Evening Edition

And the port in the besieged rebel-held city of Misrata was set ablaze in a deadly bombardment by forces loyal to the Libyan strongman, witnesses said.

Libyan government spokesman Mussa Ibrahim told reporters in Tripoli that the house of Kadhafi’s second-youngest son, Seif al-Arab, “was attacked tonight with full power.

“The house of Mr Seif al-Arab Moamer Kadhafi … who is the youngest of the leader’s children, was attacked tonight with full power. The leader with his wife was there in the house with other friends and relatives,” government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim told a news conference in Tripoli early on Sunday.

“The attack resulted in the martyrdom of brother Seif al-Arab Moamer Kadhafi, 29 years old, and three of the leader’s grandchildren,” Ibrahim said.

Hours after the attacks, angry demonstrators set fire to the Italian embassy and the residences of the Italian and British ambassadors in Tripoli, an AFP correspondent said, adding that no one was in the buildings at the time.

Speaking early Sunday, Libyan government spokesman Mussa Ibrahim said the house of Seif al-Arab Kadhafi “was attacked tonight with full power.

Anti-regime activists called for fresh protests aimed at breaking the week-long siege of the capital’s Douma suburb and of Daraa, as well as in solidarity with other towns faced with deadly crackdowns.

Six civilians were killed in Daraa on Saturday, a day after massive protests over the Muslim weekend in Syria where rights groups say the civilian death toll from unprecedented demonstrations that erupted on March 15 has topped 580.

As protesters buried scores of people killed Friday in a “day of rage,” activists vowed to keep up the pressure on the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, promising a new week of pro-democracy rallies.

And 138 more members of Assad’s ruling Baath Party quit in protest at the deadly crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators, according to collective resignation lists received by AFP in Nicosia.

Anti-regime protesters appealed for new protests to launch a “week of breaking the siege” imposed on Daraa and the Douma suburb, and other towns facing deadly crackdowns.

Six civilians were killed in Daraa on Saturday, after a day of massive protests in Syria, where rights groups say the civilian death toll from unprecedented protests that erupted March 15 has topped 580.

The Syrian Revolution 2011, a driving force behind the protests, vowed in a Facebook statement that “we will only kneel before God,” and gave a schedule of protests in solidarity with the Daraa and the Damascus suburb of Douma, both besieged since Monday.

Troops in tanks backed by other armoured vehicles cruised Daraa streets on Sunday, shooting to keep residents indoors and arresting men aged 15 and over, an activist from the town told AFP in Nicosia by telephone.

From Hong Kong to Indonesia, Moscow to Paris, protesters marched and rallied in largely peaceful demonstrations for international Labour Day.

In Russia, hundreds of thousands took to the streets in May Day rallies, with pro-government demonstrations organized by pro-Kremlin parties and trade unions far outnumbering those protesting the current regime.

Renewed fears of a Greek debt default will overshadow the meeting of ECB policymakers in Finland even though European Union (EU) leaders still reject speculation that financial markets now all but take for granted.

Economists expect the ECB governing council, gathering Thursday in Helsinki for one of two annual meetings away from the bank’s headquarters in Frankfurt, to hint at more rate hikes, with the first possibly as soon as June.

Sony executives bowed in apology and said the company would begin restoring its shut-down PlayStation Network and Qriocity online services in the next week as it moved to improve security after the breach hit 77 million accounts.

“This criminal act against our network had a significant impact not only on our consumers, but our entire industry,” said Sony executive deputy president Kazuo Hirai.

In a new delay for the US space program’s penultimate shuttle launch after last week’s scrubbed flight, electrical failures in the power supply to a fuel-line heating unit caused engineers to scrub the launch hours before liftoff Friday, NASA said.

The US space agency said a plan to try again on Monday now also is a no-go.

Sony executives bowed in apology and said the company would begin restoring its shut-down PlayStation Network and Qriocity online services in the next week as it moved to improve security after the breach hit 77 million accounts.

“This criminal act against our network had a significant impact not only on our consumers, but our entire industry,” said Sony executive deputy president Kazuo Hirai.

A giant banner bearing a smiling portrait of the charismatic Polish pope was unveiled over the facade of Saint Peter’s Basilica after Benedict pronounced the formula of beatification just six years after John Paul’s death.

Eighty-seven official delegations were also in attendance and pilgrims waved flags from around the world in the sun-drenched square, reprising the chant of “Santo Subito!” (Sainthood Now!) that had been shouted at his funeral.

The Saints will now face the Irish province, 32-23 winners over Toulouse on Saturday, in the final of European club rugby’s showpiece event at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium on May 21.

Tries from England full-back Ben Foden and centre Jon Clarke, allied with three penalties and two conversions from outside-half Stephen Myler were enough to outclass Perpignan, for whom hooker Guilhem Guirado scored a try converted by Nicolas Laharrague.

The revered magnate, who 20 years ago vowed to ruthlessly deal with staff who tarnish his firm’s reputation, told a stadium full of attentive shareholders that David Sokol had broken company rules in a share-trading scandal.

Once Buffett’s heir apparent, Sokol resigned after it emerged he bought $10 million worth of shares in chemicals firm Lubrizol before recommending Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway group snap up the company. He gained an estimated $3 million from the deal.

Part investment seminar, part stand-up comedy, it is above all a festival dedicated to capitalism and the firm’s CEO, Warren Buffett.

On Saturday, as many as 40,000 Buffett groupies — many of whom became rich through the firm — packed into a cavernous stadium in the rural state of Nebraska, listening with rapt attention to the pronouncements of the “Oracle of Omaha.”

Libyan government spokesman Mussa Ibrahim said Gaddafi was unharmed and in good health despite what he called “a direct operation to assassinate the leader of this country.”

The deaths have not been independently confirmed.

The pact would have made Saleh, a shrewd political survivor who has been in power for 33 years, the third ruler ousted by a wave of popular pro-democracy uprisings sweeping the Arab world. He had been due to sign the deal Saturday.

Yemen’s opposition, furious over the last-minute change of heart that it described as political maneuvering, said it was considering escalating pressure on the president to step aside after three months of street protests demanding his ouster.

The hardline Islamists have warned civilians to stay away from public gatherings, military bases and convoys, as well as government offices, because those sites would be the target of a wave of attacks beginning on Sunday.

Both sides of the conflict have vowed to protect civilians — the civilian toll hit record levels in 2010 — but more than half of those killed on Sunday were ordinary Afghans.

Tamping down voter anger over rising prices at the pump has emerged as a top priority for the White House, which has seen President Barack Obama’s approval ratings take a beating during Congress’s two-week spring recess.

With polls showing higher pump prices undermining Americans’ confidence in Obama’s economic leadership, Republicans are keen to exploit an issue that could hurt the Democratic president’s chances of reelection in 2012.

Top Sony executives apologized for the massive data breach at a news conference in Tokyo Sunday, the first public comments from senior management on the crisis.

“We apologize deeply for causing great unease and trouble to our users,” Kazuo Hirai, Sony’s No. 2 and the front-runner to succeed CEO Howard Stringer, said, bowing deeply three times during a lengthy news conference. Stringer was not at the event.

“From now on Pope John Paul II shall be called ‘blessed,'” Pope Benedict proclaimed in Latin, bringing cheers to the largest crowd in Rome since John Paul’s funeral six years ago.

Benedict praised his predecessor as a man who “restored to Christianity its true face as a religion of hope.”

The Polish customs agent drove his family 29 hours from their hometown on the border with Belarus and queued with hundreds of thousands of people through the night so he could make it into St. Peter’s Square for the beatification of Poland’s most famous native son.

Clutching a red-and-white Polish flag, he was among tens of thousands of devotees from Poland, flanked by pilgrims from all over the world in the biggest crowd in Rome since John Paul’s funeral six years ago.

It was the kind of answer investors had clamored to hear from Buffett at this year’s Berkshire annual meeting, ordinarily a lovefest for tens of thousands of shareholders, and over which the Sokol episode had cast a cloud.

Buffett said Sokol had violated Berkshire insider trading rules by failing to disclose his January purchase of Lubrizol shares, less than four weeks after starting talks with Citigroup Inc bankers about the company.

Britain responded to the attack on its embassy complex, which left the buildings badly burned, by announcing that it was expelling the Libyan ambassador to London.

NATO’s attack on a blast wall-ringed Gadhafi family compound in a residential area of Tripoli late Saturday signaled escalating pressure on the Libyan leader who has tried to crush an armed rebellion that erupted in mid-February. Libyan officials denounced the strike as an assassination attempt and a violation of international law.

Russia said Sunday that the bombing of the home of Gadhafi’s youngest son raised “serious doubts” about NATO’s assertions that it is not targeting the Libyan strongman or his relatives.

“Disproportionate use of force … is leading to detrimental consequences and the death of innocent civilians,” the Russian Foreign Ministry warned.

An unraveling of the deal for Ali Abdullah Saleh to step down after nearly three months of protests against his rule would greatly increase the prospects of more bloodshed in a nation long beset by serious conflict and deep poverty and which is home to al-Qaida’s most active offshoot.

At least 140 people have been killed in the government’s crackdown on the protesters, who have nonetheless grown in number week after week. The violence, which has included sniper attacks, has prompted several top military commanders, ruling party members, diplomats and others to defect to the opposition, largely isolating the president.

President Bashar Assad is determined to crush the six-week-old revolt, which began in the southern city of Daraa but quickly spread across the nation of some 23 million people.

Now, the once-unthinkable protests are posing the most serious challenge to four decades of rule by the Assad family in one of the most repressive and tightly controlled countries in the Middle East.

But even if there had been scrutiny years before the fury of an earthquake-powered wave swamped the six atomic reactors at Fukushima on March 11, it is almost certain the government wouldn’t have challenged the unrealistic analysis that Tokyo Electric Power Co. had submitted in 2001. An Associated Press review of Japan’s approach to nuclear plant safety shows how closely intertwined relationships between government regulators and industry have allowed a culture of complacency to prevail.

Regulators simply didn’t see it as their role to pick apart the utility’s raw data and computer modeling to judge for themselves whether the plant was sufficiently protected from tsunami. The policy amounted to this: Trust plant operator TEPCO – and don’t worry about verifying its math or its logic.

“Chubby kids may not outlive their parents,” for example. Or: “Big bones didn’t make me this way. Big meals did.”

The ads – part of a new “Stop Child Obesity” campaign in Georgia – won some enthusiastic praise for their attention-grabbing tactics. But they also have outraged parents, activists and academics who feel the result is more stigma for an already beleaguered and bullied group of children.

The turnout for the beatification far exceeded even the most optimistic expectation of 1 million people, the number Rome city officials predicted. For Catholics filling St. Peter’s Square and its surrounding streets, and for those watching around the world the beatification was a welcome hearkening back to the days when the pope was almost universally beloved.

“He was like a king to us, like a father,” Marynka Ulaszewska, a 28-year-old from Ciechocinek, Poland, said, weeping. “I hope these emotions will remain with us for a long time,” she said.

From Mexico to Australia, bells pealed in churches and cathedrals and people erupted in applause and tears to celebrate after Pope Benedict XVI bestowed one of the Catholic Church’s greatest honors to Polish-born Karol Wojtyla, who visited 129 countries in his 27-year papacy to become the most-traveled pope ever.

In the Philippines, where many adore the John Paul II with rock-star intensity, people flocked to see mementoes: a piece of his cassock believed to have healing powers and a set of plate, spoon and fork – still unwashed after he used them 16 years ago during a visit to the country.

In Turkey, some 200,000 protesters flooded a central plaza in Istanbul, making it the largest May Day rally there since 1977, when at least 34 people died and more than 100 were injured after shooting triggered a stampede. Turkish unions weren’t allowed back until last year.

Across Germany, some 423,000 people took to the streets to demand fair wages, better working conditions, and sufficient social security, the country’s unions’ umbrella-group, DGB said.

The NFL lockout is back in force after a short hiatus last week. A St. Louis appeals court could determine as early as Monday whether the league deserves a permanent stay of an injunction granted to the players in Minnesota to block the lockout.

“We are in uncharted but fascinating legal territory,” agent and attorney Ralph Cindrich said as he examined the short-term reinstatement of the lockout by three judges from the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. “The owners’ lockout is temporary now; it can become permanent after the same three judges do a detailed review. If the lockout is reinstated, it puts the players down on points big.”

The Army Corps of Engineers is considering blowing a two-mile hole into the Birds Point levee in southeast Missouri, which would flood 130,000 acres of farmland in Missouri’s Mississippi County but protect nearby Cairo. The city of 2,800 residents is being threatened by the dangerously swollen Mississippi and Ohio rivers.

The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Koster’s bid Saturday to stop the corps’ plan, though corps officials are monitoring water levels and haven’t decided whether to go through with the blast.

Their plan, still a work in progress, would reduce borrowing by up to $4 trillion over the next decade by putting the two parties’ sacred cows on the chopping block. Republicans would have to agree to higher taxes while Democrats would have to accept cuts in popular benefit programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and maybe even Social Security.

There is urgency to their work.

“We deeply apologize for the inconvenience we have caused,” said Kazuo Hirai, chief of Sony Corp.’s PlayStation video game unit, who was among the three executives who bowed for several seconds at the company’s Tokyo headquarters in the traditional style of a Japanese apology.

Hirai said parts of the service would be back this week and that the company would beef up security measures. But he and other executives acknowledged that not enough had been done in security precautions, and promised that the company’s network services were under a basic review to prevent a recurrence.

The presidency of the 10,000-member Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has been in question since March 28, when church bishop William E. Jessop filed papers with the Utah Department of Commerce seeking to unseat Jeffs as president of the church corporation. Under state law, the move automatically put Jessop in power.

That set into motion a flurry of filings from Jeffs loyalists removing Jessop and claiming that some 4,000 church members have pledged their loyalty to their incarcerated leader.

Developers have continued to view the 400-acre former Navy base as a precious commodity, and a proposal to turn it into a bustling residential and commercial enclave recently cleared a major hurdle when it was narrowly approved by the city Planning Commission.

The plan includes nearly 8,000 new homes, 140,000 square feet of retail space and 300 acres of public open space – a drastic change to a neighborhood that now has fewer than 2,000 full-time residents and just two restaurants.

Words like stunning and near-overwhelming have been used to describe the colorful, esoteric works of Futura, Smear, Chaz Bojorquez and dozens of other seminal street scribblers covering the walls of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Little Tokyo campus.

But take the art back to the streets, as some over-enthusiastic artists, or perhaps just wannabe Banksys, have been doing since the exhibition opened at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary campus earlier this month, and the reception hasn’t been quite as enthusiastic.

Donations solicited by telemarketers poured in to his U.S. Navy Veterans Association from around the country – largely individual gifts under $50 – piling up tens of millions of dollars intended for veterans’ needs and other military causes.

Thompson and NAVPAC, his political action committee, gave lavishly to more than 50 candidates in 16 states – most of them Republicans, records show – and the generosity was rewarded with some high-level entree, at least for photo opportunities. President George W. Bush and his adviser, Karl Rove, were among those who posing with Thompson in photographs that show him smiling broadly through an unkempt black beard and mustache.

And so instead of cooking in a restaurant or driving a tractor trailer for someone like he used to do, Bogan eats at a soup kitchen and sleeps on park benches or in a train or bus station each night. He’s one of about 500 homeless people living in the nation’s second-largest gambling market.

Reducing Atlantic City’s homeless population is a key element of a new effort to help the struggling casino resort get back on its feet after more than four years of plunging revenues, lost market share and layoffs. A state agency plans to allocate just under $100,000 to a local homeless shelter to buy bus or plane tickets back home for any homeless person who wants to leave.

But times have changed and the last time anybody counted, in 2001, there were about 100,000 harbor seals. Scientists have now begun the first seal census in a decade to determine how many there are now.

Indicators suggest that the population has continued to grow in the past 10 years, said Gordon Waring, who is leading this spring’s seal survey.

The findings by U.S. Forest Service ecologist Matt Jolly are being used by fellow ecologist Russ Parsons to develop a new model that will eventually aid firefighters who battle blazes in the tens of millions of acres from Canada to Colorado where forest canopies have turned from green to red from the beetle outbreak.

The new model incorporates a level of detail and physics that doesn’t exist in current models, and it is much more advanced in predicting how a wildfire in a beetle-ravaged region will behave, Parsons said.

Buffett assured the crowd at an Omaha convention center that Berkshire is strong enough to withstand both the David Sokol scandal and the estimated $1.7 billion in insurance losses that drove profits down 58 percent in the first quarter.

Buffett said he doesn’t think he will ever understand why Sokol bought stock in Lubrizol shortly before recommending that Berkshire buy the chemical company. Buffett said he believes Sokol clearly violated Berkshire’s ethics and insider trading policies.

For brides-to-be who can’t wait even four weeks, David’s Bridal, the largest U.S. bridal chain, was already trumpeting a strapless look from Oleg Cassini, paired with a lacey bolero jacket, on its website as an already available stand-in as it scrambled to push out modified knockoffs of the real thing to stores by September.

Meanwhile, the television home-shopping channel QVC said shoppers will be able to pre-order earrings inspired by the diamond drops worn by Middleton as early as Monday night. The piece, which will sell for under $50 and was created by Kenneth Jay Lane, will be available to shoppers in two months.