Afternoon Edition

The worst violence struck the western city of Ramadi, where 23 people were killed and 30 were wounded in co-ordinated bombings, blamed on Al-Qaeda amid collusion from the security forces, at the governor’s offices in the centre of Anbar’s provincial capital.

Governor Qassim Mohammed Abid was among the wounded, while senior security officials were also killed and injured. Around 20 cars were destroyed in the blasts.

The US soldier died from his wounds not long after the incident, NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said.

“An ISAF service member from the United States died following a shooting today in western Afghanistan,” ISAF said in a statement.

“We got married today in Ushuaia,” the windswept provincial capital, an exultant Alex Freyre told the Todos Noticias news channel in Buenos Aires by telephone Tuesday.

“It is a dream come true for us. We are completely moved, and so happy for what this means for all gays and lesbians in Argentina,” Freyre added.

Just hours later, state news agency IRNA reported that top opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi had fled the capital fearing for their lives.

“Two of the chiefs of the sedition left Tehran for the north of Iran after learning that the population was increasingly angry and demanding their punishment,” IRNA said.

Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he was “appalled and disappointed” by the execution of Akmal Shaikh, a 53-year-old father-of-three who according to supporters had bipolar disorder. His family expressed grief and asked for privacy.

China confirmed the execution and defended its use of capital punishment as a deterrent, saying evidence of Shaikh’s mental illness was “insufficient”. It said it hoped London would not “create new obstacles” to diplomatic ties.

Obama vowed to hold security agencies to account for gaping flaws, as it emerged that the 23-year-old Nigerian accused of trying to blow up a packed Northwest jet only recently left Yemen, a suspected haven for extremists.

“A systemic failure has occurred and I consider that totally unacceptable,” Obama said in a statement, breaking his Hawaii vacation for a second straight day to update Americans on the attack, claimed by Al-Qaeda.

The Conference Board said its consumer confidence index rose modestly for the second straight month in December, to 52.9 from an upwardly revised 50.6 in November.

The reading was a shade below the 53.0 expected by most analysts; the private research firm initially reported the November index at 49.5.

The blast sparked riots in Karachi, the financial capital, where angry mourners went on the rampage, throwing stones at ambulances, torching cars and shops and firing bullets into the air, sparking appeals for calm.

Pakistan had deployed tens of thousands of police and paramilitary forces, fearing sectarian clashes or militant attacks on Ashura processions, when Shiites whip themselves to mourn the seventh-century killing of Imam Hussein.

Those detained included aides to reformist ex-president Mohammad Khatami and opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, veteran dissident Ebrahim Yazdi and award-winning rights campaigner Emadeddin Baghi, reports said.

The security force raids are certain to further antagonise the opposition, which has defied the authorities to stage noisy protests at every opportunity since Ahmadinejad was returned to power in a disputed June presidential vote.

A force of 5,000 armed with batons and shields entered the camp in Huay Nam Khao village in northern Thailand before dawn to load the Hmong on to trucks, said Colonel Thana Charuvat, coordinator of the operation.

Thana said a total of 4,371 Hmong had all left the camp. “The operation finished in the late afternoon and those Hmong are all on their way back to Laos,” he said, adding that they all would have left Thai soil by Monday night.

Passengers in the United States and Europe found their flights during the already busy holiday season were subject to delay to allow time for increased searches and checks in the wake of the botched attack on Friday.

Amsterdam-Schiphol airport was investigating how a 23-year-old Nigerian with reported links to Al-Qaeda could have smuggled on board explosives that he allegedly tried to detonate as the flight from Amsterdam approached Detroit.

An angered US President Barack Obama has demanded a full accounting into what he denounced as systemic intelligence failures after the December 25 thwarted attack on a Northwest plane travelling from Amsterdam to Detroit.

Initial reports are due on his desk Thursday.

Guusje ter Horst told reporters that all available scanning machines at the city’s Schiphol Airport would be put into use next month.

“It has been decided to use body scanners at Schiphol for all flights to the United States,” she told a press conference.

Peter Moore, 36, had experienced an “unspeakable two and a half years of misery, fear and uncertainty,” Foreign Secretary David Miliband said, while lamenting the bodyguards’ deaths.

“Peter was set free by his captors this morning in Baghdad and delivered to the Iraqi authorities. He is now in the care of the British embassy in Baghdad,” he said.

The constitutional court ruled that too many exemptions to the tax on carbon dioxide emissions created inequalities and unfairly placed the burden of cutting down wasteful energy use on a minority of consumers.

Sarkozy had fiercely defended the measure in the face of strong public opposition, calling it a “revolutionary” approach in the fight against climate change and making it a pillar of his 2010 budget.

The Daily Telegraph, quoting unnamed sources, said police and security advisers fear the England team will be targeted by Pakistani militants and feel the safety of athletes cannot currently be guaranteed.

There is therefore “virtually no chance” of England sending a team, in what would be the first time that England has not competed in the 80-year history of the Games, to be held in New Delhi in October, said the paper. Related article: Australia ‘won’t join’ any pullout

Faux (false) gras is the ethical answer to the foodstuff which has been the bane of campaigners for decades for the way it’s produced: force-feeding ducks or geese to create engorged livers that yield the creamy pate.

Waitrose, House of Fraser and Tesco are among a growing number of major British retailers who are now refusing to stock real foie gras after protest campaigns.

The attacks underscored the tenaciousness of Iraq’s ongoing insurgency despite a steep drop in overall violence and reflected Iraq’s vulnerability as it prepares for national polls in March and local troops take over from U.S. forces.

U.S. forces flew Qassim Mohammed, governor of Anbar province west of the Iraqi capital, to Baghdad for treatment after he was wounded in the attacks outside the provincial government headquarters in Ramadi, Anbar’s provincial capital.

Iran’s police chief warned supporters of opposition leader Mirhossein Mousavi to expect harsh treatment if they joined illegal anti-government rallies, three days after eight protesters were killed in demonstrations.

Hundreds of thousands took part in the government-organized demonstrations, which state television broadcast live, chanting slogans against the opposition leaders — Mousavi and moderate defeated presidential candidate Mehdi Karoubi.

“My group claims responsibility for the Karachi attack and we will carry out more such attacks, within 10 days,” said Asmatullah Shaheen, one of the commanders of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or Taliban Movement of Pakistan, who spoke by telephone to a Reuters reporter in Peshawar.

The prospect of more violence comes at a tricky time for Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, who already faces political heat because corruption charges against some of his aides may be revived.

After graduating from high school more than 40 years ago, Hagan worked briefly at one of the local steel mills that dominated the local economy. In 1971, he became a locomotive engineer at railroad company CSX Corp, switching rail cars in every mill and yard in the area over the years.

The job afforded him a ground-level view of the slow-moving disaster that would tear out Youngstown’s heart over the next decade and a half — as it did many other towns in America’s Rust Belt.

The explosion occurred at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost province near the Afghan border with Pakistan.

State Department spokesman Ian Kelly confirmed that eight Americans died in the attack.

Also on Wednesday, a British hostage held for more than two years by militants was released safely in Baghdad and is now in the care of the British Embassy.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said in a statement in London that Peter Moore was released by his captors Wednesday morning and taken to Iraqi authorities.

That’s clearly worse than in 2006, the last time a similar poll was taken. The survey that year found that 58 percent of Americans felt the nation had suffered a bad year, and 39 percent considered it a good year.

Fewer than half as many people, 16 percent, said their family had a “very good year” in 2009 as said that in 2006.

Some wore white funeral shrouds to symbolize a willingness to die in defense of the ruling system. An ominous online threat in the name of a previously unknown group said suicide squads were ready to assassinate the opposition leaders should the judiciary fail to punish them within a week.

The display of popular support for the government and the stirring, violent rhetoric from the crowd appeared to be a genuine outpouring, though some supporters were bused in by the government. The rallies showed Iran’s rulers could forcefully take back control of the streets after opposition demonstrations Sunday that triggered the worst bloodshed since the height of the unrest over the summer.

Mike Leach, suspended this week by the university, is asking for a temporary restraining order that would allow him to coach the Red Raiders against Michigan State on Saturday.

In an affidavit included in the court filing Tuesday, Leach said he “would never intentionally harm or endanger a player” and that he has been “forced into this situation without being afforded any process.” He also said “absolutely” no evidence had been given to him that showed he had violated any university rules or standards.

Pound on the door at any hour – seriously, it’s OK to arrive at 4 in the morning – and the 67-year-old former auto worker will escort you through his discombobulating, floor-to-ceiling collection of photos, records, figurines, cardboard cutouts, candy wrappers, clocks and other random kitsch featuring the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

“I’d give my life right now if I could bring this guy back,” MacLeod says in his auctioneer’s staccato, his gray hair slicked back in a ’50s style.

Faced with huge budget shortfalls and little extra money to throw around, state lawmakers exercised their (inexpensive) power to clamp down on impolite, unhealthy and sometimes dangerous behaviors in 2009.

Even toy guns were targeted.

The inspiration for the district attorney on TV’s “Law & Order.” A taker-on of mobsters, misbehaving celebrities and corrupt CEOs. A Democratic powerbroker who grew up among Roosevelts and Kennedys and helped launch careers, including U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s.

A local prosecutor who used his office’s prominence to stretch the long arm of the law where he saw fit. A savvy, wry and indefatigable New York institution who happens to be 90.

Her cell phone chirps. Her desk phone bleats. She scribbles notes on a planner, spins in her chair, juggles requests about labs and drug regimens.

Rossouw is on the front lines of a new battle in the fight against HIV: The drugs that once worked so well are starting not to work. And now the resistance is showing up in sub-Saharan Africa, home to two-thirds of the world’s 33 million HIV cases.

Officials haven’t confirmed how the woman contracted the disease but are focusing on a drum circle gathering she attended Dec. 4 at the United Campus Ministry center in Durham shortly before becoming ill. Public health officials who learned of her diagnosis last week immediately began investigating, and earlier this week shut down the ministry center after anthrax spores were found on two drums.

Some health officials believe it’s the nation’s first case of gastrointestinal anthrax, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is unsure.

The reason: The Beverly Hills school board is preparing to boot out 10 percent of its students as it ends a decades-old practice of allowing out-of-district pupils to attend city schools on “opportunity permits.”

The move has upset many so-called permit parents – mostly middle-class families living in the tonier areas of Los Angeles who are loath to send their children to the beleaguered Los Angeles Unified School District, where more than a quarter of high-schoolers drop out.

U.S. Rep. Artur Davis, 42, wasted little time launching his campaign after Barack Obama’s presidential victory last year. The prospects seemed promising for the Harvard-educated lawyer, a moderate with proven appeal to white voters who will be running in a June Democratic primary where black voters could account for as much as half the turnout.

But a year in, Davis is finding that racial prejudice is not the biggest obstacle to presiding at the Capitol where Gov. George C. Wallace once proclaimed “segregation forever.”

“Yes,” the first-term Republican finally managed to utter, as if biting his tongue.

It may be fair, but the divorce decree ending his 23-year marriage to Dawn Gibbons – the first for a sitting governor in Nevada – is unlikely to undo all the political damage that motivated the former congressman to pay more alimony than he wanted and sell the ranch where he hoped to retire.

The so-called head cameras are the latest technology to come from TASER International, Inc., makers of the stun guns popular with law enforcement.

“It’s like the helmet cam you’ve seen on X Games,” said San Jose police officer William Pender, who demonstrated the camera on a recent afternoon.

The business model is unraveling at ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox and the local stations that carry the networks’ programming. Cable TV and the Web have fractured the audience for free TV and siphoned its ad dollars. The recession has squeezed advertising further, forcing broadcasters to accelerate their push for new revenue to pay for programming.

That will play out in living rooms across the country. The changes could mean higher cable or satellite TV bills, as the networks and local stations squeeze more fees from pay-TV providers such as Comcast and DirecTV for the right to show broadcast TV channels in their lineups. The networks might even ditch free broadcast signals in the next few years. Instead, they could operate as cable channels – a move that could spell the end of free TV as Americans have known it since the 1940s.

The boar gored Kremer in the knee with a razor-sharp tusk. The burly pig farmer shrugged it off, figuring: “You pour the blood out of your boot and go on.”

But Kremer’s red-hot leg ballooned to double its size. A strep infection spread, threatening his life and baffling doctors. Two months of multiple antibiotics did virtually nothing.

Confused? So were scores of passengers who flew Monday on one of the busiest travel days of the year. On some flights, passengers were told to keep their hands visible and not to listen to iPods. Even babies were frisked. But on other planes, security appeared no tighter than usual.

The Transportation Security Administration did little to explain the rules. And that inconsistency might well have been deliberate: What’s confusing to passengers is also confusing to potential terrorists.

Two Irish bishops resigned on Christmas Day, joining two others who had quit since a government report in November revealed how Dublin church leaders had shielded pedophile priests from the law.

Terence McKiernan, co-director of BishopAccountability.org, said the report detailed evidence that some accused priests in Ireland had been transferred to parishes in the United States.