Evening Edition

French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi agreed on a letter outlining their demands to EU leaders at a summit in Rome following the arrival of thousands of migrants from Tunisia.

“We both believe that in exceptional circumstances there should be variations to the Schengen treaty,” Berlusconi told reporters after the meeting, as Sarkozy said a joint letter had been sent to EU leaders.

Several Grad rockets hit the port 12 kilometres (seven miles) east of the city and an International Organisation for Migration (IOM) ship that had come to rescue refugees stood offshore as a precaution, an AFP journalist said.

The attack came after a lull in fighting as rebels in Misrata said they pushed forces loyal to Kadhafi out of the city, although the Libyan strongman remained defiant despite NATO bombing his compound.

Russia, meanwhile, said it would not back a new UN Security Council resolution on further intervention in Libya, as Italy and France called on the international community to stop shipping oil products to Kadhafi’s regime.

NATO offered details of bombing raids on several targets near Misrata, Kadhafi’s hometown of Sirte and Tripoli, including the strongman’s compound in the capital and missile launchers.

As the Daraa crackdown raged into a second day, Britain said it was working with its partners to send a “strong signal” to Damascus while France and Italy denounced the “unacceptable” situation in Syria.

Washington ordered non-essential embassy staff to leave Syria, which has been shaken by six weeks of protests against President Bashar al-Assad’s autocratic rule.

The Syrian army however, insisted it had been invited into the southern town at the request of citizens to hunt “extremist terrorist groups.”

Witnesses said troops also launched assaults on the Damascus suburbs of Douma and Al-Maadamiyeh, as a leading Syrian rights activist accused the regime of going for the “military solution” to end six weeks of dissent.

Tens of thousands of civilians have been forced to flee their homes on both sides as heavy weapons fire pounded the jungle frontier, shattering a fragile truce that had held since February.

“Cambodian Defence Minister Tea Banh has agreed to meet his Thai counterpart in Phnom Penh shortly to discuss a ceasefire between the two countries,” the Cambodian defence ministry said in a statement.

Dmitry Medvedev, making the first ever visit by a Russian president to the now defunct Chernobyl Atomic Power Station, and his Ukrainian counterpart Viktor Yanukovych paid tribute to the victims of the April 1986 catastrophe.

Speaking outside the mothballed plant where higher-than-normal radiation levels persist to this day, the leaders called for greater security at atomic power stations as they hailed the sacrifice of the Soviet clean-up workers.

The larger “Sony Tablet” S1 has a single screen while the pocketable S2 has twin screens, company officials told a news conference, with both devices using Google’s Android operating system and equipped with Wi-Fi for Internet access.

Competitors have rushed to cash in on soaring demand for tablets since the iPad was released in April last year, but Sony’s devices are not due to go on sale globally until the northern hemisphere autumn, well behind its rivals.

The funeral of Karol Wojtyla in April 2005 drew half a million Poles.

While his fast-track beatification — a key step towards canonisation as a saint — is a cause for joy among his countrymen, it nonetheless isn’t generating the same kind of mass pilgrimage to Rome this time around.

The trove of classified files released by the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks showed US officials struggling with often flawed evidence and confused about the guilt or innocence of detainees held at the prison at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Hundreds of inmates who turned out to have no serious terror links were held without trial, based on vague or inaccurate information, including accounts from unreliable fellow detainees or statements from men who had been abused or tortured, the New York Times quoted the documents as saying.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said he could not order an international investigation into the deaths. But the UN will hold an inquiry into its actions in the final months of the war following criticism by the panel that more could have been done to save lives.

The panel’s report — angrily opposed by the Sri Lankan government — painted a barbarous picture of the final offensive on the Tamil enclave in the north of the island that ended a three-decade war with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

Coupled with skyrocketing oil prices, the spike poses a serious setback for developing Asia after having rebounded rapidly and strongly from the 2008 global economic crisis, said chief ADB economist Rhee Changyong.

“Left unchecked, the food crisis will badly undermine recent gains in poverty reduction made in Asia,” Rhee said in a statement.

“We don’t have open-heart surgery problems,” they said, according to Ndiaye, head of the thoracic and cardiovascular surgery department at Dakar’s Fann university teaching hospital. “Our problems are malaria, diarrhoea, vomiting.”

“My reply, invariably, was that all patients were patients and needed care,” said Ndiaye, who received his training in Europe and returned to Senegal in 1989.

The overall confidence level, as measured by the Conference Board, an industry group, was still historically low.

A separate report on Tuesday showed the housing market continues to struggle as home prices fell for an eighth month in February, inching closer to an April 2009 trough.

As the jury studied the evidence on its second day of deliberations, a former trader associated with Rajaratnam’s Galleon Group became the latest to plead guilty in a sweeping government probe of insider trading on Wall Street.

Craig Drimal, who prosecutors said had an office on Galleon Group premises but was not an employee of the fund at the time of his November 2009 arrest, pleaded guilty to securities fraud and conspiracy. His hearing in Manhattan federal court took place four floors above a locked room where 12 jurors have weighed Rajaratnam’s fate since Monday.

In Deraa, the city where the uprising against Assad’s 11-year rule began, authorities sent in tanks on Monday and witnesses said the army was firing randomly and bodies were lying on the streets.

Residents said an army brigade led by Assad’s younger brother Maher had cut off roads, were shelling homes, storming houses and rounding people up.

“We expect an arrangement and signing of a deal to be completed — the sooner the better,” said another opposition leader, Mohammed Basindwa, who is seen as a top candidate to lead a transitional government.

Yemen’s Western and Gulf Arab allies have tried for weeks to mediate a solution to a three-month crisis in which protesters, inspired by the toppling of leaders in Egypt and Tunisia, have taken to the street demanding an end to Saleh’s 32-year rule.

More than a month of air strikes in a British and French-led NATO mission have failed to dislodge Gaddafi or bring major gains for anti-government rebels who hold much of east Libya, raising fears of a stalemate.

British Defense Secretary Liam Fox and Britain’s Chief of the Defense Staff General David Richards met U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington.

Medvedev spoke alongside Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich at a solemn ceremony marking the 25th anniversary of the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl in Ukraine when a reactor exploded, sending radiation billowing across Europe.

The ceremony, at which the two leaders paid homage to the clean-up workers and victims of the 1986 accident, took on added significance amid efforts by Japan to control the crisis at its Fukushima plant, damaged by an earthquake and tsunami.

Afghan authorities and foreign troops have launched a manhunt after Monday’s embarrassing breakout, which President Hamid Karzai’s office called a “disaster” ahead of the summer fighting months and as NATO and the United States begin preparing for a gradual withdrawal.

Tooryalai Wesa, the governor of southern Kandahar province, also said on Tuesday 65 of the 488 prisoners who escaped had been recaptured. The Taliban said as many 541 had escaped through the tunnel and were later driven away.

Putin said the coalition had gone beyond the bounds of a U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing intervention to protect civilians and suggested Gaddafi’s actions did not justify foreign interference, let alone attempts to remove him.

“They said they didn’t want to kill Gaddafi. Now some officials say, yes, we are trying to kill Gaddafi,” Putin said on a visit to Denmark. “Who permitted this, was there any trial? Who took on the right to execute this man, no matter who he is?”

Three shipping sources with direct knowledge of the transaction said the cargo was delivered via ship-to-ship transfer in Tunisia before sailing to Libya.

Saras initially declined to comment but late on Tuesday issued a statement saying it had always acted in full compliance with all applicable restrictive measures concerning Libya.

And there are few signs either of significant divisions within Muammar Gaddafi’s government that would hasten a political solution to the conflict.

NATO, which took over the air campaign from a coalition led by France, Britain and the United States a month ago, can point to some successes in protecting civilian populations in eastern Libya from attack including in Benghazi and Ajdabiyah.

The capture of the Dehiba-Wazin crossing on the Tunisian border by rebels last week has let refugees flee in cars or on foot along rocky paths, swelling the numbers of Libyans sheltering in southern Tunisia to an estimated 30,000 people.

While the world’s attention has been on the bloody siege of the western rebel stronghold of Misrata and battles further east, fighting is intensifying in the region known as the Western Mountains.

The vote, set for September, ruled out in advance any participation by the country’s 9 million women.

“We will keep trying again and again until we get our right,” she said after meeting a resolute “no” from the election official she encountered at a voter registration center in Jeddah when registration began on April 23.

Tuesday’s vote is the last stage of an election process that while considered to have been the fairest in decades has not escaped the violence long associated with Nigerian politics.

There were outbreaks of unrest in the oil-rich Niger Delta, where six people were arrested attempting to steal ballot boxes in Rivers state, and opposition party members made accusations of political thuggery in areas of President Goodluck Jonathan’s home state of Bayelsa, where there were also arrests.

The 111-page list published by the National Development and Reform Commission ratcheted up the minimum size requirement for coal mines, oil refineries and steelmaking blast furnaces while lending support to alternative energy sources.

The list, an update of one published in 2005, will serve as a guideline for Chinese regulators in making policies on tax, bank credit, land and trade, and will also be a reference for Beijing to decide which foreign investors are welcomed.

A shortage of parts in the wake of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami has savaged Japan’s auto sector supply chain, while damage to a major nuclear plant has disrupted power supplies.

Investors expecting overseas rivals to benefit from a prolonged slump in Japanese output pushed up shares in South Korea’s Hyundai Motors and associate Kia Motors to record highs on Monday.

His loyalists were driven out of the city of Misrata, a key rebel stronghold in Gadhafi-controlled territory. A NATO airstrike turned parts of his Tripoli headquarters into smoldering rubble. And rebel fighters seized a border crossing, breaking open a supply line to besieged rebel towns in a remote western mountain area.

Front lines have shifted repeatedly in two months of fighting, and the poorly trained, ill-equipped rebels have given no evidence that they could defeat Gadhafi on the battlefield. The Libyan leader has deep pockets, including several billion dollars in gold reserves, that could keep him afloat for months. And his forces continue to bombard Misrata from afar, unleashing a fierce barrage Tuesday against the port area – the city’s only lifeline to the world.

In the southern city of Daraa, where Syrian army tanks and snipers killed at least 22 people a day earlier, a resident said security forces shot and killed a man as he walked out of the main Omari mosque and shouted at them though a bullhorn: “Enough! Enough! Enough! Stop killing your brothers!”

The crackdown by President Bashar Assad has intensified since Friday, when more than 100 people were killed. Security forces also conducted raids in the Damascus suburb of Douma and the northern coastal town of Jableh.

Syria is a frontrunner for a seat on the Geneva-based Human Rights Council as one of four candidates selected to fill four Asian seats, and it is likely to win unless another candidate enters the race or it fails to win a majority of votes in the May 20 secret ballot election in the 192-member General Assembly.

Since the 53-member Asian Group endorsed its slate – which also includes India, Indonesia and the Philippines – for the council in January, rights groups and some governments have engaged in a behind-the-scenes effort to keep Syria off the council.

Prison officials discovered early Monday morning that the inmates_ nearly all of them Taliban militants – were missing from their cells, and then found the tunnel through which they appeared to have made their getaway.

The Taliban said the prison break was five months in the making, with diggers starting the tunnel from under a nearby house while they arranged for inmates to get keys so that they could open their cells on the night of the escape.

Also Tuesday, Pakistan’s interior minister defended the country’s premier spy service against what he called defamation, a day after the release of leaked documents showing U.S. officials at Guantanamo Bay had listed the agency as a terrorist organization.

The roadside blasts took place roughly 15 minutes apart in different areas of Karachi, a southern port city that is Pakistan’s economic heart. More than 50 people were wounded, Navy Commander Salman Ali said.

Census figures released Tuesday highlight the latest education milestone for women, who began to exceed men in college enrollment in the early 1980s. The findings come amid record shares of women in the workplace and a steady decline in stay-at-home mothers.

The educational gains for women are giving them greater access to a wider range of jobs, contributing to a shift of traditional gender roles at home and work. Based on one demographer’s estimate, the number of stay-at-home dads who are the primary caregivers for their children reached nearly 2 million last year, or one in 15 fathers. The official census tally was 154,000, based on a narrower definition that excludes those working part-time or looking for jobs.

Those are the findings of an Associated Press survey of leading economists, who are increasingly confident in a recovery that is nearly two years old. They expect the economy to grow faster every quarter this year.

In part, that’s because the economists think Americans will spend more freely in the coming months. Higher stock prices have made people wealthier. And a cut in the Social Security payroll tax is giving most households an extra $1,000 to $2,000 this year.

Low prices are leading investors to snap up foreclosed homes in Detroit, Las Vegas, Miami, Phoenix and Tampa. That’s reducing prices in the short run. Yet it is also thinning the supply of homes, which must happen to clear the way for higher prices in the long run.

For some, the deals are too good to pass up on. A studio apartment on the Las Vegas strip that cost $500,000 at the height of the housing boom is now selling for roughly one-third the price. Half of the homes listed in the Tampa Bay area are selling for less than $100,000, not far from some of Florida’s nicest Gulf coast beaches.

Small groups of players showed up at team facilities and were allowed inside, but couldn’t work out. Most left in a matter of minutes.

League operations were left in limbo when U.S. District Judge Susan Richard Nelson said she wouldn’t rule on the NFL’s request for a stay of her order until at least Wednesday. She said she wanted to hear from players – even as attorneys for players asked her to clarify the order.

Dmitry Medvedev and Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych took part in a religious service outside Chernobyl’s damaged No. 4 nuclear reactor, laying the first stone of a monument to cleanup workers and laying bouquets of red roses at another monument to Chernobyl victims.

Medvedev said he has invited world leaders to work on rules for safer nuclear energy. His economic adviser, Arkady Dvorkovich, said Russia forwarded its proposals to leaders of other Group of Eight countries Tuesday, and he hoped they would be discussed at next month’s summit in France.

The 200 farmers, mostly from northeastern Japan, wore green bandanas, held aloft cabbages they said they couldn’t sell and carried signs saying “Stop nuclear energy” outside the headquarters of Tokyo Electric Power Co., the operator of the plant damaged in the March 11 tsunami.

“My patience has run out. The nuclear crisis is totally destroying our farming business,” said 72-year-old Katsuo Okazaki, who grows peaches and apples.

Eight months later, Proposition 8’s proponents and their attorneys have taken a new position. They filed a motion Monday seeking to vacate Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker’s historic ruling, a move they said was prompted by the now-retired jurist’s recent disclosure that he is in a long-term relationship with another man.

Lawyers for the ban’s backers argue that the judge’s relationship status, not his sexual orientation, gave him too much in common with the couples who successfully sued to overturn the ban in his court. The judge should have recused himself or at least revealed the relationship to avoid a real or perceived conflict of interest, the lawyers say.

The double-whammy also has increased the chance that officials may eventually have to fix the problem by cutting benefits or raising taxes.

Many experts recommend states save at least 80 percent of the money they’ll eventually need to pay the pensions promised to government employees. Twenty-two states failed to previously meet that threshold and nine more fell short in fiscal 2009, according to the Pew Center on the States.

The most treasured items are from the company’s earliest days in the late 1800s, and some are so rare they don’t even appear at the Coca-Cola Co. museum in Atlanta. And now, they’re all for sale.

The family, one of the earliest bottlers of the soft drink, spent years scouring the country for pieces branded with the iconic Coca-Cola name. They opened up a museum to show off their prized collection, but they’re ready to move on and have decided to auction 80,000 items piecemeal, beginning in mid-September.

Crawford, a retired carpenter, said he knew “something messed up” was going on there. Then, the 66-year-old said, he went to sleep.

“It’s just a hazard of living close to this plant,” he said Tuesday, taking a moment while sipping coffee and reading the newspaper at a table in front of his home.

The court took up a dispute between the state of Vermont and companies that sell doctors’ prescribing information to pharmaceutical companies, though without patient names. The drug makers use the data to tailor their pitch to individual doctors.

The Vermont law had prevented the sale of information about individual doctors’ prescribing records without the doctors’ permission.

The president wrote a letter to the bipartisan congressional leadership on Tuesday, a day after Republican House Speaker John Boehner said he was willing to “take a look at” repealing the multibillion-dollar tax subsidies enjoyed by the major oil companies.

Rising gas prices have become a political weight for the White House, with polls showing that as the cost rises at the pump, the president’s approval ratings have slipped. Obama has increasingly sought to display action on oil, even as he acknowledges that there is no immediate answer to stem costs

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals told prosecutors to conduct the new sentencing hearing for the former Black Panther within six months or agree to a life sentence. Abu-Jamal’s first-degree murder conviction still stands in the fatal shooting of Officer Daniel Faulkner, who was white.

District Attorney Seth Williams pledged to mount another appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, at the urging of Faulkner’s widow, Maureen.

She thrust her arms upward and exclaimed: “Oh, 180!”

And, with that, her electrical output drooped. The generator attached to her exercise machine slowed, and the digital readout from the device on the handlebars fell below 100 watts.