Evening Edition

Thousands of people protested across Tunisia to call for ousted president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s once all-powerful Constitutional Democratic Rally (RCD) party to be excluded from the fledgling government and abolished.

In a bid for survival, the RCD officially expelled the ex-president, who fled to Saudi Arabia in disgrace Friday after a wave of protests against his 23 years of iron-fisted rule, the official TAP news agency reported.

Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi was one of eight ministers staying on from the previous government of disgraced president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who resigned and fled on Friday in the Arab world’s first such popular revolt.

Ghannouchi said that the ministers remaining, including the defence and interior ministers, had “acted to preserve the national interest.”

Duvalier’s lawyer told AFP the 59-year-old, who returned on Sunday from exile in France, had not been arrested but that prosecutors were preparing unspecified charges against him.

After being questioned for well over an hour by Haiti’s chief prosecutor and a judge, Duvalier, without handcuffs and smiling, was escorted calmly out of the luxury hotel where he had been holed up.

The prosecutor of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon warned that speculation on the indictment which he submitted on Monday and is widely believed to implicate Hezbollah, would be “counter-productive”.

“This is the first step in our collective quest to end impunity in Lebanon,” prosecutor Daniel Bellemare said in a recorded message as soldiers deployed in Beirut amid soaring tension.

Apple shares were down 2.92 percent at $338.20 shortly after noon (1700 GMT) after Jobs, the Silicon Valley legend behind the Macintosh computer, iPod, iPhone and iPad, announced he was taking another medical leave of absence.

Apple, whose share price rose 60 percent last year, had closed at a record high of $348.48 in New York on Friday.

The blast, which also wounded up to 150, was the first major strike in Iraq since the formation of a new government on December 21 and recalled an August attack against an army recruitment centre in Baghdad that killed dozens of people.

“I have been trying for hours to call my brother, he was in the queue to join the police but his phone is off,” said Mohammed Aiseh, who was standing at a checkpoint set up to bar family members from entering the city’s hospital, which was already filled with victims.

In “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” Yale University law professor Amy Chua recounts the ultra-strict regime of piano lessons and homework favoured by some Asian immigrant families in the United States as the key to future success.

Links to an excerpt published this month in the Wall Street Journal have been shared countless times on Facebook and Twitter, triggering a debate over cultural values at a time of concern in the West about falling behind China.

Italian magistrates on Friday announced an enquiry into the relationship between Berlusconi and an underage girl, known as Ruby, as the prime minister was still reeling from a court ruling partially stripping him of political immunity.

While having sex with prostitutes is not a crime in Italy, having sex with a minor is illegal.

Closing ranks going into talks between the 27 European Union finance ministers in Brussels, governments that enjoy a “Triple-A” credit rating on international borrowing markets resolved in private talks to boost lending capacity for troubled partners.

They will step up guarantees behind loans made by the temporary 440-billion-euro European Financial Stability Facility, enabling the eurozone fund to reduce the amount that has to be held in a buffer — previously estimated at almost 200 billion.

Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi brought opposition leaders into the coalition on Monday after president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia following weeks of popular protests.

But key figures from the old guard kept their jobs, angering new opposition appointees and street demonstrators, who saw in it a ploy to deny them the fruits of their “Jasmine Revolution.”

Paris was caught off guard by the speed with which a build-up of protests brought down Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, an ally for economic reasons and because his repression of Islamist militants created what France believed was a bulwark against fundamentalism.

Once it saw Tunisia’s army and institutions siding with the people against Ben Ali, France cut him off abruptly, mindful of its economic interests in its ex-colony and worried about a backlash by Tunisians in France if it offered refuge.

Moncef Cheikhrouhou, forced to sell his shares in a family press group to a relative of the president and go into exile in 2000, said a commission created by the Justice Ministry would unravel assets acquired through nepotism and corruption.

“They behaved like a mafia that reaped money from all sectors of the Tunisian economy,” Cheikhrouhou told Reuters in an interview in Paris, where he teaches international finance at the HEC business school.

A congressional official briefed on the reviews said the administration felt compelled to say publicly that the revelations had seriously damaged American interests in order to bolster legal efforts to shut down the WikiLeaks website and bring charges against the leakers.

“I think they just want to present the toughest front they can muster,” the official said.

The White House weighed in on the dispute over the level of the yuan hours before Hu was due to arrive, urging China to take more steps to allow its currency to strengthen.

“We believe that more must be done. That is an opinion that is held not just by this country but by many countries around the world,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.

Investigators accused Daniel Spitler and Andrew Auernheimer of using an “account slurper” to conduct a “brute force” attack over five days last June, to extract data about iPad users who accessed the Internet through AT&T Inc’s 3G network.

Among the possible victims were celebrities, businesses executives and government officials like New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer, movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and perhaps then-White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, prosecutors said.

The poor fixed income results left Pandit and other top executives facing myriad questions about what had gone so wrong at the bank, which only survived the financial crisis thanks to a massive taxpayer bailout.

The bottom line result — 4 cents a share, or 50 percent less than what analysts were expecting — stoked concern that the bank has yet to resolve the operational weaknesses that have plagued it for years.

Making his first visit to the Israeli-occupied West Bank as Russian head of state, Medvedev stopped short of issuing a ringing declaration of recognition of Palestinian statehood by the modern Russian Federation which he represents.

“Russia’s position remains unchanged. Russia made its choice a long time ago … we supported and will support the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to an independent state with its capital in East Jerusalem,” Medvedev said.

The go-slow approach could test the patience of investors, spooked by the euro zone debt crisis, who sold off peripheral countries’ bonds this month until the European Central Bank intervened to steady markets.

Going beyond last July’s flawed exercise, which failed to expose Irish banks’ frailty, EU ministers agreed to include targets on liquidity in new, tougher tests of banks’ ability to withstand financial shocks to be conducted by the end of May, with results in the third quarter, EU presidency sources said.

“We discussed bank stress tests … and we are really agreed that the new stress tests should include more banks,” said German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble.

“This is the clear position of the German government but also most of the others, and we should try to avoid that which happened last year,” he added, commenting on July tests, branded irrelevant after they gave Irish banks a clean bill of health.

Similar cases have been reported in Algeria and Mauritania as Arabs in authoritarian states watched with astonishment the speed at which the Tunisian uprising toppled its ruler last week. Some have responded by calling for change at home.

In Egypt, Tuesday’s acts followed an incident a day earlier when a man set himself alight outside parliament in a sign of growing public discontent in the tightly-run country.

Goldman expects to raise $1.5 billion for Facebook, the wildly popular site used as a message board and for online social networking.

The chance to buy a slice of Facebook ahead of any future public listing attracted widespread commentary and news coverage, which potentially could bring it under regulatory scrutiny.

Police in riot gear forcefully put down a demonstration of the sort that toppled the North African country’s longtime autocratic leader last week, pummeling a demonstrator with batons and boot kicks – and highlighting a question on many minds: Is the new regime really much different?

As Tunisia struggles to move past the rioting, looting and score-settling that has marked the political transition, there was a growing sense Tuesday that it will be difficult for the interim government to hold together and pave the way toward elections expected within six to seven months.

Mona Bernadeau, a Senate candidate from Duvalier’s political party, says Duvalier has been facing questions from the judge in a closed-door legal session since being taken out of his hotel by police Tuesday.

She declined to specify the allegations. Under the Haitian system, judges investigate allegations made by prosecutors. Haiti allows for pretrial detention but that is unlikely in Duvalier’s case. Bernadeau expects Duvalier will be returning to his hotel.

And you end up learning … not much.

A study of more than 2,300 undergraduates found 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years.

AT&T revealed the security vulnerability months ago, and U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman said there was no evidence that the two men used the information they acquired for criminal purposes. Authorities cautioned, however, that the information could have wound up in the hands of spammers and scammers.

Daniel Spitler, a 26-year-old bookstore security guard from San Francisco, and Andrew Auernheimer, 25, of Fayetteville, Ark., face charges of fraud and conspiracy to access a computer without authorization.

For six months, she took away the Internet, TV, iPods, cell phones and video games. The eerie glow of screens stopped lighting up the family room. Electronic devices no longer chirped through the night like “evil crickets.” And she stopped carrying her iPhone into the bathroom.

The result of what she grandly calls “The Experiment” was more OMG than LOL – and nothing less than an immersion in RL (real life).

It was the second time in three days that efforts to bolster Iraqi police and army soldiers have backfired. The violence underscores persistent gaps in the security forces’ ability to protect the country, despite seven years and $22 billion in training and equipment provided by the U.S.

In an all-too-familiar scene, the suicide bomber joined hundreds of recruits waiting outside a police station in Tikrit to submit applications for 2,000 newly created jobs – a plum, if risky, opportunity in a country with an unemployment rate as high as 30 percent.

Apple said Monday that Cook, the chief operating officer, will take charge of the iPhone and iPad maker as Jobs focuses on his health. Unlike Jobs’ half-year medical leave in 2009, during which he specified he’d return to work at the end of June and stuck to it, Apple did not say when, if ever, Jobs would return as CEO.

That means Cook, 50, considered a logical eventual successor to Jobs, 55, could be in charge for a long time, perhaps permanently.

Business groups have bitterly complained that new regulations carrying out health care and financial overhaul, among others, are holding back hiring and economic growth.

Despite Obama’s directive, there was no indication that the White House will pull back from the biggest regulatory fights ahead: the Environmental Protection Agency’s plans to regulate greenhouse gases and rules carrying out Obama’s health care overhaul.

No one expects any big breakthroughs. Instead, many U.S. companies hold out hope that the meetings between Hu and President Barack Obama will make it easier to reach long-term solutions to the major trade disputes dividing the world’s two largest economies.

Hu sounded conciliatory on the eve of his trip.

In a contentious move that has raised the hackles of privacy advocates and been met with resistance from a police department fearful of alienating residents, a councilman in Huntington Beach wants police to begin posting the mug shots of everyone who is arrested more than once for driving while under the influence.

“If it takes shaming people to save lives, I am willing to do it,” said Devin Dwyer, the councilman behind the proposal. “I’m hoping it prevents others from getting behind the wheel and getting inebriated.”

But the widely cited estimate by House GOP leaders is shaky. It’s the latest creative use of statistics in the health care debate, which has seen plenty of examples from both sides.

Republicans are calling their thumbs-down legislation the “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act.” Postponed after the mass shootings in Tucson, a House vote on the divisive issue is now expected Wednesday, although Democrats promise they’ll block repeal in the Senate.

U.S. District Court Judge Anna J. Brown sentenced Harold “Jim” Nicholson on Tuesday in Portland federal court on charges of conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Two other conspiracy charges were dropped as part of the plea deal.

Nicholson admitted to using his son, Nathaniel, to collect a “pension” from Russian agents while serving time in federal prison in Oregon.

The state e-mails obtained by The Associated Press show one firm, KRS Global Biotechnology of Boca Raton, Fla., explained its refusal by saying there was no doctor involved in the purchase of sodium thiopental, even though Kentucky law bars physicians from being involved in administering executions.

No reason was given in the e-mail traffic between state officials and pharmacists for a canceled order from the other company, Spectrum Chemical and Laboratory Products of Gardenia, Calif. A Spectrum official told the AP the ordered was scrapped when it sold that part of its business last year.

Industry members networked while catching up on the newest weapons and gun gear from 16,000 vendors spread across more than 630,000 square feet. That there are renewed calls for tougher gun restrictions after a Jan. 8 shooting rampage in Arizona killed six people and wounded 13 others – including apparent assassination target U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords – did little to dampen spirits at the giant show.

Barbara Heetderks of Dallas elbowed her way through a throng of arms dealers, shooting range owners, military buyers and law enforcement officers in search of the perfect ammunition for “Maya,” “Joe” and the other 40 rifles and pistols that make up her personal gun collection.

Gina Garrett-Jackson, a Miami-based attorney for the Department of Homeland Security, testified that federal authorities were considering pressing charges against anti-Castro militant Luis Posada Carriles even as they prepared to interrogate him during an immigration hearing in 2005.

Posada, 82, is charged with 11 counts of perjury, obstruction and naturalization fraud – accused of making false statements under oath during immigration interviews in El Paso, after he sneaked into the United States and sought political asylum. Prosecutors say he lied about how he reached American soil and failed to acknowledge his role in 1997 Cuban hotel bombings.

Lubbock attorney Kevin Glasheen has been credited by lawmakers and advocates as the driving force behind a 2009 law that made Texas the most generous state in the nation in compensating the wrongly convicted. He has said he acted appropriately in charging his clients a 25 percent contingency fee.

But the bar’s disciplinary counsel office found evidence Glasheen overcharged his clients or charged fees that violate the bar’s professional code of conduct, bar spokeswoman Maureen Ray said Tuesday. It filed the lawsuit in an effort to sanction him.

Most of the tax changes that were put in place in 2009 to spur the economy remained in effect in 2010, even though the recession was officially declared over. Among them: the Making Work Pay tax credit, which put a little extra money in the hands of 95 percent of U.S. taxpayers. Homebuyers and those who installed energy-efficient furnaces, windows and other items in their homes also could benefit, along with college students or their parents, schoolteachers and adoptive parents.

“There’s really not much from a change perspective,” said Greg Rosica, a tax partner ait Ernst & Young accounting firm.

Speaking out for the first time since she used the term in a video, Palin said on Fox’s Sean Hannity show that the term referred to those “falsely accused of having blood on their hands.”

Some Jewish groups strongly protested her use of the term, which historically was used to accuse Jews of using blood of Christians in religious rituals.

In seeking a life sentence for Ahmed Ghailani at a sentencing next week, prosecutors urged a federal judge to consider how the Tanzanian left a middle class life with a loving family to join hands with terrorists who were determined to carry out a mass killing. The twin bombings in Kenya and Tanzania killed 224 people, including a dozen Americans.

“The defendant traded away everything in his life. His family, his friends, his job, his country, his name – all for a chance to kill as many people as possible,” the prosecutors wrote in a submission late Friday. “This was an appalling choice to make. The man who would make it is evil.”