Evening Edition

It also jailed two senior officers for ordering their men to assassinate the prime minister at the start of the 100-day killing spree, when they also murdered 10 Belgian UN troops protecting her.

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) convicted the head of the paramilitary police at the time, Augustin Ndindiliyimana, of genocide crimes but ordered his release as he had already spent 11 years in jail.

The 85-year-old began her historic four-day trip surrounded by Ireland’s biggest ever security operation as the discovery of a bomb near Dublin underscored the lingering threat from dissident republicans opposed to the peace process.

Wearing white, the queen stood in silence alongside Irish President Mary McAleese during the wreath-laying ceremony at the Garden of Remembrance in Dublin.

A Tunisian government source told AFP Oil Minister Shukri Ghanem, a veteran of Moamer Kadhafi’s regime, had left Libya and was in neighbouring Tunisia.

Ghanem, also chairman of Libya’s national oil company, crossed the border by car on Saturday and checked in to a hotel on the southern tourist island of Djerba, the official said.

Rosneft officials said the state-controlled Russian oil giant was now looking for a new Western partner following the failure of the two sides to resolve a row concerning BP’s Russian joint venture before Monday’s deadline.

The deal — championed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin — was hailed as a breakthrough in Russian business ties with the West and a chance for BP to restore its reputation after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

“I’m pretty confident that towards the end of 2012 we will have an answer to the Shakespeare question for the Higgs boson — to be, or not to be?” Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director general of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), told a press conference at Britain’s Royal Society.

CERN has ordered the world’s biggest particle collider to step up the quest to explain mass, one of the greatest puzzles in physics.

In Libya’s capital, two explosions were heard overnight Tuesday in the Bab Al-Aziziya area of Tripoli where strongman Moamer Kadhafi’s residence is located, an AFP journalist reported.

A column of white smoke could be seen rising from the area after two explosions at about 1:30 am (1130 GMT Monday) and ambulance sirens could be heard.

“He’s a good friend of mine, I didn’t like the pictures I saw on TV this morning,” Juncker told a news conference in Brussels after talks between 27 European finance ministers hours after the IMF chief was denied bail by a US judge.

“Mr. Strauss-Kahn is in the hands of American justice. It’s not up to us to comment on this but it makes me deeply, deeply sad.”

“We unanimously designated Mario Draghi to succeed Jean-Claude Trichet,” Juncker said at a news conference. “Mario Draghi will be the new president of the ECB.”

Juncker said the Italian had both “an excellent international and European reputation” to take the helm of the Frankfurt-based bank.

Signs of lackluster economic activity were also evident in declines in sales at Wal-Mart Stores, which said its customers were still living from paycheck to paycheck. Home Depot also reported a drop in sales while Hewlett-Packard cut its 2011 profit forecast.

Despite the weak data, analysts are still cautiously optimistic the economy will regain speed this quarter after growth slowed to a 1.8 percent annual pace in the January-March period.

Since January, Geithner has changed his forecast of when the U.S. would hit its borrowing cap, and the final deadline for raising the debt limit, at least four times — fueling a belief among rank-and-file Republicans that his latest August 2 deadline is artificial and can be ignored.

Some Democrats are increasingly worried that the changing calendar has been counter-productive, complicating efforts to get the $14.3 trillion borrowing cap raised because many conservative Republicans do not believe the country will start to default for many months.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has asked Bank of America Corp, Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Morgan Stanley for information on their mortgage securitization practices, the source said.

Schneiderman has also requested meetings with the banks over the next couple of weeks.

Libyan rebels also said they had information that Shokri Ghanem, 68, had defected, a move that if confirmed would deal a blow to Gaddafi’s efforts to shore up his 41-year rule.

“He is in a hotel with a group of other Libyan officials,” the Tunisian source told Reuters. Another Tunisian security source said he was on his way to the capital Tunis.

Chief Executive Leo Apotheker, who took the helm in September, blamed the division’s “missed opportunities” under his predecessor Mark Hurd.

He vowed on Tuesday to revamp the division to focus on consulting, cloud computing and higher-margin businesses, moving away from less-profitable endeavors like maintenance.

The queen laid a wreath at Dublin’s Garden of Remembrance, Ireland’s monument to its fallen heroes, before a hushed crowd of dignitaries, soldiers and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, whose uncle was killed by militant Irish nationalists in 1979.

The visit, the first by a British monarch since Ireland won independence from London in 1921, is designed to show how warm neighborly relations have replaced centuries of animosity but security was tight after a homemade bomb was found.

The civil settlement is the biggest in the department’s history. It ends long-running corruption investigations into the company, Europe’s biggest arms maker by sales, on both sides of the Atlantic.

The department cleared BAE’s fast-growing U.S. unit and its subsidiaries of all charges against the parent company, based in Farnborough, outside London.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that both the European Union and the United States — which have already slapped sanctions on a number of senior Syrian officials but not on President Bashar al-Assad — were planning more steps.

“We will be taking additional steps in the days ahead,” Clinton said, saying she agreed with European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who told reporters that the time for Syria to make changes was now.

The remarks by Representative Paul Ryan, the top budget writer in the House of Representatives, underscored the divisions that Republicans and Democrats will have to overcome in order to raise the $14.3 trillion debt limit and avoid a default that would roil markets across the globe.

The Treasury Department said it was dipping into federal pension funds to pay the country’s bills, one of several emergency measures that should stave off a default until early August.

At a meeting in Brussels that was overshadowed by the weekend arrest of International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn on rape charges, the ministers also approved a bailout for Portugal and backed Italian Mario Draghi to become the next president of the European Central Bank.

Strauss-Kahn, who has run the Washington-based IMF since 2007, had been expected to attend the monthly meeting of finance ministers from the 17-nation currency bloc to discuss their widening debt crisis.

At a meeting in Brussels that was overshadowed by the weekend arrest of International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn on rape charges, the ministers also approved a bailout for Portugal and backed Italian Mario Draghi to become the next president of the European Central Bank.

Strauss-Kahn, who has run the Washington-based IMF since 2007, had been expected to attend the monthly meeting of finance ministers from the 17-nation currency bloc to discuss their widening debt crisis.

The Coast Guard said it closed the Mississippi River at the port in Natchez, Miss., because barge traffic could increase pressure on the levees and because of fears that barges couldn’t operate safely in the flooded river. Heavy flooding from Mississippi tributaries has displaced more than 4,000 in the state, about half of them upstream from Natchez in the Vicksburg area.

Several barges were idled at Natchez at the time of the closure, and many more could back up along the major artery for moving grain from farms in the Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico. It wasn’t clear when the river would reopen, but port officials said the interruption could cost the U.S. economy hundreds of millions of dollars per day.

The evening vote is expected to fail. But Democrats hope to build their case to include the measure in a deficit-reduction package being negotiated by key lawmakers and the Obama administration. Lawmakers from both parties are demanding deficit reduction as part of deal to increase the government’s ability to borrow and avoid an unprecedented default on U.S. Treasury bonds.

The oil companies are “doing just fine at every level of their business, and we’re giving them a taxpayer subsidy?” said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. “This is a place to start.”

The former House speaker has moved quickly to backtrack, arguing he remains “committed to the complete repeal of Obamacare” and supports state lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of President Barack Obama’s signature health care law.

But even as Gingrich distances himself from the law he is not backing away from one of its central tenets: that all Americans have a responsibility to share in the cost of health care.

Is it the challenge of beating an incumbent president or the state of the Republican Party?

“What if they held an election and no one ran? That’s kind of where we are right now,” Curt Anderson, a veteran GOP pollster, says with a chuckle.

Just hours before Ryan announced his intentions on his campaign website, two Republicans who have spoken with Thompson about his plans told The Associated Press that the former governor would strongly consider getting into the race if Ryan chose not to run. They requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak for Thompson, who was traveling out of the country all week.

The news was a mixed bag for the field of potential Republican candidates looking to replace retiring Democratic Sen. Herb Kohl.

The frustration evident at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing exposed the dilemma for the United States, which needs Pakistan for its supply routes into Afghanistan in the 10th year of the war there and its help in any talks with the Taliban. Still, questions loom about the uneven ally in the aftermath of the May 2 raid in which U.S. SEALs killed bin Laden on an estate near a Pakistani military training academy.

Just back from a weekend trip to Afghanistan and Pakistan, the committee chairman, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., said he told Pakistani leaders about the deep concerns in Congress and the nation about the country’s eagerness in the terror fight. The White House signed off on Kerry’s trip, which sought to ease tensions with Pakistan.

“Virtual snow days” would help ease pressure on school calendars. Because districts are required to be in session for a certain number of hours or days, losing teaching time to winter weather can mean extending the school day or cutting short spring break or summer vacation.

And canceling school in the winter, when some of the most difficult material of the year is covered, risks leaving students with a learning deficit heading into the spring, when many states administer standardized tests.

Some diplomats said a European country should no longer be guaranteed stewardship over a global economy increasingly driven by emerging powers in Asia and Latin America. The IMF board could move soon to oust Strauss-Kahn if he insists on remaining in his post while jailed on charges of trying to rape a New York City hotel maid, analysts suggested.

Even if Strauss-Kahn is presumed innocent, the IMF will approach this crisis as ruthlessly as a company would, said Robert Bennett, the lawyer who represented President Bill Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky affair and Paul Wolfowitz before he resigned from the World Bank, the IMF’s sister institution, in 2007.

Nearly two years after the recession ended, the pace of construction is inching along at less than half the level considered healthy. Single-family home building, the bulk of the market, has dropped 11 percent in that time. And there’s no sign it will improve soon.

Builders are struggling to compete with waves of foreclosures that have forced down prices for previously occupied homes. The weakness is weighing on the economy.

The two reports highlight some of the complexities of trying to rebuild ties after the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden earlier this month. Washington needs Pakistan as a crucial partner against al-Qaida, but Pakistani officials remain deeply angered by the secret operation over their borders in the assault on bin Laden.

In a possible sign of stronger controls on the frontier, Pakistani ground forces traded fire with a NATO helicopter on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, wounding two Pakistani soldiers, officials said. The Pakistani army filed a protest, and a NATO spokesman said an “incident” occurred at the border and that an investigation would be launched.

The strike, planned for Wednesday, marks a shift by opposition forces to strike at President Bashar Assad’s regime from new angles: its economic underpinnings and ability to keep the country running during two months of widening battles.

A sweeping popular acceptance of the strike call would be an embarrassing blow to Assad and show support for the uprising in places, such as central Damascus, where significant protests have yet to take hold and security forces have choked off the few that have taken place.

Until this week, European officials had denied that extending debt repayments had even been discussed, for fear of undermining market confidence. But many investors are convinced a change in Greece’s debt deals is inevitable at some point.

“A voluntary extension of loan maturities could … be examined” together with asking banks and other investors to maintain their exposure to Greece, the EU’s Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn told journalists after a two-day meeting with European finance ministers.

The queen became the first British monarch to set foot in Dublin for a century. Her four-day visit is designed to show that the bitter enmity of Ireland’s war of independence 90 years ago has been replaced by Anglo-Irish friendship, and that peace has become irreversible in the neighboring British territory of Northern Ireland.

The ceremony under threatening steel-gray skies was simple and direct, its meaning clear. There were no apologies, no acknowledgment of misdeeds, but the presence of the British monarch on ground that is sacred to many Irish was a powerful statement of a desire to start anew.

About 20 farmers around Danyang city in Jiangsu province were affected, losing up to 115 acres (45 hectares) of melon, China Central Television said in an investigative report.

Prices over the past year prompted many farmers to jump into the watermelon market. All of those with exploding melons apparently were first-time users of the growth accelerator forchlorfenuron, though it has been widely available for some time, CCTV said.

Shukri Ghanem, the Libyan oil minister and head of the National Oil Co., crossed into neighboring Tunisia by road on Monday, according to a Tunisian security official and Abdel Moneim al-Houni, a former Libyan Arab League representative who was among the first wave of Libyan diplomats to defect.

The defections suggest Gadhafi’s political structure is fraying, but it’s unclear whether there is enough internal strife to seriously undermine his ability to fight rebel forces as NATO airstrike pound Libyan military targets. Gadhafi appears to retain the backing of his core of military commanders.

Officials and attorneys for both sides said they will return for more closed-door talks with U.S. Magistrate Judge Arthur Boylan on June 7, four days after a key appeals court hearing in St. Louis on the legality of the lockout.

NFL lead negotiator Jeff Pash and former Vikings standout Carl Eller both said the talks went well, but there was no indication of any progress toward a new collective bargaining agreement. Pash said he thought Boylan had done a good job of “pushing the parties,” but he doesn’t believe the dispute over the future of the $9 billion business will be settled in court.

His chances of winning the nomination of a party dominated by religious conservatives may depend on it.

“I think people have to look at me, ask tough questions, then render judgment,” the former House speaker told The Associated Press on Monday during his first Iowa trip as a declared presidential candidate. “I have made mistakes in my life. I have had to go to God to ask for forgiveness and seek reconciliation.”

The department, cobbled together quickly out of 22 other agencies after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, answers to 108 congressional committees, subcommittees, caucuses and the like, about four times as many as the departments of State and Justice combined.

Officials and staff spent about 66 work years responding to questions from Congress in 2009 alone. That same year, Homeland Security officials say they answered 11,680 letters, gave 2,058 briefings and sent 232 witnesses to 166 hearings. All this at a cost to taxpayers of about $10 million.

The announcement from Denali-The Alaska Gas Pipeline raised questions about the prospects for building a long-hoped-for line in Alaska. For years, Alaskans have dreamed of a gas line as a way to help shore up revenues as oil production declines, create jobs and provide a more reliable source of energy. But Denali cited changes in the market – lower gas prices, the rise of North American shale – as making it tough to get the commitments they needed to move forward.

Denali venture had been competing with a plan to build a line TransCanada Corp., which says it is continuing efforts to move its project forward. TransCanada has progressed with state financial support, something Denali never received. A company official, Scott Jepsen, doesn’t believe it would have made a difference in the Denali decision.