Evening Edition

Berlusconi himself did not attend the hearing and the judges immediately adjourned the trial until May 31. The woman at the centre of the case, Karima El Mahroug — nicknamed “Ruby the Heart Stealer” — was not present either.

The hearing at Milan’s main court building lasted just under 10 minutes and a handful of protesters rallied outside both for and against Berlusconi.

Having resisted for months pressure from the markets as well as European partners, outgoing Prime Minister Jose Socrates in a televised address justified the request as needed after parliament rejected his new austerity programme which, he said, “aggravated in a dramatic way the country’s financial situation.”

“I am firmly convinced that that is going to be further aggravated if nothing is done,” added Socrates, who resigned on March 23 after parliament’s rejection, opening the way for new elections set for June 5.

“I believe it is necessary to have recourse to the financing mechanisms which are available within the European context,” Teixeira dos Santos said in written replies to questions submitted by business daily Jornal de Negocios.

“The country has been pushed, in an irresponsible manner, into a difficult situation on the financial markets,” the minister said, referring to the fall of the government last month when parliament rejected its austerity programme.

Finance Minister Elena Salgado said the economy would grow 2.3 percent in 2012 rather than 2.5 percent, and by 2.4 percent in 2013 instead of 2.7 percent due to higher prices for commodities like oil and an expected increase in eurozone interest rates.

For this year, the government kept its forecast for growth at 1.3 percent.

The Socialist government, which has received mixed results from unpopular economic policies agreed with its international creditors, is now pledging to cut its runaway deficit by some nine percentage points by 2015.

“Under no condition are we going to restructure (the debt),” government spokesman George Petalotis told reporters.

The draw back followed a day of heavy fighting at Gbagbo’s residence in Abidjan where he is holed, refusing to surrender and cede power to his rival.

“There has been a pause in the fighting,” between Gbagbo’s troops and Ouattara’s Republican Forces Army, a resident told AFP after “several hours of sustained heavy weapons fire.

As negotiations continued to end a four month post-election stand-off that has plunged the country into war, Gbagbo rejected the former colonial power’s demand that he recognise his rival Alassane Ouattara as president

“I do not recognise the victory of Ouattara….” Gbagbo said in an interview with France’s LCI news channel.

Witnesses said gunfire rang out both near the presidential palace and Gbagbo’s residence in an apparent bid to bounce him into ending to his decade-long rule of the world’s number one cocoa producer.

“We are going to take Laurent Gbagbo out of his hole and hand him over to the president of the republic,” said Sidiki Konate, spokesman for Ouattara’s forces.

France pledged to open a sea corridor to the besieged Mediterranean port and a tanker left the port of Tobruk on Wednesday carrying the first consignment of oil since the rebel government won recognition from some countries.

The White House rebuffed a letter from Kadhafi.

The accusation came as the rebels sustained their first significant loss of territory to Moamer Kadhafi’s forces in almost a week after they were sent fleeing from the edge of the oil refinery town of Brega in a major assault.

One boost was the docking in the port of Tobruk of a one-million-barrel supertanker in readiness to load the rebels’ first oil export shipment, potentially worth more than 100 million dollars (70.5 million euros).

The Liberian-flagged tanker “has docked in Tobruk,” Michelle Bockmann, markets editor of shipping news and data provider Lloyd’s List, told AFP in London. “The boat is expected to be loaded on April 6.”

Earlier, Bockman said the ship was “a Suezmax tanker and it’s able to load one million barrels, or about 130,000 tonnes of oil. So it’s over 100 million dollars’ (70.5 million euros) worth of crude.”

“We have rescued 48 people alive from the sea while 15 bodies have been spotted by the crew of the helicopter,” coast guard spokesman Vittorio Alessandro, based on the southern Italian island of Lampedusa, told AFP.

Around 130 people who were on the boat are believed to be missing.

But in an illustration of how fragile progress is at the Fukushima plant, operator Tokyo Electric Power said it was concerned a build-up of hydrogen gas at a different reactor could cause another explosion at the site.

The water leak was thought to be a source of spiking radiation levels in the sea, which prompted Japan to announce its first seafood radiation safety standards following the discovery of fish with high levels of contamination.

The physics world was abuzz with excitement over the findings, which could offer clues to the persistent riddle of mass and how objects obtain it — one of the most sought-after answers in all of physics.

But experts cautioned that more analysis was needed over the next several months to uncover the true nature of the discovery, which comes as part of an ongoing experiment with proton and antiproton collisions to understand the workings of the universe.

The 50-year-old former carnival entertainer and pop singer, known as “Sweet Micky” or Tet Kale (Bald Head), lit up the campaign, seizing the mantle of change and capturing the imagination of Haiti’s frustrated urban youth.

“Haitian people, a new era has begun,” Martelly told a victory press conference in the capital Port-au-Prince, urging the young to “raise their eyes to the rainbow of promised change.”

The other events are the ski halfpipe for men and women, team figure skating, team luge and biathlon mixed relay, meaning an extra 150 athletes will participate in the Russian Black Sea resort city.

IOC president Jacques Rogge said the “inclusion of these events on the Olympic Winter Games programme is sure to be appreciated by athletes and sports fans alike.”

Prosecutors accused Matthew H. Kluger and Garrett D. Bauer of reaping more than $32.2 million from trades on tips about upcoming mergers and acquisitions that Kluger learned as a lawyer at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati PC, the pre-eminent firm representing Silicon Valley technology companies.

The complaint details a conspiracy that had its origins in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and ended with attempts by the defendants to cover their tracks, including a discussion about cleaning money in a washing machine to rid it of fingerprints.

The nation of 10.5 million became the third member of the euro zone to seek a rescue after Greece and Ireland after months of fending off market pressure to request assistance, as borrowing costs soared amid deepening political instability.

Prime Minister Jose Socrates said in a televised statement that parliament’s rejection of additional austerity measures last month had aggravated the financial situation, ultimately making the request for aid “inevitable.”

Fighting raged for a third consecutive day in the economic capital Abidjan as Ouattara’s forces tried to unseat Gbagbo, who has refused to cede power after losing a November election to Ouattara, according to U.N.-certified results.

The source, who lives near Gbagbo’s heavily guarded residence in Abidjan, said fighting had died down in the afternoon and Ouattara’s forces had regrouped.

Misrata, Libya’s third city, rose up with other towns against Muammar Gaddafi’s rule in mid-February, and it is now under attack by government troops after a violent crackdown put an end to most protests elsewhere in the west of the country.

Rebels are angry at what they perceive to be a scaling back of operations since NATO took over an air campaign, following an early onslaught led by the United States, France and Britain that at one stage tilted the war in the rebels’ favor.

Challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg beat Republican-backed incumbent Judge David Prosser by slightly more than 200 votes out of 1.4 million cast on Tuesday, according to local media.

“We owe Justice Prosser our gratitude for his more than 30 years of public service,” Kloppenburg said. “Wisconsin voters have spoken … . I will be independent and impartial and I will decide cases based on the facts and the law.”

Dish, the second-largest U.S. satellite TV company after DirecTV, trumped at least three other bidders, including activist investor Carl Icahn, for the one-time leader in video rentals.

Dish said the deal, which includes more than 1,700 Blockbuster stores, gives it new ways to market its services.

The former Massachusetts governor has yet to formally get into the race, but Romney is on a cross-country blitz to meet wealthy, well-networked donors.

Now a seasoned campaigner, Romney is regarded as the early front-runner in a jumbled field of more than a dozen Republicans, most of whom have not formally announced. A massive war chest — likely as much as $50 million — could create an air of inevitability about his run and even keep some poorly-funded rivals out of the race entirely.

Workers started injecting nitrogen into the containment vessel of reactor No. 1 on Wednesday night, following a morning breakthrough in stopping highly radioactive water leaking into the sea at another reactor in the six-reactor complex.

“It is necessary to inject nitrogen gas into the containment vessel and eliminate the potential for a hydrogen explosion,” an official of plant operator Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) told a news briefing.

Berlusconi, who has suffered relatively limited political damage from the “Rubygate” case, did not attend the session, preferring to chair a ministerial meeting in Rome.

Crowds of critics and supporters sparred verbally outside the court over whether the 74-year-old should go to prison over his connection with Moroccan-born teenager Karima El Mahroug, a nightclub dancer with the stage name of Ruby.

Bringing the top two U.S. stock exchanges together would face “insurmountable antitrust problems,” the source said on Wednesday, suggesting NYSE’s board could look beyond the premium Nasdaq has offered and reject Nasdaq’s bid outright.

The focus on monopolies shows just how tricky it will be for the world’s top exchange operators to pull off a rash of planned tie-ups that would revamp capital markets in North America, Europe and Asia. Just this week, Australia moved to block a buyout of its bourse by Singapore Exchange.

Neither is sure to occur, but the limited-impact version seemed distinctly possible on Wednesday as Democrats and Republicans argued over the federal budget. It would involve the expiration at midnight on Friday of a stop-gap spending measure known as a continuing resolution, or CR.

The nightmare shutdown scenario, still a few weeks away, would involve Congress failing to raise the national debt ceiling and possibly an unprecedented government debt default.

In a speech on the ongoing turbulence in the Middle East and North Africa, World Bank President Robert Zoellick warned that a break from a past where societies were driven by autocrats to one that includes citizens in decision-making will be vital for the region’s transition.

“Our message to our clients, whatever their political system, is that you cannot have successful development without good governance and without the participation of your citizens,” Zoellick told a gathering at the Peterson Institute.

During a rare meeting with party leaders on Tuesday, Obama aimed to break a logjam over how to cut spending by $33 billion in this year’s budget.

The meeting did not produce a breakthrough but in a surprise appearance before reporters afterwards Obama pledged to convene further meetings and negotiate “for as long as possible to get this resolved.”

The ministry is also likely to set power-saving targets for households and small businesses, the official said, in what would be the first government curbs on power use since the oil crisis of 1974.

Tokyo Electric Power is scrambling to secure enough power for the capital area’s factories and air-conditioners this summer after a devastating earthquake and tsunami took out 23 percent of its generating capacity, including the Fukushima nuclear complex.

But after the first extra budget, which will focus on funding immediate cleanup and repair work from last month’s devastating earthquake and tsunami, the government will likely spend far more in subsequent emergency budgets and may need to issue new bonds to cover the costs, analysts say.

The more than 3 trillion yen ($35 billion) in the supplemental budget will pay for repairing roads, ports and schools, as well as helping those in quake-hit regions in Japan’s northeast find new jobs, the Asahi reported on Wednesday.

President Barack Obama checked in separately by phone with House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., then asked the two men to join him at the White House for an evening meeting. He acted after deciding “not enough progress had been made,” said spokesman Jay Carney.

Determined to avoid political blame if a shutdown occurs, Boehner said the House would vote Thursday on a one-week stopgap bill to keep the government open while cutting $12 billion in spending and providing the Pentagon with enough money to stay open until the Sept. 30 end of the budget year.

The dire message, delivered two days before the federal government’s spending authority expires, appeared aimed at jolting congressional Republicans into a budget compromise. Billions of dollars apart, congressional negotiators were working to strike a deal by Friday to avert a shutdown by setting spending limits through the end of September. The last such shutdown took place 15 years ago and lasted 21 days.

President Barack Obama telephoned House Speaker John Boehner on Wednesday, and Boehner’s office said the speaker told Obama he was hopeful a deal could be reached.

“You are a man who has enough courage to annul a wrong and mistaken action,” Gadhafi wrote in a rambling, three-page letter to Obama obtained by The Associated Press on Wednesday. “I am sure that you are able to shoulder the responsibility for that.”

The White House confirmed the letter, but top officials shrugged it off.

The finale of Gbagbo’s 10-year claim on Ivory Coast is playing out much like the beginning. The 65-year-old strongman, who made an art of staying in power years past the end of his legal mandate, is now pushing the envelope, fighting for each day, even each hour.

“He will not surrender,” said Meite Sindou, a defense spokesman for Alassane Ouattara, the man recognized worldwide as the democratically elected president of Ivory Coast. “We will have to take him.”

The Saudi king, looking thin after months of medical treatment in the United States and elsewhere, welcomed Gates for what the Pentagon chief later said was a cordial and warm visit.

The hospitality masked deep unease among Saudi Arabia’s aged leadership about what the political upheaval in the Middle East means for its hold on power, its role as the chief counterweight to a rising Iran, and its changed relationship with the United States.

With the election 19 months away, Obama’s campaign could keep a low profile while Republicans pummel each other. But he won’t be content to watch passively as his potential rivals duke it out.

Three of the earliest-voting states – Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada – will also be strongly contested in the fall of 2012. Likely Republican candidates already are assailing Obama there, and his aides say they can’t wait months to respond.

Fox and Beck’s company, Mercury Radio Arts, said Wednesday they will stay in business creating other projects for Fox television and digital, starting with some documentaries Beck is preparing.

Beck was a quick burn on Fox News Channel. Almost immediately after joining the network in January 2009, he doubled the ratings at his afternoon time slot. Fans found his conservative populism entertaining, while Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert described Beck’s “crank up the crazy and rip off the knob” moments.

In her 2009 debut with The Candies Foundation, the unwed mother and daughter of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was paid $262,500 for 15 to 20 days of work, and another $70,000 for a less amount of work last year.

The money spent has been “an amazing investment,” according to foundation founder Neil Cole.

Prosecutors called 25 witnesses to the stand over 2 1/2 weeks, but the defense needed just one minute to present its side. The jury of eight women and four men barely had time to get settled in the courtroom before being told to return Thursday morning for closing arguments.

“We are expecting that you will get this case for decision tomorrow,” U.S. District Judge Susan Illston said to them. “Tomorrow will be the last day.”

“High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants,” the stone slab reads. “Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point.”

It was advice the dozen or so households of Aneyoshi heeded, and their homes emerged unscathed from a disaster that flattened low-lying communities elsewhere and killed thousands along Japan’s northeastern shore.

The sweeping fiscal plan by House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., lays the groundwork for a decade of cuts in spending, taxes and deficits. It would be tempered by a cost shift to future retirees and features a reshaping of the government’s two chief health care programs for the elderly and poor, Medicare and Medicaid.

Though the blueprint covers the entire reach of government, much of Wednesday’s House Budget Committee debate focused on health and other social programs, from which Republicans were proposing to wring hundreds of billions in savings over the next 10 years. Ryan said that with sky-high deficits, the government needs to limit its mission to programs that are truly needed.

The trench is a key part of a $3 billion plan to fix damage left by the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, a 78-mile shipping channel dug in the 1960s. The corps says the work will help protect New Orleans from hurricanes by restoring wetlands, the natural buffer Louisiana is losing along this low-lying coast.

Locals, however, are worried.

The International Olympic Committee executive board also approved the addition of men’s and women’s ski halfpipe, mixed relay in biathlon and team events in luge and figure skating.

“The inclusion of these events … is sure to be appreciated by athletes and sports fans alike,” IOC President Jacques Rogge said. “These are exciting, entertaining events that perfectly complement the existing events on the sports program, bring added appeal and increase the number of women participating at the games.”

The 22-year-old computer science student is part of a group behind appeals that started popping up anonymously on the Internet seven weeks ago, calling on Chinese to stage peaceful protests to get the ruling Communist Party to move toward democracy.

Those calls have spooked the government into launching one of its broadest campaigns of repression in years to keep the protests from catching on, as they have in the Middle East and North Africa.

Nuclear officials said there was no immediate threat of explosions like the three that rocked the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant not long after a massive tsunami hit on March 11, but their plans are a reminder of how much work remains to stabilize the complex.

Workers are racing to cool down the plant’s reactors, which have been overheating since power was knocked out by the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami that killed as many as 25,000 people and destroyed hundreds of miles of coastline.

The conditional deal highlighted the political stakes involved in a showdown over federal spending that already has caused the loss of benefits for about 10,000 Missouri residents who have been without work for a year and a half.

Earlier Wednesday, one of the Republican senators leading the filibuster said he would allow a vote on the unemployment bill and instead try to block up to $400 million of stimulus spending. But the senators later said at a news conference that they want the Democratic governor to share responsibility for rejecting federal money – even though they could do so on their own by cutting the stimulus money out of a state budget bill.

Two groups of protesters met up in the city center where a general strike had closed shops and banks in what activists were calling the “Tsunami of Taiz” and the largest demonstration in this troubled southern city to date.

More than 120 people have been killed since Yemen’s protests calling for the removal of President Ali Abdullah Saleh began on Feb. 11, inspired by popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt.

While Walker downplayed the significance of Tuesday’s elections on Wednesday, saying they were skewed by exceptional turnout in the liberal cities of Madison and Milwaukee, Democrats warned they were only a sign of what’s to come. Recall efforts have been launched against 16 state senators from both parties for their support or opposition to the bill eliminating most public employees’ collective bargaining rights.

“This continues to add fuel to the tremendous fire of enthusiasm and passion to recall the Republican senators that support Scott Walker’s backwards priorities for the state,” Wisconsin Democratic Party chairman Mike Tate said of the election results.

The problem stems from a recent government decision to let a Virginia company called LightSquared build a nationwide broadband network using airwaves next to those used for GPS. Manufacturers of GPS equipment warn that strong signals from the planned network could jam existing navigation systems.

A technical fix could be expensive – billions of dollars by one estimate – and there’s no agreement on who should pay. Government officials pledge to block LightSquared from turning on its network as scheduled this year unless they receive assurances that GPS systems will still work.

U.S. District Judge Susan Richard Nelson, however, urged the two sides not to wait that long.

“It seems to me both sides are at risk, and now is a good time to come back to the table,” Nelson said, noting her willingness to facilitate the resumption of talks toward a new collective bargaining agreement that would put pro football back on track.

This was the supposed to be the year Maya Moore’s Connecticut juggernaut won its third straight title or Stanford broke through or Tennessee got back to the top.

Instead, the Aggies rewrote the script in their first Final Four appearance. They made the 65-year-old Blair the oldest coach to win a national championship just one night after UConn’s 68-year-old Jim Calhoun did the same thing on the men’s side.

Many economists and budget analysts suggest that a government shutdown, if it’s lengthy, or even a deal that calls for deep short-term spending cuts could stifle economic growth and lead the country back into recession. Private forecasters already have lowered their growth projections for this year based on surging fuel, food and raw material costs, and tensions in the Middle East and North Africa.

“I think the economic damage from a government shutdown would mount very quickly,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, who has been an economic adviser to both GOP and Democratic lawmakers. “And the longer it dragged on, the bigger the hit to business, consumer and investor confidence, the greater the odds of a renewed recession.” He puts the danger zone at two weeks or longer.

Three months after he succeeded Adrian Fenty, Vincent Gray has been besieged by controversies and minor scandals.

The most serious allegations involve whether the Gray campaign funneled cash and promised a six-figure job to a minor candidate who was attacking Fenty during last year’s mayoral contest. The Justice Department has said it is reviewing the allegations to determine if a criminal investigation is warranted.

In his last address to the council, Rene Preval urged the U.N.’s most powerful body to consider the effectiveness of its interventions “that have practically led to 11 years of military presence in a country that has no war.”

Speaking at the council meeting attended by Colombia’s president, former U.S. president Bill Clinton and nine foreign ministers from Latin America and Spain, Preval said it was “sad to note” that in a quarter of a century he is the only president to finish two constitutional terms and “unfortunately, I am the only one … who was never jailed or exiled.”

Rights groups and some psychologists have pressed regulators in several states to explore whether psychologists violated professional rules by designing or observing abusive interrogations, but Wednesday’s court hearing was the first on the issue, advocates said.

The hearing swept questions about national security and overseas detention sites into a New York City court, where the New York Civil Liberties Union and the San Francisco-based Center for Justice and Accountability are seeking to force state regulators to decide whether Army psychologist John F. Leso should be stripped of his New York license. They say he developed “psychologically and physically abusive” interrogation techniques for use on detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Now the chief financial officer for the Muncie schools, with more than a dozen buildings and 8,000 students, has less money to spend and a limited ability to raise more. The consequence?

“We’re not going to fix parts of our buildings that need repair unless it’s a life-safety issue,” Burkhart said. “Probably there’ll be some drippy faucets, there’ll be some leaking roofs, there’ll be some broken window panes we may put tape over.”