Evening Edition

“We’d like to tell people it’s over, but the oil will still wash up every time it storms,” said Jay LaFont, Grand Isle’s deputy mayor.

People here are used to dealing with disasters. They’ve had to rebuild from four major hurricanes — Katrina, Rita, Ike and Gustav — in the past five years alone.

The official MENA news agency reported that the 82-year-old Mubarak, in police custody in a Red Sea resort hospital, was in “unstable” condition.

Mubarak’s “health condition is unstable, and he is under observation,” the agency quoted a hospital source as saying.

In a final statement at the end of the day-long meeting, the international contact group on Libya decided to set up a “temporary financial mechanism” to aid the rebels seeking to oust Kadhafi.

It “affirmed that Kadhafi’s regime has lost all legitimacy and he should leave and allow the Libyan people to decide their future.”

UN chief Ban Ki-moon, meanwhile, warned at the Libya contact group meeting in Doha that as many as 3.6 million people, or more than half of Libya’s population, could need humanitarian assistance.

Ban also urged the international community to “speak with one voice” on Libya, as a rift appeared to be opening between EU partners, with Belgium expressing opposition to arming the rebels and Germany insisting there could be “no military solution.”

On the eve of the first meeting of an international contact group, a spokesman for the rebel Transitional National Council said it will accept nothing short of the removal of Kadhafi and his sons from the country.

Mahmud Shammam, whose council is seeking international approval, stressed: “We want to move from the de facto recognition of the council to an internationally-recognised legitimacy.”

Seeking to heal a nation broken by a four-month crisis pitting him against his strongman predecessor Gbagbo, Ouattara also called on the International Criminal Court to probe massacres carried out in the west of the country.

“I will speak shortly with the ICC’s chief prosecutor so the court can begin investigations,” Ouattara told journalists during his first major press conference since being able to exercise executive power.

Rights group Amnesty International warned that Gbagbo’s supporters were at risk of violent reprisals following his arrest on Monday for having stubbornly refused to admit defeat to Ouattara in a November presidential election.

While both Ouattara and Gbagbo have called for fighters to lay down arms to help the formerly wealthy west African nation get back on its feet, Amnesty warned that supporters of the former regime faced deadly reprisals.

In strongly worded comments on state television, the Belarussian strongman said that the worst attack in the country’s history that also wounded 200 had been “solved” but admitted its motive remained unclear.

“The crime was solved at 5:00 am. KGB officers and police took one day to complete a superb operation and detain the perpetrators without noise and chatter,” he said. The security service is still called the KGB in Belarus.

With talks underway in Lisbon on the debt rescue, European Commission head Jose Manuel Barroso said he hoped party leaders “will assume their responsibilities” to the public finances and their European Union partners.

Portugal goes to early polls on June 5 after the government fell last month when parliament rejected its latest austerity plan, forcing Lisbon to bow to market pressure and seek an EU-IMF bailout.

The emotional ceremony came about thanks to a new drive to research the provenance of state holdings with the aim of restitution, German Culture Minister Bernd Neumann said.

“The 13 books being returned today preserve the memory of the Berlin Jewish community which was decimated and its members murdered or driven out,” Neumann said. “That is why such projects are so important now and in the future.”

Another strong aftershock from the 9.0-magnitude quake that struck the northeast coast more than a month ago hit the disaster region, further fraying nerves amid tense stop-and-go containment efforts at a stricken atomic plant.

Emergency workers at the tsunami-hit Fukushima nuclear site northeast of Tokyo started syphoning off tonnes of highly radioactive water and eyed long-term plans to encase dangerous spent fuel rods in steel caskets.

The move came after the Bank of Japan last week downgraded its view of an economy ravaged by the quake and the monster wave it unleashed, which destroyed entire towns and left more than 28,000 dead or missing.

“The economy was picking up, but it has shown weak signs recently due to the impact of the Great East Japan Earthquake,” the Cabinet Office said in its monthly report. “It remains in a severe condition.”

Spanish and Chinese firms signed deals worth about one billion euros ($1.4 billion) during Zapatero’s lightning visit to Beijing, aimed at securing fresh investment to shore up Madrid’s embattled economy.

“There are no new plans on the horizon to have to take any new (deficit reduction) measures. None,” Zapatero said.

Many European banks need bigger capital cushions to restore market confidence and assure they can borrow, and some weak players will need to be closed, the International Monetary Fund said in its Global Financial Stability Report.

The debt rollover requirements are most acute for Irish and German banks, with as much as half of their outstanding debt coming due over the next two years, the fund said.

The bank’s book of consumer loans shrank by 10 percent in the quarter, and loans to corporate customers did not grow enough to make up for it. The No. 2 U.S. bank also took $1.75 billion of charges linked to collecting payments on bad mortgages and foreclosures, and said an upcoming settlement with regulators over mortgage servicing abuses could force it to hire as many 3,000 people.

The quarterly results were the first from a major Wall Street bank, and although they beat expectations, they raised investor concerns about lending profits. Bank shares broadly edged lower.

In another sign that economic growth slowed in the first quarter, the government on Wednesday separately reported a sharp slowdown in the accumulation of inventories by businesses in February.

Economists, who have steadily lowered growth forecasts as first quarter data has come in, swiftly cut them again. Still, they expect the recovery to regain momentum later this year.

The proportion of people who believe the United States is on the wrong track jumped 5 points to 69 percent from March, the poll found, the highest wrong-track figure in an Ipsos poll since President Barack Obama took office in January 2009.

More than six of every 10 Americans have cut back on other expenses and reduced their driving as a result of the rising gas prices caused by tumult in North Africa and the Middle East.

In a victory for Britain and France, which are leading the air campaign in Libya and pushed for an unequivocal call for regime change, the “contact group” of some 16 European and Middle Eastern nations, plus the United Nations, the Arab League and the African Union, said Gaddafi must go.

“Gaddafi and his regime has lost all legitimacy and he must leave power allowing the Libyan people to determine their future,” a final statement obtained by Reuters said.

Engineers moved a step closer to emptying highly radioactive water from one of the six crippled reactors, which would allow them to start repairing the cooling system crucial to regaining control of the reactors.

Japan’s nuclear safety agency said the latest tests showed radiation nearly doubled last week, to 23 times above legal limits, in the sea off Minamisoma city near the plant.

Companies trying to sell goods to Wal-Mart Stores Inc often find it difficult to figure out the best ways to work with the world’s largest retailer, as each buyer has his or her own style and there are vast amounts of sales data to decipher.

Sales executives who sell their goods to Wal-Mart said that while the retailer willingly shares data, it is up to the vendors to crunch the numbers.

As Washington’s point man on healthcare fraud, the 66-year-old Budetti knows there are no quick fixes to a mind-boggling mess that ranks as one of America’s top crime problems. But he has been working to develop new technological tools and a comprehensive, long-term strategy to rein in fraud since his appointment as director of Program Integrity at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) last year.

Although fraudsters have had the run of the place for some two decades, life is about to get “an awful lot tougher” for them, Budetti told Reuters in a recent interview. He promised new measures to curb waste and fraud in Medicare and Medicaid, the massive federal programs that provide healthcare for America’s elderly and poor, will soon pay big dividends.

With shareholder balloting season well underway, companies have been challenging proxy advisers’ opinions, demanding more disclosure about their work and asking regulators to rein in the firms.

Proxy firms such as ISS, part of investor services firm MSCI, and Glass Lewis & Co advise some of America’s biggest investors and have gained influence as shareholder voting rights increased.

The Libyan National Council (LNC), with the help of OPEC member Qatar has been able to export a “minimal” amount of crude oil and needs international help to continue overseas shipments, said spokesman Mahmud Awad Shammama.

“We have a dreadful situation in the east. Lack of food, lack of fuel, there is no income except oil, financial reserves are depleting and we need to sort these issues out to ensure the people do not suffer,” said Aref Ali Nayed, who coordinates the LNC’s efforts to secure overseas supplies, in an interview.

The three men he approached — Hisham Morsy, a physician, Wael Adel, a civil engineer by training, and Adel’s cousin Ahmed, a chemist — had all left Egypt for jobs in London.

Inspired by the way Serbian group Otpor had brought down Slobodan Milosevic through non-violent protests in 2000, the trio studied previous struggles. One of their favorite thinkers was Gene Sharp, a Boston-based academic who was heavily influenced by Mahatma Gandhi. The group had set up a webpage in 2004 to propagate civil disobedience ideas in Arabic.

Mubarak, toppled on February 11 after mass demonstrations against his 30-year rule, was admitted to hospital on Tuesday suffering what state media called a “heart crisis.” There were conflicting reports about the seriousness of his illness.

The public prosecutor had summoned Mubarak for questioning on Sunday over the killing of protesters and embezzling of public funds. His two sons, Alaa and Gamal, were also summoned for questioning over graft and ordered detained, state TV said.

The meeting of the Group of 20 rich and emerging-market nations comes at a time of conflicting economic signals.

Just as signs of a strengthening recovery in some rich countries have pushed their central banks to begin to pull back on economic supports, world markets have been rocked by fears that high oil prices will put the brakes on global growth.

“I do expect a short list of countries to emerge from this process and those countries will be the focus of a second stage of analysis,” the official told reporters at a briefing ahead of a meeting of the Group of 20 rich and emerging-market nations on Thursday and Friday.

The G20 is aiming to develop “indicative guidelines” to detect imbalances such as excessive trade deficits or surpluses and then develop policy recommendations to address them. The official said this week’s meeting will focus on the first stage of the process — the language for identifying imbalances.

Army chiefs who fought for Laurent Gbagbo, including chief of staff General Philippe Mangou, swore loyalty to Ouattara on Tuesday, a day after his forces captured Gbagbo, who had refused to relinquish power after November elections.

In a boost to his legitimacy, the former military top brass were shown on Ouattara’s TCI television station meeting him.

NATO aircraft destroyed five tanks close to Misrata — the last big rebel stronghold in the west of the country — which were “threatening the civilian population,” the alliance said.

“Our aircraft will continue to hit regime targets around Misrata,” the NATO operation commander, Lieutenant-General Charles Bouchard, said in a statement.

Mubarak’s two sons, Gamal and Alaa, were also detained for questioning and taken to Cairo’s Torah prison, where a string of former top regime figures – including the former prime minister, ruling party chief and Mubarak’s chief of staff – are already languishing, facing similar investigations on corruption.

The move was brought by enormous public pressure on the ruling military, which was handed power when Mubarak stepped down on Feb. 11. Tens of thousands protested in Cairo’s central Tahrir Square on Friday, the biggest rally in weeks, demanding Mubarak and his family be put on trial. Many in the crowd accused the military of protecting the former president.

President Alassane Ouattara said Laurent Gbagbo had been moved out of the Golf Hotel, where he was taken after his capture on Monday. He said Gbagbo will be kept in a villa and that his rights as a former head of state will be respected. A U.N. official said that its peacekeeping forces are providing personal security protection for Gbagbo.

“Gbagbo is in a residence under surveillance somewhere in Ivory Coast,” Ouattara told reporters at the Golf Hotel.

The appeals reflected the urgent backdrop for meetings among the U.N. secretary-general and other top Western and Arab envoys gathered in Qatar’s capital to discuss ways to end the Libyan crisis.

While peace efforts remain the top objective, there also appeared to be a shift toward trying to boost the rebels’ ability to protect their territory. One proposal noted by Italy – Libya’s former colonial ruler – calls for allies to provide defensive weapons.

But the campaign has come at a dear cost. Officials tell The Associated Press that more than 50 peacekeepers have been killed, along with an unknown number of Somali dead.

The casualty rate is so high that the AU has not announced it, saying that is the responsibility of Uganda and Burundi, the two countries that currently contribute troops to the mission that is shoring up the weak U.N.-backed government.

The head of the KGB, Belarus’ security service, said a man in his mid-20s was arrested and confessed to carrying out the bombing that killed 12 people and wounded over 200 Monday at the main subway station in Minsk, the capital.

KGB chief Vadim Zaitsev did not identify the man and refused to discuss his motives but said he was “not only unhealthy in his psychological state but unhealthy in his ambitions.”

People are increasingly growing frustrated with Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s handling of the nuclear crisis, which has progressed fitfully since the March 11 tsunami swamped the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, knocking out important cooling systems. Restoring them will take months.

“I am not asking for anything more than I am entitled to,” said Ichijiro Ishikawa, 69, who dug roads and tunnels and is now living in a shelter because his home is in a 12-mile (20-kilometer) evacuation zone around the plant. “I just want my due.”

But don’t tell Pensacola residents that the Jan. 8, 1861, skirmish meant nothing – the event is the stuff of legend in this military town. Some even claim the clash was the Civil War’s first, three months before the battle on April 12, 1861, at South Carolina’s Fort Sumter, which is widely recognized as the start of the war.

Dale Cox, the unofficial historian for the Florida Panhandle chapter of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, wrote on his blog that he considers the Pensacola shot the first of the Civil War, saying in an interview that it marked the first time federal troops fired toward Confederate agitators.

The protest movement is posing an increasing threat to Assad’s iron rule as it attracts an ever-wider following, with tens of thousands of people demanding political freedoms and an end to the decades-old emergency laws that extend state authority into nearly all aspects of Syrians’ lives.

“We will not be humiliated!” shouted some 2,000 women and children who blocked a main coastal road in northeastern Syria, where security forces and pro-government gunmen have cracked down on dissent in recent days. The protesters were demanding the release of hundreds of men who have been rounded up in the villages of Bayda and Beit Jnad.

The strikes were the first since a mid-March attack took out what the Pakistanis said were dozens of peaceful tribesmen. A U.S. official at the time denied innocent people had been targeted.

The U.S. relies heavily on the covert, CIA-run missile program to kill al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in Pakistan’s northwest, and with a few exceptions keeps up a steady pace of strikes even when relations with Pakistan are tense.

BP and the government appeared on the list, compiled by the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, for their roles in restricting news media access to the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Other recipients included the Transportation Security Administration, which arrested a passenger who stripped to his shorts to protest security measures; a Mississippi judge who jailed a lawyer for refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and the Virginia prisons agency for banning a “Jailhouse Lawyers Handbook.”

But the second-generation of BMW’s smallish X3 crossover sport utility vehicle impressed just the same with its strong turbo power, standout road composure and quiet and upscale interior.

I even managed to best the federal government’s combined city/highway fuel mileage rating during an X3 test drive, managing 22.1 miles per gallon during comfortable driving in the city, on mountainous roads and on multi-lane highways. I just wish the required fuel for the turbocharged X3 xDrive35i test vehicle hadn’t been premium gasoline. At $4.32 a gallon, this gasoline cost me nearly $50 for just over 10 gallons.

A federal jury convicted Officer Melvin Williams of violating Raymond Robair’s constitutional rights by kicking and beating him with a baton while he and Officer Matthew Dean Moore patrolled the Treme neighborhood on July 30, 2005. The jury of seven men and five women also convicted Williams and Moore of submitting a false report on the incident and found Moore guilty of lying to the FBI.

The case is one of several probes of alleged misconduct by New Orleans police officers opened by the Justice Department. The investigations have resulted in charges against 20 current or former officers.

Now that authorities have identified a body that washed up on an Oregon beach as his son, Dustin Weber, Jon Weber is thinking he will scatter some of his ashes along a trail leading to the hot springs where they used to go together.

“The last time, it was just him and I and the bald eagles and the golden eagles, and we sat there and enjoyed life a few moments,” he said Tuesday as he described the site on the shores of Paulina Lake south of Bend.

Jeff Anderson, an attorney for the man making the allegations, said he had been notified the papers were successfully filed through official diplomatic channels.

“Every time we make a step forward, as long as that takes, we are going in the right direction,” Anderson said. “And the direction we’re headed is a measure of accountability. We really believe that we need to put some heat on the Vatican to bring some light.”

The events marked the 150th anniversary of the Confederate bombardment of Union-held Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, an engagement that plunged the nation into four years of war at a cost of more than 600,000 lives.

Several hundred people gathered on Charleston’s Battery in the pre-dawn darkness, much as Charleston residents gathered 150 years ago to view the bombardment of April 12, 1861.

Wildlife advocates conceded Tuesday the wolf provision was all but certain to remain in the spending bill after efforts to remove it failed. Congress faces a tight deadline on a budget plan already months overdue, and the rider has bipartisan support.

It orders the Interior Department to lift protections for wolves within 60 days in five Western states. A federal judge in Montana has turned back three prior attempts by Interior officials to declare wolves recovered, under both the Bush and Obama administrations.