Evening Edition

Pupils blockaded their schools and some near Paris threw stones at police who responded with non-lethal riot guns as officials warned protests against raising the retirement age from 60 to 62 could get out of hand.

With eight of France’s 12 refineries shutting down operations, the petrol industry association urged the government to release emergency fuel stocks and called for protestors blocking fuel depots to be removed.

“Our plan worked, that’s why we’re so satisfied,” Mining Minister Laurence Golborne told reporters at the San Jose mine outside the northern city of Copiapo where the drama unfolded.

“If this story was a movie, no one would have believed that this story would have happened as it has now,” said Golborne, the public face of the unprecedented rescue effort since its launch back in August.

Three of the 33 miners, who were not named, had surgery under general anesthetic for serious dental problems at a hospital treating the men in Copiapo, the nearest town to the now-famous San Jose mine.

Hospital director Jorge Montes said all the men, who spent a record 69 days underground, were doing well despite their ordeal, which started way back on August 5 when a huge rockfall trapped them almost half a mile down.

One by one, Chile’s newest heroes emerged from a hellish confinement to roars of applause and came face to face with their loved ones, their national leaders and the camera lens of a world intoxicated by their sensational and uplifting story.

When Luis Urzua, the grizzled leader of “the 33” who had been trapped in the bowels of the San Jose mine, finally emerged looking cool and collected, an emotional President Sebastian Pinera signaled a dramatic conclusion their 69-day ordeal.

The ascent late Wednesday of the last of the miners, grizzled shift leader Luis Urzua, capped an against-all-odds operation of high technology and true grit, and hailed by Chile’s president as an inspiration to the world.

It also spelled the end of a nightmare lived by the men, who had survived more than two months in a dank and dark tunnel 622 meters (2,041 feet) below the surface of Chile’s northern Atacama desert following an August 5 cave-in.

While the NATO-led force was willing to provide “practical assistance” for reconciliation efforts, “we should continue our military operations” against the Taliban, Rasmussen told a news conference.

Talks with the insurgents must be led by the Afghan government “but our position is if we can facilitate this process through practical assistance then why not?” said the NATO secretary general, without providing further details.

Earlier, the drama of the last of the 272 gold medals provided the perfect finale for the Indian hosts as poster girl Saina Nehwal saved a match point against Malaysia’s Wong Mew Choo in winning the women’s singles badminton title.

That was India’s 38th gold, one clear of England and for the first time ensuring them second place in the Commonwealth Games medals table. Australia were runaway winners with 74 golds and a total of 176.

The police broke into the monument perimeter through a side entrance and used tear gas to disperse media covering the event as they tried to corner the protesters and empty the site, which was closed to the public since Wednesday.

The protesters, who had padlocked themselves inside the perimeter overnight, grabbed on to fence railings to prevent their removal from the hilltop site overlooking central Athens as gathered tourists snapped pictures.

The US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said three soldiers died in a single attack in western Afghanistan while the fourth and fifth died in two separate bomb blasts in the restive south and east.

The force released no further details and does not disclose the nationalities of soldiers killed as a matter of policy.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defence Secretary Robert Gates made the plea, echoed by NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, amid French reservations about the system.

“The studies have been done, the data are well-known and the affordability is clear,” Gates told alliance ministers. “It is time for a decision.”

The comments came as China came under fresh pressure, with Norway criticising Chinese retaliatory steps over the award and Japan’s prime minister saying the jailed laureate should be freed.

“Liu Xiaobo is a convicted criminal. Awarding the Nobel Prize to him is equivalent to encouraging crime,” foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu told reporters.

All indications are that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries will decide against changing its official daily output of 24.84 million barrels, with OPEC kingpin Saudi Arabia saying it is happy with current oil prices.

In London, the benchmark price of oil edged up as the meeting began, gaining 59 cents to 83.60 dollars a barrel, but traders said a fall of the dollar against the euro was a driving factor.

Most of the miners were found in surprisingly good health considering that they had been stuck in a wet, hot, collapsed mine tunnel since August 5.

The men were resting in a hospital after being hoisted to the surface in a rescue operation watched by hundreds of millions worldwide. One of the miners had pneumonia and was being treated with antibiotics.

At the same time, record-high imports from China helped push the U.S. trade deficit wider in August, which could drag on U.S. growth and increase international tensions over trade and currency policy.

“We are basically plodding along at subpar growth. Overall, the whole data set is disappointing,” said Omair Sharif, an economist with RBS Securities in Stamford, Connecticut.

The building furor over whether the largest U.S. mortgage lenders used so-called robo-signers and incomplete paperwork to force delinquent borrowers from their homes has mushroomed into a probe by the attorneys general in all 50 states, with U.S. Congressional hearings not far behind. [nN19590716]

Those on Wall Street, however, are largely unsympathetic, insisting that possible errors in the foreclosure process are beside the point, that the process begins only when a borrower starts missing mortgage payments.

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said there was broad agreement at a meeting of defense and foreign ministers on the need for a NATO-wide defense against missile attack, although France expressed skepticism about the plan.

NATO officials said ministers backed a series of priority projects for alliance members to pursue jointly, including one to counter improvised explosive devices that are the biggest killers of NATO troops in Afghanistan.

The report by the congressional panel overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), said that the $437 million in Treasury contracts to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and private companies to manage critical aspects of the bailout program raised a number of concerns about public oversight and conflicts of interest.

“Treasury may be less likely to expedite meaningful reforms of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac when it has employed them for combined arrangements of $240.5 million and when these firms agreed to provide their services at cost, receiving no profit from the deals,” the report said.

Speaking a day after a senior NATO official said the military alliance was already assisting Karzai’s outreach to senior Taliban leaders, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Washington would do “whatever it takes” to get the peace process on track.

“We have always acknowledged that reconciliation has to be part of the solution in Afghanistan and we will do whatever we can to support this process,” Gates told a news conference at a NATO meeting in Brussels.

Already respected by investors looking for opportunities in largely left-leaning South America, Chile’s reputation for efficiency was enhanced by the technically complicated rescue operation on Wednesday.

Pinera, 60, a credit card and airline magnate who took office in March for a four-year term as Chile’s first conservative president in two decades, is already basking in the glow of success.

The national poll found that Americans plan to vote for Republicans over Democratic candidates by 48 percent to 44 percent, an edge that will likely give Republicans dozens of seats in the House and big gains in the Senate.

The poll numbers suggest Republicans would win around 227 seats in the House to 208 for the Democrats, Ipsos pollster Cliff Young said. In the Senate, the poll indicates Democrats would retain control but with a smaller, 52-to-48 seat margin.

The state attorneys general are looking at allegations some banks did not properly review files or submitted false statements to evict delinquent borrowers from their homes during a foreclosure crisis that is one of the most visible wounds of the 2007-2009 recession.

“We are in the fourth year of a housing and economic crisis that was brought on by lax practices of the mortgage lending industry,” Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson said.

Most of the stores the company plans to build in the United States will be larger than 60,000 square feet. But Wal-Mart plans for 30 to 40 of its 185-205 new U.S. discount stores to be smaller than that, Bill Simon said at the company’s annual meeting with analysts and investors in Rogers, Arkansas.

Both Wal-Mart and rival discounter Target Corp are trying out smaller store formats to get into densely populated urban areas and increase sales. Some of the new Wal-Mart stores will be less than 30,000-square feet and will be targeted at those urban areas and small towns, the company said.

They said Tuesday’s lifting of the drilling moratorium would not end the uncertainty they faced during the months of the ban imposed by President Barack Obama’s administration because of the BP oil spill, the worst in U.S. history.

Fishermen became the most visible economic victims of the spill — which flowed for 87 days following the April 20 Deepwater Horizon rig explosion — during which authorities banned fishing in much of the Gulf’s waters.

Relatives were organizing welcome-home parties and trying to hold off an onslaught of demands by those seeking to share in the glory of the amazing rescue that entranced people around the world and set off horn-blowing celebrations across this South American nation.

President Sebastian Pinera posed with the miners, most of whom were wearing bathrobes and slippers, for a group photo, and then celebrated the rescue as an achievement that will bring Chile a new level of respect around the world.

Urzua, 54, was the shift commander at the time of the disaster, and used all his wits and his leadership talents to help his men stay calm and in control for the 17 harrowing days it took for rescuers to make their first contact with them.

It was no surprise, then, that Urzua was the last of the 33 miners to leave the San Jose gold and copper mine after more than two months of confinement.

From Australia to the coal fields of Appalachia, people in seemingly every corner of the world followed the Chilean miners’ rescue Wednesday on TV and the Internet, and many were uplifted by the experience.

“It’s a heartwarming story. It’s family values. It’s leadership. It’s everything that we should have here,” Mark Vannucci said as he watched on a TV at a restaurant in New York’s Times Square. His wife, Susan, said: “Instead of those guys in the mine turning on each other, they worked together, they bonded.”

A cadre of new GOP governors, including some in battleground states that Obama won two years ago, could complicate his efforts to deliver benefits to voters and campaign effectively in 2012. They could also help create Republican-friendly House seats in next year’s once-a-decade redistricting process.

In the final weeks of this year’s contest, Obama is campaigning hard for Democrats coast to coast, well aware of the worrisome signs for the future. So far, his results seem mixed, and some candidates seem wary of him.

Trailing badly in the polls, O’Donnell has bobbed and weaved recently on her previously bold and provocative positions that are sure to alienate the all-important centrist voting bloc in politically moderate Delaware.

“What I believe is irrelevant,” she said under the bright lights of a nationally televised debate Wednesday when asked if she still believes evolution is a myth and schools should be teaching creationism as science.

The 1,900-foot engineering wonder perched 890 feet above the Colorado River is expected to drastically cut travel time along the main route between Las Vegas and Phoenix, as motorists will no longer have to make their way across the dam’s winding two-lane road at a snail’s pace.

“I know that the Hoover Dam is one of the wonders of the world,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said at a dedication ceremony Thursday. “I don’t know who gives that designation, but I hope the bridge will become another wonder of the world.”

Amid the bustle of a shopping mall, with babies wailing and pop music piped in overhead, clutches of people tried to snooze Thursday in what was billed as Spain’s first siesta competition.

The goal – to promote Spain’s cherished post-luncheon nap – is no joke, although the costumes of some who participated may be.

A total of 288,345 properties were lost to foreclosure in the July-September quarter, according to data released Thursday by RealtyTrac Inc., a foreclosure listing service. That’s up from nearly 270,000 in the second quarter, the previous high point in the firm’s records dating back to 2005.

Banks have seized more than 816,000 homes through the first nine months of the year and had been on pace to seize 1.2 million by the end of 2010. But fewer are expected now that several major lenders have suspended foreclosures and sales of repossessed homes until they can sort out the foreclosure-documents mess.

Burhanuddin Rabbani told reporters in Kabul the Taliban have not completely rejected the idea of negotiating a nonmilitary resolution of the war.

“They have some conditions to start the negotiations process. It gives us hope that they want to talk and negotiate,” Rabbani said.

The number of people applying for jobless benefits and the high unemployment rate have essentially been static in that time, the latest data show.

It’s a bleak picture for Democrats, who could lose control of Congress in three weeks. Numerous polls show voters blame President Barack Obama and his party for the slow economic recovery and the 9.6 percent unemployment rate – not much better than the 9.7 percent rate when the year began.

Here’s who is out: Notre Dame, Michigan, Texas, USC, Penn State and Miami. Those teams have won a combined 23 AP national championships.

Here’s who is in: Oregon, Boise State, TCU, South Carolina, Utah and Nevada. That group has one AP title – by TCU in 1938.

In a written ruling, U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson said it also needs to be decided whether it’s constitutional to penalize people who do not buy insurance with taxes and to require states to expand their Medicaid programs. Another federal judge in Michigan threw out a similar lawsuit last week.

Vinson set a hearing for Dec. 16. The lawsuits will likely wind up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Although doctors are at odds about when during development a fetus can feel pain, it’s an issue that could change the way abortions are regulated in the United States.

The Nebraska law that takes effect Friday bans abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy based on the idea of fetal pain, a departure from the standard of viability – when the fetus could survive outside the womb, generally considered to be between 22 and 24 weeks – established by the 1973 landmark ruling in Roe v. Wade.

In interviews with The Associated Press, station owners from Wisconsin to Virginia say BP dealers are being courted by other brands or are approaching them on their own.

While the practice is common in such a competitive business, it has become more frequent since the April 20 offshore rig explosion and spill that tarnished BP’s image and led some customers to go elsewhere for gas, the owners say.

The city did what it has done time and time again: pay.

Nearly $1 billion has been paid over the past decade to resolve claims against the nation’s largest police department, according to an investigation by The Associated Press. Some smaller departments also shell out tens of millions a year in payouts, but New York’s spending on police claims dwarfs that of any other U.S. city.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen said that, based on Thursday’s meeting of the foreign and defense ministers of NATO’s 28 members, he was “quite optimistic” the anti-missile shield would be formally adopted at the organization’s next summit in Portugal on Nov. 19-20.

“I was very encouraged by the determination of the allies to modernize the alliance for the 21st century,” Fogh Rasmussen told journalists. “We are oriented towards a consensus at the summit in Lisbon that NATO should protect the populations against a missile attack.”

It has been the deadliest year for international forces in the nine-year Afghan conflict. Troop numbers have been ramped up to turn the screws on insurgents and casualties have mounted. The escalating toll has shaken the commitment of many NATO countries, with calls growing to start drawing down forces quickly.

A homemade bomb in western Afghanistan killed three service members Thursday, an alliance statement said without giving the nationalities of the dead or the specific location of the attack. American, Italian, Spanish and Lithuanian forces are deployed in the country’s west.

The poster, not quite big enough to qualify as a billboard, reflects an unspoken bargain between Obama and black voters: He asks, they deliver.

Last week, Obama asked.

The moves are just the latest in a constantly shifting battleground as Republicans seek to take advantage of a political tail wind by broadening their footprint. Democrats are narrowing their focus to places they must win to keep their Senate and House majorities.

With little more than two weeks before Nov. 2, both sides are making decisions hourly about where to spend limited resources even as donations continue to pour in.

Coons, meanwhile, during a nationally televised debate portrayed O’Donnell as an extremist more interested in clever sound bites than offering solutions to the problems confronting the nation.

O’Donnell, a tea party favorite, has drawn attention for her comments years ago that she dabbled in witchcraft as a teenager and opposed masturbation in a crusade against premarital sex. She frequently sought Wednesday to distance herself from her past views, softening her rhetoric on issues such as homosexuality and evolution.

Homeland security officials put the latest generation of the bottled liquid scanner to the test Wednesday during a demonstration at Albuquerque’s international airport. Everything from bottled water and champagne to shampoo and pink liquid laxatives were scanned to make sure explosives weren’t hiding inside.

The device, about the size of a small refrigerator, uses magnetic resonance to read the liquids’ molecular makeup, even when the substances are in metal containers. Within 15 seconds, a light on top of the simple-looking metal box flashes red or green, depending on whether there’s danger.

Leading the call for a nationwide time-out on kicking people out of their homes is Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is locked in a neck-and-neck re-election contest with tea party-endorsed Sharron Angle in Nevada, which has the highest foreclose rate in the country. Reid is decrying “reports of shoddy and defective affidavit preparation.”

On Wednesday, attorneys general and bank regulators in all 50 states announced a joint investigation into questionable foreclosure practices, including forged documents, apparently bogus signatures and questionable notarizations. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has said the Justice Department also is looking into the allegations – but he stopped short of opening a formal investigation.

U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips won praise from gays and was derided by critics as an activist judge when she issued an injunction Tuesday ending the 17-year-old “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, saying it violates due process rights, freedom of speech and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances guaranteed by the First Amendment.

The fallout on the polarizing topic has surprised Phillips’ friends and colleagues, who said the 53-year-old registered Democrat is much better known in her inner circle for her empathy, her love of Jane Austen novels and her annual walking tours of Europe.

An all-white jury in Scranton convicted Derrick Donchak and Brandon Piekarsky of violating the civil rights of 25-year-old Luis Ramirez, who died in July 2008 following a confrontation with a group of white high school football players in the former mining town of Shenandoah. The jury also convicted Donchak of two other counts related to a plot to cover up the beating.

Donchak, 20, sobbed as the verdict was read. Piekarsky, 18, put his head in his hands. Both were led away in handcuffs and ordered held behind bars pending their Jan. 24 sentencing. They could be sentenced to life in prison.

Omar Regan said the federal review into the death last October of his father, Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah, lacked sufficient evidence to prove his father’s death was justified. He hoped the report released Wednesday would reveal violations by FBI agents during the raid in a Dearborn warehouse that included dozens of federal, state and local law enforcement officers.

“We hurt – we really hurt, and we’re disappointed in the Department of Justice,” said Regan, who was joined at a news conference by Christian, Muslim and civil-rights leaders. “It’s been nearly a year. I honestly had high hopes that they would honestly see injustice. It’s clear to everybody on the ground level that it was not legitimate.”

Suffolk County, on the eastern half of Long Island, moved to create the nation’s first animal abuse registry this week, requiring people convicted of cruelty to animals to register or face jail time and fines.

“We know there is a very strong correlation between animal abuse and domestic violence,” said Suffolk County legislator Jon Cooper, the bill’s sponsor. “Almost every serial killer starts out by torturing animals, so in a strange sense we could end up protecting the lives of people.”

In the redacted ruling released Thursday, U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan explained his reasons for deciding last week to block the witness, Hussein Abebe, from the trial of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani.

Kaplan said prosecutors failed to show Ghailani’s rough CIA interrogation at a secret camp overseas played no role in getting the witness to cooperate.

Before being stricken three years ago with Lou Gehrig’s disease, the 61-year-old Oregon resident who was an avid hiker would have backpacked this canyon. Instead, he was there to pick out his grave site.

Three months later, Sall was laid to rest in the forest.

Attorneys for Brian Dorian have said he was the victim of a botched investigation by Will County detectives and prosecutors. But Pat Barry, a spokesman for the Will County sheriff, told The Associated Press that Dorian didn’t provide specifics about what he was doing the morning of the shootings until Tuesday, four days after his arrest.

In an interview Wednesday, Barry also said that while there was no physical evidence linking Dorian to the Oct. 5 shootings, the circumstantial evidence seemed compelling and included a witness who identified Dorian as the shooter.

The lawsuit filed in federal court in Atlanta by the American Civil Liberties Union seeks damages from the federal government and people ranging from Obama administration officials to immigration agents. It also asks for a jury trial.

Mark Lyttle was serving prison time in North Carolina for a misdemeanor offense in 2008 when prison officials say he gave Mexico as his place of birth, drawing the attention of immigration agents. His lawyers acknowledge he eventually signed papers allowing his deportation, but argue he was too mentally disabled to understand what he was doing. He spent four months in Central America before his family helped him return.

Police and investigators from the Dallas County District Attorney’s office took Robert Warterfield into custody as a suspect in a different sexual assault of a child.

The DA’s office said in a statement that its forensics lab confirmed a DNA match between Warterfield and evidence left at the scene of an unsolved 1989 sexual assault of a 9-year-old Dallas girl. Warterfield will be charged with aggravated sexual assault of a child, said Jamille Bradfield, a spokeswoman for DA Craig Watkins.

Rhee stepped down Wednesday, several weeks after the man who appointed her, Mayor Adrian Fenty, was defeated in a Democratic primary where Rhee’s celebrated yet stormy tenure was a factor.

“We have agreed that the best way to keep the reforms going is for this reformer to step aside,” she said during Wednesday’s announcement, adding that the decision was one both she and Fenty’s presumed successor, D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray, agreed on.