Evening Edition

At least three civilians were killed when heavy weapons fire hit the town of Myawaddy in Karen State, an official in the military-ruled country said. There was no information on any troop casualties on either side.

Clashes were also reported further south near Myanmar’s Three Pagodas Pass.

With democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi still locked up and two pro-junta parties fielding about two-thirds of the total candidates, world leaders rejected the legitimacy of the poll in a broadside of statements.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Suu Kyi swept her party to power in 1990 but the result was never recognised by the ruling generals. She has been detained for most of the last 20 years and supported a boycott of Sunday’s election.

At least three civilians were killed when heavy weapons fire hit the town of Myawaddy in Karen State, an official in the military-ruled country said. There was no information on any troop casualties on either side.

About 10,000 people fled across the frontier to neighbouring Thailand, including many women and children, said Samart Loyfah, the governor of Thailand’s Tak province on the border.

Around 1,500 demonstrators, including farmers with tractors, blocked roads as authorities loaded the cargo on lorries for the 20-kilometre (12-mile) trip to a storage facility in Gorleben, northern Germany.

By evening, seven of the 11 containers had been transferred from the train. Authorities said they hoped to have the operation completed by around midnight (2300 GMT).

The operation to remove protestors blocking the rail line leading to the nuclear storage facility lasted throughout the night, police said.

“The evacuation is completed, there is nobody left on the tracks,” a police spokeswoman told AFP.

Other rats trained under the same scheme have already helped clear large swathes of land in neighbouring mine-infested Mozambique.

Babette, the two-month-old baby, walks unsteadily across the weedy patch followed by two trainers rolling a bar that teaches her to go back and forth across the patch in straight lines.

In a symbolic climax of his three-day visit to a nation he hailed as an “indispensable” US partner, Obama delivered the foreign policy victory to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in a landmark address to the Indian parliament.

But at the same time he warned that with growing power came increased responsibility, as he pointedly criticised India for failing to condemn human rights abuses in neighbouring Myanmar.

Polling stations closed as expected at 1800 GMT, with no serious incident reported throughout the day as voters took part in the mineral-rich country’s first democratic election since independence from France in 1958.

“There was a strong mobilisation in all regions, popular interest and extraordinary discipline,” said Aziz Diop, executive secretary of the National Council of Guinean Civil Society Organisations. It had 964 observers spread across the country.

Their one-two triumph confirmed the Red Bull team as the 2010 constructors’ champions, but left the drivers’ title race wide open with both drivers still fighting to take the crown from leading Ferrari driver two-times champion Spaniard Fernando Alonso.

Alonso finished a steady third for Ferrari ahead of the 2008 champion Briton Lewis Hamilton, who was fourth ahead of last year’s champion and McLaren team-mate Jenson Button.

“The pope has invited the members of the college of cardinals… to a day of reflection and prayer,” the Vatican said in a statement on Monday.

“The Church’s response to sexual abuse cases” will be one of the themes of the meeting in the Vatican, formally known as a consistory, it added.

While the leaders said talks would continue in Baghdad on Tuesday and Wednesday, twin bombings in the Shiite holy cities of Karbala and Najaf killed at least 18 people and wounded 58, mostly Iranian pilgrims.

The meeting in the northern city of Arbil attended by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and his chief rival, former premier Iyad Allawi, followed an agreement on Saturday between the main Shiite bloc and a Kurdish coalition.

The meeting in the northern city, attended by Maliki and his rival-in-chief former premier Iyad Allawi, follows an agreement on Saturday between the main Shiite bloc and a Kurdish coalition.

Support of Allawi’s Iraqiya party, the other main player in a saga that has dragged on since inconclusive elections in March, hinges on whether it insists on the presidency or accepts the post of parliament speaker on offer.

“On Monday morning Haider left the team hotel without informing any member of the team and the management. Haider was in possession of his passport and there are indications that he has left for London,” a Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) release said.

PCB release said they had informed the Dubai Police about Haider’s disappearance.

However Singapore Airlines said Monday its inspections of its 11 A380 superjumbos had found no problems with their Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engines, as it continues flying the planes.

In Sydney, Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce said rigorous testing had uncovered the anomalies on the Rolls-Royce engines on three separate aircraft, pushing back the return to action of the long-haul planes by 72 hours.

Ahead of a Group of 20 summit this week in Seoul, Zoellick said an updated gold standard could help retool the world economy at a time of serious tensions over currencies and US monetary policy.

He said the world needed a new regime to succeed the “Bretton Woods II” system of floating currencies, which has been in place since the fixed-rate currency system linked to gold broke down in 1971.

Europe and Japan also condemned the conduct of the poll.

Complex rules for Sunday’s election thwarted any chance of a pro-democracy upset as Myanmar ends half a century of direct army rule. State TV said voters “freely and happily” cast ballots, but witness accounts suggested low turn-out and irregularities in the former British colony also known as Burma.

“To date we have not seen a single instance where a human being made a conscious decision to favor dollars over safety,” the commission’s Chief Counsel Fred Bartlit said at a meeting exploring the causes of the Gulf of Mexico spill.

Bartlit said the panel agreed with about 90 percent of the findings of BP’s internal investigation of the accident released this summer. BP’s report assigned much of the blame for the accident to its drilling partners.

Shares in Rolls reversed losses and rose 3 percent as the group eased fears that the failure of one of the four Trent 900 engines powering the Qantas superjumbo signaled a possible wider problem in its family of Trent engines.

“Rolls-Royce has made progress in understanding the cause of the engine failure on the Trent 900-powered A380 Qantas flight QF32 on 4 November,” the company said in a statement, ruling out any link to a Trent 1000 engine test explosion in August.

India says a seat on the council would reflect the importance of the G20 nation as its trillion dollar economy helps spur global growth and its government exerts more and more influence over issues from Doha trade to climate change talks.

“In the years ahead, I look forward to a reformed United Nations Security Council that includes India as a permanent member,” Obama said in a speech to India’s parliament on his first official visit to the world’s largest democracy.

The G20 summit has been pitched as a chance for leaders of the countries that account for 85 percent of world output to prevent a currency row escalating into a rush to protectionism that could imperil the global recovery.

But there is little sign of consensus.

The threat of an early election had unsettled markets and analysts said his decision had removed short-term uncertainties.

Initial official estimates put Papandreou’s socialist party (PASOK) ahead in seven out of 13 regions, with the center-right New Democracy ahead in the rest, although some races we’re very close and almost all were set to go to a run-off next Sunday.

Two of the bombs targeted Iranian pilgrims in Iraq’s holy Shi’ite cities of Kerbala and Najaf, killing at least 10 people, while a third struck a bustling street of shops and restaurants in Iraq’s southern oil hub of Basra.

The deputy head of Basra’s provincial council, Ahmed al-Sulaiti, and an Iraqi army source both put the toll from the Basra explosion at five killed and 42 wounded. The Iraqi army source had initially said 12 people were dead.

“I don’t think it is a good decision,” Juncker told a European Parliament hearing.

Leaders of the world’s 20 biggest developed and developing economies, the G20, meet in Korea this week to discuss how to prevent a currency row escalating into a rush to protectionism that could imperil the global recovery. The Fed decision is likely to be discussed.

Geithner, speaking in the Indian capital during a state visit with President Barack Obama, earlier met with Indian Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee in part to discuss the G20 agenda.

“I’m very confident that you’re going to see very strong consensus on this basic framework because it meets the basic tests and it’s better than the alternatives,” Geithner told an audience of Indian business leaders.

Fighting broke out between ethnic minority Karen rebels and government troops in two locations along Myanmar’s eastern border with Thailand, in the town of Myawaddy and in another area about 200 km (124 miles) further south near the Three Pagodas Pass, as votes from Sunday’s election were being counted.

Five Thai villagers were wounded when four rocket-propelled grenades landed on Thai soil near the town of Mae Sot opposite Myawaddy, a Thai official said, as about 12,000 people fled the fighting in one of the main trade gateways along the 1,800-km (1,100-mile) border with Thailand.

The panel’s chief investigator, Fred H. Bartlit Jr., announced 13 principal findings, many of which seemed to track with investigations of the blowout, including BP’s. Bartlit said he agreed with “about 90 percent” of the company’s own conclusions.

Under commission procedures, Bartlit presented the findings to the seven-member panel. A report is due with Obama in mid-January.

Obama’s declaration, delivered to the pounding applause of India’s parliament members, spoke to a mission broader than the makeup of one global institution. By spending three packed days in India, announcing trade deals, dismissing job-outsourcing gripes and admonishing India’s rival Pakistan, Obama went all in for an ally whose support he hopes to bank on for years.

“I want every Indian citizen to know: The United States of America will not simply be cheering you on from the sidelines,” Obama said inside the soaring legislative chamber of the capital city. “We will be right there with you, shoulder to shoulder, because we believe in the promise of India.”

After two years of near silence, Bush is back.

With his new memoir, “Decision Points,” and a promotion tour, the president who in cockier times could not think of a single mistake he had made, lists many. He counts the years without a post-9/11 attack as his transcendent achievement. He says the economic calamity he handed off to Barack Obama was “one ugly way to end a presidency.”

It may sound old-fashioned, but a Cleveland Clinic study comparing which method best uncovered an increased risk of cancer helps confirm the value of what’s called a family health history.

All it costs is a little time questioning your relatives, yet good family health trees are rare. A government survey estimated less than a third of families have one – and time-crunched doctors seldom push their patients to remedy that.

During a season played in the shadow of a potential labor stoppage – yes, folks, possibly no pro football in 2011 – the headlines have shifted from the sports sections to the gossip pages and even to the police blotters.

Placed in the spotlight as much for news away from the games as for what they could and would do playing were such big names as Ben Roethlisberger, Brett Favre, Randy Moss and Braylon Edwards.

The 90-minute meeting in the northern town of Irbil was the start of three days of negotiations that could signal the deeply divided political blocs are close to a power-sharing agreement in which Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki would keep his job. However, officials said there are still major obstacles to overcome.

Political blocs that in the past settled their differences in the streets remain deeply suspicious of one another. Al-Maliki’s State of Law coalition won 89 seats compared with 91 for the Sunni-backed alliance headed by former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi in the March 7 election.

Australia’s national carrier said its fleet of six double-decker planes would stay grounded for another 72 hours.

Airbus and other airlines said they would take no action until the investigation is completed, and that it was premature to contemplate any change from the Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engines mounted on many of the A380s – the world’s largest passenger jet.

MSNBC’s chief executive Phil Griffin said late Sunday that after several days of deliberation, he had determined that two days off the air was “an appropriate punishment for his violation of our policy.”

The left-leaning cable network’s most popular personality acknowledged donating $2,400 apiece to the campaigns of Kentucky Senate candidate Jack Conway and Arizona Reps. Raul Grijalva and Gabrielle Giffords. NBC News prohibits its employees from making political donations unless an exception is granted in advance by the network news president. In this case, Olbermann’s bosses didn’t know about them until being informed by a reporter.

What’s more, even when controlling for key socio-economic characteristics, the U.S. continues to confront a racial gap in residential broadband use, with non-Hispanic white Americans and Asian-Americans more likely to go online using a high-speed connection than African-Americans and Hispanics.

Those are some of the key conclusions of a new analysis of Census data released Monday by the Commerce Department.

Initial returns show write-in ballots holding a 13,439-vote edge over GOP nominee Joe Miller, and though it’s not clear how many of those are for her or will be counted as valid, she’s confident enough in her winning to tell supporters that they’d “made history.” The write-in count starts Wednesday in Juneau.

Murkowski needed broad-based support – from fellow Republicans, Democrats, independents – to be successful in what was a three-way race (Democrat Scott McAdams has conceded). And while a win would return her to Washington, to the colleagues and party leaders who turned their backs on her after her humiliating primary loss to the Sarah Palin-backed Miller, it also raises questions about how she would legislate.

But his new Marine commandant thinks otherwise and the Senate has not yet taken action, setting up yet another hurdle for gay activists who see their window quickly closing. After Tuesday’s elections that saw Republicans chip away at Democrats’ majority in the Senate and wrest the House from their control, their hopes for ending the 17-year-old law have dimmed.

“I would like to see the repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ but I’m not sure what the prospects for that are and we’ll just have to see,” Gates told reporters traveling with him to Australia this weekend.

So far, attorneys in Seattle, Houston, Chicago and Minneapolis have filed at least 10 cases related to recalls by Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms of Iowa. The companies recalled 550 million eggs in August after a salmonella outbreak was traced to their farms.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention linked at least 1,600 illness to the eggs, and CDC spokeswoman Lola Russell said for every case reported there may be up to 30 more.

Republicans said they were willing to work with President Barack Obama but also signaled it would be only on their terms. With control of the White House and the Senate, Democrats showed no sign they were conceding the final two years of Obama’s term to Republican lawmakers who claimed the majority in the House.

“I think this week’s election was a historic rejection of American liberalism and the Obama and Pelosi agenda,” said Rep. Mike Pence, the Indiana Republican who is stepping down from his post in GOP leadership. “The American people are tired of the borrowing, the spending, the bailouts, the takeovers.”

Fighting raged at key points on the Thai border, wounding at least 10 people on both sides of the frontier as stray shots fell into Thai territory.

The clashes underlined Myanmar’s vulnerability to unrest even as it passes through a key stage of the ruling junta’s self-proclaimed “road map to democracy.” The country has been ruled by the military near-continuously since 1962, and rebellions by its ethnic minorities predate its independence from Britain in 1948.

Historians say the instigators included some of Columbia’s most prominent citizens. The crowd that watched James T. Scott hang was filled with laughing and cheering students from the first public university west of the Mississippi River.

Eighty-seven years later, civic leaders have come together to confront an ugly episode in Columbia and correct the record on the death of Scott, who insisted the rape allegation was a case of mistaken identity.

Gibbs will get a chance to contest that portrait Tuesday during a military hearing at Joint Base Lewis-McChord south of Seattle on charges that include murder, dereliction of duty and trying to impede an investigation.

The Article 32 hearing is similar to a civilian grand jury proceeding, with a military judge looking into charges to see if there is enough evidence to send the case to a court martial.

“When you don’t have it, you don’t miss it. That’s what I say,” says the spunky 70-year-old grandmother, who’s as comfortable telling jokes at the local pub as she is attending Mass each morning.

Technology isn’t really her thing. So, it’s a small miracle when Bass drives, once a month, to her island’s rural health center to sit down in front of a wide-screen television. There, she and a handful of other islanders connect by video conference with a similar group in Charlevoix, Mich., a two-hour ferry ride to the south and east.

Before long, Georgian officials seized the uranium and arrested the men, breaking up a ring they say was willing to sell material for nuclear weapons to any bidder. International officials see the operation as one victory in the effort to prevent nuclear weapons from falling into terrorists’ hands.

The seizure was reported in April, but few details were disclosed. The Associated Press now has obtained more information from Georgian officials about an operation involving international smugglers and undercover agents. Some elements were confirmed by U.N. and U.S. officials.