The United States appealed to Kadhafi’s regime to stop attacking the port and to allow international organisations to send in humanitarian aid and evacuate civilians from the rebel-held city.

A rebel spokesman said loyalist shelling killed at least five people in the port, from which the International Organisation of Migration (IOM) said a ship managed to evacuate about 800 people, including stranded migrants and wounded.

In the capital Tripoli three loud explosions were heard early Wednesday as jets flew overhead, days after the regime said Libyan strongman Moamer Kadhafi narrowly escaped a NATO air strike that killed one of his sons.

The explosion in Benghazi took place about 200 metres (yards) from a seafront headquarters of insurgents fighting to overthrow Kadhafi.

A rebel spokesman said at least five people were killed the same day as pro-Kadhafi forces shelled Misrata port, where a ship docked to evacuate 1,000 migrants and casualties, the International Organisation for Migration said.

As military heads of NATO’s 28 member states gathered for a two-day meeting in Brussels, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said the aim of the Western alliance’s air campaign was to weaken but not to kill Kadhafi.

Around 100 tanks and troop transports converged on Ar-Rastan, the rights activist told AFP after anti-regime protesters pledged to press ahead with their “revolution” despite sweeping arrests by Assad’s regime.

“Reinforcements continue to mass at the northern entrance to Ar-Rastan and, according to our estimates, there must be 100 tanks and troop transports on the highway between Homs and Hamah near Oronte reservoir,” said the activist.

The vow came as around 150 students held a brief sit-in at the university in the besieged southern flashpoint town of Daraa, as activists said more than 1,000 people had been arrested across the country so far this week.

“We must continue our peaceful revolution throughout Syria until we achieve the freedom we demand,” said the committee coordinating the anti-government protests in a string of cities.

“The government has reached a good agreement that defends Portugal,” outgoing Prime Minister Jose Socrates announced on television late on Tuesday, but the country got a rough ride on Wednesday when it had to pay sharply increased rates to borrow money.

A deadline looms on June 15, six weeks away, when Portugal must redeem old loans of nearly 5.0 billion euros ($7.3 billion) and avert default. The country now joins Greece and Ireland as eurozone members on financial life support from the EU, ECB and IMF.

“I would like to announce to the Portuguese people that the government has reached agreement today with the representatives of international institutions on the programme of financial aid to our country,” Socrates said in a televised address.

“The government has reached a good agreement that defends Portugal,” he said.

“The government has reached a good agreement that defends Portugal,” outgoing Prime Minister Jose Socrates announced on television, but the country got a rough ride on Wednesday when it had to pay sharply increased rates to borrow money.

A deadline looms on June 15, six weeks away, when Portugal must redeem old loans of nearly 5.0 billion euros ($7.3 billion) and avert default. The country now joins Greece and Ireland as eurozone now on financial life support from the EU, ECB and IMF.

Following the killing of bin Laden by US commandos in a raid on his sprawling villa, Washington revealed that Pakistan was kept in the dark to avoid tipping off the mastermind behind the September 11, 2001 attacks.

A Pakistani intelligence official said one of bin Laden’s children, now in custody with a Yemeni wife of the Al-Qaeda leader, saw her father shot dead.

Dawn is on a long-haul mission to unlock the secrets of the solar system by studying the two largest asteroids orbiting the sun, Vesta and Ceres — a trip that will carry it three billion miles by the time it is over.

It will be about three more months before the spacecraft gets close enough to begin orbiting the huge proto-planet, but NASA said it is eager to get to work.

Deutsche Bank and its subsidiary MortgageIT “repeatedly lied to be included in a government program to select mortgages for insurance by the government,” the Justice Department complaint said.

“While Deutsche Bank and MortgageIT profited from the resale of these government-insured mortgages, thousands of American homeowners have faced default and eviction, and the government has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in insurance claims, with hundreds of millions of dollars more expected in the future,” it said.

Private equity company CVC confirmed in a statement it had received an enquiry from News Corp and Exor, and that the companies had acknowledged Formula One was privately owned and not on the market.

“CVC can confirm that it has recently received an approach from the Exor News Corporation consortium,” the statement read.

With no rules and no holds barred, the game — known as Lelo — is only played once a year and only in this rural hamlet, where the local men hurl themselves into the churning melee of bodies with little regard for their own safety.

“Lelo is our national heritage and we must cherish it,” explained one of the players, taxi driver Robinzon Kobalava.

“It’s our natural capital that we are spending too fast — and we all know what happens when we borrow beyond our means,” said European Union environment commissioner Janez Potocnik.

In the EU, around one in four species are considered “threatened with extinction,” he said. Worldwide, species and natural habitats are lost at “alarming rates… up to 1,000 times the natural rate.”

Russian and South African delegates sharply criticized the NATO-led operations to protect civilians and enforce a no-fly zone and suggested the ICC should not limit its investigation to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s government.

The U.N. Security Council referred the Libyan violence to the ICC in February. ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo is investigating Gaddafi, some of his sons and aides over what he called a “pre-determined plan” to attack protesters.

Aid workers had earlier scrambled to embark the migrants, along with journalists and the wounded, on the ship bound for rebel-held Benghazi as the Misrata port came under heavy fire from forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi.

“The bombing has caused so many casualties among Libyans and people of other nationalities waiting for evacuation,” Gemal Salem, a rebel spokesman told Reuters. “So far we have five killed and ambulances are rushing to the scene.”

Economists expressed disappointment ahead of a key labor market report on Friday that is also expected to show payroll growth eased last month.

Higher gasoline prices and slower economic growth in the first quarter likely weighed on the world’s biggest economy and tempered hiring.

Wednesday’s replacement of juror No. 2 by an alternate could change the dynamic and decision-making of a panel that had deliberated for six days.

U.S. District Judge Richard Holwell in New York ordered the panel to start over with deliberations. Soon after the jury restarted, it asked to re-hear recordings of 12 phone taps that are at the heart of the government’s case against Rajaratnam, founder of the Galleon Group hedge fund.

Portugal’s caretaker Prime Minister Jose Socrates announced late on Tuesday he had reached preliminary agreement with the EU, IMF and the European Central Bank for a three-year package of support, including help for Lisbon’s banks.

Portuguese government officials said the aid would total 78 billion euros, with 12 billion of that going to Portugal’s banks. But a senior euro zone source said the range EU officials were working with was still 75-90 billion euros, depending on how much the banks ended up needing.

Caretaker Prime Minister Jose Socrates announced late on Tuesday that Lisbon had reached a three-year bailout agreement with the European Union and International Monetary Fund after weeks of negotiations, becoming the third euro zone country to secure foreign assistance, after Greece and Ireland.

A euro zone source said the financial aid package is expected to total between 75 and 90 billion euros, depending how much assistance Portugal’s banks need.

The source close to the bailout process told Reuters banks would have to raise their core Tier 1 capital ratio — a gauge of higher quality capital that mainly comprises equity and retained earnings — to 9 percent at the end of this year and to 10 percent by the end of 2012.

To get to 9 percent the top five banks would need about 2 billion euros and require about double that to get to 10 percent, according to Reuters estimates.

A ComRes poll for Wednesday’s Independent newspaper showed 66 percent of Britons are against changing the way members of parliament are elected, against 34 percent who want to move to the Alternative Vote (AV) system.

The referendum, to be held on Thursday along with local elections, has exposed rifts in the Conservative-led government.

Glencore said in a prospectus on Wednesday, ahead of its planned $11 billion listing, that its subsidiary Glencore Grain Rotterdam, a former employee and a current employee had been charged in a criminal case in Belgium.

Glencore said the criminal investigation was probing a public official, the European Commission’s Directorate General for Agriculture and others for “violation of professional secrecy, corruption of an international civil servant and criminal conspiracy.”

Pressed into an alliance with the United States in its “war on terror” days after the September 11, 2001, attacks, nuclear-armed Pakistan has never been able to shake off doubts about its commitment to the battle against Islamist militancy.

When U.S. Special Forces killed Osama bin Laden in a dramatic helicopter raid on Monday, it turned out that — contrary to popular imagination — the al Qaeda leader had not been hiding in a mountain cave along the violence-plagued border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, an area U.S. President Barack Obama once described as “the most dangerous place in the world”.

The controversy surrounding the extraordinary demolition continued, with farmers affected by it filing suit.

Dick Durbin, a Democratic Senator from Illinois, also cautioned that the endangered river towns, including Cairo at the southern-most tip of Illinois, were “not out of the woods yet.”

Detroit automakers were also helped by the spike in gasoline prices to near $4 a gallon which fed consumer hunger for more fuel-efficient cars.

“An American resurgence seems to be occurring,” said Edmunds.com senior analyst Michelle Krebs.

It took five weeks of fierce street battles – on rooftops, in alleyways – for Misrata’s inexperienced rebels to wrest control of their city’s commercial heart from forces loyal to Libyan ruler Moammar Gadhafi. Up against armored units and professional sniper squads, they turned bottles, tires and trailer trucks into tools of war.

When they finally succeeded in pushing government forces out of Libya’s third-largest city in late April, it was the greatest head-to-head military victory yet in the uprising that threatens Gadhafi’s 42-year hold on power. The opposition controls much of eastern Libya, but Misrata is the only city in the west rebels have managed to hold.

Luis Moreno-Ocampo told the U.N. Security Council that he is also investigating allegations of war crimes, and at a press conference later he didn’t rule out future cases stemming from rebel or NATO attacks.

He said the evidence his office has collected on alleged crimes against humanity establishes “reasonable grounds” to believe that widespread and systematic attacks are being committed against civilians by Moammar Gadhafi’s security forces.

The motion, filed on behalf of 26 states, urges the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta to uphold a Florida federal judge’s ruling that the overhaul’s core requirement is unconstitutional. The judge, U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson, said Congress cannot require nearly all Americans to carry health insurance.

Allowing the law to go forward, the states argued in the 69-page filing, would set a troubling precedent that “would imperil individual liberty, render Congress’s other enumerated powers superfluous, and allow Congress to usurp the general police power reserved to the states.”

In a letter to members of the House Commerce Committee released Wednesday, Kazuo Hirai, chairman of Sony Computer Entertainment America LLC, defended the company’s handling of the breach.

Sony first disclosed the attack last week and said it may have compromised credit card data, email addresses and other personal information from 77 million user accounts. On Monday, Sony said data from an additional 24.6 million online gaming accounts also may have been stolen.

Those allegations appear in a federal lawsuit alleging that the firm, Atlanta-based Aaron’s Inc., loaded computers with spyware to track renters’ keystrokes, make screenshots and even take webcam images of them using the devices at home. The suit filed by a Wyoming couple Tuesday raises anew questions of how invasive custodians of technology should be in protecting their equipment.

Computer privacy experts said Aaron’s, a major furniture rental chain, has the right to equip its computers with software it can use to shut off the devices remotely if customers stop paying their bills, but they must be told if they’re being monitored.

William Melchert-Dinkel was convicted of two counts of aiding suicide under a rarely used Minnesota law. Prosecutors said he posed online as a suicidal nurse and encouraged a Canadian woman and a British man to commit suicide.

Judge Thomas Neuville’s sentence was less than the maximum 15 years Melchert-Dinkel could have gotten for each count. Neuville officially sentenced Melchert-Dinkel to six-and-a-half years in prison – but stayed execution of that sentence, meaning Melchert-Dinkel will go to prison only if he violates terms of his probation, which includes the jail time. He’ll be on probation for 15 years.

Fort Sill Apache Tribal Chairman Jeff Houser sent a letter to the president Tuesday, saying equating the legendary Apache warrior to a “mass murderer and cowardly terrorist” was painful and offensive to all Native Americans.

The letter was posted Wednesday morning on the Oklahoma tribe’s website.

The law, written to protect people who seek or provide abortions, was revived after Obama took office and in the wake of the 2009 slaying of Kansas abortion provider George Tiller, who was shot to death moments before Sunday services were to begin at his Wichita church.

Since Obama’s inauguration, federal lawsuits have been filed against a woman who blocked a car from entering a clinic in West Palm Beach, Fla.; a Texas man who threw his body across the door of a patient waiting area in San Antonio; and a Pennsylvania man who posted on the Internet the names and addresses of abortion providers and extolled his readers to kill them.

The starving girls in this hospital ward include a 21-month-old with arms and legs the size of twigs and an emaciated 1-year-old with huge, vacant eyes. Without urgent medical care, most will not live to see their next birthday.

They point to a painful reality revealed in India’s most recent census: Despite a booming economy and big cities full of luxury cars and glittering malls, the country is failing its girls.

The switches, known as transistors, have typically been flat. By adding a third dimension – “fins” that jut up from the base – Intel will be able to make the transistors and chips smaller. Think of how skyscrapers address the need for more office space when land is scarce.

The company said the new structure will let chips run on less power. That gives Intel its best shot yet at cracking the growing markets for chips used in smartphones and tablet computers. Intel has been weak there because its current chips use too much power.

So much for those old stats. Now, he’s Mr. No-Hitter.

The struggling Minnesota lefty pitched the first no-hitter in the majors this season, hanging on Tuesday night for a most unlikely gem and a 1-0 win over Chicago White Sox.

Public hunts for hundreds of wolves already are planned this fall in Idaho and Montana.

Conservationists have hailed the animal’s recovery from near extinction last century as a landmark achievement – one that should be extended to the Pacific Northwest and New England.

Republicans claim this stark landscape is the nation’s best hope for a national nuclear waste dump.

But with Democrats running the White House and Senate, the Yucca Mountain nuclear site has been shuttered with no chance of reopening.

The industry considers a bill before the Legislature to be another “nanny state” assault on their business, and the proposal comes at the height of the indoor tanning season for teens: prom time.

The American Cancer Society has named the bill as one of its top priorities for the legislative session.

Such vocabulary shifts will help elevate the discourse about other species and, in turn, improve our treatment of them, according to the new Journal on Animal Ethics.

The foreword in the peer-reviewed academic publication, which was first published last month, even suggests getting rid of terms like “critters,” “beasts” and “wild animals,” along with phrases such as “drunk as a skunk” and “eat like a pig.”

U.S. District Judge Lance Africk ruled that Travis McCabe deserves a second trial because the newly discovered evidence – a different copy of the report that McCabe is accused of doctoring – surfaced after his December 2010 convictions. Africk, who threw out those convictions Wednesday, said he believes the jury probably would have acquitted McCabe if it had been presented with the newly discovered narrative report.

“As this court instructed the jury prior to its deliberations, there are no winners or losers here. Only justice prevails,” Africk wrote.

Senators said the current law is only months old and that schools have just put policies into place to handle bullying. Senators agreed the law needs further study before any changes are made.

Many states have been moving in this direction of extending school involvement to off-campus bullying, but some New Hampshire lawmakers wanted to restrict the boundaries to school grounds. The House passed a bill in March that would remove the off-campus provision and make other changes. The Senate’s rejection leaves the measure’s future in doubt.

The four-passenger, two-door 500, which is the first Fiat to be sold by the automaker in this country since 1983, is rated at 30 miles per gallon in city driving and 38 mpg on the highway with standard manual transmission.

This is a higher rating than Toyota’s littlest car here, the Yaris, as well as any Mini Cooper model, which also are subcompacts. The 500 ties the subcompact 2011 Ford Fiesta, fitted with optional special fuel economy package, in combined city/highway mileage of 33 mpg.

The substitution would allow the U.S. to cut back on its oil use, however slightly, and give poultry producers another market for the more than 3 billion pounds of leftover chicken feathers they have each year, the developers and others said. The challenge, they added, is coming up with products that manufacturers and consumers want at a price that’s right.

“What works in the lab and what works commercially are two different things,” said Sonny Meyerhoeffer, whose company began selling flower pots made partially from feathers last fall.

The lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan seeks to recover hundreds of millions of dollars in insurance claims that the government has had to pay when homeowners defaulted on their mortgages. The lawsuit also asked for punitive damages. The government said the bank made substantial profits between 2007 and 2009 from the resale of the risky mortgages, leaving the government to foot the bill for loans that defaulted. The mortgage insurance is issued by the Federal Housing Administration.

The lawsuit said the bank carried out the fraud through its subsidiary, MortgageIT, which employed more than 2,000 people at branches in all 50 states. Deutsche acquired MortgageIT in 2007.

One email from someone in the sheriff’s office that was included in a flurry of lawyers’ filings late last week had an attachment with a joke and image that reinforced stereotypes of drinking by Mexicans. Several officers also distributed an email making fun of Mexican accents, while another officer circulated a photo of a mock driver’s license for a fictional state called “Mexifornia” with a photo depicting stereotypical Mexican facial features.

Lawyers for the handful of Latinos who filed the lawsuit also zeroed in on Arpaio in the court filings, saying he passed along letters from people calling for racial profiling to some of his top managers, including an official in charge of selecting the location of his immigration patrols.

However, fighting continued in the Al-Ghiran and Zawiat al-Mahjub areas near the airport, which rebels have been trying to capture from Kadhafi forces based there.

In their eastern stronghold of Benghazi, the rebels warned that they would soon run out of funds unless Western governments make them a $3 billion loan secured on frozen Kadhafi regime assets.

In a landmark vote likely to reshape the Canadian political landscape, Harper won re-election Monday at the head of a long-coveted majority wiping out the party’s previous back-to-back minority governments.

After routing his long-time Liberal rivals, Harper dismissed fears he might track the country, one of the world’s leading economies, to the far right.

Leon Panetta’s comments were the most direct yet from President Barack Obama’s administration since bin Laden was killed in a US raid on Sunday, laying bare the chasm of suspicion between the United States and nuclear-armed Pakistan, a key “war-on-terror” ally.

“It was decided that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardize the mission,” the CIA director told Time magazine. “They might alert the targets,” he added in an unusually blunt and damning remark.

Hackers breached the Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) network as well as the PlayStation Network and the Qriocity streaming music service, according to the Japanese consumer electronics giant.

“We had previously believed that Sony Online Entertainment customer data had not been obtained in the cyber-attacks on the company,” it said in an online update.

According to the lawsuit, Deutsche Bank and its MortgageIT Inc unit misled the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, into believing their mortgages qualified for federal insurance, knowing they could make “substantial profits” when the loans were later sold.

In fact, the government said, the loan quality was so poor that nearly one in three mortgages defaulted, a percentage elevated by Deutsche Bank’s “dysfunctional” quality control.

Michael Meister, deputy parliamentary leader of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, said he saw logic in extending the repayment schedule for the 110 billion euros of loans granted to Greece on May 2, 2010.

His intervention followed European Central Bank policymaker Nout Wellink, who said on Monday he was open to the idea of extending maturities on all Greek debt, becoming the first senior ECB official to admit the possibility of a restructuring publicly.

GM and Ford Motor Co showed much faster growth rates than Toyota and other Japanese brands, in an early sign that supply disruptions as a result of Japan’s March 11 earthquake are hitting Japanese manufacturers hardest.

“An American resurgence seems to be occurring,” said Edmunds.com senior analyst Michelle Krebs.

The National Weather Service said the river gauge at Cairo, Illinois where the Mississippi and Ohio rivers meet, showed water levels had dropped a foot since 10 p.m. last night, when the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers blasted a hole in the protective embankment downriver from the historic town.

“The plan performed as expected,” Jim Pogue, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spokesman, said in a telephone interview.

Harper, in his Western Canadian home base of Calgary on the morning after his Conservatives won big in the federal election, singled out the Western-based oil industry as being a beneficiary of his party’s pro-business agenda, which will also include corporate tax cuts and deficit reduction. Investors greeted the result with relief.

“There were a lot of policies being quoted by the other parties, whether it’s on West Coast transportation or the energy sector, that simply did not reflect the needs and concerns of this part of the country,” he told reporters.

The death of the al Qaeda leader in Monday’s U.S. raid on his compound in Abbottabad, a military garrison town 38 miles from the capital Islamabad, has led some U.S. lawmakers to demand a review of U.S. aid to nuclear-armed Pakistan.

“They (Pakistani officials) are expressing as great a surprise as we had when we first learned about this compound, so there is no indication at this point that the people we have talked to were aware of this, but we need to dig deeper into this,” White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan said in an interview with National Public Radio.

Michael Meister, deputy parliamentary leader of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, said he saw logic in extending the repayment schedule for the 110 billion euros of loans granted to Greece on May 2, 2010.

His intervention followed European Central Bank policymaker Nout Wellink, who said on Monday he was open to the idea of extending maturities on all Greek debt, becoming the first senior ECB official to admit the possibility of a restructuring publicly.

But Duan, based in the southwest Chinese city of Chengdu, is working on an audacious project described as a “man-made sun”. He hopes it will eventually create almost unlimited supplies of cheap and clean energy.

Duan is no maverick either, but a pioneer in one of the many expeditions that China has launched to map out its nuclear energy options in the future.

Officials from the government, Tokyo Electric, and creditor banks have been scrambling to craft a scheme that would allow the utility to cope with the bill of compensating those displaced by the crisis at its Fukushima Daiichi plant, while continuing to operate as a private firm.

The draft government plan reported by the Asahi newspaper could mark a significant development in those efforts because it puts a ballpark figure on the total cost at 4 trillion yen ($49.2 billion) and suggests a cap on Tokyo Electric’s burden.

Ali Tarhouni, head of the rebel national council’s finance committee, said Tuesday he expected France, Italy and the United States to extend credit secured against frozen Libyan state assets. Money should arrive in a week to ten days.

“I need about $2-3 billion and we are hoping to get most or all of this,” Tarhouni told reporters in the eastern rebel stronghold of Benghazi.

Nasdaq and ICE said on Monday that they will launch a tender offer for NYSE’s shares later this month. The move comes after NYSE’s board twice rejected the $11 billion unsolicited offer in favor of its existing $10.2 billion deal with Deutsche Boerse.

Nasdaq and ICE’s move to go hostile could force NYSE to the negotiating table or to fight back with defensive measures if shareholders step up pressure. It could also pressure Deutsche Boerse into sweetening its deal.

Some 410 million Swiss francs traced to former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and 60 million Swiss francs linked to former Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali have also been identified, Foreign Ministry spokesman Lars Knuchel said.

“In the case of Libya, it was 360 million Swiss francs,” Knuchel told Reuters. “These amounts are frozen in Switzerland following blocking orders by the Swiss government related to potentially illegal assets in Switzerland.”

The study by the international Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, or AMAP, is one of the most comprehensive updates on climate change in the Arctic, and builds on a similar assessment in 2005.

The full report will be delivered to foreign ministers of the eight Arctic nations next week, but an executive summary including the key findings was obtained by The Associated Press on Tuesday.

But the demolition project did nothing to ease the risk of more trouble downstream, where the mighty river is expected to rise to its highest levels since the 1920s in some parts of Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana. Authorities were considering using techniques similar to the Missouri project to divert on oncoming rush of water.

By Tuesday, sunny skies and dry conditions gave residents and government officials their clearest view of the inundation triggered after the Army Corps of Engineers blew a massive hold in the Birds Point levee late Monday.

Along with the information about the growing influence of older adults, preliminary census estimates also show a decline in the number of married couples with children, slight growth in household size and a rapid rise in the number of Mexicans.

The findings, based on the latest publicly available government data, offer a preview of trends that will be detailed in the next round of 2010 census results being released this month that focus on age, household relationships and racial subgroups.

The White House said it was considering whether to release photos that were taken of bin Laden after he was killed but was concerned that the photos were “gruesome” and could be inflammatory.

Other details that emerged on Tuesday, according to U.S. officials: One of bin Laden’s wives tried to rush the commandos and was shot in the leg. High temperatures caused a lumbering helicopter carrying the raiders to make a hard landing. And as Navy SEALs swept through the compound, they handcuffed those they encountered with plastic zip ties and pressed on in pursuit of their target, code-named Geronimo.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of a Wyoming couple who said they learned about the PC Rental Agent “device and/or software” inside the computer they rented last year when an Aaron’s Inc. store manager in Casper came to their home on Dec. 22.

The manager tried to repossess the computer because he mistakenly believed the couple hadn’t finished paying for it, the couple said. Brian Byrd, 26, said the manager showed him a picture of Byrd using the computer – taken by the computer’s webcam. The image was shot with the help of spying software, which the lawsuit contends is made by North East, Pa.-based Designerware LLC and is installed on all Aaron’s rental computers.

They report a sharp escalation in arbitrary arrests and unexplained disappearances – including people being plucked from their homes and offices in the middle of the day. One prominent activist in an upscale Damascus neighborhood was reportedly bundled into a car after being beaten by security officers.

“Syrian cities have witnessed in the past few days an insane escalation by authorities who are arresting anyone with the potential to stage protests and demonstrations,” Ammar Qurabi, who heads the National Organization for Human Rights in Syria, told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

Monday’s election marks a change in the country’s political landscape with opposition Liberals and Quebec separatists suffering a punishing defeat.

Harper said the Conservatives won their mandate because of the way they’ve governed so far and sought to allay fears he would implement a hidden right wing agenda.

A boxy minivan made by Nissan will be the next iconic yellow cab in New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced Tuesday.

The model, selected from among three finalists in a city competition, is designed so that it could eventually be updated with an electric engine. The city is exploring the possibility of ultimately replacing the city’s entire fleet of more than 13,000 taxis with vehicles powered by electricity.

The lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan seeks to recover hundreds of millions of dollars in insurance claims that the government has had to pay when homeowners defaulted on their mortgages. The lawsuit also asked for punitive damages. The government said the bank made substantial profits between 2007 and 2009 from the resale of the risky mortgages, leaving the government to foot the bill for loans that defaulted. The mortgage insurance is issued by the Federal Housing Administration.

The lawsuit said the bank carried out the fraud through its subsidiary, MortgageIT, which employed more than 2,000 people at branches in all 50 states. Deutsche acquired MortgageIT in 2007.

Traian Basescu announced that Bucharest had agreed to build the interceptor site at the Deveselu former air base near the Bulgarian border, in a remote agricultural region. Romania already had agreed to host the interceptors, but the location had not been decided. The president, a staunch ally of the U.S., said it would give Romania “the highest security level in its history.”

The announcement prompted a strong complaint from Russia, which sees European missile defense as a potential encroachment.

A bill providing authority for Federal Aviation Administration programs that the House passed in March contains an amendment sponsored by Rep. Bill Shuster, R-Pa. It would change the way the FAA goes about making regulations, including requiring an analysis of the effect proposed rules may have on the economy, private markets, productivity, employment and competitiveness.

The FAA would also be required to write separate safety rules for different segments of the airline industry – passenger airlines, cargo carriers, charters and others – even though the agency’s oft-stated goal is to have “one level of safety” across the aviation industry.

The often sad family history behind “the greatest show on Earth” is poised to go on trial May 9 before U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle in a Washington courtroom. Karen Feld filed a $110 million suit against her younger brother, Kenneth, for assault when they came together in the Jewish rite of sitting shiva for their dead aunt.

The suit filed by 63-year-old Karen Feld says her 62-year-old brother long wanted to harm her and control her life because he feared she would reveal facts about their father and family that could tarnish the image of the family business. Irvin Feld created Feld Entertainment, which Kenneth Feld now runs and bills as the world’s largest source of live family entertainment, including the circus, Disney on Ice, drag racing and monster truck shows.

But it was unclear how far their arguments would go, given the previous failed lawsuits on the issue and concern from the court about whether the latest claim was filed too late to be considered.

Obama’s production of the vital record was aimed at quashing any lingering doubt among critics who contend he shouldn’t have been elected because he couldn’t prove he was a citizen – a prerequisite for the nation’s highest office.

The company hopes to see results from a $3.5 billion investment into Arctic Ocean drilling that has been thwarted in recent years by court challenges or inability to obtain federal permits.

“Maybe four times is a charm,” said Pete Slaiby, Shell Alaska vice president, on Monday. “This is our fourth Beaufort Sea exploration plan that has gone down the pike. And next week it will be the second Chukchi exploration plan. We feel that we’ve got pretty good and robust plans.”