

“What does it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or a marble tower?” author Raymond Chandler’s legendary protagonist asked not long after Marlowe had plugged a bad guy in “The Big Sleep.”

When it came time for Chandler’s big sleep, however, his sentiments were different. The man who put Los Angeles on the literary map with detective novels that dismissed the place as “a big, hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup” actually was a romantic who had planned to spend eternity alongside his beloved wife, Cissy Chandler.

The latest deaths took the death toll from three months of civil unrest against Indian rule to more than 100.

Thousands of people in Anantnag, a town south of the main city of Srinagar, defied the curfew to participate in the funeral of a 17-year-old boy whose body was recovered from a river early Saturday.

On Friday, Alaskans learned her decision: She’s in. And, this time, she said: “The gloves are off.”

Murkowski faces tough odds with her write-in candidacy. She has lost support from members within the Republican establishment, who are backing the Republican nominee, Joe Miller. She also has just more than six weeks to gear up a campaign, motivate her staff and turn out the vote.

“These 33 miner-heroes, with their iron will, their spirit, their fight, their strength, are an example to all of us of what it means to be Chilean,” Interior Ministry official Cristian Barra said as a flag signed by the miners was raised next to the tent camp where families have held vigil. Another Chilean flag was signed by the families and sent down for the miners to unfurl.

The miners feasted on traditional Chilean meat pies – two each, baked in tubular form to fit through the narrow bore holes to their deep refuge. But they had make do with sodas because doctors vetoed their request for another national specialty: wine. Rescuers also sent down fuel to power machinery the miners will use to move tons of falling rock as their escape tunnels are widened.

So it came as no surprise when meteorologists determined late Friday that the storm that barreled across a large swath of Brooklyn and Queens a day earlier spawned two tornadoes and a fierce macroburst with wind speeds up to 125 mph.

What was surprising, meteorologists said, was that only one person died.

Commissioner Roger Goodell said while the “conduct of the Jets clearly should have been better” team owner Woody Johnson and his staff acted promptly to correct the situation that arose last weekend when TV Azteca reporter Ines Sainz said she felt uncomfortable in the team’s locker room.

Goodell said that, as a result of the incident, the league will implement a training program for all 32 teams on proper conduct in the workplace and that the program would be underwritten by Johnson, who personally apologized to Sainz.

Of course not.

Because in less than a week, Ines Sainz has become the focus of renewed debate over the thorniest of issues: Women’s access to men’s locker rooms; their choice of attire on the job; and even the highly charged question of whether the way a woman dresses can ever mean she’s “asking for” consequences.

Over the next 30 years, Jones and his family embraced that ideal. They created Feed the Children, one of the world’s largest charities, and it became known for Jones’ heart-wrenching televised pleas for donations as a hungry child with sad eyes sat by his side.

But now Jones has been fired from his own charity and is in a legal fight to get his job back from the $1 billion organization that’s striving to push forward amid lawsuits, a state attorney general’s investigation and watchdog groups warning people not to give it money. All of this comes as competition among nonprofits is fierce for dwindling donations in a tough economy.

On Monday, another summit will open in New York to review what has, and hasn’t, been done.

“These Millennium Development Goals are a promise of world leaders,” says Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who invited leaders of the 192 U.N. member nations to the three-day summit. “They’re a blueprint to help those most vulnerable and poorest people, to lift them out of poverty. This promise must be met,” he said in an interview with the Associated Press.

He picks up a necklace of Indian-style fetish animals made in the Philippines; dangles an earring with colored stones made of plastic; explains that what looks like solid turquoise is glued-together dust of turquoise and other rocks; uses a magnet to pick up beads supposedly made of silver, which isn’t magnetic.

What bothers Eriacho isn’t just that these objects look like something they’re not. It’s that too often, they’re fraudulently marketed as authentic, a violation of federal law.