Evening Edition

As workers doused the stricken reactor with sea water to try to avert catastrophe, Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan said the chaos unleashed by Friday’s 8.9 magnitude quake was an “unprecedented national disaster”.

The quake, one of the biggest ever recorded, unleashed a terrifying tsunami that engulfed towns and cities on Japan’s northeastern coast, destroying everything in its path.

And then disaster struck Japan.

Such issues have been put on the back burner after the government was confronted by the strongest earthquake on record ever to hit Japan and the subsequent tsunamis it unleashed, now set to claim well in excess of 1,300 lives.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan said Saturday 45,000 residents living within 10 kilometres (six miles) of the plant must evacuate amid fears of a slight radiation leak, before stepping onto a helicopter to head for the area.

The atomic emergency came as the country struggled to assess the full extent of the devastation wrought by the massive tsunami triggered by the strongest quake ever recorded in Japan.

After having abandoned an operation to recapture the oil town of Ras Lanuf, the outgunned anti-regime fighters struggled to set up a new defensive line 30 kilometres (about 20 miles) further east along a coastal road towards Brega.

Brega is the last main town before Ajdabiya, gateway to eastern Libya on the roads to the main rebel cities of Benghazi and Tobruk.

Kadhafi is “a leader shooting at his own people”, EU president Herman Van Rompuy said at the close of an emergency summit of the 27-nation bloc in Brussels to examine the crisis and seek consensus on how to deal with it.

“The Libyan leadership must give up power without delay,” Van Rompuy said.

Two airstrikes aimed at a rebel checkpoint in Uqayla, east of Ras Lanuf, sent insurgents fleeing back down the coastal road towards the next town of Brega, which an AFP correspondent said had become a ghost town.

Rebels in Uqayla said they had pulled out of Ras Lanuf after fierce fighting since government forces loyal to Kadhafi stormed the town on Thursday.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague condemned the “unacceptable” violence against anti-regime protesters and the Foreign Office said all British citizens “should leave Yemen as soon as they can”.

Security forces in the impoverished country, a key US ally in the war against Al-Qaeda, fired bullets and tear gas at demonstrators camping at University Square since February 21, killing one and wounding 300 other, protest organisers said.

Security forces fired live rounds and gas in an attack on demonstrators camping at University Square in Sanaa, killing one protester and wounding many more, protest organisers said.

More than 30 protesters were shot with live rounds, while hundreds more suffered from injuries including loss of consciousness and spasms from breathing gases, medics said.

As international sanctions have cut off his funding and tighten the noose around his command, Gbago troops launched a “make or break” offensive to rid opponents from the Abobo district north of the capital Abidjan.

Gbagbo forces were “blindly launching artillery, which fell on civilian houses. The majority of those killed are innocent,” Patric Achi, spokesman for the internationally-recognised president Alassane Ouattara told AFP.

Karzai’s comments came after a week in which a relative of his was killed in a raid by foreign forces and he rejected an apology by the US commander of troops General David Petraeus for the deaths of nine children in a NATO strike.

“I would like to ask NATO and the US with honour and humbleness and not with arrogance to stop their operations in our land,” Karzai said in Pashto as he visited the dead children’s relatives in Kunar province, eastern Afghanistan.

European Council President Herman van Rompuy said the agreements, to be finalised at a full EU summit March 24-25, “should allow us to finally turn the corner” on a crisis that has tested the whole euro project to breaking point.

Van Rompuy spoke after drawn-out talks, which ended shortly before dawn and saw testy exchanges between new Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny and his colleagues over the terms of Dublin’s debt rescue.

It was the hosts’ first ever Six Nations win against the French, whose championship hopes are all but in tatters following a second successive defeat.

For Italy this stunning and dogged performance will have banished memories of their 59-13 capitulation to England at Twickenham earlier this season.

A controversial Mike Phillips try, 11 points from the boot of James Hook and a long-range penalty from Leigh Halfpenny proved too much for Ireland, for whom Brian O’Driscoll scored a five-pointer and Ronan O’Gara bagged two penalties and a conversion.

The victory means Wales, who have beaten Scotland (24-6) and Italy (24-16) but lost to England (26-19), remain in contention for winning the Six Nations.

Apple began selling the iPad 2, which was unveiled by chief executive Steve Jobs last week, online overnight and in its 236 US stores starting at 5:00 pm (2200 GMT).

The queues did not appear to be as long as those for the iPhone 4 released in June but thousands of people lined up outside Apple stores in San Francisco, New York, Washington and other cities to get their hands on the device, which is one-third thinner, 15 percent lighter and faster than the previous model.

Thirteen months after Mamadou Tandja was jettisoned from office over his attempts to amend the constitution, voters were choosing between a former ally of the toppled president and a veteran opposition leader in the runoff poll.

General Salou Djibo, installed as leader of the junta after the February 2010 coup, was among the first to cast his ballot as polls opened at 0700 GMT.

Thousands huddled over heaters in emergency shelters through another freezing night along the northeastern coast, a scene of devastation after the 8.9 magnitude earthquake sent a 10-meter (33-foot) tsunami surging through towns and cities.

Kyodo news agency said the number of dead or unaccounted for as a result of the quake and tsunami was expected to exceed 1,800. It also reported there had been no contact with around 10,000 people in one small town, more than half its population.

The tsunami lost much of its energy as it moved thousands of miles (km) across the Pacific Ocean, although governments took no chances and ordered large-scale evacuations of coastal areas, ports and refineries.

Despite the power of Japan’s biggest-ever quake that killed at least 1,300 people, the tsunami waves were relatively benign as they rolled into the Americas, causing only isolated flooding, and fears of a catastrophe proved unfounded.

There are about $24 billion in insured properties in the three-kilometer (1.8 mile) band closest to the coast in the four most affected prefectures, Jayanta Guin of Air Worldwide, a disaster-modeling firm, said in an interview. In the four prefectures most affected by the quake’s shaking, there is some $300 billion in insured property.

But that does not equate in any way to a similar loss value. Guin said it will be days or even weeks until an accurate estimate can be made of what was lost, how it was lost, and what it will take to fix.

The Fukushima incident, brought on by the biggest earthquake ever recorded in Japan, took a turn for the worse on Saturday after a blast blew the roof off the facility.

There are direct comparisons with the 1979 disaster at Three Mile Island in the United States — in both cases a cooling fault led to a build up of pressure in the radioactive core and resulted in a relatively small radiation leak.

Japan’s Daiichi 1 reactor north of the capital Tokyo began leaking radiation after the 8.9-magnitude earthquake triggered a tsunami, and swiftly prompted fears of a nuclear meltdown.

But experts said pictures of mist above the plant suggested only small amounts of radiation had been expelled as part of measures to ensure its stability, far from the radioactive clouds that Chernobyl spewed out when it exploded in 1986.

Aerial footage showed buildings and trains strewn like children’s toys after powerful walls of seawater swamped areas around the worst-hit city of Sendai, about 130 km (80 miles) from the earthquake’s epicenter.

“Everything is so hard now,” said Kumi Onodera, a 34-year-old dental technician in Sendai, a port of 1 million people known as the “City of Trees” and cradled by dormant volcanoes.

“We are in the process of deploying 9 experts who are among the most experienced we have for dealing with catastrophes. They will help evaluate needs and coordinate assistance with Japanese authorities,” Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told Reuters.

The team of U.N. disaster relief officials includes several Japanese speakers and an environmental expert, she said.

Tokyo Electric Power Co also said fuel may have been damaged by falling water levels at the Daiichi facility, one of its two nuclear power plants in Fukushima, some 240 km (150 miles) north of Tokyo.

Officials said that so far the level of radiation leakage was small. And Naoto Sekimura, a professor at the University of Tokyo, said a major radioactive disaster was unlikely.

Washington, which would play a leading role in enforcing any no-fly zone, called the declaration an “important step”; but it stopped short of commitment to any military action and made no proposal for a swift meeting of the U.N. Security Council.

Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa said the League, meeting in Cairo on Saturday, had decided that “serious crimes and great violations” committed by the government of Muammar Gaddafi against his people had stripped it of legitimacy.

The front line now stands between the rebel-held town of Uqaylah and Ras Lanuf, where oil storage tanks were hit during Friday’s fighting. Rebels blamed an air strike but the government denied hitting the oil plant.

Rebels said there were more fighters standing by.

In a bold series of steps that may help to calm some of the pressure in financial markets, the leaders of the 17 countries that share the European single currency said they would increase the guarantees they pay into the European Financial Stability Facility, allowing its capacity to be increased to the full 440 billion euros, from a current level of around 250 billion euros.

They also agreed to lower the interest rate and lengthen the maturity on loans extended to Greece, reducing the rate by 100 basis points to bring it into line with IMF lending. The term on the 110 billion euros of EU/IMF loans was lengthened to 7.5 years from three, giving Athens more time to repay.

Hordes of fans — some of whom had queued up overnight — formed raucous pre-sale lines, and attracted curious onlookers, in the chilly rain in Manhattan, and in San Francisco.

The crowds erupted as a sea of blue-shirted Apple staff threw open the doors at 5 p.m. and gave high-fives to the first iPad shoppers in Manhattan and San Francisco.

The Japanese government said radiation emanating from the plant appeared to have decreased after Saturday’s blast, which produced a cloud of white smoke that obscured the complex. But the danger was grave enough that officials pumped seawater into the reactor to avoid disaster and moved 170,000 people from the area.

Japan’s nuclear safety agency then reported an emergency at a second reactor unit when its cooling systems malfunctioned.

Satako Yusawa teared up but pulled herself together quickly. Because for the 69-year-old widow, there was this to be thankful for: Her son and his family were out of town when Friday’s offshore, 8.9-magnitude quake sparked huge surges of water that washed fleets of cars, boats and entire houses across coastal Sendai like detritus perched on lava.

But her son had borrowed a lot of money to build that house, and had moved in only last month.

At least for the time being.

The chain of events started Friday when a magnitude-8.9 earthquake and tsunami severed electricity to the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex 170 miles (270 kilometers) northeast of Tokyo, crippling its cooling system. Then, backup power did not kick in properly at one of its units.

“It’s like science fiction, not like what really happens in Japan,” said Niijima, who is concerned about her sister in the Okinawa island chain, whom she has been unable to reach. The good news is that she has no family near the hardest-hit areas.

In the Los Angeles area and other U.S. regions with large Japanese-American and Japanese expatriate populations, those with ties to the Asian country expressed shock at the damage wrought by the 8.9-magnitude quake and fear for the safety of their loved ones there.

“This harbor is the lifeblood of our community and the soul of our community,” said Del Norte County Sheriff Dean Wilson as he looked across what was left of the Crescent City boat basin, which last year saw landings of crab and fish worth $12.5 million. “The fishing industry is the identity and soul of this community, besides tourism.

“It’s going to be hard to recover here.”

Gadhafi’s forces pushed the front line miles deeper into rebel territory and violence erupted at the front door of the opposition stronghold in eastern Libya, where an Al-Jazeera cameraman slain in an ambush became the first journalist killed in the nearly monthlong conflict.

In Cairo, the Arab League asked the U.N. Security Council to impose a no-fly zone to protect the rebels, increasing pressure on the U.S. and other Western powers to take action that most have expressed deep reservations about.

In nearby Jordan, too, an outside assist on election day 2007 helped put that kingdom’s undemocratic political structure in a harsh spotlight – and the king in a bind.

And when 2011’s winter of discontent exploded into a pro-democracy storm in Tunisia and then Egypt, opposition activist Bilal Diab broke away from his six-month “young leaders school” and its imported instructors, and put his new skills to use among the protest tents of Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, the head of the opposition’s interim governing council, also expressed disappointment over the failure to act by the United States and other Western countries, which have expressed solidarity with the rebels in their fight to oust Gadhafi but stopped short of approving any military action.

“If there is no no-fly zone imposed on Gadhafi’s regime, and if his ships are not checked then we will have a catastrophe in Libya,” Abdul-Jalil told The Associated Press in an interview in a professors’ lounge at the Omar Mukhtar University in Bayda, where he is also head of the city council.

Before headlining a GOP fundraiser, the possible presidential hopeful told a group of students and conservative activists in Manchester, “You’re the state where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord.”

But those first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired in Massachusetts, not New Hampshire.

All along, the union insisted the league’s owners were planning to lock out the players.

And that’s exactly what happened.

Republican congressional investigators got the brush-off this past week after pressing for details of meetings between White House officials and interest groups, including drug companies and hospitals that provided critical backing for Obama’s health insurance expansion.

Complying with the records request from the House Energy and Commerce Committee “would constitute a vast and expensive undertaking” and could “implicate longstanding executive branch confidentiality interests,” White House lawyer Robert Bauer wrote the committee. Translation: Nice try.

On hot issues that Democrats and Republicans have found cause to fret about – from spending reductions to state labor disputes – President Barack Obama is keeping a low profile.

Democrats such as Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia want him more publicly engaged in budget negotiations in Congress; some lawmakers want him to denounce Republican proposed program cuts.

Request rebuffed, they asked for Labor Secretary Hilda Solis. So far, however, the White House has stayed away from any trips to Madison, the state capital, or other states in the throes of union battles. The Obama administration is treading carefully on the contentious political issue that has led to a national debate over the power that public sector unions wield in negotiating wages and benefits.

A few labor leaders have complained openly that President Barack Obama is ignoring a campaign pledge he made to stand with unions; most others say his public comments have been powerful enough.

A month into his tenure as Obama’s press secretary, Carney doesn’t appear to be looking for fight each time he enters the daily press briefing. Unlike his feisty predecessor, Robert Gibbs, Carney hasn’t spent his career in partisan politics – his main experience is as a reporter – and his style is more measured.

“He is not part of the journalistic culture of hyping conflicts,” said Walter Isaacson, the former editor of Time magazine, where Carney worked for two decades. “I think he will be disdainful of those who try to hype conflict unfairly because he spent so much of his career being intellectually honest.”

A loose coalition of Democratic legislators failed to cobble together enough votes to overcome opposition from Republicans and religious groups, including the Catholic church and many black congregations, to make Maryland the sixth state to legalize gay marriage.

Lawmakers had planned to vote on the bill in the House, but it was withdrawn instead Friday and effectively killed for the year.

Lead producers Michael Cohl and Jeremiah J. Harris said in a statement Friday that “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” which has been in previews for a record 103 performances, would officially open June 14. The show’s opening, delayed six times, was to have opened last on March 15.

The final preview performance before the shutdown will be April 17. Performances will be canceled from April 19-May 11, with previews resuming on May 12.

As she crammed before class this week, Bakri-Bazzi caught up on testimony from a congressional hearing on the radicalization of U.S. Muslims. She contends Rep. Peter King, the New York Republican who called it, is ignoring the positive steps Muslims have taken in fighting terrorism since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Bakri-Bazzi, president of the Muslim Legal Society at Thomas M. Cooley Law School’s Detroit area campus, says she fears Thursday’s hearing will only spark backlash against innocent members of her community just going about their lives.

Mariscal fears his own day of reckoning is near as a series of disputes surround the adobe buildings, shops and Mexican-era churches in an increasingly trafficked corner of the city’s revitalizing downtown.

One dustup is over Indian graves unearthed during construction of a Mexican-American cultural center. Another involves a monument to Hispanic war heroes where the original Chinatown once stood.

As initially envisioned a decade ago, anyone in any courthouse today should be able to get real-time information on just about any case anywhere in the state.

Instead, the state auditor has concluded that court officials have so badly mismanaged the massive information technology project formally launched in 2004 that it has been installed to mixed reviews in just seven counties. And more than what may become a $2 billion computer project is at stake.

As she set out to start the nation’s first female VFW post, it turned out the answers had to do not only with gender, but generation.

“For years, it was really a loss for me as to what the issues were, why women weren’t coming in,” said Roll, a former sergeant in the Army Reserves who served in Desert Shield and Desert Storm before joining the VFW in 1991.

Maier observed it all without judgment. This was her hobby, not her job. But over the decades, it also was her life. She shot tens of thousands of photos. Most were never printed. Many weren’t even developed. And few were seen by anyone but her.

Vivian Maier wanted it that way. She guarded her privacy so zealously that she didn’t even want people to know her full name.

The number appears in the minutes of an Archdiocesan Pastoral Council meeting held exactly a year ago Friday. The document records a discussion about the list, as well as questions by council members and answers by archdiocesan officials, including:

Question: “How many names will be on the list of credibly accused priests?”

Answer: “155 names will appear, of which 40 may be new names.”