Evening Edition

Those killed in the protests in Taloqan, capital of the northeastern province of Takhar, were mainly civilians, while police trainers and cadets died when a bomber drove his car into a police bus near Jalalabad, eastern Afghanistan.

The NATO raid that led to the demonstrations in usually peaceful Takhar saw President Hamid Karzai demanding an explanation of what happened from the US commander of troops in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus.

The British monarch heard of the tragic events in the two countries’ shared history and the hurt they inflicted, but was nonetheless told her visit to Dublin’s Croke Park stadium was an honour for her Irish hosts.

Such sentiments would have been unthinkable until recently as peace in Northern Ireland has created the conditions for the first visit of a British sovereign to the Republic since it won independence from London in 1922.

The state-run Rosneft oil company issued a brief statement saying it was reviewing new cooperation proposals submitted to it by BP in recent days.

President Dmitry Medvedev for his part said he personally approved of the Rosneft-BP tie-up and blamed government bureaucrats for muddling the $16 billion share-swap.

Despite the startling warning to the United States and Europe, Medvedev confounded expectations he would use the event to finally announce if he intends to seek a new Kremlin mandate in 2012 elections.

Russia is increasingly worried about US plans to build missile defence facilities in ex-Communist eastern Europe and is also offended that NATO appears to have shunned its proposals for a joint missile defence shield.

Earth’s biodiversity continues to dwindle due to deforestation, climate change, over-exploitation and chemical runoff into rivers and oceans, said the study, published in Nature.

“The evidence is in — humans really are causing extreme extinction rates,” said co-author Stephen Hubbell, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California at Los Angeles.

The Olympic flame will arrive from Greece on May 18, 2012 and the relay will get under way on the westerly tip of mainland Britain and continue for 70 days until the opening ceremony of the Games on July 27, 2012.

There will be no international relay after the chaos caused by human rights protesters demonstrating against China’s hosting of the 2008 Games, although the relay may incorporate a stop in Dublin.

LinkedIn raised the share price for its public listing by some 30 percent, lifting the company’s value as high as $4 billion and testing the market’s lust for Internet companies.

For what will be the first initial public offering by a major US social-networking firm, LinkedIn jacked up its expected share price for 7.84 million shares to between $42 and $45, just a week after it first set a target of $32-35 per share.

The wake-up call came as the Greek government struggled to finalise a new austerity package and a privatisation drive of state assets calculated to bring in up to 50 billion euros ($71 billion) to help restore its finances.

On Wednesday, the authorities appointed a number of banks and investment advisors to help offload stakes in a number of state companies, including the lucrative gaming monopoly OPAP, one of Greece’s few profitable state firms.

“We want to attend, and will study the legal procedure,” Mahmud Shammam, media spokesman for the rebels’ National Transitional Council (NTC) told AFP in Dubai.

“We still do not know if OPEC will invite us,” he said.

Heavy diplomatic wrangling by Western and Gulf diplomats keen to resolve the three-month standoff had secured an agreement in principle that would see Saleh, a shrewd political survivor, resign within a month, an opposition official said.

But in a familiar twist, last-minute snags over details derailed the deal that would have granted Saleh immunity from prosecution, allowing him a dignified exit from power in the Arabian Peninsula state he has ruled for nearly 33 years.

Assad had been partly rehabilitated in the West over the last three years but Western powers have condemned his use of force to quell protests against his 11 years in power, killing at least 700 civilians according to rights groups.

Targeting Assad personally with sanctions, which the United States and the European Union had previously avoided, is a significant slap at Damascus and raises questions about whether the West may ultimately seek Assad’s removal from power.

A raft of social media companies, including Twitter and Groupon, are expected to go public in the coming months and years.

Groupon has had talks with bankers about its IPO and is expected to hire Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Morgan Stanley for an offering that could value it at $15 billion to $20 billion.

In a gesture that summed up how far relations between the two old enemies have come, the queen was brought into Croke Park through the Hogan Stand, named after a player killed on “Bloody Sunday” nearly a century ago.

She met players, chatted about Irish sport and was entertained by a marching band and traditional dancing, although the seats around the vast stadium were empty — a reflection of the tight security around the trip.

European finance ministers broke a taboo this week by acknowledging for the first time that some form of restructuring might be required to ease Greece’s debt burden, which at 150 percent of annual output is among the highest in the world.

Some have said that private creditors could be asked, on a voluntary basis, to accept later repayment of their Greek debt but ministers have also made clear that their first priority is ensuring Prime Minister George Papandreou’s government steps up reforms.

Kan, battling low support rates, a feisty opposition and rebels in his own party, has pledged a blank-slate review of Japan’s current energy policy that aims to boost nuclear power to more than 50 percent of electricity supply by 2020 from about 30 percent now. But whether he can break the grip of the politically powerful utilities remains in doubt.

“We need to fundamentally review the way nuclear policy has been administrated,” Kan told a news conference, noting the nuclear safety agency was under the jurisdiction of the trade ministry, which has long promoted nuclear power as a way to reduce Japan’s reliance on imported fossil fuels.

“What are you doing on our land?” said one of the group of trespassers who had seized his property, poking a rifle at him.

That was in March. Like many Egyptians, Matta hoped this was an ugly but temporary problem, the result of a security vacuum from the withdrawal of police from duty after they lost control of the streets in the unrest that ousted Mubarak on February 11.

Hundreds of angry demonstrators armed with spades and axes took to the streets of Taloqan, a normally peaceful town in Takhar province, chanting “death to America” and tried to storm a foreign military base nearby.

Local police and residents said the four people killed in the raid late Tuesday night in Taloqan were civilians. NATO-led forces said they were armed insurgents.

Panos Moumtzis, humanitarian coordinator for Libya, said he would also seek security guarantees for U.N. aid workers to reach the rebel-held city of Misrata and the Western Mountains in talks with authorities in the Libyan capital on Friday.

Misrata is a key battleground in the three-month-old war in which rebels fighting to topple Muammar Gaddafi have seized control of the oil-producing east of the country, aided by a NATO bombing campaign to enforce a U.N. mandate.

His bearded face, framed in a white shroud and a green headband emblazoned with a koranic verse, now adorns websites linked to the Kurdish Hizbullah movement group which fought a vicious battle with the leftist separatists through the 1990s.

Durna’s killing in the town of Yuksekova near Turkey’s border with Iran on May 5 marked a chilling escalation in unrest between the two sides.

Geithner said the Obama administration hopes to take up the issue of tax simplification before the presidential election in 2012 but he signaled the issue is on hold for now.

“I think realistically this fiscal debate we’re having is going to dominate our preoccupation for the next couple of months,” Geithner said in response to a question after remarks to the Harvard Club in New York.

In a significant move China, which last year become the IMF’s third most powerful member country, called for “fairness, transparency and merit” in the selection of the next IMF boss.

Brazil and South Africa echoed China’s message and insisted the selection of the next head of the IMF be based on a candidate’s qualifications and not their nationality.

Signs of lackluster economic activity were also evident in declining 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.

Analysts are cautiously optimistic the economy will regain speed this quarter after growth slowed to a 1.8 percent annual pace in the January-March period, but some doubt that growth will pick back up to an annualized rate of 3.0 percent.

Some of the worst flooding in Mississippi has been in the Vicksburg area, where people have been living in shelters for nearly two weeks. It’s anyone’s guess when they’ll be able to return to what’s left of their homes. The river is expected to crest there Thursday, but the governor said it could take until late June for water to retreat in certain places.

“Lord only knows when it’s going to recede. It’s so much water,” said evacuee Steven Cole, who’s staying at a Vicksburg church being used as shelter for Red Cross victims.

Roughly 75 percent of those who have married since 1990 reported they had reached their 10-year anniversary. That’s up about 3 percentage points for both men and women who married a decade earlier in the 1980s, when divorce rates in the U.S. had peaked, according to census figures released Wednesday.

The census report partly attributed the small declines in divorce to a recent jump in couples cohabitating as well as rising median ages before marriage as people wait longer before making long-term commitments. Increases in educational attainment and job opportunity might also be a factor.

A Facebook page titled “Post rapture looting” offers this invitation: “When everyone is gone and god’s not looking, we need to pick up some sweet stereo equipment and maybe some new furniture for the mansion we’re going to squat in.” By Wednesday afternoon, more than 175,000 people indicated they would be “attending” the “public event.”

The prediction is also being mocked in the comic strip “Doonesbury” and has inspired “Rapture parties” to celebrate what hosts expect will be the failure of the world to come to an end.

These mysterious bodies, apparently gaseous balls like the largest planets in our solar system, may help scientists understand how planets form.

“They’re finding evidence for a lot of pretty big planets,” said Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, who wasn’t involved in the research.

The White House announced the sanctions Wednesday, a day before President Barack Obama delivers a major speech on the uprisings throughout the Arab world. The speech is expected to include prominent mentions of Syria.

The Obama administration had pinned hopes on Assad, seen until recent months as a pragmatist and potential reformer who could buck Iranian influence and help broker an eventual Arab peace deal with Israel.

The riot suggests more trouble ahead for NATO as upcoming troop drawdowns are likely to make the alliance increasingly reliant on quick-strike raids on insurgent hideouts. Such raids often produce results – most famously in the May 2 killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan – but deeply offend Afghans when they go wrong.

Demonstrators swarmed the road leading into the northern city of Taloqan early Wednesday, running through a cloud of dust as they pumped their fists and shouted insults at Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the United States.

A panel of Food and Drug Administration advisers voted 21-0 in favor of adding doses for children 6 months to 2 years old to over-the-counter acetaminophen formulas. The FDA convened a two-day meeting to consider changes that will make the formulas safer and easier to use.

The liquid formulas have never contained dosing information for children under 2 to avoid an overdose and to encourage parents to seek medical attention for sick infants. Fever in children younger than 6 months can be associated with dangerous infections like meningitis and pneumonia.

The study by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York instead said that the problem was largely the result of poor seminary training and insufficient emotional support for men ordained in the 1940s and 1950s, who were not able to withstand the social upheaval they confronted as pastors in the 1960s. Crime and other deviant behavior increased overall in the United States during this period, when the rate of abuse by priests was climbing.

“The rise in abuse cases in the 1960s and 1970s was influenced by social factors in society generally,” the report’s authors said. “Factors that were invariant during the time period addressed, such as celibacy, were not responsible for the increase or decline in abuse cases over this time.”

He left the governor’s office after seven years without making good on his central campaign promise to fix the state’s budgeting system, then commuted the manslaughter sentence for the son of a political ally in one of his final official acts, drawing the condemnation of prosecutors and the family of a slain college student.

Now he’s revealed to be the father of an out-of-wedlock child, a secret he kept during two gubernatorial terms.

“I retired, I started drinking more,” one man said. “I lost my father, my mother, my dog, and it gave me a good excuse,” said another.

A remarkable shift in the number of older adults reporting substance abuse problems is making this scene more common. Between 1992 and 2008, treatment admissions for those 50 and older more than doubled in the U.S. That number will continue to grow, experts say, as the massive baby boom generation ages.

People are holding on to cars and trucks for about a year longer than they did before the recession, which has created a tight supply of used vehicles. So few are on the market that prices have risen to their highest in at least 16 years.

Dealers are paying an average of $11,660 for a used car or truck, up almost 30 percent since December 2008.

Strauss-Kahn’s arrest on sex charges has put new focus on the informal arrangement under which a European heads the International Monetary Fund, an American leads the World Bank and another American holds the No. 2 spot at the IMF.

Europeans are citing the IMF’s key role in fighting the eurozone’s debt crisis as the main reason to keep the job on their continent. But developing nations – many of whom are sitting on piles of cash while rich countries have loaded up on debt – argue their increasing wealth and importance in the global economy means those old ways are outdated.

The messages from Damascus and Washington highlight a sharp divide: Western governments trying to boost pressure on Syria’s regime, but Assad displaying confidence he can ride it out.

Assad received a further boost when a call for nationwide strikes fell flat and longtime ally Russia vowed to stand against any U.N. resolutions that would sanction Syria.

One document says the case was initially based on activities of two local activists – including their travels to terrorist-controlled areas of Colombia – then expanded to include 16 more people in six states accused of providing material support to terrorists in Colombia or Palestinian territories.

Since September, 23 people in Minneapolis, Chicago and Grand Rapids, Mich., have been subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury in Illinois. Authorities haven’t revealed the targets of the investigation or its exact nature, other than to say it involves activities concerning the material support of terrorism.

Romney raised a remarkable $10.25 million on Monday; Republican officials from across the nation meeting the next day in Dallas mostly shrugged. In nearly two dozen interviews at the Republican National Committee’s spring meeting, no one fully embraced Romney, and several said they’d like to see other candidates enter the race.

“A lot of Republicans are hoping someone new pops up,” said Kirby Wilbur, GOP chairman in Washington state. “He keeps having to figure out who he is,” a reference to Romney’s changed positions on issues including abortion and health care.

The bill was defeated on a procedural vote. 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.

“This bill says that even the most rich and powerful among us must do their fair share to help us reduce the deficit,” said Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., the bill’s sponsor. “Their high-priced lobbyists cannot stop us from doing what is fair and what is right.”

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.

Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma said he doesn’t see how the group can reach agreement and that he would stop participating in its discussions.

“It’s got to be balanced. And I didn’t perceive where we were was balanced,” Coburn said.

The mixed reception underscored the strained relations between Thomas and some black residents in his home state. Many remain upset he was tapped to speak at the opening of a court building dedicated to pioneering civil rights lawyer John “Jack” Ruffin Jr., who later became the first black chief judge of the state Court of Appeals.

“The folks that had a vested interest weren’t really consulted,” said Richmond County State Court Judge David Watkins. “Look, imagine you invite someone to your house to spend the night and you don’t ask your wife, and it may be someone she didn’t agree with. Would that go well?”

Don’t blame a spoiled generation, says Cliff Zukin, a Rutgers University political science and public policy professor who was co-author of the study.

“Eighty-three percent of them worked when they were in college,” he said. “They’re making sacrifices to go through with this and they’re coming out without a great job and with debt. That’s not a great situation.”

The mid-size A7 has four doors and well-sized back seat like a sedan. But people typically don’t notice because of the car’s sleek, deceptively styled, coupe-like body.

Indeed, the coupe shape and side profile of the A7 are similar to that of the pricier, rarified Aston Martin Rapide.

“Hell, yes!” says Su Ramgoolam, a 34-year-old mechanic from Schenectady, N.Y.

Not so fast.

The Masters of Beef Advocacy program also recruits farmers, ranchers, high-end chefs and school dietitians to spread the gospel of red meat consumption. But the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, which started the outreach effort two years ago, has placed a strong emphasis on the Twitter generation. At least 20 percent of the nearly 2,200 program graduates are age 21 or younger.

The online program – called MBA in a nod to the more commonly known graduate business degree – is available in 47 states and particularly popular at public land-grant universities with strong agricultural schools, such as the University of Missouri, Iowa State, Kansas State and Western Kentucky.

For the first openly gay House speaker in the nation, the protests were personal. But Fox, who sold ice cream to pay his way through law school and who cites Winston Churchill as a role model, knows something about persevering. About taking the long view. And about counting votes.

“These folks were looking for a champion,” Fox, a Providence Democrat, told The Associated Press. “It hurts me to think that I’m not quite their champion at this point. That bothers me. Because so many people were waiting for so long … but you have to be able to move votes.”

A report released Wednesday by The Constitution Project, a bipartisan legal think tank, recommended that the Homeland Security Department discontinue its policy of searching electronic devices without a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing.

From Oct. 1, 2008, to June 2, 2010, over 6,500 people – almost half of them U.S. citizens – had electronic devices searched at the border, the report found.

The spud has had a tough time lately. In the last year, it has been marginalized by new school lunch rules, demonized by a popular television program and blamed for the nation’s obesity epidemic. Health advocates and government officials have pushed to take them off lunch lines, where kids often reach for the crispy treats instead of greener vegetables.

Now some in Washington say they’re fed up with the war on fries. In a letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack this month, 40 Republicans and Democrats in Congress questioned his department’s proposal to reduce the amount of potatoes and other starchy vegetables in school meals to about two servings a week, saying they can be a tasty, healthy way to provide potassium, fiber and other nutrients at a low cost.

While American authorities have condoned, or at least tolerated, such “perp walks” for more than a century, in France it’s been illegal to show images of suspects in handcuffs since 2000. French politicians and citizens alike are upset by the images, which they say make Strauss-Kahn, accused of sexual abuse, appear guilty.

“DSK Handcuffed: Photo Shock,” read a headline in Tuesday’s daily Le Parisien.

The disease, called white-nose syndrome, is caused by a fungus. The disease has spread to 16 states, from New Hampshire to Tennessee, and three Canadian provinces.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said the new plan provides a road map for more than 100 federal, state, and tribal agencies and scientific researchers that are tracking the disease and attempting to combat it.