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.”

Former Swiss banker Rudolf Elmer, who worked for eight years in the Cayman Islands, a renowned offshore tax haven in the Caribbean, personally gave Assange two CDs of data at a London press conference.

Elmer said he wanted the world to know the truth about money concealed in offshore accounts and the systems in place to keep it secret.

Human rights groups called for Duvalier, known as “Baby Doc,” to face trial, but the justice system is in tatters after last year’s earthquake and most Haitians are too young to remember his rapacious 1971-1986 rule.

“Duvalier’s return to Haiti should be for one purpose only: to face justice,” said Jose Miguel Vivanco, Americas director of Human Rights Watch.

Returning to his homeland Sunday for the first time after 25 years in the political wilderness, most of them spent in exile in France, Duvalier told reporters at the airport, simply: “I’ve come to help.”

The sudden re-emergence of Duvalier, 59, only added to the intrigue in earthquake-ravaged Haiti, as efforts to find a successor to President Rene Preval have fallen into disarray.

Prosecutor Daniel Bellemare submitted his long-awaited indictment under wraps, but speculation was rife that it names the Hezbollah militant group in connection with the massive car bombing that killed Hariri and 22 others on the Beirut seafront six years ago.

“The prosecutor of the tribunal has submitted an indictment and supporting materials to the pre-trial judge,” the UN-backed tribunal (STL) said in a statement from Leidschendam, near The Hague, where it is based for security reasons.

“We have decided to free all the people imprisoned for their ideas, their beliefs or for having expressed dissenting opinions,” Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi told reporters in the capital Tunis, adding: “We announce total freedom of information.”

The new authority also put a cost to weeks of turmoil that forced president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to flee Friday after 23 years in power, saying 78 people had been killed and the economy had lost 1.6 billion euros (2.2 billion dollars).

“The army has launched an assault on the palace in Carthage, where elements of the presidential guard have taken refuge,” the senior source told AFP on condition of anonymity, as a witness reported heavy gunfire in the area.

Security forces also shot dead two gunmen who were hiding in a building near the interior ministry in the centre of Tunis and exchanged fire with some other gunmen near the headquarters of the main opposition party, the PDP.

The government, with Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi at its helm, also abolished the information ministry and lifted a ban on the country’s main human rights group, the Tunisian League for Human Rights.

The government includes three members of the opposition and several key ministers from the cabinet of disgraced Ben Ali, who fled to Saudi Arabia Friday after 23 years of iron-fisted rule, including Foreign Minister Kamal Morjane.

Hundreds of people rallied in Tunis and there were similar protests in Sidi Bouzid and Regueb in central Tunisia — two towns at the heart of the movement that forced Ben Ali to resign and flee on Friday after 23 years in power.

“With our blood and our soul we are ready to sacrifice ourselves for the martyrs,” the protesters in Tunis chanted, referring to the dozens of people reported killed in the protests against Ben Ali.

“Our challenge is transformation. We need a global clean energy revolution — a revolution that makes energy available and affordable for all,” he told participants in the fourth edition of the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi.

“This is essential for minimising climate risks, for reducing poverty and improving global health, for empowering women and meeting the Millennium Development Goals, for global economic growth, peace and security, and the health of the planet,” he said in his keynote speech.

Jobs, 55, who underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer in 2004 and a liver transplant in 2009, said he would continue as chief executive “and be involved in major strategic decisions for the company.”

Wall Street was closed for a holiday but the surprise announcement that the iconic technology executive was facing renewed health issues sent Apple shares tumbling in Frankfurt, where they lost 6.57 percent to 243.10 euros.

Eurozone finance ministers entered a two-day monthly meeting in Brussels under pressure to find common ground on the timing, size and scope of an eventual overhaul of the 750-billion-euro ($1.0 trillion) financial safety net.

But Germany, the fund’s main guarantor, went into the talks insisting there was no reason to rush, despite calls from European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso for EU leaders to act by their next summit on February 4.

The researchers will try to revive the species by obtaining tissue this summer from the carcass of a mammoth preserved in a Russian research laboratory, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported.

“Preparations to realise this goal have been made,” Akira Iritani, leader of the team and a professor emeritus of Kyoto University, told the mass-circulation daily.

Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi also said the government was committed to releasing all political prisoners and would investigate anyone with great wealth or suspected of corruption.

Interior Minister Ahmed Friaa told state television at least 78 people had been killed in the unrest, and the cost so far in damage and lost business was 3 billion dinars ($2 billion).

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.

In Cairo, a man set himself ablaze on Monday near parliament in a protest against poor living conditions.

In Algeria, where riots over the last few weeks have broken out in parallel to the unrest in Tunisia, newspapers gave their first reports on Sunday and Monday of at least four men who set themselves on fire in provincial towns in the last five days.

From Atlantic coast to Gulf shores, live images on Arab satellite channels of a popular uprising unseating President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali after 25 years in power must have rattled Arab leaders, many with similarly repressive records.

Analysts, opposition figures and ordinary people say the Tunisian revolt may prove contagious. Like Tunisians, many Arabs are frustrated by soaring prices, poverty, high unemployment, a bulging population and systems of rule that ignore their voices.

Indeed, in a sign that the future of the U.S. currency continues to concern the most senior levels of the Chinese government, he said the dollar-based international currency system is a “product of the past”.

Overall though, the president, who will visit Washington this week, struck an upbeat tone about ties with the United States in a rare written interview with two U.S. newspapers, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.

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.

“In light of this intense media coverage, Goldman Sachs has decided to proceed only with the offer to investors outside the U.S.,” the company said in a statement provided to Reuters.

The company disclosed the news early on a U.S. holiday when U.S. markets were closed and did not specify why or for how long its visionary leader would be absent. Jobs’ latest leave comes nearly two years to the date after he took a six-month break to undergo a liver transplant.

“At my request, the board of directors has granted me a medical leave of absence so I can focus on my health,” Jobs, 55, wrote in an email to staff published on a regulatory newswire. “I love Apple so much and hope to be back as soon as I can.”

Analysts said the unexpected arrival in Port-au-Prince on Sunday of “Baby Doc” Duvalier, who had fled his homeland in 1986 to escape a popular revolt, could only complicate the climate of nervous uncertainty in earthquake-battered Haiti.

Tensions in the impoverished nation are running high following chaotic and inconclusive November 28 elections.

Growing realization that a deal to widen the bailout fund was not imminent caused the euro to retreat on Monday from a one-month high reached after successful debt auctions by Portugal and Spain last week.

Dutch Finance Minister Jan Kees de Jager said it was vital that euro zone governments under pressure forge ahead with structural economic reforms and deficit-cutting to make debt levels sustainable.

Early results from last week’s plebiscite suggest people from Sudan’s oil-producing south voted overwhelmingly to split away from the north after decades of civil war.

Observers from the Carter Center and the European Union both said the vote had been credible, an endorsement that moved the region a step closer to independence.

The four permits, the first to be issued since 2000 in the environmentally sensitive Great Australian Bight off South Australia state, cleared the way for BP to explore waters up to 4,600 meters deep in some areas.

“If BP had not have accepted those conditions, then I would not be doing this media conference and they would not have been given the permits,” Resources Minister Martin Ferguson told journalists at parliament in Canberra.

“There’s no bigger step we can take to preserve the American dream and promote job creation, particularly in the manufacturing sector … than to confront China’s manipulation of its currency,” Democratic Senator Charles Schumer said.

The message to Hu is “we are fed up with your government’s intransigence on currency manipulation. If you refuse to play by the same rules, we will force you to do so,” Schumer said in a conference call on a proposed bill to prod China to raise the value of its yuan currency.

Analysts said the deal with state-controlled Rosneft opened up massive reserves in the arctic, a region they said was believed to contain one fifth of the world’s undiscovered oil.

It also showed that BP’s talent for cutting innovative deals survives after last year’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill raised questions about the company’s tolerance of risk.

His Foreign Minister Micheal Martin said he would not support Cowen in the Tuesday poll in a last-ditch effort to force him out before an election that is expected to go badly wrong for Fianna Fail.

Analysts said Cowen, who knew Martin would go public with his dissent, likely had enough support within the parliamentary party to secure his tenure until the election, which is expected to take place in March.

Demonstrators carrying signs reading “GET OUT! demanded that the former ruling party be banished altogether – a sign more troubles lie ahead for the new unity government as security forces struggle to contain violent reprisals, shootings and lootings three days after the country’s longtime president fled under pressure from the streets.

“We’re afraid that the president has left, but the powers-that-be remain,” said Hylel Belhassen, a 51-year-old insurance salesman. Even before the new government was announced Monday, security forces fired tear gas to repel demonstrators who see the change of power as Tunisia’s first real chance at democracy.

Duvalier met with allies inside the hotel in the hills above downtown Port-au-Prince and spoke publicly only through emissaries, who gave vague explanations for his sudden and mysterious appearance – nearly 25 years after he was forced into exile by a popular uprising against his brutal regime.

Henry Robert Sterlin, a former ambassador who said he was speaking on behalf of Duvalier, portrayed the 59-year-old former “president for life,” as merely a concerned elder statesmen who wanted to see the effects of the devastating Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake on his homeland.

Attorney General Eric Holder, speaking at King’s former church in Atlanta, praised him as “our nation’s greatest drum major of peace” and said the Jan. 8 bloodshed was a call to recommit to King’s values of nonviolence, tolerance, compassion and justice.

“Last week a senseless rampage in Tucson reminded us that more than 40 years after Dr. King’s own tragic death, our struggle to eradicate violence and to promote peace goes on,” Holder said.

Swiss banking giant UBS AG said Monday it is revising its 44-page dress code telling its Swiss staff how to present themselves, which generated worldwide ridicule for its micromanagement of their dressing and dining habits.

The code instructs employees on everything from their breath – no garlic or onions, please – to their underwear, which should be skin-colored.

The New York Jets and Green Bay Packers sure like that scenario, and it’s impossible to ignore them after this weekend’s divisional playoff games.

The Jets (13-5), who have never won more games in their half-century of existence, went into New England and handed the league’s top regular-season team a 28-21 defeat Sunday. They now have knocked off Peyton Manning’s Colts and Tom Brady’s Patriots in successive weeks.

A year after Obama’s visit to China, the envisioned partnership has largely evaporated. The U.S. has filed a complaint at the World Trade Organization against China’s policies favoring its producers of wind and solar equipment. Cooperation in climate change talks has been rare.

On the eve of Hu’s U.S. visit, the conflict is emblematic of a range of areas, from climate to technology to reducing strains in the the global economy, where Beijing sees its interests as very different from Washington even as they pledge cooperation.

His doctor told him it was nothing, but when he finally had it removed, he learned he had melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer.

He beat the disease, but he never got over the sense of frustration he felt as he clawed his way through the maze of treatment options, clinical trials and research in search of a way to survive.

Police arrested dozens of people, including the top presidential security chief, as tensions appeared to mount between Tunisians buoyant over Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s departure and loyalists in danger of losing major perks.

There were cheers and smiles in much of Tunis, the capital, as residents tore down the massive portraits of Ben Ali, some of them several stories high, that hung from lampposts and billboards and were omnipresent during his 23-year reign.

Yet that is no guarantee that the ex-cop, or many others like him, will qualify for a substantial share of the $2.78 billion Congress has set to compensate people who fell ill after being exposed to ground zero toxins.

Like thousands of other rescue and recovery workers, Volpe suffers from an ailment that is not expressly covered by the law. Only a few diseases were singled out by name in the act, including asthma, certain types of lung disease and a handful of other respiratory ailments. They were included because research has suggested there is a link between those illnesses and the tons of caustic dust that blanketed lower Manhattan after the twin towers collapsed.

“On our way here we saw some things I had never anticipated to see,” he wrote his father in June 1944. “After we passed Washington there was no discrimination at all. The white people here are very nice. We go to any place we want to and sit any where we want to.”

The slain civil rights leader, whose birthday is observed Monday as a federal holiday, spent that summer working in a tobacco field in the Hartford suburb of Simsbury. That experience would influence his decision to become a minister and heighten his resentment of segregation.

The incidents, while isolated, reflect the growing despair among the public of many Arab regimes resisting reform. They are deeply symbolic means of protest in a region that has little or no tolerance for dissent.

It was the self-immolation of a 26-year-old unemployed man in Tunisia last month that sparked the tidal wave of protests that toppled President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali last week.

Symbolism and protocol are very important to the Chinese and the opulence of Wednesday’s black-tie affair with President Barack Obama should be plenty satisfying for Hu, a 67-year-old hydroelectric engineer who has ruled the country since 2002. That could help relations between the leaders of the world’s two largest economies.

A grand soiree is in the works, but big questions remain. Will a celebrity chef do the cooking? Will first lady Michelle Obama’s gown have an Oriental flair? Will the Obamas try to turn Hu on to American pop culture with the entertainment? The White House has yet to release any details.

The shooting rampage that wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, a former legislative colleague, has done nothing to slow down the Legislature.

Gun rights bills were introduced in the days after the shootings last week, and more proposals are to come.

But they could run into resistance from leaders of their own party. Congress may be less likely to pass legislation on the issue than it had been last year, when both chambers were under Democratic control. A bill to give U.S. companies a means of challenging what they view as an unfair export subsidy sailed through the House, but died in the Senate.

Three Democratic senators – Charles Schumer of New York, Debbie Stabenow of Michigan and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania – plan to introduce legislation this week to address the currency issue.

Now that they’re freshmen in a GOP-run House, the political movement’s candidates are running smack into the traditions, partisan divisions and powerful competing interests that make it so hard to redirect the government.

Some tea party activists – part of a loose-knit, libertarian-tinged network advocating small government and less federal spending – already are dismayed to see their new lawmakers plunge into familiar patterns of raising political cash, hiring former lobbyists and stopping short of the often-heard vow to “change the way Washington works.”

About $13 million has gone to more than 2,400 farmers in 43 states to help pay for the low-tech tunnels that look like a cross between Quonset huts and conventional greenhouses. The structures, also known as hoop houses, have been particularly beneficial in the north, where they allow farmers to plant as much as four weeks early and keep growing later in the fall.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture touts the tunnels as environmentally friendly and a way to help meet the demand for local and sustainable produce. Experts say high tunnels employ efficient drip irrigation systems and reduce pest problems, diseases and fertilizer costs.

The letter to Homeland Security was sent late Friday by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. It represents an early move by House Republicans who have vowed to launch numerous probes of President Barack Obama’s administration, ranging from its implementation of the new health care law to rules curbing air pollution to spending in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Associated Press reported in July that for at least a year, Homeland Security had sidetracked hundreds of requests for federal records to top political advisers to the department’s secretary, Janet Napolitano. The political appointees wanted information about those requesting the materials, and in some cases the release of documents considered politically sensitive was delayed, according to numerous e-mails that were obtained by the AP.

A few days later, a blood test revealed a possible reason for the wreck: Bisard’s blood-alcohol level was still more than twice the legal limit hours after the crash. The local prosecutor filed charges, only to drop them a few weeks later, saying the blood test hadn’t been properly done and couldn’t be used in court.

Officers and emergency medical personnel at the scene said they had no reason to suspect Bisard had been drinking that morning, and no breath test had been done. The case, which rocked Indianapolis and led to emotional allegations of a cover-up, was revived Wednesday when a new prosecutor re-filed drunken driving charges. The question for families and victims now is whether the charges will stick despite what police admit was a bungled investigation.

Brett Reese is airing the editorial four times daily – up from two – on his station KELS-FM 104.7. He is unapologetic that portions of the editorial that call King a “plastic god,” a “sexual degenerate,” and “an America hating communist” appear verbatim on a website with links to a white supremacist group.

“Facts are facts, truth is truth,” he said, adding that he might pre-empt other programing to air the editorial round the clock. The 40-year-old former carpenter claims he helped build houses for Habitat for Humanity in the Mississippi Delta and once dated an African American woman. He insists he’s not racist.

That means Congress soon will have to lift the legal debt limit to give the nearly maxed-out government an even higher credit limit or dramatically cut spending to stay within the current cap. Either way, a fight is ahead on Capitol Hill, inflamed by the passions of tea party activists and deficit hawks.

Already, both sides are blaming each other for an approaching economic train wreck as Washington wrestles over how to keep the government in business and avoid default on global financial obligations.

Feisal Abdul Rauf began his tour to inspire “interfaith understanding” in Detroit, saying Islam should be seen as an American religion “not an alien religion.” The Detroit area is home to the largest Muslim population in North America.

The imam told about 400 people at a diversity forum sponsored by the Council of Islamic Organizations of Michigan and the Islamic Society of North America that the backlash against Islam that arose from the New York City mosque plan was “triggered by a mix of race, religion and politics in America.”

Giving students and teachers more flexibility is an idea with bipartisan support. Yet the debate about the overdue renewal of the nation’s chief education law, known as No Child Left Behind, is complicated by political pressures from the coming 2012 presidential campaign and disputes over timing, money and scope of the update.

While education might offer the best chance for the White House to work with newly empowered Republicans, any consensus could fade in the pitiless political crosscurrents, leaving the debate for another day, perhaps even another presidency.

“Ugliness rears its head,” Martin Luther King III told a dinner gathering hosted by the King Center. “And that tragic incident in a real sense should say to us all that the work of Martin Luther King Jr. is nowhere near finished because he tried to teach us how to live in a nation and world without destroying either person or property.”

“And so the message of nonviolence resonates strongly, particularly this year after that great tragedy,” King said.