Evening Edition

The cholera outbreak, the first in Haiti in more than 100 years, has stabilized in recent days but the number of new deaths announced on Tuesday was more than four times the six reported on Monday.

Overall infections have been increasing steadily and doctor Roc Magloire of the Haitian public health ministry said the number being treated in hospitals and clinics had risen over the past 24 hours by 270 to 3,612.

The outbreak emerged last Thursday as the toll soared to 135, but the number of new daily deaths has since rapidly declined to 33 on Sunday and just six on Monday.

Announcing the new toll of 259, Gabriel Thimote, director general of Haiti’s health department, said the overall number of infections had risen from 3,115 to 3,342 over the past 24 hours.

“At the WHO we think more cases will be found. The most important thing is prevention,” World Health Organization spokeswoman Fadela Chaib told reporters in Geneva.

Haiti’s first cholera epidemic in more than 100 years emerged last week and has so far killed 259 people and infected more than 3,000 others, although the fatality rate has slowed dramatically in recent days.

However, the result disappointed markets as analysts said that exceptional items bolstered the result. UBS’s share price fell by 4.99 percent on Tuesday.

The result also depressed banking stocks in France, as UBS adopted a cautious tone in its statements.

“Management and staff at the Oberhausen Sea Life Centre were devastated to discover that oracle octopus Paul, who achieved global renown during the recent World Cup, had passed away overnight,” the aquarium said in a statement.

“He appears to have passed away peacefully during the night, of natural causes,” said Sea Life manager Stefan Porwoll.

The whistleblower website WikiLeaks released an unprecedented 400,000 classified US documents, which recount widespread torture in Iraqi prisons and purport to show 15,000 more civilian deaths than previously disclosed.

General George Casey, the top officer in the US Army who earlier headed forces in Iraq for three of the bloodiest years in the war, denied that the United States “turned a blind eye” to abuse of prisoners.

In a tactical victory for Sarkozy, workers at three of France’s refineries voted to return to work and police were able to clear protesters blocking all 219 fuel depots not attached to the nine refining sites still on strike.

In a possible sign of further easing, the leader of the Marseille region, Eugene Castelli, said waste collectors would end their two-week strike Tuesday in France’s second city where 10,000 tonnes of refuse is lying uncollected.

As his Italian team crackled with excitement following Alonso’s triumph – a win that lifted him to the top of the drivers’ world championship with two races remaining – the scarlet scuderia’s boss Stefano Domenicali warned them it was too soon to celebrate and to stay focussed for the final events in Brazil and Abu Dhabi.

“For us now, the mission is to stay cool, to keep very concentrated and without over-reacting to this great part of the season,” said Domenicali.

However, the result disappointed markets as analysts said that exceptional items bolstered the result, and UBS’s share price dropped by 5.39 percent by the middle of the day (1121 GMT).

The result also depressed banking stock in France, as UBS adopted a cautious tone in its statements.

An anaconda as long as a limousine, a giant catfish that eats monkeys, a blue fanged spider and poisoned dart frogs are among the 1,220 animals and plants to have been found from 1999 to 2009, according to the study.

The report was released on the sidelines of a United Nations summit in Japan that is being held to try to stem the mass extinction of species around the world, and the WWF said it highlighted why protecting the Amazon was so vital.

Those walls stood firm when the earth shook on January 12, and for three months after that devastating quake the CDTI du Sacre Coeur Hospital threw open its doors, treating thousands of victims free of charge.

American and French doctors, flown in by their respective governments, worked non-stop in CDTI’s operating rooms together with their Haitian counterparts seeing more than 12,000 patients and performing more than 700 major surgeries.

Despite initial encouraging signs of a decrease in the week-old outbreak’s lethality, Haitian and international health authorities warned they were still preparing for the deadly diarrheal disease to extend further before it was controlled.

“A nationwide outbreak with tens of thousands of cases is a real possibility,” the United Nations humanitarian agency OCHA said in a statement.

A thirst for change in Washington and worries about the stumbling economy appear likely to break the Democrats’ grip on Congress next Tuesday in a rout that would topple House Speaker Nancy Pelosi from power.

With more than 90 Democratic-held seats at risk in the 435-member House, independent analysts project Republicans will pick up at least the 39 Democratic seats they need for control.

Ford, which expects to be solidly profitable this year, said it repaid $2 billion of debt in the third quarter, expects to pay off a debt to a union retiree healthcare trust fund on Friday and has launched an offer to encourage holders of two issues of its convertible notes to exchange them for shares, in an effort to further reduce its debt.

Ford shares, which touched a six-month high on Monday, were up 1.8 percent in afternoon trading after the release of the earnings results and debt-reduction plans, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average was essentially flat.

The talks in the Japanese city of Nagoya are aimed at setting new 2020 targets to protect plant and animal species, a protocol to share genetic resources between countries and companies and more funding to protect nature, especially forests.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates global deforestation fell from 16 million hectares (40 million acres) per year in the 1990s to 13 million hectares per year in the past decade, with the bulk of the losses in tropical countries.

The whistle-blower website WikiLeaks on Friday released nearly 400,000 classified U.S. files on the Iraq war, the biggest leak of its kind in U.S. military history.

WikiLeaks said the documents detailed the deaths of 15,000 more Iraqi civilians than the U.S. military had reported.

Making a campaign stop in the tiny state of Rhode Island, Obama acknowledged some of his policies were not popular and that Americans were frustrated by the weak economic recovery. But the steps he took averted a second Great Depression, he stressed.

“It took us a long time to get us into this economic hole that we’ve been in. But we are going to get out and I am absolutely convinced there are brighter days ahead for America,” Obama told workers after touring the American Cord & Webbing plant in Woonsocket, outside Providence.

U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn called the documents “stolen material” and said they give adversaries key insight on how the U.S. military operates. He did not say which groups, or how the Pentagon knew they were researching the documents.

“There are groups out there that have said they are indeed mining this data to turn around and use against us,” Lynn told a small group of reporters during a brief visit to Baghdad. “We think this is problematic.”

Don’t count on a quick resolution to the drama on Election Night. If the race turns out to be as tight as polling suggests, write-in and absentee ballots could come into play. That could put off a final tally — and the determination of the winner — for weeks.

Republican nominee Joe Miller is courting the conservative vote and seeking to draw Republican support away from Sen. Lisa Murkowski, whom he defeated in the primary. Democrat Scott McAdams is competing for on-the-fence Democrats and moderate independents. Campaigns say many voters are still undecided.

Now the Wisconsin Department of Corrections’ handling of the three-year-old case involving Prairie du Chien Correctional Institution guard James Trentin is costing taxpayers money.

The state this year paid $150,000 to avoid a lawsuit by a former inmate who says Trentin gave him oral sex four times, according to documents obtained by the AP under Wisconsin’s open records law. Four other inmates who told investigators they received oral sex or were inappropriately touched could seek payments.

The Emperor’s size set him apart from the herd, but may also have made him prize prey for hunters willing to pay handsomely for such a majestic trophy.

“With a set of antlers such as this deer had, it was basically going to kill him in the end,” said Richard Austin, the photographer whose images appeared in newspapers – inevitably accompanied by the word “majestic.”

Karzai said Monday he receives millions of dollars in cash from Iran, adding that Washington gives him “bags of money” too because his office lacks funds.

In Washington, President Barack Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, denied that. “We’re not in the big bags of cash business,” he said Tuesday.

Its popular new cars and trucks are grabbing a bigger share of the U.S. market. It’s about to erase a big chunk of its health care debt. And it’s adding a significant number of jobs for the first time in five years.

On Tuesday, the automaker said it made $1.7 billion from July through September, a jump of nearly 70 percent from a year earlier and its sixth consecutive quarter in the black.

The new head of the players’ union says his members are open to adding more wild-card teams for 2012 and possibly extending the division series to a best-of-seven.

Union head Michael Weiner says it’s also possible players would agree to cutting the regular season from 162 games, but that’s more problematic because it would cost teams revenue.

Jury selection began Tuesday some five years after DeLay was indicted on charges he illegally funneled corporate money to help Republicans in Texas legislative races in 2002.

DeLay smiled and held the hand of his wife, Christine, as he entered a courthouse in Travis County earlier in the day.

The father of Spc. Adam Winfield is objecting to the conditions at Joint Base Lewis-McChord south of Seattle, and wants the soldier moved to a different facility.

Christopher Winfield said his son was separated from other defendants in the case about a month ago after he reported being threatened by one of them. He’s been in protective solitary custody since then, but conditions grew markedly worse last week when he was moved from a cell with access to a common area and television to one he’s locked in nearly all the time, his father said.

Several states are considering outlawing the drinks and at least two universities have banned them from campus while the Food and Drug Administration reviews their safety.

Washington state Attorney General Rob McKenna called for the drinks to be banned and sent a letter to the FDA on Monday, saying the drinks “present a serious threat to public health and safety.”

Defenders say Omar Khadr, who was 15 at the time of his capture, was a “child soldier” pushed into becoming an al-Qaida fighter by his father, an associate of Osama bin Laden.

The plea deal ends a widely criticized trial that made the United States the first Western nation since World War II to prosecute a child offender for alleged war crimes. The exact terms were not immediately disclosed, but Khadr’s sentence was reportedly capped at eight years, in addition to time already spent at the Guantanamo detention camp.

Three of the biggest prizes are New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania. All three states are expected to lose seats in Congress as a result of the 2010 census, and that’s sure to ignite boundary fights. A party’s congressman on the wrong end of redistricting can find the district he’s represented for years no longer exists.

Democrats have hopes, too. They aim to take away state Senate control in Michigan and Kentucky and the House in Texas and Tennessee. Texas would be a particular victory, since it seems likely to have four more seats to divvy up under the new census. But none of the analysts contacted by The Associated Press predicted the Democrats would succeed in any of those states.

Nor was his greeting totally friendly in a state where Obama has pointedly declined to endorse his party’s candidate for governor.

Obama can “take his endorsement and really shove it,” declared Democrat Frank Caprio, battling Republican-turned-independent Lincoln Chafee in a Rhode Island gubernatorial race rated tight in the polls. Chafee endorsed Obama during the 2008 campaign for the White House.

Frank Caprio’s campaign said last week that he would welcome the president’s endorsement. But on Monday, the same day Obama made his first visit to Rhode Island as president and a day after the White House said Obama would endorse no one, Caprio angrily told WPRO-AM that Obama can “take his endorsement and really shove it.”

It was a surprising about-face for Caprio, the state’s general treasurer, whose campaign had said as recently as Sunday night that he was looking forward to Obama’s visit and that he would accompany the president to two appearances.

Joe Patten, 83, occupies a spacious dwelling nestled beneath the theater’s onion-shaped dome. His original lease, drawn up in the 1970s after he helped save the Fox from the wrecking ball, said he could live there for life.

Earlier this month his lawyer sued the nonprofit organization that runs the Fox, saying the trustees of Atlanta Landmarks are trying to unfairly evict Patten.

The memo was written to then-Gov. Paul Cellucci during Baker’s tenure as state budget chief. Baker said Monday during the last televised debate in the race for governor the memo was meant to highlight his concern about overall state spending.

“The memo that I wrote was about my concern about state spending overall and the growth in spending on the state side which had been growing at a significant rate,” Baker said when asked about the memo. “We were continuing to grow the level of spending that we were seeing on the statewide side at the same time we had a fixed set of expenses associated with the Dig.”

At issue is the RGA’s sponsorship of ads that have aired in Vermont promoting GOP gubernatorial nominee Brian Dubie, which Attorney General William Sorrell says makes the RGA a de facto political action committee subject to Vermont’s campaign finance laws.

The RGA says the ads are “advocacy communication” not aired to elect or defeat any one candidate, and that it shouldn’t have to meet the reporting requirements of political action committees – or register as one.

For the past 15 years, the southern California-based urban planner has been answering a hotline number for Mormons struggling with their sexual identity. Jarvis, a volunteer for Affirmation, a support group for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Mormons, estimates he’s talked to as many as 3,000 people.

Many of them are “deathly afraid,” their secret will be discovered by friends, family, or members of their Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints congregations, he said.

The proposal was introduced by a bipartisan group of legislators and advocates and seeks to augment laws New Jersey passed eight years ago. It would require anti-bullying programs in public K-12 schools and language in college codes of conduct to address bullying.

State Sen. Barbara Buono, a Democrat from Metuchen who was one of the main sponsors of the 2002 law, said she has learned since then how prevalent bullying is as parents of tormented children have called her office. The original law only encouraged anti-bullying programs and wasn’t doing enough, she said.

Some travelers who had arranged trips to New York say they are creeped out about staying in hotels and visiting attractions as new reports of bedbugs seem to pop up every few days. And officials in Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration are concerned about the effect on the city’s image and $30 billion tourism industry.

The discoveries of the bloodsucking pests at high-profile places are often not full-blown infestations, or even in public areas. Bloomingdale’s reported finding exactly one bug in the famous department store, the Empire State Building had them in the basement and Lincoln Center’s were in a dressing room.

The Washington, D.C.-based National Organization for Marriage argued last week that it should be allowed to run ads for Paladino, who has railed against same-sex marriage, without reporting donors’ names or adhering to other election law requirements governing political committees.

U.S. District Judge Richard Arcara dismissed the lawsuit as premature because state elections officials haven’t classified the organization as a political committee. The judge added there was “at least a notable chance” it would not meet the definition.