Evening Edition

The violence, which saw 38 people killed across the country, was the worst to hit Iraq since US troops declared an official end to combat operations on September 1, and comes with no new government yet formed since a March poll.

The twin blasts struck near the Aden junction in north Baghdad and in the residential district of Mansur in the west at around 10:10 am (0710 GMT), AFP journalists and security officials said.

The announcement comes after a Japanese court authorised prosecutors to extend by 10 days the detention of a Chinese captain accused of ramming his trawler against Japanese patrol boats in the East China Sea.

It also comes as Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and his counterpart Naoto Kan prepare to fly to New York to attend a UN gathering where they will meet US President Barack Obama in separate talks.

The pope told 55,000 pilgrims gathered in a park in Birmingham, central England, that Cardinal John Henry Newman was a man of “outstanding holiness” whose teachings were as relevant today as they were more than a century ago.

The beatification mass — elevating the late cardinal towards sainthood — was the crowning moment of a four-day trip which the Vatican hailed as a “spiritual success”.

Earlier, in a homily at Westminster Cathedral the pontiff condemned the “unspeakable crimes” committed by paedophile priests and said they had brought “shame and humiliation” on the Catholic Church and caused “immense suffering”.

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

Retired admiral Thad Allen, the US pointman for the response to the disaster, said the operation to intersect and cement the deepwater well had been successfully completed.

“With this development, which has been confirmed by the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, we can finally announce that the Macondo 252 well is effectively dead,” Allen said.

Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, 45, should see his four-party Alliance become the first right-leaning government to win a second term in nearly a century.

But with just 49.1 percent of the vote, according to exit polls broadcast on Swedish public television, Reinfeldt’s coalition is likely to fall narrowly short of a majority of seats in parliament.

At least 14 civilians were killed in the second parliamentary vote since the 2001 US-led invasion ousted the Taliban but more than 3.5 million Afghans took part in the election.

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.

The protesters died in two separate hospitals Sunday after being injured last week in clashes in the disputed Himalayan region, where protests began in June and have escalated in the past week.

Thirty-four civilians have been killed in the last seven days, with a total of 105 protesters and bystanders dead — most of them young men and teenagers — in three and a half months of unrest.

Western supporters praised the more than four million Afghans who, according to preliminary figures, took part in Saturday’s election, compared with the 4.8 million valid votes cast in last year’s presidential poll.

The bodies of three election workers were found Sunday in northern Balkh province, the head of the Independent Election Commission (IEC) said, following the country’s second parliamentary polls since the Taliban was overthrown in 2001.

In past years, olfactory offences in the giant tents emanating from stale beer, sweat and bratwurst could simply be masked with cigarette smoke.

But now smokers hoping to enjoy a puff with their brew were advised to leave their packets at home after the southern state of Bavaria decided to ban smoking across the state in all pubs, cafes and beer tents.

Afghan election officials declared Saturday’s result a success despite widespread reports of fraud, worryingly low voter turnout and attacks across the country that killed at least 17 people after the Taliban vowed to disrupt the poll.

“I think that that is premature, with all due respect,” Staffan de Mistura, special representative for U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told Reuters in an interview.

Some 153 days after the Macondo well ruptured, the U.S. government confirmed that BP had succeeded in drilling a relief well nearly 18,000 feet below the ocean surface and permanently sealing the well with cement.

“The Macondo 252 well is effectively dead,” retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, who has overseen the U.S. government’s response, said in a statement. “We can now state, definitively, that the Macondo well poses no continuing threat to the Gulf of Mexico.”

However, as a knife-edge vote count continued, Swedish state TV forecast the governing coalition would win a one-seat majority, based on districts counted two hours after the polls closed.

A hung parliament would unsettle investors, and analysts have predicted a sharp fall in the crown currency against the euro and rising bond yields should the far right Sweden Democrats deprive the government of its outright majority.

The spat between Asia’s two largest economies has flared since Japan arrested the captain, accusing him of deliberately striking a patrol ship and obstructing public officers near uninhabited islets in the East China Sea claimed by both sides.

“China demands that Japan immediately release the captain without any preconditions,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said in a statement on the ministry’s website (www.mfa.gov.cn), repeating that Beijing viewed the detention as illegal and invalid.

On the last day of a four-day visit to Britain that drew the biggest protest march of any of his foreign trips, the pope also beatified Cardinal John Henry Newman, one of the most prominent English converts from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism.

The pope was seen off from the airport by Prime Minister David Cameron who said Benedict had challenged the “whole of the country to sit up and think” about issues such as social responsibility during his four-day state visit.

One blast targeting a national security office killed at least six people and wounded 15, bringing down the facades of nearby houses, the Baghdad security command said.

Interior Ministry sources put the death toll from the blast as high as 19, but other government agencies denied that.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the ministerial session in New York on September 24 to give political impetus to the Conference on Disarmament, the world’s sole multilateral negotiating body which is known as the “CD.”

But few people expect the 65-member Geneva forum to move forward on nuclear disarmament, despite endorsements from U.S. President Barack Obama and others for a move toward a nuclear-free world.

A permanent cement plug sealed BP’s well nearly 2.5 miles below the sea floor in the Gulf of Mexico, five agonizing months after an explosion sank a drilling rig and led to the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the federal government’s point man on the disaster, said Sunday BP’s well “is effectively dead” and posed no further threat to the Gulf. Allen said a pressure test to ensure the cement plug would hold was completed at 5:54 a.m. CDT.

The conflicting statements underscored the difficulty of determining the credibility of the vote also hit by militant attacks that hurt the turnout. Afghan officials started gathering and tallying results Sunday in a process that could take weeks if not months to complete.

The country’s international backers offered praise for those who voted Saturday despite bomb and rocket attacks, and voiced hoped for a democratic result. A repeat of the pervasive fraud that tainted a presidential election a year ago would only erode further the standing of Karzai administration – both at home and abroad – as it struggles against a Taliban insurgency.

It was the worst violence since the U.S. military dropped to 50,000 troops in Iraq and formally declared an end to combat operations on Sept. 1, saying Iraqi forces were up to the task of protecting their own country.

Insurgents have hammered Iraqi forces and government buildings, capitalizing on gaps in security as the U.S. scales back its military mission and Iraqi politicians fail to overcome divisions and form a new government after national elections in March.

Scientists of a U.S. government-funded asthma study had to spend nearly $1 million of taxpayers’ money after British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline PLC declined to donate its asthma drug and look-alike dummy medicine for the study, which compared two other treatments.

Editors of the New England Journal of Medicine, which published the study, chastised Glaxo, saying its actions made the research harder and more expensive to do. Drug companies aren’t required to supply their medicines for study, but they often do.

There was no movement at the top of the rankings Sunday. The top five of Alabama, Ohio State, Boise State, TCU and Oregon was unchanged from last week.

The Crimson Tide received 53 first-place votes, Ohio State got five and Boise State and Texas each received one.

On his final day, Benedict praised British heroics against the Nazis to mark the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain and moved an Englishman a step closer to possible sainthood.

Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said the important thing wasn’t so much the turnout – crowds were much smaller than when Pope John Paul II visited in 1982 – but that Benedict’s warning about the dangers of an increasingly secularized society had been received “with profound interest” from Britons as a whole.

Not even they know.

Some have proposed major changes to workplace coverage, even turning Medicare into a voucher plan. Many prefer small steps that tiptoe around political land mines. Others want a clean start.

In a fiery speech to the Congressional Black Caucus, Obama warned that Republicans hoping to seize control of Congress want “to do what’s right politically, instead of what’s right – period.”

“I need everybody here to go back to your neighborhoods, to go back to your workplaces, to go to the churches, and go to the barbershops and go to the beauty shops. And tell them we’ve got more work to do,” Obama said to cheers from a black-tie audience at the Washington Convention Center. “Tell them we can’t wait to organize. Tell them that the time for action is now.”

Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt was seeking to become the first center-right leader to win re-election after serving a full term in a Scandinavian welfare nation dominated for decades by the left-wing Social Democrats.

But the Islam-bashing Sweden Democrats appeared set to enter Parliament for the first time, potentially spoiling the governing coalition’s majority in the 349-seat legislature.

Now when she looks around the South Florida community she and her four daughters call home, she sees teenage boys hanging out at all hours in a nearby park, homes in battered condition, some with wood covering the windows, and groups of men and children sitting listlessly on their front porches.

“There’s a lot of parents over here that don’t have a job,” Mansfield, a hospital receptionist said. “Some of them don’t even know how to put together a resume.”

“He really is sort of like an uncle for mayors, a godfather around the country,” said Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, N.J. “Whatever the issue … you can count on Daley to have created a record on the issue and tried new ideas.”

Daley has been called the best mayor in America, even when criticized by constituents. He has forged strong alliances with the business community, then traveled to promote his city as a global business and tourism destination. He’s mentored leaders from cities large and small.

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.

What looked like a pretty bad grade was supposed to entice teenagers to take a closer look at the pluses of attending the school in Des Moines, Iowa.

Drake officials didn’t anticipate their daring idea getting ridiculed on advertising blogs, angering alumni who complained on Facebook that their degrees had been devalued, or inspiring a local store to market “D+ student” T-shirts to amused Drake students and underachievers alike.

Authorities say there were no arrests and no confrontations during the march Saturday that drew about 250 people to the Rampart area west of downtown. Many carried flags from Central American countries and placards decrying the Sept. 5 shooting death of Manuel Jaminez.

Most of the protesters marched past the Rampart police station before winding their way to MacArthur Park. A smaller group took their demonstration to LAPD headquarters downtown.