Evening Edition

Anibal Cavaco Silva said that with new elections due on June 5 “what we need now is an interim programme so that the next government can take part in the final negotiations, because it is the next government that will implement” the deal that emerges.

“It’s understandable (and) we need, let’s say, a little imagination on the part of European institutions to come up with a suitable interim programme,” he added.

“We want jobs, growth, our welfare state intact, and we are not going to pay for bankers’ mistakes,” European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) leader John Monks said in front of a crowd organisers estimated at 45,000.

The tens of thousands of marchers swarmed from everywhere from Spain to Romania into Budapest, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the European Union.

The latest opinion polls put the “no” vote on the 3.9 billion euro ($5.6 billion) deal slightly in the lead.

The Netherlands and Britain spent this amount to compensate some 340,000 of their citizens who lost money when Icesave, an online bank, went under at the height of the global financial crisis.

As diplomatic efforts gathered pace for a truce, the Red Cross brought much-needed relief to the besieged rebel-held port city of Misrata, the scene of fighting for more than 40 days.

A huge blast rocked Ajdabiya, said an AFP correspondent on its outskirts, with some residents suggesting it might have been a NATO air strike. In Brussels, a NATO official denied that there had been a strike.

The health ministry said one person died, a figure later echoed by the army, and 71 people were hurt — some from bullet wounds and others suffering breathing difficulties or having been struck during clashes.

Medics said two people were killed and 18 people wounded.

Witnesses told AFP the Golf Hotel in Abidjan, where Ouattara has been holed up since disputed November elections, came under attack starting from about 5:00 pm local time (1700 GMT).

It was the first time since the start of the west African nation’s political crisis that the hotel had come under direct attack.

In New York, UN peacekeeping chief Alain Le Roy warned that troops loyal to Gbagbo, who has refused to cede power after a November election, still had tanks and other heavy weapons and had made advances in Abidjan.

Gbagbo forces were just one kilometre (0.6 miles) from the hotel headquarters of internationally recognized president Alassane Ouattara, Le Roy told reporters after a UN Security Council briefing on the Ivory Coast crisis.

The evacuation began at around 3:00 am (0300 GMT) but the head of the country’s mission decided to cancel the operation because “security conditions were insufficient,” Colonel Thierry Burkhard of the French forces in Ivory Coast told AFP.

French forces drew fire during the operation and French helicopters destroyed an armoured vehicle of pro-Gbagbo forces in Abidjan’s diplomatic quarter, Burkhard said.

Parliamentary polls finally went ahead Saturday after two earlier postponements and despite violence that included a bomb attack on an electoral office Friday night which officials said killed 13 people and wounded dozens more.

Another explosion occurred at a polling place in the northeastern city of Maiduguri on Saturday, but authorities had not officially confirmed any deaths. A police source said on condition of anonymity that three people were killed.

The Ulsterman has led from the start at Augusta National and his 10 under par halfway total of 134 gave him a two strokes lead over Australia’s Jason Day with Tiger Woods and K.J. Choi tied for third a further stroke back.

Before they set off several players started to make their moves.

Don’t Push It, last year’s winner, put up a valiant defence of his crown in third under Tony McCoy with State Of Play coming from the clouds to grab fourth.

McCain was cementing his family’s links with the world’s most famous steeplechase, his father Ginger having sent out Red Rum to memorably win three Grand Nationals in the 1970s.

China and Hong Kong have become the biggest customers for the world renowned Bordeaux wines but some traders are warning against neglecting the more traditional markets in Europe and the United States.

Most expect sales and prices to match last year’s or to increase through the three month sales period, leading up to June’s annual Vinexpo sales fair.

The German ace narrowly beat McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton by just over one-tenth of a second in the session’s dying moments, with Vettel’s Red Bull team-mate Mark Webber third and Jenson Button (McLaren) fourth.

Hamilton had set the best time with some audacious driving, before Vettel — who claimed last month’s season-opener from pole — snatched top spot with a red-hot 1min 34.870 sec.

Finance ministers and central bankers from the 27-nation bloc held a second day of informal talks outside the Hungarian capital on their response to the euro zone debt crisis after Portugal on Wednesday became the third euro zone country to ask for EU and IMF financial aid.

EU ministers said that in return for an estimated 80 billion euros in emergency loans over three years, Lisbon would have to commit to further structural reforms to bring down its budget deficit and debt in a sustainable way.

Portugal bowed to pressure from financial markets and its European partners this week and became the third euro zone country after Greece and Ireland to request financial help from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.

Finance ministers from the 17-nation single currency area met at a palace north of Budapest on Friday to discuss the details and timeline of a rescue, which has been complicated by political turmoil in the Iberian nation of 10.5 million.

Soldiers and police had used tasers and batons to try to drive out protesters from the square, the epicenter of protests that toppled Hosni Mubarak on February 11. Gunshots echoed across the square in the overnight operation.

Hundreds defied the army move and stayed. Thousands more joined them on Saturday demanding power be handed to civilians and calling for the resignation of Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, who heads the ruling council.

As fighting raged on for the coastal town, where conditions are said to be desperate, a buoyant Muammar Gaddafi made his first television appearance for five days and his troops engaged rebels in more fighting on the eastern front of the civil war.

Rebel spokesman Mustafa Abdulrahman told Reuters by telephone that Saturday’s fighting centered on the Nakl al-Theqeel road to Misrata port, where a Red Cross vessel brought in badly needed medical supplies earlier in the day.

Security forces used live ammunition and tear gas to disperse thousands of people who were chanting freedom slogans after assembling near the old Omari mosque in the old quarter of the city, near the border with Jordan, the witnesses said.

Dozens of people have been killed in a wave of protests across Syria against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad.

U.N. peacekeeping chief Alain Le Roy told reporters on Friday that Gbagbo forces had used a lull in fighting for peace talks as a ruse to reinforce their positions.

“We understand that since that time, the forces of Mr. Gbagbo … have regained terrain and they have full control of the Plateau and Cocody area,” Le Roy said, referring to districts of the commercial capital Abidjan where his residence and diplomats’ homes are located.

“Europe cannot get out of this,” he said during a visit to Lampedusa, the tiny island located midway between Sicily and Tunisia.

“Either Europe is something that’s real and concrete or it isn’t and in that case it’s better to go back to each going our own way and letting everyone follow their own policies and egotism.”

The apology from Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) came a day after China and South Korea expressed concern at the discharge of contaminated water from the Fukushima Daiichi plant smashed by last month’s earthquake, reflecting growing international unease over the month-long nuclear crisis.

“It is almost a month since the earthquake took place. I would like to apologize from my heart over the worries and troubles we are causing for society due to the release of radiological materials into the atmosphere and seawater,” Sakae Muto, a TEPCO vice president, told a news conference.

At least seven more people were killed in four separate incidents in the last few hours before polling. Those deaths followed the killing of at least 10 people by a bomb at an election office late on Friday.

Violence which has taken around 100 lives in the run-up to the election, as well as the logistical chaos which forced the postponement of the vote a week ago, have renewed doubts over whether democracy can work in Nigeria.

Uneasy U.S.-Pakistani ties have become even more tense after a string of diplomatic disputes so far this year, including a massive drone strike in March and the case of Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor who shot dead two Pakistanis on January 27 in the eastern city of Lahore.

“Presently, joint operations are on hold,” a senior Pakistani intelligence officer told Reuters, adding that they were halted after Davis killed the two men. A Pakistani court has since acquitted Davis of murder and he has been released.

On the 8th anniversary of the day U.S. forces toppled Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad, senior Sadr aide Hazem al-Araji told tens of thousands of followers: “We say to the Black House (White House), ‘we are all time bombs and the detonators are at the hands of Moqtada al-Sadr.’ American troops must definitely leave our lands.”

Men, women and children — many waving Iraq’s black, white and red flag or singing songs — gathered in Baghdad’s Mustansiriya square to mark the occasion. The mood was festive, and vendors milled around, selling ice cream, water and juice.

With just over an hour to spare before a midnight deadline, Obama’s Democrats and opposition Republicans agreed on Friday to a compromise that will cut about $38 billion in spending for the rest of this fiscal year, which ends on Sept 30.

Congress then approved a stopgap funding measure to keep the federal government running until the deal can be formally approved in the next several days. Obama signed it on Saturday.

As the week began, Obama kicked off his re-election bid with a sunny video of people talking about their hopes and needs, the very image of life outside Washington politics.

By week’s end, Obama was mired in budget negotiations, canceling trips and scrambling to stave off a government shutdown that could only undermine the public’s faith in his leadership.

Their compromise is the result of a battle pitting the enduring power of the presidential veto and the White House soapbox – despite a “shellacking” in the last election – against a strong-willed GOP House speaker vaulted into office by a voter revolt against Washington’s free-spending ways.

The resulting measure will bleed about $40 billion from the day-to-day budgets of domestic agencies over just the next six months, the biggest rollback of such government programs in history. It allows Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, to claim his GOP shock troops had put Cabinet department operating budgets on track toward levels in place before Obama took office. In the end, the White House had to meet Boehner more than halfway on spending.

Emboldened by last fall’s election victories, fiscal conservatives have changed the debate in Washington. The question no longer is whether to cut spending, but how deeply. Rarely mentioned is the idea of higher taxes to lower the deficit.

Their success is all the more notable because Democrats control the Senate and White House.

“He said we don’t have the Senate and we don’t have the White House, and it’s a good day’s work,” said Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., who was in the closed-door session and later described the scene.

And with that, Republicans clapped: “Not euphoria,” Kingston said, reflecting fatigue and the realization of a long year of intense budget battling lay ahead. But for now, a week of top-level White House meetings, round-the-clock bargaining by staff and lots of emotional hills and valleys had produced a bipartisan accord to trim $38.5 billion in spending over this fiscal year’s remaining six months and head off a federal shutdown that both parties feared could hurt their standing with voters.

Thousands of tourists poured into the Smithsonian museums in Washington – which would have been shuttered without Friday’s late-night budget deal – to see artifacts like the original “Star-Spangled Banner” flag. And military families won’t have to stock their freezers, not knowing when they might have another paycheck to put food on the table.

The only thing that rivals their comfort? Widespread disgust, knowing that political bickering made them cringe in the first place.

The News of the World has acknowledged eavesdropping on the voicemails of public figures and says it will pay compensation for an unspecified number of “justifiable claims.”

But the admission has done little to end a scandal that has rattled Britain’s political establishment and Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.

At least eight people were killed in the fighting over Ajdabiya, a hospital official said.

Recapturing the city would give the Libyan military a staging ground to attack the rebels’ main stronghold, Benghazi, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) farther east along the coastal highway. Moammar Gadhafi’s forces were approaching Benghazi when they were driven back by the international air campaign launched last month to protect civilians and ground Gadhafi’s aircraft.

Activists vowed to accelerate their movement with daily protests nationwide, bringing new pressure on President Bashar Assad’s authoritarian regime. Assad has answered the tens of thousands of protesters with both force and limited concessions that have failed to appease an emboldened movement inspired by the Arab uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt.

“Old-style crackdowns and techniques simply do not work anymore,” said Aktham Nuaisse, a prominent Syrian pro-democracy activist. “The first thing authorities must do is stop this violence and enact serious reforms. Failing that, I fear everyone is going to lose control of the situation.”

In a sign the confrontation could escalate, the military warned Saturday evening that it will clear Tahrir Square of protesters “with all force and decisiveness” for life to get back to normal.

The warning could presage a repeat of the scene before dawn, when hundreds of soldiers, including a highly trained parachute unit, swarmed into Tahrir Square, firing in the air and beating protesters with clubs and shocking some with electrical batons. Troops dragged away protesters, while others staggered away bleeding from beatings and gunshot wounds. Witnesses reported two killed, though the Health Ministry insisted there was only one death.

Muqtada al-Sadr issued a statement to his followers on the eight anniversary of Saddam Hussein’s ouster that stopped just short of calling for violent action against U.S. forces. He accused “the occupation” of inciting panic, corruption and unrest among Iraqis.

His statement was read aloud at a huge protest of tens of thousands in Baghdad’s Mawal Square, near al-Sadr’s stronghold in an eastern Baghdad slum. The cleric is in Iran, where he has been studying religion for the last several years.

No French soldiers were injured in the attack late Friday, but French forces fired back destroying one armored vehicle, Cmdr. Frederic Daguillon said. The mission to evacuate diplomats from an embassy was aborted, he said.

The attack came the same night that France’s embassy was hit by two mortars and a rocket fired by forces for Laurent Gbagbo, who refuses to cede power or emerge from a bunker at his residence.

Radiation has covered the area around the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant and blanketed parts of the complex, making the job of “decommissioning” the plant – rendering it safe so it doesn’t threaten public health and the environment – a bigger task than usual.

Toshiba Corp., which supplied four of Fukushima’s six reactors, including two on which General Electric Co. collaborated, submitted a roadmap this past week to the plant’s operator for decommissioning the crippled reactors. The study, done with three other companies, projects that it would take about 10 years to remove the fuel rods and the reactors and contain other radioactivity at the site, said Keisuke Omori of Toshiba.

Vegetables and milk were the first foods that sparked concerns about the safety of Japanese agriculture after the March 11 tsunami flooded the nuclear plant and its reactors began to overheat and spew radiation. But those worries intensified when highly radioactive water was spotted gushing from the complex into the Pacific and contaminated fish showed up in catches.

Those concerns have abated somewhat after the leak was plugged and bans on produce from some areas were lifted.

“I’m at ease,” Ramirez told ESPNdeportes.com by phone from his home in Miami. “God knows what’s best (for me). I’m now an officially retired baseball player. I’ll be going away on a trip to Spain with my old man.”

One of the game’s great sluggers, Ramirez tested positive for a performance-enhancing substance and wasted little time in saying he was done with the game.

Most travelers don’t think twice about it – although there’s something unsettling about easing into your seat and finding the armrest still has an ashtray built in.

But fliers may be more worried than usual after a 5-foot hole opened in the roof of a 15-year-old Southwest jet earlier this month. Southwest quickly grounded 79 of its older Boeing 737s for inspections.

A 5-foot section of the passenger cabin roof of a 15-year-old Boeing 737-300 tore off April 1, forcing the Southwest Airlines flight to make an emergency landing.

None of the 118 people aboard was seriously injured, but light-headed passengers were banged around the cabin and had to quickly put on overhead oxygen masks as pilots made a rapid descent.

For Europe’s once-staunchly neutral countries, much has changed in the two decades since the Cold War ended. With no East-West conflict as a reference point, the concept of neutrality has been redefined to the point that some would say it’s lost its meaning.

“There’s total confusion. People have forgotten the concept of neutrality, which means don’t take sides in a military conflict,” said Swiss peace researcher Daniele Ganser.

Driven by social media and mobile startups, the money is flowing in the city’s tech industry again, a decade after the dot-com boom minted overnight millionaires and its crash fueled a local recession worse than anything San Francisco has seen in the latest downturn.

A recent tax break for Twitter and other proposals show city officials are hopeful that this latest tech industry prosperity does not portend another bubble and another bust.

Delegates from 173 nations did agree that delays in averting global warming merely fast-forward the risk of plunging the world into “catastrophe.” The delegate from Bolivia noted that the international effort, which began with a 1992 U.N. convention, has so far amounted to “throwing water on a forest fire.”

But the U.N. meeting in Bangkok, which concluded late Friday after delegates cobbled together a broad agenda for the December summit, failed to narrow the deep divisions between the developing world and the camp of industrialized nations led by the United States. These may come to plague the summit in Durban.

Today, solar panels might just outnumber cowboys.

Rural Pendleton is blazing an unlikely renewable energy trail, offering no-interest loans to spark interest in solar power and a group-buy philosophy to get better prices. More than 50 residents installed systems last year, and the program was expanded to more residents and to include businesses this year.

“I think that’s one of the things they should probably leave alone – you know – unless it’s absolutely necessary,” Krutsch said as he took a break from reviewing job openings at the Rock County Job Center. “Old people need help with medical bills. There’s too many people under-insured right now – especially people like myself right now who don’t have insurance.”

Changing Medicare has become a hot topic around town, and the qualms underscore why many officeholders are wary of talking about it.

The die-hards converging soon at the site where the War Between the States began 150 years ago with a Confederate artillery barrage on Union-held Fort Sumter can’t wait to help others understand why they spend weekends tramping through the rain, sleeping in tents in snow-covered fields, cooking on open campfires and enduring mock battles in wool coats under the hot Southern sun.

They’re expecting a surge of interest in a pastime that has roots at the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1913, when Confederate veterans retraced Pickett’s Charge. Re-enacting took hold for good five decades ago during the Civil War’s centennial.

Not so, say Democrats who counter that the group’s 800-plus health centers nationwide provide an array of services, from screenings for cancer to testing for sexually transmitted diseases. Abortion is just one of many procedures, and the law bars Planned Parenthood from using tax money for it.

In the budget maelstrom Friday stood Planned Parenthood Federation of America, a 90-year-old organization now part of a decades-long congressional battle over abortion. Republicans wanted any legislation keeping the government operating to bar federal dollars for Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest provider of abortions. They wanted to distribute the money to the states.

Republicans, in voting to repeal rules on “network neutrality” set down by the Federal Communications Commission, said the FCC lacked the authority to promulgate the rules. They disputed the need to intervene in an already open Internet and warned that the rules would stifle investment in broadband systems.

“The FCC power grab would allow it to regulate any interstate communication service on barely more than a whim and without any additional input from Congress,” said Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., sponsor of the legislation. The Internet, he added, “is open and innovative thanks to the government’s hands-off approach.”