Evening Edition

Russian prime minister and self-proclaimed animal lover Vladimir Putin opened his native city to the world’s first gathering of leaders from 13 nations where the tiger’s free rein has been squeezed ever-tighter by poachers.

“This is an unprecedented gathering of world leaders (that aims) to double the number of tigers,” Jim Adams, vice president for the East Asia and Pacific Region at the World Bank, said at the opening ceremony of the four-day event.

In a series of interviews to appear in a book published this week, Benedict says for the first time that while the use of condoms should not be seen as a “moral solution”, it could be justified in stopping the spread of AIDS.

“In certain cases, where the intention is to reduce the risk of infection, it can nevertheless be a first step on the way to another, more humane sexuality,” said the head of the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics.

In a series of interviews to appear in a book published this week, Benedict said that while the use of condoms should not be seen as a “moral solution”, he stepped back from the Vatican’s blanket ban on all forms of contraception.

“In certain cases, where the intention is to reduce the risk of infection, it can nevertheless be a first step on the way to another, more humane sexuality,” said the head of the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics.

News Corp. has been tight-lipped about the project but the Australian-born media mogul acknowledged its existence for the first time in an interview last week with his Fox Business Network.

Asked what “exciting projects” his sprawling media and entertainment company was working on, the 79-year-old Murdoch cited The Daily but offered no further information about the tabloid for Apple’s touchscreen tablet computer.

The 48 countries of the NATO-led force in Afghanistan struck a deal with President Hamid Karzai to begin transferring parts of the battlefield to his control in early 2011 and move Western troops to a support role by 2014.

While all the allies agreed to set the target date to end their offensive operations in Afghanistan, the United States warned that “some hard fighting remains ahead” and did not rule out combat continuing after 2014.

Although officials said they were still focusing on a rescue operation at the Pike River colliery they added they were being realistic with the information they passed on to the families of the missing men.

Arrangements were being made to fly relatives of the five foreign nationals among the 29 to New Zealand as the news became more grim.

As NATO leaders vowed to pass on responsibility for ensuring security to Afghan forces by the end of 2014, a man, woman and child were killed when a bomber on a bicycle blew himself up in Mihtarlam, in eastern Laghman province.

A second attack in the city just a few minutes later killed one man, the interior ministry said. Twenty-five were wounded in the first attack and eight in the second, it added.

Gunshots and explosions rang out as around 400 armed soldiers launched the assault on the army barracks where the 20 or so renegades were holed up.

The dissident soldiers announced Wednesday that all government institutions were suspended and that a military council had taken charge.

Finance Minister Brian Lenihan said before the emergency cabinet meeting that he would recommend the government apply for the bailout programme as it finalises its own four-year deficit crisis plan.

Irish officials have held four days of tense talks with the European Union, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on financial assistance worth tens of billions of euros.

Aid groups sought to ramp up their work in the wake of deadly violence which had hampered the anti-cholera battle, while the United Nations starkly warned that the global community has lagged in its assistance since the epidemic began in October.

“The number of (cholera) focal points of infection are increasing, and those that appeared a month ago are not extinguished,” said French doctor Gerard Chevallier, a cholera specialist studying the epidemic and advising Haiti’s Health Ministry.

The popular Lin, who had won world and Olympic titles but never an Asian Games crown, was in top form in front of a vociferous home crowd to beat his Malaysian arch-rival 21-13, 15-21, 21-10.

His reaction on winning, ripping off his shirt and repeatedly punching the air shouting ‘yes, yes’, told the story of how much it meant to a man seen by many as the best shuttler ever.

Preeja Sreedharan led an Indian one-two in the women’s 10,000m while team-mate Sudha Singh claimed a last-gasp victory in the women’s 3000m steeplechase.

Sreedharan produced an astonishing burst of speed down the back straight to clock 31min 50.28sec for gold.

The nations of the NATO-led force in Afghanistan agreed to press Kabul to take charge of its own security by 2014, but some of the leaders who met in Lisbon had their own way of presenting the withdrawal timetable.

For the United States, which provides the vast bulk of the NATO-led force and warned that “some hard fighting remains ahead”, President Barack Obama said for the first time that he hoped US troops would stop fighting in 2014.

“They were able to go aside into a room by themselves and talk for 15 to 20 minutes,” White House spokesman Ben Rhodes told reporters aboard Air Force One before it landed in Washington late Saturday. “It was informal, it wasn?t planned.”

Only a translator accompanied the two leaders at their meeting on the sidelines of a NATO summit, US officials said.

Police said they had “no idea” when it would be safe for rescuers to try to reach the men at the Pike River colliery, who have not been heard from since the blast on Friday.

“This is not a quick fix, we’re into day two, we have no idea how long this will take but we are still focused on bringing these guys out,” police commander Gary Knowles told reporters.

Prosecutors and securities regulators are likely to file a number of cases targeting the $1.7 trillion hedge fund industry rather than a single spectacular case, said the lawyers, who have knowledge of the investigations but did not want to be identified since details have not been made public.

The new round of prosecutions could start in the next few weeks or early next year, the lawyers said, but it is too soon to say whether they will rival last year’s arrest of Galleon Group hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam and nearly two-dozen others, one of the largest insider trading cases ever.

“It is a marvelous victory for common sense and reason, a major step forward toward recognizing that condom use can play a vital role in reducing the future impact of the HIV pandemic, said Jon O’Brien, head of the U.S. group Catholics for Choice.

The pope spoke out in a new book to be published on Tuesday and called “Light of the World: The Pope, the Church, and the Sign of the Times”. His remarks, while limited in scope and not changing the Roman Catholic ban on contraception, were nonetheless greeted as a breakthrough.

Many Jews accuse Pius, who reigned from 1939 to 1958, of having turned a blind eye to the Holocaust. The Vatican says he worked quietly behind the scenes because speaking out would have prompted Nazi reprisals against Catholics and Jews in Europe.

In his book to be published Tuesday, called “Light of the World: The Pope, the Church, and the Sign of the Times,” the German pope says Pius did what he could and did not protest more clearly because he feared the consequences.

In a five-point statement released in response to a NATO summit that wrapped up in Lisbon on Saturday, the Taliban said delaying the withdrawal of foreign troops would only lead to more “tragic events and battles.”

U.S. President Barack Obama, who is due to review his Afghanistan war strategy next month, has already committed to a gradual drawdown of U.S. troops from July 2011, his counterpart Hamid Karzai saying he wants Afghans in control by 2014.

Political stability in the monarchy is of global concern. The Gulf Arab state controls more than a fifth of the world’s crude reserves, is a vital U.S. ally in the region, a major holder of dollar assets and home to the biggest Arab bourse.

Western diplomats in Riyadh said the king’s departure and the crown prince’s sudden return indicate the kingdom, which has no political parties or elected parliament, is trying to prevent a power vacuum and reassure Washington and other allies.

The latest blow to a vote already plagued by allegations of widespread corruption comes a day after NATO wrapped up a major summit in Lisbon where Afghanistan topped the agenda, particularly an exit plan for foreign troops there.

Twenty-one candidates who had earned a winning number of votes in their district were banned, said Ahmad Zia Rafat, part of the five-person Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) panel. There are 249 seats in parliament.

European Union finance ministers quickly agreed to the bailout, saying it “is warranted to safeguard financial stability in the EU and euro area.”

The European Central Bank, which oversees monetary policy for the 16-nation eurozone, welcomed the agreement and confirmed that the International Monetary Fund would contribute financing, while Sweden and Britain – not members of the euro currency – said they were willing to provide bilateral loans to Ireland, too.

There was praise and wariness for the pope’s comments that condoms could be morally justified in some limited situations, such as for male prostitutes wanting to prevent the spread of HIV.

Others cautioned that it could open a doctrinal Pandora’s box. And the exact meaning of what the pope said was still up for interpretation.

After nine years of funneling travelers into ever longer lines with orders to have shoes off, sippy cups empty and laptops out for inspection, the most surprising thing about increasingly heated frustration with the federal Transportation Security Administration may be that it took so long to boil over.

Even Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is not subjected to security pat-downs when she travels, understands the public’s irritation. She, for one, wouldn’t want to go through such scrutiny.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in message e-mailed to the media that NATO will be unable to establish a stable government in Afghanistan by that date. He did not mention an offer from President Hamid Karzai for peace talks and eventual reconciliation – an offer rejected by the hard-line Taliban leadership.

During a weekend summit in Lisbon, Portugal, NATO leaders agreed to begin handing off security responsibility to Afghan security forces in early 2011, with a full transition targeted for the end of 2014. No timetable was set for the gradual transition of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces to Afghan control and some foreign troops are expected to remain in a combat role after 2014, although most will be in a training role.

When he came to, Daniel Rockhouse, 24, dragged himself upright and staggered to a nearby compressed air line to breathe in fresh air and gain some strength.

“I got up and there was thick white smoke everywhere – worse than a fire. I knew straight away that it was carbon monoxide,” Rockhouse, whose brother Ben remains underground, told the New Zealand Herald newspaper in its Monday edition.

Gas locked inside Siberia’s frozen soil and under its lakes has been seeping out since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. But in the past few decades, as the Earth has warmed, the icy ground has begun thawing more rapidly, accelerating the release of methane – a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide – at a perilous rate.

Some scientists believe the thawing of permafrost could become the epicenter of climate change. They say 1.5 trillion tons of carbon, locked inside icebound earth since the age of mammoths, is a climate time bomb waiting to explode if released into the atmosphere.

Transportation Security Administration head John Pistole said in a statement that the agency would work to make screening methods “as minimally invasive as possible,” although he gave no indication that screening changes were imminent.

The statement came just hours after Pistole, in a TV interview, said that while the full-body scans and pat-downs could be intrusive and uncomfortable, the high threat level required their use. “No, we’re not changing the policies,” he told CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Allies had different interpretations of that target’s meaning.

Capping a two-day summit of 28 NATO leaders in this Atlantic port city, Obama said that after a series of public disputes with Afghan President Hamid Karzai – and despite the likelihood of more to come – the U.S. and its NATO partners have aligned their aims for stabilizing the country with Karzai’s eagerness to assume full control.

Just a year after he said condoms could be making the AIDS crisis worse, Benedict said that for some people, such as male prostitutes, using them could represent a first step in assuming moral responsibility “in the intention of reducing the risk of infection.”

The Vatican’s ban on contraception remains, but Alberto Melloni, an Italian church historian, said Benedict “opened without a doubt a crack that cannot help but have consequences.”

Two years later, with regulations set to take effect in January, the longtime foes are increasingly at odds over how the state should implement regulations that would apply to everything from baby bottles to cars.

Environmentalists complain the plan is too slow to be effective, while manufacturers say the state rushed to draft regulations so bureaucratic and broad they would even apply to the sale of a used boat.

On Wednesday, the first day of the commercial crab harvest, Brookings, Ore.-based captain Joe Speir motored his 50-foot boat, the Equinox, through unusually calm, deep blue seas. A line of buoys marked where his crab pots lay.

With an electric wench humming, Speir’s deckhands pulled up hundreds of Dungeness crab from metal traps tethered about 60 feet below. They toiled at lightning speed, taking advantage of the windless, sun-drenched day. The crew threw female and immature crabs over the railing and dumped keepers into the boat’s hold before dropping the pots back into the water for another go.