Evening Edition

“BP, Halliburton and Transocean are major companies operating throughout the Gulf, and the evidence is that they are in need of top-to-bottom reform,” said William Reilly, co-chair of the presidential oil spill commission.

“Emphatically, there was not a culture of safety on that rig… We know a safety culture must be led from the top and permeate a company,” he said as he opened the second day of a hearing into the April 20 explosion on a BP-leased drilling rig off the Louisiana coast.

One person was said to have died in the sprawling Cite Soleil slum, badly hit in the January earthquake which left 1.3 million people homeless in the impoverished Caribbean nation of some 10 million people.

For the moment there has been no large scale outbreak of the disease in the capital, but “it’s coming,” warned health ministry chief of staff Ariel Henry.

Health Ministry chief of staff Ariel Henry told AFP that while there is no widespread infection in the capital so far, a sizeable outbreak here now appears likely.

“It’s coming,” Henry warned, adding that two deaths believed to have been caused by cholera were being probed by health officials, who planned a press conference in Port-au-Prince later Tuesday to discuss the developments.

Obama marvelled at the transformation of the sleepy city of Jakarta he once knew into a bustling metropolis and noted the country’s parallel evolution from authoritarianism to democracy and a burgeoning alliance with Washington.

“It’s wonderful to be here although I have to tell you that when you visit a place that you spent time in as a child, as the president it’s a little disorientating,” he told reporters.

“It is deplorable that so many major airlines coordinated their pricing to the detriment of European businesses and European consumers,” said European competition commissioner Joaquin Almunia.

The fines, totalling 799.4 million euros (1.1 billion dollars), were slapped on airlines that span the globe, from Air Canada and LAN Chile in the Americas to Cathay Pacific Airways and Singapore Airlines in Asia and Qantas in Australia.

“I felt so strongly about the decisions I was making and I felt that history would understand,” Bush, who left office deeply unpopular at home and abroad, said during an hour-long interview with US talk show queen Oprah Winfrey.

The former president, who dubbed himself “the decider” during his eight years in the White House, takes readers of his 500-page “Decision Points” on a backstage tour of his administration and confronts his bitterest critics.

“Decision Points” appears a week after the momentous November 2 US elections saw congressional Republicans make a strong recovery after falling out of favor with US voters following the eight often tumultuous years of Bush’s administration.

Bush will be as ubiquitous over the next few weeks as he has been scarce since handing over the keys to the White House to Barack Obama in January 2009, with a whirlwind schedule of media appearances to promote his book, which has a print-run of some 1.5 million copies.

“(The shipment) may have arrived but the government is further than ever from its aim of getting people in Germany to accept nuclear power,” Florian Kubitz from protest group Robin Wood said.

“We are going to draw new strength from these protests and feel we have been supported by a broad and decisive movement.”

The question is raised by a new study which suggests that these over-the-counter analgesics may be a greater risk than hormone-disrupting chemicals and plastics that are most blamed for causing reproductive problems in later life.

Researchers pored over data from 834 women in Denmark and 1,463 in Finland who were questioned during their pregnancy about their health and use of medication.

The Lapita, as the ancient Oceanic people are known, were all-but-unheard of just a few decades ago.

But since the mid-1990s the discovery of a body of highly-distinctive potteries, spread across some 250 sites, has shed light on how the Lapita set out over uncharted waters, bringing their language and culture with them.

Pre-tax earnings collapsed to 327 million pounds (379 million euros, 528 million dollars) in the three months to September, compared with 1.362 billion pounds in the same part of 2009.

However, the figure included a huge 947-million-pound charge against the rising value of the group’s debts at its Barclays Capital investment division.

Pro-democracy parties urged the authorities to act against “cheating” during Sunday’s poll, in which the junta-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) had already enjoyed major financial and campaigning advantages.

“We have won about 80 percent of the seats. We are glad,” said a senior USDP member who did not want to be named.

They sound like the fantasies of science fiction writers, but they are among the discoveries being presented at Nano Israel 2010, a nanotech conference in Tel Aviv that has attracted researchers from across the science world, united by their work with the very, very small.

The 1,500 participants at the two-day meeting which ends on Tuesday include chemists, physicists and medical researchers, all working with tiny structures around the thickness of a cell wall.

Obama arrived in Jakarta under stormy skies on Air Force One from India, as his nine-day Asian odyssey took him from the world’s largest democracy to its most populous Muslim-majority nation.

The president spent four years in Indonesia as a boy with his late mother, though he will have little time for tourism on the 24-hour visit in which he will attempt to renew his outreach to the Muslim world while courting new markets and business opportunities for US companies.

Complacency at BP, as well as at Transocean Ltd and Halliburton, led to serious missteps prior to the rig explosion that unleashed millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico over the summer, said Commission co-chair Bill Reilly, in comments more critical than Monday’s Commission statements that rig workers did not place cost cutting over safety.

“BP, Halliburton and Transocean are major respected companies operating throughout the Gulf and the evidence is they are in need of top-to-bottom reform,” Reilly, a former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said at the start of the second session of commission’s two-day meeting on the root causes of the spill this week.

Opposition parties conceded defeat but accused the military junta of fraud and said many state workers had been forced to support the army-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) in advance balloting ahead of Sunday’s vote.

U.S. President Barack Obama told a news conference in Indonesia Myanmar’s election was neither free nor fair and called on Burmese authorities to immediately and unconditionally release all political prisoners.

But it is here in Forest City and communities across the country that families like the Jordals will battle the legacy of both conflicts for decades to come.

Surrounded by red, white and blue Americana in their powder blue Midwestern home, family matriarch Rhonda Jordal says she can deal with most of the fallout of her son Steven’s two tours in Iraq.

The U.S. leader cut short his long-delayed visit to Indonesia, where he lived for four years as a child, by concern that an ash cloud from the deadly Mount Merapi volcano would prevent his taking off in time to attend a G20 summit in South Korea.

But his curtailed schedule will still allow time for a visit to Jakarta’s national Istiqlal Mosque, the largest in southeast Asia, and to make the speech at the University of Indonesia.

“Most people do not read presidential memoirs because they get bored,” said Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. “People just like to have the presidential memoir sitting on the coffee table.”

Readers are wary of such memoirs, Gelb said, noting the most honest accounts typically come from journalists or aides, not from the official account. He said that in Bush’s case, four books from Bob Woodward, starting with the favorable “Bush at War” and then growing more critical with each volume over Bush’s eight-year presidency from 2001-2009, had the gossip Americans want.

An international code of conduct setting down the first set of standards was sparked by concerns over alleged abuses committed by the Pentagon’s private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan amid virtual impunity from criminal prosecution.

Neutral Switzerland initiated the landmark code, drawn up over the past year with the help of Britain and the United States, home to most private security companies.

One of the measures directed against inflows — requiring banks to hold a minimum amount of dollars overnight — sparked a day of unprecedented yuan volatility, with the Chinese currency ending sharply up against the dollar.

Taken together, the moves flagged China’s increasing concern about a surge in liquidity after the U.S. Federal Reserve launched another round of quantitative easing, prompting some analysts to say monetary tightening may be closer than thought.

A U.S. delegation, responding to 228 recommendations made by other countries during a U.N. debate last Friday, said that the Obama administration was working to close its detention center for foreign terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and would not tolerate torture anywhere.

But it rejected as “political provocations” recommendations about some judicial cases handled by U.S. courts. These had been raised by ideological foes including Cuba, which called for the release of five Cuban agents convicted of spying.

Yokohama will host the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders’ meeting this weekend, giving Japanese and Chinese leaders another chance to grapple with tensions over territorial claims. The port city is also home to Japan’s biggest Chinatown.

On alleys crammed with Chinese restaurants, shops and stalls selling roasted chestnuts, Japanese and ethnic Chinese vendors and visitors said the political rancor could not crowd out the more pressing business of making a living.

“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.

The decision not to prosecute anyone in the videotape destruction came five years to the day after the CIA destroyed its cache of 92 videos of two al-Qaida operatives, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Nashiri, being subjected to waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning. The deadline for prosecuting someone under most federal laws is five years.

The part of the nearly 3-year-old criminal investigation that examines whether U.S. interrogators went beyond the legal guidance given them on the rough treatment of suspects will continue, a Justice Department official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because that part of the probe is still under way.

The Democrats’ problems don’t end with senators.

President Barack Obama carried those states in 2008, and he will need most of them to win re-election in two years. But this time they all will have Republican governors. These GOP governors can try to inhibit the president’s policies and campaign operations. They also can help steer next year’s once-a-decade House redistricting process in the GOP’s favor.

What’s it going to cost me? Can I keep the coverage I have if I like it?

Republicans can call hearings and compel testimony, and Obama has no veto power to stop them. In the House, they’ll control three major committees with a mandate to poke around on health care, subpoenas available if needed. In the Senate, they’ll have added leverage on two key panels, so their demands can’t be easily ignored.

Obama on Wednesday will deliver one of the most personal and potentially consequential speeches of his presidency, reflecting on his own years of upbringing in Indonesia and giving an update on America’s “new beginning” with Muslims that he promised last year in Cairo.

At the same time, the path to lasting peace in the Middle East was hardly looking smoother. A reminder of that difficult road was waiting for Obama when he landed here Tuesday on a steamy afternoon in southeast Asia. Israel’s decision to build more apartments in east Jerusalem, a disputed territory claimed by Palestinians, had already earned a rebuke from American diplomats before a tired, traveling president weighed in himself.

The vote count could help determine whether Sen. Lisa Murkowski wins re-election as a write-in candidate – or whether the courts get the final say in what has been a fiercely contested race.

Murkowski waged an aggressive write-in campaign after losing the GOP primary to the Sarah Palin-backed candidate Joe Miller. While initial returns showed write-in ballots leading Miller by 13,439 votes, it’s not clear how many of those were for Murkowski or the 159 other write-in candidates.

First in line were Terry and Tammy Jones of suburban Justin, who had camped out since the previous afternoon with sleeping bags and a portable DVD player. They said when they told Bush of their wait, he said he would sign their books “with admiration,” shaking 53-year-old Terry Jones’ hand and kissing his wife’s.

“Eighteen hours for two seconds and a kiss on the hand,” Tammy Jones, 52, said with a smile.

“We’re stunned when some walls fall down. But these are ruins not systematically maintained, so the miracle is that so few of them collapse,” said Andrea Carandini, a world-renowned archaeologist who leads a panel of professional consultants in the Cultural Ministry.

Last spring, a huge segment of Nero’s fabled Golden Palace beneath Rome gave way, raining down pieces of vaulted ceiling in one of the galleries under a garden popular with strollers. Three years ago, a 20-foot (6-meter) section of ancient wall crumpled into a pile of bricks after days of heavy rain. The wall had been named after the third century emperor Aurelius, who built it to defend Rome against the first onslaught of barbarians.

San Francisco is poised to become the first major American city to prohibit fast food restaurants from including toys with children’s meals that do not meet nutritional guidelines.

The measure passed on a preliminary vote by the city’s Board of Supervisors last week, and is expected to win final passage Tuesday with enough votes to survive a likely veto by Mayor Gavin Newsom.

The study’s authors aren’t suggesting that “hyper-texting” leads to sex, drinking or drugs, but say it’s startling to see an apparent link between excessive messaging and that kind of risky behavior.

The study concludes that a significant number of teens are very susceptible to peer pressure and also have permissive or absent parents, said Dr. Scott Frank, the study’s lead author.

The survey released Tuesday by the San Francisco-based Asia Foundation found that 83 percent of Afghan adults back negotiations with armed, anti-government groups, up from 71 percent last year. But it also said 55 percent of Afghans had no sympathy at all for the insurgency this year, up from 36 percent last year. Twenty-six percent of respondents said they had “a little sympathy” for the aims of the insurgency.

Analysts said the survey reflected growing doubt that the government and its NATO allies can defeat the insurgency with military means and that after 30 years of war, some Afghans were willing to sacrifice some freedoms for the sake of peace.

Miles driven by older drivers are going up and fatal crashes involving seniors coming down, but too often they are forced to choose between safety and being able to get around, experts told a National Transportation Safety Board forum on transportation and aging Tuesday.

Within 15 years more than one in five licensed drivers will be 65 or older, the safety board said. Their number will nearly double, from 30 million today to about 57 million in 2030, according to the Government Accountability Office.

During his three day visit that ended Tuesday, the U.S. president delivered nearly everything on India’s wish list, affirming the country’s growing importance.

He endorsed India’s role in nearby Afghanistan, even though such a statement was sure to annoy India’s regional rival Pakistan, a key U.S. ally in the Afghan war. He chided Pakistan for not cracking down heavily enough on anti-India militant groups operating there. He lifted export controls, allowing India to buy high-tech weaponry from the U.S., and he gave spirited support to Indian industry, maintaining it wasn’t stealing American jobs, but helping create new ones.

Intelligence officials around the world narrowly thwarted an al-Qaida mail bomb plot last month, intercepting two explosive packages shipped from Yemen with UPS and FedEx.

But it was a tip from Saudi intelligence, not cargo screening, that turned up the bombs before they could take down airplanes. Company employees in Yemen were not required to X-ray the printer cartridges the explosives were hidden inside. Instead, they looked at the printers and sent them off, U.S. officials said.

Health authorities told The Associated Press on Monday that tests confirmed a 3-year-old boy who hadn’t been out of the city had caught the disease. More than 100 other suspected cholera cases among city residents also were being tested.

The outbreak has already killed at least 544 people in Haiti, Health Ministry Executive Director Gabriel Timothee told the AP.

With his new TBS show titled simply “Conan,” O’Brien seemed appealingly stoked yet comfortable in his new home at 11 p.m. ET and on basic cable, originating from a sleek, cozy set with a full moon poised on a seaside backdrop.

If there were very few surprises on the premiere, well, how could there have been after the incessant online hype and all the press attention showered on his much-anticipated return? Besides, O’Brien was back with his longtime sidekick Andy Richter and most of his trusty house band members, now led by Jimmy Vivino (and renamed The Basic Cable Band).

Now – if he wants – he might never have to work again.

Duhamel won the World Series of Poker title and $8.94 million on Monday night, becoming the first Canadian to take down the no-limit Texas Hold ’em main event in Las Vegas.

Few here now believe he will change American policies in the Middle East or improve U.S. relations with the Muslim world. And hopes that the two countries would march forward together on the world stage have been cast aside.

Still, Indonesians gathered around television sets all over the country – in their houses, coffee shops and office buildings – and watched as he touched down.

Investigators at the commission’s hearing outlined more than a dozen decisions that at the time seemed questionable but also explainable. It was how those cascaded and crashed together that fueled catastrophe.

Yet there was no evidence of a conscious decision on the BP rig to do things on the cheap at the expense of safety, investigators stressed several times. Likewise, representatives of the companies involved in the disaster denied that corners were cut because of cost.

Workers who participated in the ground zero cleanup initially had until the end of the day Monday to decide whether to join a deal that would pay at least $625 million to people who developed illnesses after working in the rubble.

But after a “huge influx” of people filed paperwork related to the settlement in the days before the deadline, lawyers representing the city agreed to extended the deadline for another week.

The appeals court had granted the new sentencing hearing on the grounds that the jury at Abu-Jamal’s 1982 trial was not given proper death-penalty instructions. But the U.S. Supreme Court this year, in rejecting a similar Ohio case, ordered the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judges to rethink its decision.

Under Pennsylvania law, Abu-Jamal should have received a life sentence if a single juror found the mitigating circumstances outweighed the aggravating factors in the slaying of Officer Daniel Faulkner.

Fisher, who’s black, believes there was something race-related about the way Aldrich, who’s white, turned him away when he ducked into Mike’s Barber Shop asking for a trim one day last month.

What happened next triggered hard feelings on both sides, a demonstration by locals unhappy with the barber and a new example of an old problem – white barbers and hairdressers struggling to cope with black customers’ hair, which generally is thicker and curlier than white people’s hair.

The lawsuits were filed in federal courts in Connecticut and New York and come just months after a federal judge in Boston struck down a key component of the federal Defense of Marriage Act.

The legal actions seek judicial declarations that the law enacted by Congress in 1996, when it appeared Hawaii would soon legalize same-sex marriage, was unconstitutional because it prevents the federal government from affording pension and other benefits to same-sex couples. Since 2004, five states – Connecticut, Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts – and the District of Columbia have legalized gay marriage.

A shopping mall built in 1962, now dwarfed by glitzy high-rises, was the only building on Jakarta’s skyline he recognized, Obama said Tuesday.

The bicycle rickshaws that plied the streets when he lived here in the 1960s were nowhere to be seen as the president’s limousine hurried along routes cleared for his motorcade – though he still said “my understanding is that Jakarta traffic is pretty tough.” In fact, Jakarta has changed, even as Obama’s own circumstances have dramatically altered since the days he played and studied in a humble neighborhood here.

In what has emerged as one of the most gruesome cases of the Afghan war, fellow soldiers say Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs also threatened them, collected fingers of the dead and found it amusing to slaughter animals with his assault rifle.

Gibbs has a chance to contest that portrait during the Article 32 hearing at Joint Base Lewis-McChord south of Seattle. Charges against him include murder, dereliction of duty and trying to impede an investigation.

The human rights lawyer, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her efforts to promote democracy, said in an interview with The Associated Press that she came to the United Nations to talk about the deteriorating human rights situation in Iran and seek support for a draft U.N. General Assembly resolution that would condemn the country’s rights record.

Although much of the opposition movement has gone underground since the violent crackdown after the disputed June 2009 presidential election, Ebadi said it definitely isn’t faltering.

Andrew Shirvell, 30, went on leave about a month ago after national criticism erupted over a blog he wrote characterizing student leader Chris Armstrong as a “racist” and a “liar” who promoted a “radical homosexual agenda.”

Shirvell’s attorney has said his actions were constitutionally protected as free speech. Shirvell had attended the first day of a disciplinary hearing Friday and expected that hearing to continue later this week, but then was called in and fired.