Afternoon Edition

With up to 200,000 gallons of oil a day spewing into the Gulf of Mexico from a ruptured well, the accident stemming from a sunken offshore rig may soon rival the Exxon Valdez disaster as the worst oil spill in US history.

Strong southeast winds blew the first oily strands of the slick directly onto the coastal wetlands of South Pass near the mouth of the Mississippi river late Thursday, Billy Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish, where oil washed ashore, told AFP.

Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal declared a state of emergency and called for urgent help to prevent fragile wetlands and vital fishing communities along the coast from pollution on a massive scale.

The wind started to strengthen and blow the 600-square-mile (1,550-square-kilometer) slick directly onto the coast, where a rich variety of wildlife were at risk in the maze of marshes that amounts to 40 percent of the US wetlands.

Prime Minister George Papandreou made his appeal hours after fresh protests over austerity measures demanded by creditors in return for a European Union-IMF rescue deal which officials expect to conclude this weekend.

Amid mounting social tensions expected to surge during labour day parades on Saturday and a general strike on Wednesday, Papandreou told the Greek parliament: “Today what is most important is the survival of the nation.

Police fired tear gas at hundreds of demonstrators trying to approach the finance ministry in Athens in protest at austerity cuts aimed at reducing Greece’s budget deficit, which has ignited Europe-wide fears.

“Around 500 people were demonstrating and some of them tried to break through a police cordon guarding the ministry,” a police source told AFP. Further clashes erupted outside parliament, an AFP photographer said.

Greece is in negotiations with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund on a financial bailout that its government says is desperately needed by May 19 in order to avoid a devastating debt default.

“I’m confident that the talks will be concluded soon, meaning in the next days,” Barroso told a press conference at the end of a visit to Beijing.

The number of unemployed jumped by 280,200 to 4.61 million, more than in Germany which has nearly twice Spain’s population, for a jobless rate of 20.05 percent, said national statistics institute INE.

The unemployment rate rose from 18.83 percent in the fourth quarter.

Chulalongkorn Hospital also stopped receiving outpatients following the Thursday night incident, in which some 100 Red Shirt guards searched its buildings for troops they feared were preparing for a crackdown.

Tensions are high in Bangkok following the worst political violence in almost two decades which has left 27 people dead and almost 1,000 injured this month in a series of bloody confrontations.

Still basking in the glow of its successful staging of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, China is treating the Expo as an equally important showcase for its growing political and economic clout.

From the United States to North Korea, a total of 189 countries will take part in the six-month display of ideas, culture and technology expected to attract at least 70 million visitors — the vast majority of them Chinese.

The rampage in Shandong province left five children and a teacher hurt but in stable condition, Xinhua news agency said, as China ordered stepped up security at schools nationwide to prevent further attacks.

Before the incident, China had seen three stabbing frenzies at schools in the past month, including two this week alone, by mentally disturbed adults that left eight children dead and nearly 50 injured.

Many were unable to get inside the 60-year-old landmark theatre for sold-out closing ceremonies with all-star dance dramas, including a story about a young woman who is possessed by unrequited love and turns into a serpent.

For decades, the Kabukiza has been the premier venue to see the 400-year-old stylised performing art whose all-male actors perform in extravagant costumes and mask-like facial makeup.

Two snap surveys after the debate revealed that David Cameron, the leader of the main opposition Conservatives, had won the debate just a week before the election.

Brown was fighting for his political life after he described a widowed voter as “bigoted” when she challenged him about immigration during a campaign visit on Wednesday, but he slumped to last in both polls.

NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) confirmed an overnight operation in eastern Nangarhar province’s Surkh Rod district and said troops killed an “individual” because he was carrying a gun.

The soldiers were “pursuing a Taliban facilitator” in the area, ISAF said in a statement, without mentioning the MP.

In the lower house of federal parliament, 136 deputies voted to ban nationwide clothes or veils that do not allow the wearer to be fully identified, including the full-face niqab and burqa.

There were two abstentions. No one voted against.

With leading edges of the slick lapping up to outlying marshes and waterways on the fringes of the Mississippi Delta, the Coast Guard deployed protective equipment called booms along the coast in a bid to stop oil from soiling the shore.

Oil is pouring out of a blown-out undersea well off Louisiana at a rate of up to 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons or 955,000 liters) a day. Forecasters say the spill could affect Mississippi, Alabama and northwest Florida in coming days.

“We are taking full responsibility for the spill and we will clean it up and where people can present legitimate claims for damages we will honor them. We are going to be very, very aggressive in all of that,” Tony Hayward told Reuters in an interview on Friday.

The massive spill, which started when an oil rig caught fire and sank last week, washed up to wildlife refuges and seafood grounds on the Louisiana coast on Friday.

Negotiations on the aid package could be wrapped up by Saturday, the European Commission said, and private sector involvement could make it easier for EU governments to persuade skeptical taxpayers to rescue Greece from its debt crisis.

German Vice Chancellor Guido Westerwelle compared the need for the private sector to support Athens with Berlin’s planned levy on banks to insure against future bank crises.

Protest leaders apologized after more than 200 “red shirts” forced their way into Chulalongkorn University Hospital late on Thursday to look for soldiers they accused of preparing an attack, forcing the hospital to evacuate some patients.

They didn’t find any and left after roaming for an hour through the grounds, the lobby and car parks, some carrying wooden staves.

With an estimated 10.8 million people in the United States illegally, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and fellow Democrats said the first step toward reform must be bolstered U.S. border security.

Also on Thursday, the first legal and political challenges to Arizona’s new controversial law were filed in the state, and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa endorsed an economic boycott of Arizona by the second-largest U.S. city.

Nuri al-Maliki’s angry words added to a political crisis stirred up by attempts by Shi’te-led groups, including the premier’s bloc, to overturn a slim lead in a March 7 vote posted by a cross-sectarian alliance that won strong Sunni support.

The Sunni-backed list led by secular ex-premier Iyad Allawi called this week for an internationally monitored caretaker government after its two-seat election lead was threatened by a recount of votes in Baghdad and a bid to disqualify candidates.

With a week to go before an election, snap viewer polls judged Cameron, 43, the victor of the third and final TV debate on Thursday night. Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, 43, was second while Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown, 59, came last.

“This election is far from over. We are now entering the most energetic and the most important stage of this campaign … I’m taking nothing for granted,” Cameron said during an upbeat campaign stop at a school in Derby in central England.

The feud over the Futenma base on Japan’s southern Okinawa islands has helped erode support for Hatoyama’s government, which slid to about 20 percent in a poll this week after a judicial panel said ruling party kingpin Ichiro Ozawa should be charged over a funding scandal.

Hatoyama also said that while the panel’s decision will likely have an impact on the upper house vote that is expected in July or August, he wants Ozawa to stay on as the Democratic Party’s secretary-general until the election.

The 53-year-old Crist announced his widely expected nonaffiliated Senate bid at a rally in a park in his hometown, St. Petersburg.

Accused by conservative Republicans of being too moderate, although he has been a party fixture in the state capital, Tallahassee, for more than 15 years, the first-term governor has lagged far behind conservative rival Marco Rubio in the race for the Republican nomination.

Boats patrolled coastal marshes early Friday looking for areas where the oil has flowed in, the Coast Guard said, and the state of Louisiana diverted thousands of gallons of fresh water from the Mississippi River to try to flush out the wetlands, though that effort was being hampered by wind.

The Louisiana National Guard prepared to send communication equipment, boats, all-terrain vehicles and other equipment to help.

Obama ordered Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to report within 30 days on what new technologies are needed to tighten safeguards against oil spills from deep water drilling rigs.

“We are going to make sure that any leases going forward have those safeguards,” said Obama at a White House Rose Garden event.

Spending by consumers rose by the fastest pace in three years, the Commerce Department said Friday . That helped the economy grow at a 3.2 percent pace in the January-to-March quarter. It marked the third straight quarterly gain as the United States heals from the longest and deepest recession since the 1930s.

Still, growth was weaker than in the fourth quarter of last year, when the economy grew at 5.6 percent. The first-quarter’s performance would normally be considered respectable in normal times. Yet coming out of the severe recession, more robust growth is needed to drive down high joblessness, stimulate wage increases and lift consumer spending.

Conservative challenger David Cameron, fresh off what observers said was his best live televised debate performance to date, told BBC radio that next week’s national election was “still far from won.”

Nick Clegg, still riding higher in the polls than most political observers had ever expected, said the campaign was “wide open.”

The National Statistics Institute said the rate rose 1.22 percentage points in the first quarter to 20.05 percent.

While other major economies in Europe and elsewhere have posted at least tepid growth as they crawl out of recession, the eurozone’s fourth-largest economy is still contracting after the collapse of a construction boom that had fueled years of expansion.

The government ordered schools across the country to tighten security, and anxious parents of students targeted in an earlier attack marched in protest Friday night, demanding a better government response to the crisis.

In the latest assault, Wang Yonglai used a motorcycle to break down the gate of the Shangzhuang Primary School in the city of Weifang and struck a teacher who tried to block him before hitting students with a hammer, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

The criminal inquiry follows civil fraud charges filed by the government against Goldman two weeks ago and as Congress pushes toward enacting sweeping legislation aimed at preventing another near-meltdown of the financial system.

The investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan stems from a criminal referral by the Securities and Exchange Commission, a knowledgeable person said Thursday. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the inquiry is in a preliminary phase.

Now that partisanship is at a peak, he wants to be “The People’s Senator,” vowing to change his registration to no party affiliation and abandon the Republican primary for a populist run for Senate.

In a short speech before hundreds of supporters in a park near his apartment, Crist on Thursday repeatedly referred to “the people” in explaining his decision to run on his own after falling far behind Republican Marco Rubio in a race most a year ago said was Crist’s to win.

In a move that still needs the governor’s signature to become law, the House of Representatives Thursday night approved a measure that has drawn some of the state’s biggest protest rallies.

Republican Gov. Linda Lingle hasn’t said whether she’ll reject it or sign it into law but her office said later that she will carefully review the bill.

The president noted that lawmakers may lack the “appetite” to take on immigration while many of them are up for re-election and while another big legislative issue – climate change – is already on their plate.

“I don’t want us to do something just for the sake of politics that doesn’t solve the problem,” Obama told reporters Wednesday night aboard Air Force One.

Dozens of marches are planned for Saturday in cities across the country from Los Angeles to Dallas to New York.

“What happened in Arizona proves that racism and anti-immigrant hysteria across the country still exists. We need to continue to fight,” said Lee Siu Hin, a coordinator with the Washington, D.C.-based National Immigrant Solidarity Network.

The rock fall that killed the men happened late Wednesday about four miles inside the Dotiki Mine and instability in the roof hampered rescue efforts, mining officials said Thursday.

Rescuers were “within an arm’s length” of the body of a miner trapped under rock when the roof became unstable and they had to retreat, said Gov. Steve Beshear, who traveled to the mine and met with families of the victims.

The cramped quarters and scant privacy aboard submarines, combined with long tours of up to 90 days at sea, kept them off-limits to female sailors for 16 years after the Navy began allowing women to serve on all its surface ships in 1994.

There were some protests, particularly from wives of sub sailors, after the military began formulating a plan last fall. But it received no objections from Congress after Defense Secretary Robert Gates notified lawmakers in mid-February that the Navy intended to lift the ban. The deadline for Congress to intervene passed at midnight Wednesday.

E-mail, text and instant messaging have become the go-to technology for parents on family outings or at the end of a long day, when mom’s chilling on the couch in front of the TV and dad’s reading in the bedroom more than a whisper away.

“There was a time when I would get really upset if I was IMed from another room in the house. Now it’s a complete parental survival tool,” says KellyAnn Bonnell, whose kids are 10 and 15.

Most of the tests will be conducted in military air space above the Snake Valley in Utah during the next several years. Some test flights are scheduled over the northern part of Great Salt Lake.

The military held a series of public meetings this week about the project.

Shock and outrage over the May 4 National Guard slayings of four Kent State University students, on the other end of Ohio from his University of Cincinnati campus. Then fear and confusion as schools across the state and much of the country saw the demonstrations against the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia swell into angry, combative confrontations.

One by one, colleges closed and students were ordered to pack up and leave, some amid the acrid smell of tear gas as police and armed soldiers stood guard. TV helicopters buzzed overhead. Rumors and reports were rampant, of undercover FBI agents infiltrating students, or violent radicals converging to escalate the protests.

“It’s been on the beach for a while,” Howell says, flipping over the decomposing, dried-out shell.

More than 30 dead turtles have been found stranded on Galveston and the Bolivar Peninsula south of Houston this month – an unusually high number that has puzzled researchers, in part because most are so decomposed that there are few clues left about why they died.