Evening Edition

The announcement comes hours before the scheduled opening of the biggest ruling party meeting for 30 years. The conference is expected to anoint the son Kim Jong-Un as eventual successor to the ailing 68-year-old leader.

The North’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) also said the leader’s sister Kim Kyong-Hui was appointed a four-star general along with Choe Ryong-Hae, a longtime aide to the Kim dynasty.

Despite warnings that work would not be finished at the much-criticised village until Wednesday, athletes and support staff from nations including England, South Africa, Australia and Canada arrived during the day.

Problems plaguing the crisis-hit Games range from shabby accommodation to security fears, an outbreak of dengue fever, and doubts about public safety after the collapse of a new footbridge next to the main stadium.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar meanwhile told the bipartisan commission that the spill had bolstered a drive to reform federal regulations for offshore drilling, promising that lessons were learnt.

In an ominous sign for Gulf residents, however, oceanographer Ian MacDonald told the probe that while much of the oil was dispersed, evaporated or removed by burning and skimming, the “remaining fraction — over 50 percent of the total discharge — is a highly durable material that resists further dissipation.”

Cameramen swarmed around Clooney and girlfriend Elisabetta Canalis as they took their front-row seats for the pageant, staged as footage of rolling Saharan sand dunes and music suggesting desert wind played in the background.

Models wearing modified Tuareg turbans and flat sandals or Aladdin slippers — spike heels just wouldn’t do in the desert — trod the catwalk at a stately camel’s pace in colours ranging from dark blue to darker blue to midnight blue.

With more than 220 million bloggers in China alone and nearly three out of five people in Singapore having a Facebook account, Asia is presenting a huge commercial opportunity for online advertising.

Social media guru Thomas Crampton, Asia-Pacific director of Ogilvy Public Relations’ global social media team, said regional users were jumping on the social media bandwagon at a faster rate than the rest of the world.

Germany and the European Central Bank threw their weight behind proposals to be presented by the European Commission to toughen up budget rules with “quasi-automatic” fines for states with high public deficits and debts.

But French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde poured cold water on the plans as she arrived in Brussels for a meeting of a task force led by EU President Herman Van Rompuy to strengthen the 27-nation bloc’s fiscal discipline.

Tokyo also summoned Beijing’s ambassador to demand regular consular access to four Japanese nationals whom China detained last week amid the ugly spat for allegedly filming a military facility.

Japanese media reported Monday that China’s foreign ministry had rejected a request from Tokyo’s ambassador to Beijing for a meeting over the issue.

If green is the new black on the high-street, then global retailers are lining up to parade their eco-credentials, from Marks and Spencers in Britain, to sportswear behemoth Nike or the fashion giant H&M.

“There’s a paradigm shift in the textile sector,” John Mowbray, editor of the green trends magazine Ecotextile, told AFP at the Texworld trade fair in Paris this month.

“There is a high risk that any artisanally mined gold coming out of the country is ‘blood gold’,” Gregory Mthembu-Salter, a member of the UN Group of Experts on the conflict-riven but resource-rich African country, said.

He said rebels in eastern DRC, including those blamed by the UN for the rapes of at least 303 civilians in four days in July-August, were being financed by illegal mining of gold and other minerals that are exported worldwide

The 30-year-old mother was among the tens of thousands of textile workers who took part in a four-day mass strike earlier this month to demand higher wages — the latest bout of worker unrest in Asia.

She says she joined the stoppage because she cannot get by on the 50 dollars a month she earns making T-shirts.

Germany launched the opening salvo in intense negotiations between European Union finance ministers meeting in Brussels as part of a task force looking into ways to strengthen the 27-nation bloc’s fiscal discipline.

The moves to punish budget bingers came as trade unions prepared to lead demonstrations in Brussels and other parts of Europe on Wednesday to protest austerity measures launched by EU states to bring down huge public deficits.

It was the first time the 20-something Kim Jong-un had been mentioned by name in the North’s media, and his appointment came just hours before the start of a rare ruling party meeting to elect its supreme leadership.

Kim Jong-il, 68, is believed to have suffered a stroke in 2008, but despite his declining health is not expected to go into retirement just yet, experts say. They say his son is too young and inexperienced to fully take the reins.

The merger, which was announced Monday, would be the first between leading U.S. low-cost airlines and prompted speculation of more deals to come as the industry cuts costs and carriers look to expand their networks.

The cash-and-stock deal needs government approval. The acquisition values AirTran at a rich 69 percent premium to its Friday closing price and would lift Southwest into fourth place in U.S. air traffic rankings, from sixth place.

China’s newspapers accused Japan of exploiting the dispute to bolster its alliance with the United States and warned that Tokyo couldn’t afford the economic price of confrontation with Beijing.

Verbal volleying has continued for days in a quarrel between the two neighbors over Japan’s detention of the Chinese skipper of the fishing boat that collided with two Japanese coastguard ships, although he was released and returned home on the weekend.

American students are falling behind their foreign counterparts, especially in math and science, and that’s got to change, Obama said. Seeking to revive a sense of urgency that education reform may have lost amid the recession’s focus on the economy, Obama declared that the future of the country is at stake.

“Whether jobs are created here, high-end jobs that support families and support the future of the American people, is going to depend on whether or not we can do something about these schools,” the president said in an interview on NBC’s “Today” show.

Kim Jong Il issued an order handing six people – including son Kim Jong Un – the rank of general, the Korean Central News Agency reported in a dispatch published early Tuesday. Also promoted was Kim Kyong Hui, which is the name of Kim Jong Il’s sister. Her name was listed ahead of Kim Jong Un’s in the report.

The Korean-language report came hours ahead of the start of the country’s biggest political meeting in three decades and amid intense speculation that Kim Jong Il’s youngest son and sister could be given key posts at the gathering.

Frustrated by sophisticated and often encrypted phone and e-mail technologies, U.S. officials say that law enforcement needs to improve its ability to eavesdrop on conversations involving terrorism, crimes or other public safety issues.

Critics worry the changes are an unnecessary invasion of privacy and would only make citizens and businesses more vulnerable to identity theft and espionage.

The body of 62-year-old Jimi Heselden and a Segway personal transporter were found in the River Wharfe and he was pronounced dead at the scene, West Yorkshire Police said.

A witness had reported seeing a man fall Sunday over a 30-foot (9-meter) drop into the river near the village of Boston Spa, 140 miles (225 kilometers) north of London.

Attorney Robert Craanen said Calumet County District Attorney Ken Kratz will step down before Oct. 8, the date set for a hearing to hear testimony on his possible removal from office.

Kratz, a Republican, had been the top prosecutor in the eastern Wisconsin county south of Green Bay since 1992. He had been facing demands for his resignation since The Associated Press reported earlier this month he sent 30 text messages to a domestic abuse victim trying to strike up an affair while he prosecuted her ex-boyfriend on a strangulation charge.

Comcast Corp. and General Electric Co., which currently owns NBC, said Sunday that Burke will work with Zucker during the transition. Zucker, who has spent his entire career at NBC, said last week that he would be stepping down after the change in control, telling employees in an e-mail that he understood the new owners would want to have one of their own at the helm.

The possibility of a change-in-command had been looming since last December, when Comcast agreed to buy a 51 percent stake in NBC Universal from Fairfield, Conn.-based GE. That deal, worth $13.75 billion, still hasn’t cleared regulatory hurdles, but is expected to be completed around the end of the year.

Bossie is the president of Citizens United, a conservative group whose anti-Hillary Clinton movie in 2008 led to a landmark ruling this year. The Supreme Court threw out parts of a 63-year-old law prohibiting corporations and unions from paying to air ads for or against political candidates.

The decision has contributed to an explosion in political advertising by outside groups, so far most of them allied with the Republican Party, that have flocked to raise big money from individuals and companies and flooded into some of the most competitive races across the country.

Casting himself as the Bible’s ultimate underdog, Long went before congregants who packed his 10,000-seat church Sunday and promised to battle claims in lawsuits filed last week that he abused his “spiritual authority.”

Three members of the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in suburban Atlanta and a fourth from a North Carolina branch filed lawsuits last week alleging Long used his standing and gifts including cash, cars and travel to coerce them into sexual relations when they were 17 or 18 years old.

The miners are sleeping on cots that were sent down in pieces and reassembled, and each can look forward every weekend to eight minutes each of video chat time with his family using compact cameras and a phone that was disassembled to fit through the hole.

Settling in for the long wait, they have established a disciplined routine designed not only to keep them mentally and physically fit, but working together.

“It’s the right thing to do,” Rumsfeld said. “And it is my intention to see that we do.”

Six years later, the U.S. Army is unable to document a single payment for prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.

The diplomatic back-and-forth shows that nationalistic sentiments stirred up by the incident – and the territorial dispute behind it – are not fading even after Tokyo released the ship’s captain Friday amid intense pressure from China.

Welcoming the skipper home as a hero, China stunned Japan over the weekend by demanding an apology and compensation over his arrest, a move that reflects Beijing’s growing self-confidence and its attempts to test the resolve of key neighbors like Japan, Washington’s closest ally in the region.

Cpl. Jeremy Morlock of Wasilla, Alaska, is among five Stryker soldiers charged with premeditated murder and conspiracy to commit premeditated murder. In interviews with Army investigators, he described a plot led by Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs to randomly kill civilians while on patrol in Kandahar Province.

Prosecutors have also alleged that members of the platoon mutilated Afghan corpses and even collected fingers and other body parts, and that some posed for photos with Afghan corpses.

Are we raising a generation of nincompoops? And do we have only ourselves to blame? Or are some of these things simply the result of kids growing up with push-button technology in an era when mechanical devices are gradually being replaced by electronics?

Susan Maushart, a mother of three, says her teenage daughter “literally does not know how to use a can opener. Most cans come with pull-tops these days. I see her reaching for a can that requires a can opener, and her shoulders slump and she goes for something else.”

Tuesday’s visit carries a decidedly different political atmosphere than the one that surrounded the then-candidate in 2008, when a boisterous overflow crowd of more than 17,000 people greeted Obama at the Madison campus. His popularity has since dipped amid the nationwide recession, and many Democrats face tough challenges in the Nov. 2 midterm election.

During a Monday conference call with college journalists, Obama acknowledged excitement has waned in the last two years. But he said he hoped the Madison rally would re-engage students and emphasize the importance of the midterm to advancing his agenda.

“I wanted to know not just if my arms and legs were there – I wanted to know if everything else was there,” he said. “You’re a man, you just got blown up. What do you see when things explode? You see little pieces flying everywhere.”

Crosby, now 26, joined the Marines right out of high school and had been in Iraq for 30 days when the truck he was riding was hit by a series of rockets in March 2004. Shrapnel tore up his intestines and severed a ureter, one of the tubes that carry urine from the kidney to the bladder. Left a partial paraplegic, he suffered years of painful urinary tract infections that set off excruciating nerve pain in his legs.

Maj. George Bivens, head of the criminal investigation division, said some of the notices about threats to Pennsylvania infrastructure produced by the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response for the state Office of Homeland Security resulted in a waste of manpower to address nonexistent threats. He compared the bulletins to a tabloid magazine.

“Every so often they have something right. Much of the time it is unsubstantiated gossip,” he told the Senate Veterans Affairs and Emergency Preparedness Committee.

Several of the 35 states that rely on lethal injection are either scrambling to find sodium thiopental – an anesthetic that renders the condemned inmate unconscious – or considering using another drug. But both routes are strewn with legal or ethical roadblocks.

The shortage delayed an Oklahoma execution last month and led Kentucky’s governor to postpone the signing of death warrants for two inmates. Arizona is trying to get its hands on the drug in time for its next execution, in late October. California, with an inmate set to die on Wednesday, said the shortage will force it to stop executions after Sept. 30.

Hoshyar Zebari said in an interview with The Associated Press that since the pullout of U.S. combat forces at the end of August, Iraqi security forces have proved that they are taking responsibility and there hasn’t been a security vacuum – but he said the failure to form a government is creating serious problems.

“Lack of efforts of government formation has been very negative on all aspects of life,” he said. “Everybody is holding back to see whether there would be a government, whether this political, security stability can last and continue.”

Xanax helps her rest. Still, it’s hard to relax when you’ve lost your house and are sleeping at friends’ places or, sometimes, in the front seat.

The oil gusher is dead, but the mental trauma it caused along the Gulf of Mexico coast is still very much alive.