Evening Edition

The elusive 39-year-old Australian said he would fight an extradition request by Swedish authorities as he appeared in court in London just hours after he emerged from a month in hiding and surrendered to police.

Filmmaker Ken Loach, socialite Jemima Khan and campaigning journalist John Pilger each offered to put up part of his bail but a judge in London refused, saying a court would review the situation at a hearing on December 14.

Swedish authorities want to quiz the elusive 39-year-old Australian — whose website is in the process of releasing tens of thousands of US cables — on suspicion of crimes including rape.

Assange’s lawyer, Mark Stephens, said British police had telephoned him to say they have received an extradition request from Sweden.

The 39-year-old Australian, whose whistleblowing website has enraged Washington by releasing thousands of secret US diplomatic cables, appeared in court just hours after handing himself in to British police.

Filmmaker Ken Loach, socialite Jemima Khan, and campaigning journalist John Pilger each offered 20,000 pounds (23,600 euros, 31,400 dollars) for Assange’s bail, but it was refused on the grounds that he might try to flee Britain.

At the same time UN staff began evacuating from Ivory Coast, split in half in 2002 and 2003 by a civil war, for fear that the standoff following the November 28 presidential run-off vote could turn into violent conflict.

The regional bloc ECOWAS Tuesday suspended Ivory Coast over the crisis and called on Gbagbo to yield power as it recognised opposition leader Alassane Ouattara as the new president.

“For now, we have suspended Cote d’Ivoire from all our activities,” Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan said following a special summit on Ivory Coast’s electoral crisis.

“We believe that the result declared by the electoral commission … is the authentic one, and that (Alassane) Ouattara is the person who we support as the president of Cote d’Ivoire.”

As the pullout of non-essential UN staff began, Gbagbo raised the stakes in the crisis, with his allies announcing a new government to rival the one declared by Alassane Ouattara, his opponent in last month’s disputed election.

International mediators are trying to break the deadlock amid warnings that it could erupt into violent unrest in the west African country, which suffered a civil war in 2002 and 2O03.

“You only have to look at the figures. The vast majority of countries invited will be represented,” Nobel Institute director Geir Lundestad told AFP on Tuesday.

According to the Nobel Institute, 44 embassies have accepted invitations to the event while 19 have refused “for various reasons” and two have not replied.

“We’ve reached a very important agreement,” said President Dmitry Medvedev at a one-day EU-Russia summit. “I’m very satisfied.”

Russia is the last major world power still outside the global trade body and the deal with the world’s largest trading bloc clears a crucial hurdle for Moscow’s possible accession as early as next year.

Citing the difficulties of a “unique and extraordinary case” involving an American citizen abroad, US district judge John Bates in an 83-page decision ruled that the obstacles in determining the merit of the constitutional challenges “require dismissal of this case at the outset.”

The judge specifically said he was not ruling on the merits of the case, noting, “the serious issues regarding the merits of the alleged authorization of the targeted killing of a US citizen overseas must await another day or another (non-judicial) forum.”

Finance Minister Brian Lenihan, delivering his 2011 budget to the Dail, or lower house of parliament, said he would make the savings as part of a four-year plan to slash a huge deficit by a total of 15 billion euros.

“As outlined in the plan, six billion euros of the overall adjustment is made in today’s budget. The scale of this adjustment is demanding but it demonstrates the seriousness of our intent,” Lenihan told lawmakers.

Amid constant strain on eurozone debt markets, tense talks set the landscape for a summit of national leaders next week, focused on contentious measures to tighten the way the 27 EU states manage their economies.

Related to this was a question of relaxing rules on controlling public finances for eastern, ex-communist nations which have had to reform their pension systems.

Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, had earlier handed himself in to British police after Sweden had issued a European Arrest Warrant for him. Assange, who denies the allegations, will remain behind bars until a fresh hearing on December 14.

He has spent some time in Sweden and was accused this year of sexual misconduct by two female Swedish WikiLeaks volunteers. A Swedish prosecutor wants to question him about the accusation.

In a speech to parliament, Irish Finance Minister Brian Lenihan sketched out austerity measures for 2011 including cuts to child benefit and public sector pensions, but stuck with growth forecasts that some economists — and even the European Commission — believe are too optimistic.

Parliament passed the first in a series of votes on the budget on Tuesday evening, suggesting that enough of the budget is likely to pass to release bailout funds. The budget’s success had looked in doubt when independent politicians, on whom the government depends for support, said they might vote against it.

IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn failed to persuade finance ministers of the 16-nation common currency area on Monday to increase the size of their financial safety net or the European Central Bank to step up government bond purchases.

“The euro zone has to provide a comprehensive solution to this problem,” Strauss-Kahn said after meeting Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou in Athens. “The piecemeal approach, one country after another, is not a good one.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s call during a visit to Greece — the first euro zone country rescued by an EU/IMF bailout — came after euro zone ministers on Monday resisted IMF calls to do more to quell the currency bloc’s debt crisis.

He said there was a risk of Europe becoming divided, and urged it to agree more coordinated policies.

Obama found himself in an unusual position a day after sealing a major tax-cut agreement — praised by Republican opponents and denounced by liberal Democrats who felt he violated a pledge that helped get him elected in 2008.

Liberals accused him of caving to Republican demands by agreeing to extend all the Bush-era tax cuts, even those for wealthier Americans, instead of their preference for limiting the tax cuts to families making less than $250,000 a year.

Obama struck an agreement on Monday with congressional leaders on a range of tax issues, including cutting the estate tax to 35 percent and raising the individual exemption to $5 million. The estate tax, which expired this year, is due to return in 2011 at 55 percent with a $1 million exemption.

If the compromise proposal is passed, roughly 40,700 families will avoid an estimated $23.2 billion of estate taxes next year, according to the Urban-Brookings Institute Tax Policy Center. Around 3,500 families would pay an estimated $11.2 billion in estate taxes.

While analysts believe Congress will probably approve the deal, Obama faced a rift with many in his party who worried about its impact on the federal budget.

Stock markets in the United States and Europe initially applauded the proposed deal on taxes and unemployment benefits as it may give economic growth a boost in 2011, but U.S. Treasury bond yields rose sharply late in the day.

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) said it had filed 16-count charges at a federal high court in Abuja against Cheney, Halliburton Chief Executive David Lesar and two other executives, in a case dating back to the mid-1990s.

It also filed charges against Halliburton as a company, which was headed by Cheney during the 1990s, and four associated businesses. Cheney was U.S. vice president from 2001 to 2009.

EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht and Russian Economic Development Minister Elvira Nabiullina signed an agreement on the sidelines of an EU-Russia summit, after the resolution of a tariff dispute that had held up EU approval.

“The European Union and Russia have concluded their bilateral negotiations on the WTO…and we agree that we should now focus on the multilateral negotiations so that Russia can become a member of the WTO as soon as possible,” European Council President Herman Van Rompuy told reporters after the summit.

In a banner headline across its front page, the China Securities Journal said this weekend offered a “sensitive window” for a rate rise, which would be the country’s second after a surprise increase in October, the central bank’s first rate hike since 2007.

An increase in rates would also put flesh on the bones of Beijing’s announcement late last week that it was switching to a “prudent” monetary policy from the “appropriately loose” stance of the past two years.

Britain has the second-biggest foreign troop contingent in Afghanistan after the United States, and Cameron has said he wants British troops out of combat roles by 2015.

While he has said before he wants that process to begin next year, British commanders have since tried to play down the prospect of any major withdrawals in early 2011, saying this would depend on the readiness of Afghan forces to take over and other conditions on the ground.

In a report based on surveys of half a million 15-year-old students in 65 countries, the Paris-based OECD noted a drop in reading skills in the United States and many western European countries in the past decade, most notably Ireland and Sweden.

In contrast, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development signaled marked improvement in reading proficiency in countries such as Peru, Chile, Brazil, Indonesia, Latvia and Poland, albeit from low starting points in most of those cases.

The U.S. Treasury said it will take in $10.5 billion in sale proceeds from a public offering of 2.4 billion Citigroup shares, announced just hours earlier. The price is 10 cents below the $4.45 closing price on the New York Stock Exchange.

“By selling all the remaining Citigroup shares today, we had an opportunity to lock in substantial profits for the taxpayer and avoid future risk,” said Tim Massad, Treasury acting assistant secretary for financial stability.

Company officials are facing a Food and Drug Administration panel of outside advisers who have already rejected two competing diet drugs this year and are likely to have tough questions about the pill’s effect on blood pressure and pulse rates, among other safety concerns.

Shares of Orexigen have fallen 36 percent this year as investors worry whether the biotech can succeed where rivals have failed, aiming to tap into a potentially major market in the United States, where rates of obesity continue to soar.

The findings will fuel an already intense debate about the merits of taking aspirin, which increases the risk of bleeding in the stomach to around one patient in every thousand per year.

In a study of eight trials involving 25,570 patients, researchers found that cancer deaths among those who took aspirin in doses as low as 75 milligrams a day were 21 percent lower during the studies and 34 percent lower after five years.

The nation’s highest court agreed to hear an appeal by the world’s largest retailer and the largest private employer arguing the claims of as many as 1.5 million current and former female employees were too diverse to proceed as a single class-action lawsuit.

The justices decided to review a ruling by a appeals court in California that upheld the class-action certification in the lawsuit alleging discrimination against every woman employed over the past decade at the company’s 3,400 U.S. stores.

California voters, with a reputation for social liberalism, shocked the United States in 2008 when they narrowly approved the Proposition 8 ban on gay marriage only months after the top state court opened the door to same-sex weddings.

A federal judge sided with the same-sex couples and struck down the ban, but the ruling is on hold while it is on appeal.

Mbeki had hoped to defuse a power struggle enveloping the country since an election which the electoral commission and international observers say Ouattara won — a decision reversed by the Constitutional Council, backed by the armed forces chief.

Gbagbo refused to concede defeat after the election commission said the November 28 poll, meant to reunite the region’s former economic powerhouse after a 2002-03 civil war, had been won by Ouattara with 54.1 percent of the vote.

A month after dropping out of public view, the 39-year-old Australian surrendered to Scotland Yard to answer a warrant issued for his arrest by Sweden. He is wanted for questioning after two women accused him of having sex with them without a condom and without their consent.

Assange said he would fight extradition to Sweden, setting the stage for what could be a pitched legal battle. And as if to prove that it can’t be intimidated, WikiLeaks promptly released a dozen new cables, including details of a NATO defense plan for Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania that made Russia bristle.

Epidemiologist Renaud Piarroux concluded that the cholera originated in a tributary of Haiti’s Artibonite river, next to a U.N. base outside the town of Mirebalais. He was sent by the French government to assist Haitian health officials in determining the source of the outbreak, a French Foreign Ministry official said Tuesday.

“No other hypothesis could be found to explain the outbreak of a cholera epidemic in this village … not affected by the earthquake earlier this year and located dozens of kilometers from the coast and (tent) camps,” he wrote in a report that has not been publicly released.

“The pace of human-induced climate change is accelerating. We need results now, results that curb global greenhouse emissions,” Ban declared at the opening of high-level talks at the annual U.N. climate conference.

In the two-week session’s final days, environment ministers will seek agreement on knotty side issues in coping with global warming, but once more the U.N. climate treaty’s 193 parties will fail at Cancun to produce a sweeping deal to slash greenhouse gas emissions and control climate change.

“Take a tally. Look at what I promised during the campaign. There’s not a single thing that I haven’t done or tried to do,” the president said.

He staunchly defended his decision to deal with the GOP in order to extend about-to-expire tax cuts for all Americans.

Sensitive to charges of caving on bedrock principles, he said he welcomed fights with the GOP ahead of his 2012 re-election bid.

“I will be happy to see the Republicans test whether or not I’m itching for a fight on a whole range of issues,” Obama said. “I suspect they will find I am. And I think the American people will be on my side.”

Many GOP lawmakers seemed ready to embrace the Obama-GOP compromise and declare victory. The question was whether enough Democrats would join them in support, especially in the House, where liberal resentment of the president’s concessions on tax breaks for the wealthiest runs strong.

Obama went on national TV to give a ringing defense of his compromise, declaring it the necessary price for heading off a tax increase that neither taxpayers nor the weak economy could stand and for gaining more months of unemployment payments for millions of jobless workers.

The compromise already has economists raising their forecasts for growth next year, mainly because it includes a surprising one-year cut in Social Security taxes. The amount of that cut – 2 percent of pay for most American workers – instantly becomes more take-home money. Critics complain that the deal would further swell the $1.3 trillion federal budget deficit.

Two central parts of the agreement extend income-tax cuts that would have expired Dec. 31 and renew benefits for the long-term unemployed. Those were both expected. But they still give a psychological boost to shoppers in the midst of the holiday shopping season.

De La Salle Christian Brothers, which educates more than 1 million students around the world, apologized for Price’s pain and sought to reassure him. The order’s Midwest leader said the brother in question had been forbidden from contact with anyone under 18 and was working in a prison.

But in a 1995 letter obtained by The Associated Press, the leader neglected to mention something: The prison was for males from age 10 to 21. The writer of that letter, Brother Thomas Johnson, is now the second-ranking official in the worldwide order.

The new feature, however, won’t be as sweeping as a “do not track” option that the Federal Trade Commission is proposing to limit advertisers’ ability to do that. Users will have to create or find their own lists of sites they want to block.

And the feature won’t be automatically turned on when it debuts with the release of Internet Explorer 9 early next year.

Lenihan’s plan – the harshest yet of four emergency budgets unveiled since 2008 to combat a runaway deficit – contains ?4.5 billion ($6 billion) in spending cuts and ?1.5 billion ($2 billion) in tax rises.

Lenihan told lawmakers he believes Ireland’s economy can grow despite the fact that almost all 4.5 million residents face “a traumatic and worrying time.” He said the depth of the cuts represents the minimum required to counter “the worst crisis in our history and one with few international parallels.”

With its 435 hand-colored illustrations of birds drawn to size, the volume is one of the best preserved editions of Audubon’s 19th-century masterpiece. The sale at Sotheby’s auction house had been anticipated for months by wealthy collectors.

The book sold for $10,270,000 (6.5 million pounds) to an anonymous collector bidding by telephone, the auction house said.

U.S. District Judge John Bates said in an 83-page opinion that he does not have the authority to review the president’s military decisions and al-Awlaki’s father does not have the legal right to sue to stop the United States from killing his son. But Bates also said the “unique and extraordinary case” raised vital considerations of national security and for military and foreign affairs.

Among the “stark and perplexing questions” Bates said the case raises is why courts have authority to approve surveillance of Americans overseas but not their killing. And he questioned whether the president or his advisers can order the assassination of a U.S. citizen without “any form of judicial process whatsoever, based on the mere assertion that he is a dangerous member of a terrorist organization.”

Chinese officials in Beijing called Liu’s backers “clowns” in an anti-Chinese farce – comments that came only three days before the Dec. 10 Nobel peace prize ceremony in Oslo.

Beijing considers Liu’s recognition an attack on China’s political and legal system, and says the country’s policies will not be swayed by outside forces in what it calls “flagrant interference in China’s sovereignty.”

The probe, called Akatsuki, which means “dawn,” reached Venus on Tuesday to orbit Earth’s neighbor on a two-year mission. But communication problems left scientists in the dark about whether it was successfully in orbit.

An American scientist on the probe’s research team said the probe shut itself partially down and is in safe mode. That means it is sending back signals indicating it is alive, but not transmitting any data.

Superior Court Judge Scott Gordon said there wasn’t a mutual understanding between Jamie and Frank McCourt about what the pact spelled out when they signed it in March 2004 in Massachusetts.

“The parties had mistaken belief and no agreement as to the meaning of the agreement, the content of the agreement, and the effect of the (agreement) on their property and property rights,” Gordon wrote in his 100-page tentative ruling.

Joseph Keith, who works for a unit of Halliburton, told the joint U.S. Coast Guard-Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement panel that the BP wellsite leader and mud engineers onboard would have been in a better position to assess whether work should have stopped.

“I just didn’t think about it at the time,” Keith said when asked why he didn’t pull the plug on the job if he felt uncomfortable.

Carson Helicopters of Grants Pass, Ore., intentionally altered documents to exaggerate the helicopter’s performance capabilities in order to win a Forest Service contract, the board said.

But the Federal Aviation Administration and the Forest Service missed several opportunities to uncover those problems, the board said.

Prosecutors told jurors the teen was part of a mob that descended on Derrion Albert as he made his way home from school in September 2009. On the video, Albert could be seen being punched, slammed over his head with large boards, kicked and finally stomped on his head.

“Those injuries acted together to cause the death of Derrion Albert,” Cook County assistant state’s attorney Lisa Morrison told the jury. “The damage inflicted on him was too much for his body to handle.”

“Long after the last veteran of the war in the Pacific is gone, we will still be here telling their story and honoring their dedication and sacrifice,” National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis told about 120 survivors who traveled to Hawaii from around the country for the event.

Merl Resler, 88, of Newcastle, Calif., was among those who returned. He remembered firing shots at Japanese planes from the USS Maryland and standing in the blood of a shipmate hit by shrapnel during the attack.

The commander’s assertion of victory in Marjah comes 10 months after thousands of U.S.-led NATO troops stormed the cluster of farming hamlets to rout insurgents and cut off their income from the drug trade.

The campaign took longer than NATO officials had hoped, and underscored the complexity of trying to wrest control of an area where Taliban influence remained strong.

What really tormented him was watching his youth slip away as he served time for a murder he didn’t commit.

The Wisconsin Innocence Project helped free him last year, and now the 46-year-old Milwaukee man wants to make sure no one else has to endure what he suffered. Stinson is seeking $115,000 from a state claims board this week, a settlement that could help him afford a criminal-justice degree.

John Graham is accused of shooting Annie Mae Aquash and leaving her to die on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge reservation.

In five days of testimony, prosecution witnesses said Graham and two other AIM activists kidnapped and killed Aquash because they thought Aquash was a government informant. One of the witnesses to testify against Graham was Arlo Looking Cloud, who was convicted for his role in Aquash’s death in 2004 and said he saw Graham shoot Aquash.

With most state governments facing serious budget problems amid plunging tax revenues, expanding or even adding gambling can seem like an attractive solution. It brings with it not only the possibility of more money without raising taxes, but also new jobs. Proponents of Illinois’ plan say it could raise up to $1 billion in new tax revenue annually for a state that could face a deficit of up to $15 billion next year.

But experts point out that while it could allow Illinois to take more money from its own residents rather than having them spend their money in Indiana or Wisconsin, it’s unlikely it would drum up new gamblers or draw people from very far away. And with casinos already scrambling for every customer, it’s possible Illinois will become so crowded with gambling opportunities that some casinos will fail, they warn.

Pfc. David Lawrence, 20, had also told family members before the shooting that he was hearing voices.

Lawrence is charged with premeditated murder in the Oct. 17 death of the prisoner, who prosecutors say was asleep in a jail cell when he was shot. If convicted, Lawrence could face execution or life in prison.

A hearing is scheduled Wednesday in a state court after the United Federation of Teachers filed a lawsuit seeking to keep the data confidential. The union called the ratings “unreliable, often incorrect, subjective analyses dressed up as scientific facts.”

The teacher ratings controversy follows a scandal in Los Angeles in which a teacher committed suicide after the ratings were released. It comes during a transition period for the nation’s largest school system, as publishing executive Cathie Black prepares to take over from outgoing Chancellor Joel Klein.

Japanese, Germans and Italians, both foreign nationals and foreign-born American citizens considered potential threats, were rousted from their homes in the U.S. and in Latin American nations friendly to the U.S. and were then shipped to internment camps.

As many as seven camps may have been in Texas where historians are working to gather stories from some of the thousands who were confined and to preserve the few visible signs of the camps.

The frustrations of these “left-behind” parents run deep. They seethe over Japan’s and India’s noncompliance with U.S. court orders regarding children taken by the other parent to the far side of the world, and many also fault top U.S. leaders for reluctance to ratchet up the pressure for change.

“If they really made it an issue to solve these cases, I believe they could be resolved tomorrow. … They don’t have the will,” said Christopher Savoie of Franklin, Tenn.

The frustrated 73-year-old had spent thousands of dollars on technology and improvements to try to resolve the problem at his Central Texas ranch without ever learning what was killing the trees that had supported three generations of his family. Now, 18 years after his death, Baca’s son-in-law, Harvey Hayek, believes he’s solved the mystery: Sulfur dioxide pollution from a nearby coal-fired power plant has slowly killed two-thirds of his family’s 250-acre pecan orchard.

On Monday, Hayek and other pecan growers held a news conference in Austin to demand compensation from the Lower Colorado River Authority, which operates the plant, and the city. They also want research done on what and how much pollution is being emitted now and how much will be discharged after the plant installs equipment aimed at reducing emissions of sulfur dioxide, a component of acid rain.

Despite the prosecution’s actions, the judge ordered the hearing to go forward and lawyers for John Edward Green Jr., the Houston man who asked for the proceeding, began calling witnesses.

The attorneys say will try to show that the way death penalty cases are handled in Texas creates a risk that innocent people will be executed. Green faces a possible death sentence if convicted of fatally shooting a Houston woman during a June 2008 robbery.

The lawsuit alleges that Discover Bank, DFS Services and parent company Discover Financial Services broke state consumer fraud and deceptive trade practices laws. Swanson sued on behalf of the Minnesota public but said the billing practices are likely widespread in other states. She is seeking refunds for Minnesota customers and civil penalties, but said she couldn’t estimate how much money that might amount to because she didn’t have a complete customer list for the state.

Swanson said Discover telemarketers talked fast, skipped over words and rushed customers through a script to sign them up for the programs, including payment protection, identity theft protection and credit monitoring. She said the phone conversations often started out as courtesy calls before the telemarketer brought up the protection programs, leaving consumers confused.