Evening Edition

A total of 4,147 people were now being treated in hospitals for cholera, said the head of Haiti’s health department Gabriel Thimote, while eight new fatalities brought the death toll to 292.

The World Health Organization warned the outbreak had yet to reach its peak, and said Haiti should prepare for the disease to hit the capital Port-au-Prince, teeming with squalid tent cities.

The National Assembly voted 336 for and 233 against the law, which raises the minimum retirement age from 60 to 62, on the eve of the latest in a series of protests that have threatened to bring France to a standstill.

Sarkozy must now sign off on the law and publish it in the official gazette, which a presidential advisor has said will happen around November 15.

The Giants have not won the crown since 1954, four years before moving from New York to San Francisco, while the Rangers are in the first World Series in their half-century history and had not won a playoff series before this month.

“You dream to be in this position,” Rangers manager Ron Washington said. “This is what it’s all about. It just means everything to me and to my players. They play with a deep feeling of passion.”

The group reported a profit of 2.2 billion euros (3.0 billion dollars), reflecting strong demand and strict cost controls but did not raise its full-year outlook even though the targets are considered prudent by analysts.

“Increased demand for our models and our disciplined cost management led to these strong results, which have strengthened our sound financial base,” VW finance director Hans Dieter Poetsch said in a statement.

In the first game of the NBA season, the league’s latest star-studded team managed just nine points in the first quarter and fell 88-80 to the veteran Celtics.

“This is one of 82,” Dwyane Wade said. “Sorry if everyone thought we were going to go 82 and 0. It just ain’t happening.”

Analysts predict Republicans would retake the House of Representatives and cut deeply into the Democrats’ Senate majority, winning a solid base to assail Obama’s agenda two years before his 2012 reelection bid.

Democrats hoped their get-out-the-vote efforts would make the difference in scores of nail-biter races and help contain a Republican tide that was also expected to give the president’s opponents control of key governorships.

Deutsche Bank reported a net loss of 1.2 billion euros (1.66 billion dollars) that included a one-off charge from its takeover of Postbank, a deal meant to broaden Deutsche Bank’s revenue base.

Analysts polled by Dow Jones Newswires had forecast a deeper net loss of 1.47 billion euros, and Deutsche Bank shares leapt higher in morning trading on the Frankfurt stock exchange.

A self-avowed Tea Party activist, he opposes abortion even in the cases of rape and incest. He wants to abolish the Federal Reserve, labeling it “unconstitutional.” He vows to “guarantee constitutional rights for home-schooling.” And he is still calling for President Barack Obama to produce his birth certificate or face deportation.

Yet Schneller quite possibly might never have become a candidate for Congress in Pennsylvania’s seventh congressional district were it not for a helping hand from his opponents. As it happens, a dozen Delaware County Democratic Party activists obtained nearly all of the necessary signatures for him to qualify for the ballot, records of the Pennsylvania Secretary of State show.

NATO officials say reintegrating insurgents is still in its infancy, with only four or five groups of fighters disarmed and contact with 25 other small groups, many only loosely tied to the Taliban militants.

But the idea of negotiating with insurgents on all levels is gaining ground as U.S. President Barack Obama and NATO allies come under pressure over mounting casualties in a war many Western officials believe can’t be won on the battlefield alone.

“If everybody in state service worked as long as I have, the pension system would be overfunded by 50 percent,” Brown quipped in a debate.

But at an estimated half a trillion dollars, California’s public pension shortfall is no laughing matter, and Brown quickly moved on to lay out serious solutions.

Senior officials from nearly 200 countries have gathered in Nagoya, Japan, to set new goals for 2020 to fight animal and plant extinctions after they missed a goal for a “significant reduction” in losses of biological diversity by 2010.

The meeting hopes to push governments and businesses to commit to sweeping steps to protect ecosystems under threat, such as forests that clean the air, insects that pollinate crops and coral reefs that nurture valuable fisheries.

“We have to look at the entire system and how we do things, and take into account the rapid technological change that we’re seeing today,” Army Vice Chief of Staff General Peter Chiarelli said at the annual Association of the U.S. Army conference.

“I don’t understand how we can take 8 to 10 years or even longer and put something on the street and have it be relevant,” he told reporters after delivering an even more blunt assessment to a panel discussion: “I’m a firm believer that it’s going to take the big bang theory.”

Karzai has stressed his commitment to a decree disbanding private security companies, spurring concern in Washington that aid work in Afghanistan may already be starting to suffer over security fears, but on Wednesday said the original December deadline could be extended up to two months.

Some U.S.-funded development companies have said they have started scaling back projects. On Saturday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Karzai to recommend a joint plan to replace the guard firms gradually rather than enforce a ban that could threaten millions of dollars in aid work.

Officials and industry executives in Berlin and Washington warned of severe repercussions from a scarcity of the minerals with magnetic, luminescent and other properties which go into products such as hybrid cars, solar panels and windmills.

The near monopoly China has in producing 97 percent of the world’s supply of rare earths has been well-known among industrial users for years, but came under the international spotlight after reports Beijing halted shipments to Japan over a territorial dispute with Tokyo last month.

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

With more than 90 Democratic-held seats at risk on November 2 in the 435-member House, independent analysts project Republicans will pick up at least the 39 Democratic seats they need for control.

Toronto native Omar Khadr pleaded guilty on Monday to all five terrorism charges against him, including conspiring with al Qaeda to commit terrorist acts and murdering a U.S. soldier with a grenade during an Afghanistan firefight.

Now 24, he was captured at age 15 and has been locked up with adult prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. naval base in Cuba for more than eight years. At his sentencing hearing, the U.S. military jury heard from a forensic psychiatrist hired by prosecutors to meet with Khadr and assess his dangerousness.

The question is how much of the GOP’s government-shrinking, tax-cutting agenda to advance, and how fast.

It’s certain that Republicans want to capitalize quickly on tea party-fueled anger and the antiestablishment fervor that they believe will provide momentum to accomplish an activist to-do list. It’s equally clear, however, that the outsized expectations of a fed-up electorate and a crop of unruly newcomers could complicate the plans. So could Obama and fellow Democrats who will still be around after Tuesday’s elections.

Christie, a rising star in the Republican Party for his fearless budget-slashing, has argued that his cash-strapped state can’t afford to pay for any overruns on the $9 billion-plus rail tunnel under the Hudson River. The state is on the hook for $2.7 billion plus overruns.

“In the end, my decision does not change,” Christie said. “I cannot place upon the citizens of New Jersey an open-ended letter of credit, and that’s what this project represents.”

The 23-year-old from Bremen, Ga. was scanning the horizon for Taliban gunmen who were maneuvering unseen somewhere across this rural battlefield, ordering civilians out of their homes in apparent preparation for a fight.

Eight months after U.S.-led forces launched the biggest operation of the war to clear insurgents from the southern poppy-growing district of Marjah, it wasn’t supposed to be this way. Today, the world’s most powerful military is still struggling to rout guerrillas staging complex hit-and-run attacks relentlessly, every day.

“We can see 2012 from our house,” Sarah Palin quipped recently, setting off another round of will-she-or-won’t-she speculation.

But even though Nov. 3 is the unofficial start of the 2012 campaign, don’t expect a surge of Republicans to declare their intentions anytime soon.

TV commercials are shrinking along with attention spans and advertising budgets. The 15-second ad is increasingly common, gradually supplanting the 30-second spot just as it knocked off the full-minute pitch decades ago.

For viewers, it means more commercials in a more rapid-fire format. For advertisers, shorter commercials are a way to save some money, and research shows they hold on to more eyeballs than the longer format.

“The way he does it, no one else does it that way. I like that,” Lee said Tuesday, a day before the Texas Rangers ace pitches against the San Francisco Giants star in Game 1 of the World Series.

“I like when unorthodox works and it works to that kind of an extent, back-to-back Cy Young winner. He throws in a way that you probably wouldn’t want to show your kid how to throw,” Lee said. “He definitely is doing something right. He’s different.”

Mocking Miami in the closing minutes of the much-hyped but lackluster debut of its new superstar trio, the boisterous crowd at the TD Garden serenaded two-time NBA MVP LeBron James and sent him away with another loss on Tuesday night as the Celtics beat the Heat 88-80.

James scored 21 of his 31 points in the second half and helped cut a 19-point deficit to three points in the final 70 seconds. But Ray Allen hit a 3-pointer, and Paul Pierce made a pair of free throws to seal it for the defending Eastern Conference champions.

The Commerce Department says orders for durable goods rose 3.3 percent last month. Overall, it was the best showing since January. But excluding transportation, orders fell 0.8 percent after having risen 1.9 percent in August.

And spending by companies on capital goods excluding aircraft dropped 0.6 percent after rising 4.8 percent in August. The category, which is viewed as a good proxy for business investment in the economy, has declined in two of the past three months.

The international community supports the idea of getting rid of the estimated 30,000 to 40,000 guns-for-hire in the war-torn country, but not by the Dec. 17 deadline Karzai had set. International officials spent several days in intense negotiations with the president, and even U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton weighed in with a phone call asking him to reconsider.

Some security contractors still could be barred from working in Afghanistan by Dec. 17 under Karzai’s revised plan, but others will get extensions until at least February.

The social-networking pioneer, which was among the top Internet sites just a few years ago, now has its sights set decidedly lower. Starting Wednesday and over the next month, MySpace will be relaunching its site to focus on giving users more ways to consume music, videos and celebrity gossip.

Entertainment has long been central to the MySpace experience, but over the years the site was also pulled in different directions as it dabbled in classifieds, job ads and even user reviews in a partnership with Citysearch as it pushed to become a social portal for the Web. It didn’t work out, and Facebook is now emerging as that portal.

Polish prosecutors are looking at him as a victim as they investigate a now-shuttered secret CIA prison that operated in Poland where he was subjected to harsh interrogation techniques, according to former U.S. intelligence officials and publicly available documents.

The chief prosecutor in the case, Jerzy Mierzewski, said Wednesday that Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri has received the status of victim, a move that allows the detainee’s lawyers to participate in the larger investigation by reviewing evidence and calling witnesses.

A monthlong leadership course at the Ivy League university costs taxpayers more than $18,000 per employee. That’s more than twice what the average public university charges for tuition and fees, excluding room and board, for an entire year, and enough to pay the same charges for a semester and a half at the average private university.

Government and school officials say that’s what it costs to train executives. And it’s what’s being paid by top companies, which compete with government agencies for talent.

Nearly 80 percent of U.S. government agencies are at risk of illegally destroying public records and the National Archives is backlogged with hefty volumes of records needing preservation care, the audit by the Government Accountability Office found.

The report by the watchdog arm of Congress, completed this month after a year’s work and obtained by The Associated Press, also found many U.S. agencies do not follow proper procedures for disposing of public records.

Such a move, experts say, raises questions about the effectiveness of the drug. But it also may further complicate executions in the 35 states that allow them, as inmates challenge the use of drugs not approved by federal inspectors for use in the U.S.

Arizona said Tuesday that it got its sodium thiopental from Great Britain, the first time a state has acknowledged obtaining the drug from outside the United States since the shortage began slowing executions in the spring.

Sure, there are real dangers associated with all this screen time – everything from cyberbullying to couch-potato obesity. Not to mention driving while texting, shortened attention spans and Internet porn.

But many of today’s parents spent hours as kids sitting in front of screens too – only they were TV screens.

It’s not that VW is turning against diesels. The automaker is covering all the bases, particularly in the United States where hybrids like the Toyota Prius have been a growing market segment for a decade.

VW’s first mass-production hybrid – the 2011 Touareg Hybrid – is selling alongside the 2011 diesel-powered Touareg TDI and the non-hybrid, gasoline-powered Touareg FSI.

Shortly after Melinda Hackett put up the round, cedar treehouse for her girls in a broad-trunked London Plane tree in her tiny Greenwich Village backyard, a neighbor called about “a structure in rear which is nailed to a tree” and “looks unsafe,” with no construction permit posted, according to a complaint filed with the city.

“I got home and the police were at the door,” says Hackett, a 49-year-old artist. “Then firefighters came.”

In a laboratory just a few steps away from the warehouse, white-coated scientists for a company called Solazyme are changing the genetic makeup of algae to construct a new generation of fuels.

These “bioengineered” algae are placed into tanks, where they get fat on sugar beets, switch grass or a host of other plants. The sun’s energy, which is stored in the plants, is transformed by the hungry algae into oil, which can be refined into jet fuel, bio-diesel, cooking oil or even cosmetics.

While the front-runner Democrat has accused his Republican Senate opponent, Linda McMahon, of attempting to use her millions to buy the seat – a promised $50 million – he appears uneasy when asked about his own wealth, even though he has loaned his campaign $2.25 million as of Oct. 13.

Blumenthal’s family is actually worth tens of millions of dollars. Though his office is in Hartford, his home – like McMahon’s – is in well-heeled Greenwich. And his wife’s family is part-owner of the Empire State Building.

On the 10th anniversary of the first U.N. Security Council resolution to call for women’s “full involvement” in efforts to maintain and promote peace and security, diplomats from more than 80 countries addressed the U.N.’s most powerful body.

Speaker after speaker said there had been some progress but immense challenges lay ahead.

Bryan Almonte and Brian Cepeda, both 17, and Steven Carabello, 16, had been charged with robbery, gang assault and unlawful imprisonment as hate crimes in the Oct. 3 attacks.

Eight other people remain accused in the case, which city officials called the worst anti-gay attacks in recent history. It’s possible more people will be arrested because investigators are still working.