Evening Edition

Ahmed Wali Karzai was shot dead in his own home by a long-serving commander of his family’s personal protection force, said the police chief for Kandahar province, although the Taliban claimed responsibility for the killing.

The 49-year-old was a shadowy figure, dogged for years by allegations of unsavoury links to the lucrative opium trade and private security firms, but others said he brought control to an otherwise chaotic domain.

Former prime minister Gordon Brown also piled pressure on Murdoch’s media empire, accusing it of hiring “criminals” to obtain his private documents and suggesting it used illegal methods to break the news of his son’s illness.

The government meanwhile said it would back a parliamentary motion by the opposition Labour party on Wednesday calling on Murdoch to drop his controversial bid for control of satellite broadcaster BSkyB.

The 40-year-old Australian appeared at the High Court in London seeking to overturn a lower court’s rejection in February of defence arguments that he would have an unfair trial in Sweden.

Assange’s lawyer Ben Emmerson said the conduct described in a European arrest warrant issued by Sweden “fails to provide a fair, proper and accurate description of what is alleged against the appellant.”

A regime-backed “national dialogue” on reforms, meanwhile, wrapped up a three-day meeting in Damascus with calls for the release of all political detainees.

Syria accused US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of “incitement” after she maintained Assad had lost legitimacy and the right to remain in power.

Americans Ron Garan and Mike Fossum, who were already aboard the ISS as part of the six-member international Expedition 28 crew when Atlantis arrived on Sunday, successfully completed their repair and maintenance tasks at the lab.

The main objective — of retrieving a failed ammonia pump from the orbiting outpost and placing it into the shuttle’s payload for return to Earth — was tackled early in the six hour, 31 minute spacewalk.

The trade gap expanded to $50.2 billion from $43.6 billion in April, the Commerce Department said.

The higher cost of oil drove imports up 2.6 percent, while exports slipped 0.5 percent. Exports however still were at the second-highest monthly level on record.

By joining a phalanx of resistance to the global media magnate that now includes all Britain’s main parties, Prime Minister David Cameron showed how far Murdoch, long feared and courted by both left and right as a kingmaker, may be damaged by outrage at the past week’s allegations of criminal journalism.

The U.S.-based media magnate, his son James and Rebekah Brooks, the News International executive and former editor at the center of the storm, were summoned to answer questions next week by a parliamentary committee which on Tuesday grilled police chiefs on failures in earlier inquiries into the affair.

Denunciations of Assad from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and French Prime Minister Francois Fillon marked those countries’ sharpest condemnation yet of the Syrian president, struggling to put down four months of revolts that have swept the country and threatened his 11-year rule.

“From our perspective, he has lost legitimacy, he has failed to deliver on the promises he’s made, he has sought and accepted aid from the Iranians as to how to repress his own people,” Clinton said, adding Assad was “not indispensable.”

“There will be an extra summit this Friday,” a senior euro zone diplomat told Reuters, suggesting policymakers have been seized with a new sense of urgency after markets started targeting Italian assets.

There is now acute concern about the crisis spreading to Italy, where political tensions between Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti have exacerbated concerns, and to Spain, the euro zone’s fourth-largest economy.

The comments came as top Republicans toughened their stance in the deficit reduction talks.

Hours before heading to the White House, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said a “real solution” to the U.S. debt problem was unlikely while Obama was in office.

The president, who raised a record $745 million in cash during 2008 is likely to keep his perch as leading the fundraising race in 2012, though may rely on fewer small donations than last time around.

Obama starts the 2012 race as the cash leader and is seen breaking his goal of raising $60 million in the second quarter alone, dwarfing all the Republican hopefuls combined.

The U.S. military will need more equipment like infrared sensors, jammers and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems to counter threats to its troops, with the Obama administration planning to cut troops in Afghanistan by a third by 2012, and exit from Iraq by the end of this year.

“(The United States) will have to continue to keep an eye on what is occurring in these countries. So, we will invest in intelligence gathering equipment to complement the decrease in actual forces on ground,” Lazard Capital Markets analyst Michael Lewis said.

The assassination of Ahmed Wali Karzai, a wheeler-dealer and the key to his half brother’s power in the south, leaves the president without an influential ally to handle the tricky job of balancing the interests of the region’s tribal and political leaders, drug runners, insurgents and militias.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, but officials immediately cast doubt that they were involved. If they were, it could undercut the president’s own effort to talk peace with insurgents as foreign forces begin their exit.

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the head of the Kandahar provincial council, was shot to death while receiving guests at his home in Kandahar, the capital of the province that was the birthplace of the Taliban movement and was the site of a recent U.S.-led offensive.

Tooryalai Wesa, the provincial governor of Kandahar, identified the assassin as Sardar Mohammad and said he was a close, “trustworthy” person who had gone to Wali Karzai’s house to get him to sign some papers.

The British leader has lost his confident aura as his friendships with figures central to the tabloid hacking scandal hand his government its biggest crisis since he entered No. 10 Downing Street. Questions are mounting about whether the scandal will poison his premiership.

From the moment allegations first emerged that the News of the World had hacked into the cell phone of missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler, Cameron has been on the defensive. He has repeatedly been forced to answer questions about his ties to Andy Coulson, his former communications director and a one-time News of the World editor who was arrested last week in the scandal.

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., offered a new plan to allow the president to demand up to $2.4 trillion in new borrowing authority by the summer of next year in three separate submissions. Those increases would automatically take effect unless both the Republican House and the Democratic Senate enacted legislation disapproving them.

Obama would be able to veto such legislation, giving him power to muscle through the debt increases.

To them, those newfangled curly fluorescent light bulbs are the last straw, another example of an overreaching government that’s forcing people to buy health insurance, prodding them to get more fuel-efficient cars and sticking its nose into too many places it doesn’t belong.

For most Democrats, it’s an exasperating debate that, just like the old incandescent bulbs being crowded out of the market, produces more heat than light.

The 75-year-old Republican said he will serve out his term through December 2012, whether his presidential campaign is successful or not. He told The Associated Press he has been criticized for running for Congress while seeking the presidency in the past.

Paul said the growing support for his 2012 presidential bid convinced him he should not divide his energies. He won a straw poll at the Republican Leadership Conference held in New Orleans last month.

The space station’s two-armed robot Dextre won’t tackle the $22.6 million playset – a fancy Fisher-Price toy as one astronaut describes it – until long after Atlantis departs and the shuttle program ends.

But perhaps more than anything else on this final journey by a shuttle, the robotic demo illustrates the possibilities ahead for NASA: satellite-refueling stations in space run by robots.

It has happened a few times in the U.S., and the opinion piece in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association says putting children temporarily in foster care is in some cases more ethical than obesity surgery.

Dr. David Ludwig, an obesity specialist at Harvard-affiliated Children’s Hospital Boston, said the point isn’t to blame parents, but rather to act in children’s best interest and get them help that for whatever reason their parents can’t provide.

In an email to The Associated Press, attorney Jonathan Turley said he will file the lawsuit challenging Utah’s bigamy law in Salt Lake City’s U.S. District Court on Wednesday.

Turley represents Kody Brown and his four wives, Meri, Janelle, Christine and Robyn. Brown is only legally married to Meri Brown.