Evening Edition

“I want us to lay down arms and to enter the civilian part of the crisis, which should be completed rapidly for life in the country to resume,” Gbagbo said on his rival Alassane Ouattara’s TCI channel shortly after his capture.

Gbagbo, who has held power since 2000 and stubbornly refused to admit defeat in November’s presidential election, was detained and taken to his rival’s temporary hotel headquarters with his wife Simone and son Michel.

The rebel rejection came after NATO chiefs warned that any deal must be “credible and verifiable,” and as alliance warplanes were again in action against Kadhafi armour pounding Ajdabiya and Misrata.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also stuck to US demands for Kadhafi to step down and leave Libya as part of a peaceful transition, but declined to comment on the proposed African Union deal before being fully briefed.

Workers at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant ran for safety after the latest of hundreds of powerful tremors to hit Japan since the 9.0 magnitude quake on March 11 and the towering tsunami that followed.

Japan’s meteorological agency warned that a wave up to one metre (three feet) high could hit the coast near the power station after Monday’s shock, before cancelling the alert less than an hour later.

People across the country were expected to pause at 2:46pm (0546 GMT), the moment Japan’s biggest ever recorded earthquake struck, setting off a chain of events that has left workers scrambling to tame runaway atomic reactors.

With around 13,000 people known to have died and 15,000 still officially listed as missing, it is the worst tragedy to envelop the country since World War II.

The women, part of a demonstration that erupted in front of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, were detained for taking part in an unauthorised protest rather than for wearing their veils.

But, in theory at least, French officials can now slap fines on Muslim women who refuse orders to expose their faces when in public.

The explosion left clouds of suffocating smoke inside the city’s busiest metro station, as bloodied passengers ran for the exits, which lead to both the strongman president’s main office and his residence.

Confirming the death toll of eleven, Lukashenko immediately called an emergency security session in which he placed the blame on unnamed political opponents claiming they were seeking to destabilise his regime.

“In Praise of Doubt” is the latest contemporary art exhibition at the Punta della Dogana gallery, a former Venetian Republic Customs House located at the centre of the lagoon on the Grand Canal, just across from Piazza San Marco.

The eclectic collection, inspired by “uncertainty and convictions about identity,” features 19 established and up-and-coming artists, from minimalist Donald Judd to playful Jeff Koons and self-declared clown Paul McCarthy.

The IMF said its latest world economic forecasts were “little changed” from a January update: 4.4 percent global growth in 2011, ticking down from 5.0 percent in 2010.

A two-speed recovery from the 2009 global recession was expected to continue apace, with the emerging-market and developing economies expanding at a 6.5 percent clip, and the advanced economies mustering only 2.4 percent growth.

A column of more than 30 French armored vehicles moved in on Gbagbo’s residence in Abidjan after French and U.N. helicopter gunships began attacking the compound overnight to end a drawn-out standoff that had reignited a civil war.

Witnesses said Ouattara’s forces, who had failed to dislodge Gbagbo despite mounting a fierce attack on his bunker last week, had joined French ground troops advancing on the compound.

The rebel rejection came less than 24 hours after South African President Jacob Zuma, head of an African Union mission, said Gaddafi had accepted the plan, including a ceasefire proposal for the conflict in the North African desert state.

As African presidents negotiated with the rebel leadership in their stronghold of Benghazi, insurgents said Gaddafi’s forces had bombarded the besieged western city of Misrata.

South African President Jacob Zuma urged NATO to stop air strikes on government targets to give a truce “a chance,” after Gaddafi said he accepted an African Union road map for ending the conflict in Libya including an immediate ceasefire.

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told a Brussels news briefing that Gaddafi’s government had announced ceasefires in the past, but “they did not keep their promises.”

Tens of thousands have taken to the streets demanding an end to Saleh’s 32 years as leader of the poorest country in the Middle East, where he has struggled to quell a northern Shi’ite rebellion, a southern separatist movement and a resurgent wing of al Qaeda.

A proposal last week by Saudi Arabia, Saleh’s main financial backer until now, and other Gulf states for talks appeared to be in jeopardy Friday, when Saleh lashed out in fury at Qatar’s prime minister for suggesting that mediation would lead to Saleh standing down. Saleh called it “belligerent intervention.”

The report came as the government expanded an evacuation zone around the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant because of the high levels of accumulated radiation since a 15-meter tsunami ripped through the complex a month ago, causing massive damage to its reactors which engineers are still struggling to control.

The Kyodo report said that the high levels of radiation that have been released by the Fukushima Daiichi plant meant it could raise the severity level from 5 to the highest 7, the same as the 1986 Chernobyl accident.

A poisoned corpse of a city, its crumbling, deserted buildings devoid of life stand as a symbol of human folly, lost dreams and broken childhood.

Just down the road from Prypyat, a short time after midnight on April 26, 1986, reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded, spewing radioactive debris into the air after a safety experiment went horribly wrong.

Shares of Tokyo Electric, commonly known as Tepco, have lost about three-fourths of their value since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami tore through the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex, causing it to leak radiation.

The government has evacuated people living in a 20 km (12 miles) radius of the plant and announced on Monday that it would encourage people to leave certain areas beyond that exclusion zone due to accumulated radiation.

The blast occurred on a platform at around 6 p.m. at the Oktyabrskaya metro station — one of the city’s busiest underground rail junctions — about 100 meters (yards) from the main presidential headquarters.

Witnesses said it tore through a crush of waiting passengers just as a train pulled in. “There was blood everywhere, in splashes and in pools. I saw pieces of flesh. It was terrible,” a 47-year-old man, who gave his name only as Viktor, said.

Kenneth Robinson admitted to being a middleman who supplied information to accused trader Garrett D. Bauer about pending mergers. He said he got the tips from corporate lawyer Matthew H. Kluger, who is accused of stealing the details from law firms where he worked.

Kluger and Bauer were arrested last week for their roles in the estimated $32.2 million scheme. Bauer made most of the illegal profit, while Robinson made about $875,000 and Kluger made $500,000, investigators said. Kluger and Bauer have not yet entered pleas.

One-time Galleon chief operating officer Rick Schutte took the witness stand at Rajaratnam’s insider trading trial on Monday as the defense presented its side of the case to New York jurors who have heard five weeks of prosecution evidence and witnesses.

Schutte repeatedly used the word “discipline” to describe life at Galleon and called Rajaratnam “very professional” and “educated” about the issues facing companies covered by Galleon funds for its investors.

Shareholders at the center of the increasingly bitter fight were bracing for a bidding war and weighing a stark choice: The short-term gain from Nasdaq’s higher but probably riskier offer or leaving cash on the table for what could be a better long-term fit with Deutsche Boerse.

Nasdaq and partner IntercontinentalExchange Inc are not about to walk away from their $11.3 billion unsolicited offer, and they are working behind the scenes to persuade NYSE shareholders to pressure the exchange’s directors, according to people familiar with the matter.

Schwartzel, who began the final round at Augusta National four strokes off the pace, showed nerves of steel as he rolled in a 20-footer on the 18th green to complete a six-under-par 66, the lowest score of the day.

The 26-year-old threw both arms skywards in jubilation after his ball dropped into the cup to give him a 14-under total of 274 in the season’s opening major.

Video of former President Laurent Gbagbo being led into a room in a white undershirt was broadcast on television as proof of his detention. He would not sign a statement formally ceding power after losing a Nov. 28 election to economist Alassane Ouattara.

More than 1 million civilians fled their homes and untold numbers were killed in the power struggle between the two rivals that threatened to re-ignite a civil war in the world’s largest cocoa producer. Gbagbo’s security forces have been accused of using cannons, 60 mm mortars and 50-caliber machine guns to mow down opponents during the standoff.

A day after an announcement that the Libyan leader had accepted the truce, a doctor in rebel-held Misrata said Gadhafi’s forces battered that western city and its Mediterranean port with artillery fire that killed six people.

“He is the biggest lie in the history of Libya,” said Jilal Tajouri, 42, who joined more than 1,000 flag-waving protesters in the eastern rebel stronghold of Benghazi as the African Union delegation arrived.

Some 100,000 Libyans have crossed into neighboring countries since fighting erupted between rebels and leader Moammar Gadhafi’s forces nearly two months ago. Migration officials say much of that border traffic is routine and goes both ways.

However, hundreds of women and children in the past week fled to Tunisia by taking back roads through the Libyan desert, trying to avoid Gadhafi’s men. East of Libya, instant communities of exiles have sprung up in the Egyptian port city of Alexandria and the coastal resort of Mersa Matrouh, where thousands have received aid and some 500 Libyan families found temporary refuge in vacant holiday apartments.

In the latest violence, security forces killed a student Monday during a protest at Damascus University in the capital, bringing the death toll to well over 170 after more than three week of unrest, activists said. There were conflicting reports about whether the student was shot or beaten to death.

The United States, France, Germany and Britain demanded an immediate end to the bloodshed.

From the outside, the building where a reactor blew up April 26, 1986, in the world’s worst nuclear disaster mostly looks like an ordinary, dull industrial building. Only an odd addition supported by buttresses – the sarcophagus covering the reactor – hints that anything unusual happened here.

The imagination struggles, too, to repopulate nearby Pripyat with the 50,000 people who lived there. Once a busy town built especially for the plant’s workers, it’s now a silent husk of abandoned apartment towers and scrubby brush slowly overtaking the main square.

Vast tracts of the northeast are demolition sites: The stuff of entire cities is sorted into piles taller than three-story buildings around which dump trucks and earth-movers crawl. Ankle-deep water stagnates in streets, and massive fishing boats lie perched atop pancaked houses and cars. The occasional telephone poll or bulldozer is sometimes the only skyline.

“It’s a hellish sorrow,” said Numata Takahashi, 56, who escaped his home in Natori just before the waters came. “I don’t know where we’ll go, but I’m not coming back here. … We’ll go somewhere where there are no tsunamis.”

Across the country, people are pumping less into the tank, reversing what had been a steady increase in demand for fuel. For five weeks in a row, they have bought less gas than they did a year ago.

Drivers bought about 2.4 million fewer gallons for the week of April 1, a 3.6 percent drop from last year, according to MasterCard SpendingPulse, which tracks the volume of gas sold at 140,000 service stations nationwide.

Romney, who has been planning a second run since losing the Republican nomination in 2008, focused in his announcement on the economy and what he described as President Barack Obama’s failed policies.

“It is time that we put America back on a course of greatness, with a growing economy, good jobs and fiscal discipline in Washington,” the former Massachusetts governor said in a video posted on his website, on Facebook and on Twitter.

The oil giant opened its checkbook while the crisis was still unfolding last spring and poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Gulf Coast communities with few strings attached.

In sleepy Ocean Springs, Miss., reserve police officers got Tasers. The sewer department in nearby Gulfport bought a $300,000 vacuum truck that never sucked up a drop of oil. Biloxi, Miss., bought 14 SUVs. A parish president in Louisiana got herself a deluxe iPad, her spokesman a $3,100 laptop. And a county in Florida spent $560,000 on rock concerts to promote its oil-free beaches.

The perfect crop field could be inside a windowless building with meticulously controlled light, temperature, humidity, air quality and nutrition. It could be in a New York high-rise, a Siberian bunker, or a sprawling complex in the Saudi desert.

Advocates say this, or something like it, may be an answer to the world’s food problems.

Two veiled women were hauled off from a Paris protest within hours of the new ban. Their unauthorized demonstration, on the cobblestone square facing Notre Dame Cathedral, was rich with both the symbolism of France’s medieval history and its modern spirit of defiance.

While some see encroaching Islamophobia in the new ban, President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government defended it as a rampart protecting France’s identity against inequality and extremism. Police grumbled that it will be hard to enforce.

The agency the bishops hired to conduct the review said 55 of the 188 participating dioceses needed to make improvements or risk being out of compliance with the national policy, more than double the number of dioceses who were found lacking in 2009.

“The church cannot afford to relax its standards,” the authors of the study warned.

Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. CEO Robert Greifeld said in a statement late Sunday that feedback from NYSE Euronext shareholders was positive, and that the companies had expected NYSE Euronext would meet with them to discuss the merits of their proposal.

NYSE Euronext said earlier Sunday that its board decided to turn down the offer, which was submitted earlier this month, because it was “highly conditional” and would have caused unnecessary risk for shareholders.

He was not being called as a witness in his first appearance at his nearly six-year-old tax fraud trial, nor did he request to address the court. Rather, Berlusconi was making good on a pledge to show up in court as often as his duties allow to contest charges of corruption, tax fraud and paying an underage prostitute in four active cases. During his 2 1/2 hours in court, the premier sat silently in the front row next to his lawyer.

Before he left, he told journalists the appearance had been a waste of his time.

After spraying his second shot far right of the green, he pulled out a 6-iron, chipped the ball off a patch of trampled-down grass, and watched it roll and roll and roll – right in the cup for an improbable birdie.

Think that was unexpected? The South African was just getting warmed up. He drilled his tee shot at No. 3 into the middle of the fairway, then holed out with a wedge from 114 yards for eagle.

The GOP budget expected to go to the full House this week would remake health care programs for the elderly and the poor that have been in place for nearly half a century. Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., says his approach would “save” Medicare by keeping the financially troubled program affordable for federal taxpayers.

But it turns out that people now 54 and younger would pay the price.

Such moves permitted Obama to save favorite programs – Pell grants for poor college students, health research and “Race to the Top” aid for public schools, among others – from Republican knives.

The full details of Friday’s agreement weren’t being released until late Monday when it was officially submitted to the House. But the picture already emerging is of legislation financed with a lot of one-time savings and cuts that officially “score” as savings to pay for spending elsewhere, but that often have little to no actual impact on the deficit.

The items have turned up at a Wilmington store owned by a Southern Baptist with a flair for self-promotion. It’s the latest stop on a strange journey involving luminaries ranging from UN Secretary General U Thant to Evel Knievel, and which began with Paul VI’s novel decision to allow some of his jewelry to be sold to raise money for charity.

One of the items is a pectoral cross, given to clergy who attain the rank of bishop or higher to signify their office. The pope’s donation was a testament to his willingness to engage the contemporary world by de-emphasizing the importance of such regalia.

It has 447 people, no downtown, no post office, no school and miles of dirt roads. The town government’s annual budget is only $212,000.

So when people here found that mild-mannered town Treasurer Donald Hewitt was accused of cooking the books, it was big news. When they learned the extent of it – more than $400,000 allegedly embezzled over about 30 years – it was even bigger.

The brand brought on a revolution in baby care, obliterating safety pins, soaking pails and diaper delivery trucks. But reusables have been slowly inching back into the mainstream, with the predictable faceoff among parents choosing one or the other – though some families use both.

In 1958, with other disposables already out, P&G’s version was a “fortunate failure” during a summer test run in Dallas, according to a company history. Consisting of pads and plastic pants, it made babies uncomfortable in the heat.