Afternoon Edition

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, co-hosting the conference with UN chief Ban Ki-moon, pledged 1.15 billion dollars, saying the funds would go toward supporting Haiti’s plan “to strengthen agriculture, energy, health, and security and governance.”

The 27-member European Union and the European Commission said its members would provide a total 1.235 billion dollars, with France offering to disburse 180 million euros (243 million dollars) in 2010-2011 for food and the re-establishment of government authority.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said the latest attack in the North Caucasus region may be linked to the strikes on the Moscow metro by two female suicide bombers.

The leader of the Islamist “Emirate of the Caucasus” has claimed responsibility for the Moscow metro bombings, two Internet sites reported Wednesday, citing a video message and adding that he threatened more attacks.

The parliament voted by a slender majority — 127 out of 250 seats in the House — in favour of a text condemning the 1995 massacre of some 8,000 people and issuing an apology to the victims.

The resolution voted in the early hours of Wednesday however stopped short of using the word genocide, although it referred to an International Court of Justice decision which does use the term.

“This is really the first step in reviewing the past from the highest authority in the state, the parliament of Serbia,” said Ivan Vejvoda, the executive director of the Balkan Trust for Democracy.

“This resolution is a milestone in facing up to the recent past and has a decisive importance,” Vejvoda told AFP.

“The elections will not be postponed or cancelled. They will take place on time,” Beshir told a political rally in Damazin, the capital of the Blue Nile state, an AFP correspondent reported.

“Our partner (in the government), the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, agrees with us,” that the legislative, presidential and municipal elections should be held as planned April 11-13, Beshir added.

Driving the dirt road to the Karoo Array Telescope site, the FM radio searches in vain for a frequency it can catch, scanning the dial bottom to top and back again.

This very quiet corner of South Africa’s sparsely populated Northern Cape province seems an unlikely place to build such an instrument, but its silence is precisely what makes the Karoo an attractive site for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope project.

The finance minister had lambasted the banks on Tuesday for reckless behaviour that helped push the Ireland into one of its worst economic downturns and on Wednesday the extent of the damage was made abundantly clear.

Anglo Irish Bank, nationalised in early 2009 to save it from collapse, said it posted a net loss of 12.7 billion euros (17.2 billion dollars) in the 15 months to the end of December as its bad debts ballooned.

The president’s plan, part of a comprehensive energy strategy, would see new tracts of the Atlantic off the Virginia coast opened to exploration, and expand leases for prospecting in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Florida.

Scientific research off Alaska in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas will also be authorized, but four pending lease sales approved under a previous Bush administration plan in those waters will be cancelled.

Today, she is an essential part of Sarah’s Bag, a Lebanese designer label that blends style with social activism.

The brainchild and namesake of Lebanese entrepreneur Sarah Beydoun, Sarah’s Bag employs female convicts and underprivileged women from rural areas to create purses and accessories that have made their way into top fashion stores in London and Paris.

US companies shed 23,000 jobs in March, payrolls firm ADP said Wednesday in a report that was dramatically worse than market expectations.

The private sector accounts for more than two-thirds of US jobs and its ability to create new posts is a widely watched barometer of the recovery.

The promises, made under the Copenhagen Accord, are only a step towards wider action to tackle global warming, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) said in its official report on December’s world climate summit.

A total of 111 countries plus the European Union (EU) “have indicated their support for the Accord,” the UNFCCC said.

Pakistan’s fight against militants and a covert US drone war against Taliban and Al-Qaeda leaders is concentrated in Pakistan’s rugged northwest border area which Washington calls the most dangerous region on Earth.

In the Khyber tribal district that straddles NATO supply lines, Pakistan’s military said 80 to 100 militants armed with guns, rockets and suicide vehicles attacked a paramilitary camp, sparking clashes that killed six soldiers.

Afghan officials said the attack took place in a village near Lashkar Gah, capital of Helmand province, as farmers were receiving seeds being handed out to persuade Afghans to abandon the poppy crops that produce heroin.

A NATO official said at least 13 people were killed and dozens more wounded.

“What we envision today is wholesale national renewal,” United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said, opening a one-day conference of some 120 countries, international organizations and aid agencies.

Ban called for quick donations in response to a U.N. request for $1.4 billion in immediate humanitarian assistance for Haiti, which even before the January 12 earthquake was the poorest country in the western hemisphere.

But in an apparent setback to the court’s prosecution of top officials for perceived corruption, the Swiss prosecutor-general said any case against Zardari could not be reopened — because of his immunity.

The dramatic back and forth comes after the Supreme Court last year ordered the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) to revive corruption cases against Zardari, many senior government officials and thousands of political activists.

“What the secretary (of defense) has placed a moratorium on is going forward on discharges,” Army Secretary John McHugh told defense reporters.

The statement seemed to indicate that some Pentagon leaders had already shifted their stance, at least regarding private admissions by gay troops, although Congress has not yet formally repealed the law banning declared homosexuals.

A car packed with explosives blew up as police gave chase, and a bomber in a police uniform set off a second blast in a crowd of police who rushed to the scene, authorities said.

The coordinated attacks in the town of Kizlyar, in Dagestan region close to its border with Chechnya, were the latest outbreaks in a surge of violence in the Caucasus a decade after the Kremlin’s second of two wars against Chechen separatists.

Obama, a Democrat, said his administration would consider new areas for drilling in the mid and south Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, while “studying and protecting sensitive areas in the Arctic.”

Some senior Republicans in Congress called the announcement a step in the right direction, but said Obama did not go far enough. Environmental groups and some congressional liberals condemned the plan as endangering wildlife and coastal areas merely to give oil companies more profits.

A week after Pope Benedict XVI excoriated Irish bishops for gross errors of judgment in handling cases of priests who sexually abuse children, European bishops are admitting to mistakes, reaching out to victims and promising to act quickly when they learn about abuse cases.

Their mea culpas and pledges to be more transparent and cooperative in the future come amid mounting public outrage over the scope of the abuse and what victims say has been a pattern of coverup by bishops and the Vatican itself to keep the cases quiet.

Court documents obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press show that Vatican lawyers plan to argue that the pope has immunity as head of state, that American bishops who oversaw abusive priests weren’t employees of the Vatican, and that a 1962 document is not the “smoking gun” that provides proof of a cover-up.

The Holy See is trying to fend off the first U.S. case to reach the stage of determining whether victims actually have a claim against the Vatican itself for negligence for allegedly failing to alert police or the public about Roman Catholic priests who molested children.

Attorney Jessica Arbour, who represents an alleged victim of the Rev. Ernesto Garcia-Rubio, released a 1968 letter from the Vatican to the Archdiocese of Miami, stating the cleric had been forced to leave Cuba “because of serious difficulties of a moral nature (homosexuality).”

Arbour contends that the wording of the letter was used at the time as code for pedophilia, though archdiocese officials disputed that.

The Rev. Thomas Brundage, who in the mid-1990s helped investigate the allegations against the Rev. Lawrence Murphy for the Milwaukee Archdiocese, said by phone from Alaska that the Vatican’s office of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith receives an enormous amount of mail. He said it’s unfair to assume that then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict XVI, saw two letters addressed to him outlining the abuse allegations.

Rembert Weakland, then the Milwaukee archbishop, sent letters to Ratzinger’s office twice in 1996 reporting the allegations against Murphy, who died in 1998 and is accused of molesting boys from 1950-74 at St. John’s School for the Deaf near Milwaukee, where he worked.

Doku Umarov, who leads Islamic militants in Chechnya and other regions in Russia’s North Caucasus, said in a video posted Wednesday on a pro-rebel Web site that Monday’s twin suicide attacks were an act of revenge for the killing of civilians by Russian security forces. He warned that attacks on Russian cities will continue.

Umarov’s statement was posted after Prime Minister Vladimir Putin vowed to “drag out of the sewer” the terrorists who plotted the subway bombings, which killed 39 people and injured scores of commuters during rush hour.

The development could help calm Pakistan’s turbulent political environment at time when Washington wants the government focused on battling Taliban and al-Qaida militants blamed for cross-border attacks against U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan.

“This was a difficult job that has been done amicably and with consensus,” Senator Raza Rabbani, the head of the parliamentary committee, told reporters Wednesday.

President Barack Obama supports lifting the ban, and an active attempt to keep it in place could be considered insubordination.

But Lt. Gen. Benjamin Mixon’s civilian boss says the three-star Army general won’t receive a letter of reprimand or be forced to step down. Army Secretary John McHugh told reporters Wednesday that Mixon has been told by Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey that what he did was inappropriate.

Though service resumed Wednesday, many users inside China were unable to search anything for the latter part of Tuesday. Google initially said it was an in-house technical problem but later shifted its explanation, blaming the “Great Firewall” – the nickname for the network of filters that keep mainland Web surfers from accessing material the government deems sensitive.

Whatever the reason, the outage reaffirmed suspicions that China’s government would settle scores after a public dispute over censorship prompted Google to shut its mainland-based search engine and move the service to the freer Chinese territory of Hong Kong last week.

Forty-five people, including eight children, were wounded in the blast, which occurred in the Nahr-e-Sarraj district just north of Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province, deputy provincial police chief Kamaluddin, who uses one name, said.

The bomb exploded near a crowd gathered to receive free vegetable seeds provided by the British government as part of a program to encourage them not to plant opium poppy, provincial government spokesman Daoud Ahmadi said.

Nine suspected members of Hutaree, self-proclaimed “Christian warriors” who trained themselves in paramilitary techniques in preparation for a battle against the Antichrist, were arrested after a series of raids across the Midwest.

All have been charged with seditious conspiracy.

Officials say there have been no signs of life at the Wangjialing mine in Shanxi province since 108 miners escaped or were rescued following the flooding Sunday. Desperate relatives have traveled from afar to the site to demand that efforts to save the missing miners be speeded up.

About 1,000 rescuers have been working around the clock at the mine in southern Shanxi province, tunneling and laying pipes to drain away water, but hopes are fading.

On Wednesday, roulette wheels will stop spinning and blackjack games will cease at Sinatra’s old resort that straddles the Nevada-California border on Lake Tahoe’s north shore at Crystal Bay.

While the resort’s current owner hopes to reopen the casino under a new outside contractor by year’s end, some analysts think the Cal Neva might have dealt its last hand. They said Tahoe casinos are particularly vulnerable to the double-whammy of the recession and competition from Las Vegas and Indian casinos.

ADP said Wednesday that private employers slashed 23,000 jobs in March. Economists surveyed by Thomson Reuters had forecast the report would show private employers added 40,000 jobs during the month.

The ADP report is seen as an early indicator of the Labor Department’s monthly employment report, which is due out Friday. However, there can be wide variations between the two.

It’s fine to criticize the health law and the way Democrats pushed it through Congress without a single GOP vote, these party leaders say. But focusing on its outright repeal carries two big risks.

Repeal is politically and legally unlikely, and grass-roots activists may feel disillusioned by a failed crusade. More important, say strategists from both parties, a fiercely repeal-the-bill stance might prove far less popular in a general election than in a conservative-dominated GOP primary, especially in states such as Illinois and California.

The Republican National Committee fired a staffer who helped organize the Jan. 31 visit to Voyeur Hollywood West, which features topless dancers, bondage outfits and erotic themes. It said it will recoup the money from a donor who paid the tab and was reimbursed by the party on Feb. 4.

The episode raises new questions about Steele’s oversight of the RNC. But party officials said Steele knew nothing of the nightclub visit by a group of young Republicans, which was listed in a federally required financial disclosure report, and they promised to tighten accounting practices.

It’s a simple dish, usually a hunk of golden brown cod or haddock served with thickly cut strips of potatoes sprinkled with salt and vinegar. Despite that simplicity, the dish has become an icon of British culture.

This year, fish and chips is celebrating its 150th birthday. Or is it? That date is according to the National Federation of Fish Friers, which represents about 8,500 fish and chip shop owners in Britain.

The cash incentives funded with private donations have helped some New Yorkers make better choices, but it has not encouraged young people to do better in school or adults to keep a job. And Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the incentives are not the answer to eradicating poverty.

The program, which will end as scheduled in August, “doesn’t work in every case,” Bloomberg said. “You always hope that you’ve come across a magic silver bullet and you never do. You make progress incrementally, particularly when you’re trying to focus on some of society’s biggest problems.”

“We’ve won some really huge victory. Will it fix anything? No, but it’s a stepping stone,” Elouise Cobell of Browning, Mont., said during a meeting on the settlement at Heritage University on the Yakama Indian Reservation. “We have made a tremendous impact on this government and the way our trust has been managed in the past.”

The meeting was one of several planned across the Northwest this week by Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet Tribe, and her legal team. The deadline for Congress to approve the settlement was extended to April 16, and Cobell maintains further delays could terminate the deal.

The shooting occurred Monday evening, when the stolen Chevrolet Blazer being pursued got stuck in traffic near Universal Studios.

Officers got out of their cars and maneuvered so they were standing on either side and behind the vehicle.

The House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee said Wednesday that they’d seen no evidence to support charges that the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit or its director, Phil Jones, had tampered with data or perverted the peer review process to exaggerate the threat of global warming – two of the most serious criticisms levied against the climatologist and his colleagues.

In their report, the committee said that, as far as it was able to ascertain, “the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact,” adding that nothing in the more than 1,000 stolen e-mails, or the controversy kicked up by their publication, challenged scientific consensus that “global warming is happening and that it is induced by human activity.”

Voters worry the new law will erode the quality of care and jack up costs, even while it helps reduce the number of people unable to get health insurance.

The new polls suggest that Democrats still have a big sales job ahead of them as November House and Senate elections draw closer, and as Americans try to learn more about what the law means for them (see “Healthcare Reform 101”).

The Republican National Committee reimbursed about $2,000 in expenses rung up by the Young Eagles at a Hollywood nightclub featuring topless dancers and bondage outfits. Ms. Meyers allegedly approved the expense.

Fallout could affect Republican fundraising, particularly among its fiscally and morally conservative small donors. Moreover, the news has increased pressure on party Chairman Michael Steele, who is already already under fire for his management of party spending.

Only Texas, with 57 so-called “patriot” groups, outstrips Michigan’s 47, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a nonprofit civil rights organization in Montgomery, Ala., that tracks hate group activity.

Nationwide, the patriot movement has grown dramatically since the election of President Obama. Between 2008 and 2009, the number of such groups increased from 149 to 512, SPLC numbers suggest.