Weekend News Digest

But Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva did not say when security forces would retake the Red Shirts’ vast protest site, occupied for three weeks and fortified with barricades made from truck tyres and sharpened bamboo poles.

Adding to the tension, the rival Yellow Shirt group, who are backed by the country’s elite, plan to meet on Monday upon the expiry of a deadline they set a week ago for the government to deal with the Reds.

An overflight detected a 20-mile by 20-mile slick emanating from the semi-submersible Deepwater Horizon platform that spectacularly sank last Thursday, two days after a massive blast left 11 workers missing and presumed dead.

British oil giant BP, which leases the platform, initially said no oil was leaking from the site but a robotic vessel on Saturday detected two holes in the riser that connects the wellhead to the sunken rig.

The bank’s 186 members approved a capital increase of 5.1 billion dollars, the first such hike in more than 20 years, to fund greater lending in the wake of the global economic crisis.

At the same time, they approved a shift of 3.13 percent of voting rights on bank policy to developing countries, giving them a bigger voice in one of the world’s most high-profile institutions.

“The IMF, the European partners and everyone involved in the financing effort recognizes the need for speed,” said International Monetary Fund managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn in Washington after talks with Greek Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou.

“I am confident that we will conclude discussions in time to meet Greece’s needs,” Strauss-Kahn underlined in a his statement.

“The IMF, the European partners and everyone involved in the financing effort recognizes the need for speed,” said International Monetary Fund managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn in Washington after talks with Greek Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou.

“I am confident that we will conclude discussions in time to meet Greece’s needs,” Strauss-Kahn underlined in a his statement.

More than any other instrument, the Hubble has stimulated a modern-day infatuation with deep space, beaming to Earth the most spectacular images ever taken of faraway galaxies and the births and deaths of stars — and along the way helping scientists make some of the most important discoveries of our time.

Hubble was launched aboard space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990 and deployed into orbit the following day.

Despite the political tensions, this year also saw the anniversary marked for the first time in Turkey, where rights activists and artists in Istanbul broke with taboo and commemorated the massacres.

Under grey skies in the Armenian capital Yerevan, a stream of people marched to lay flowers at a hilltop memorial to the massacres, which Armenians insist constituted genocide.

King Albert II is trying to avoid the need for snap elections after premier Yves Leterme threw in the towel on Thursday, little more than two months before Belgium assumes the rotating EU presidency.

Leterme’s decision became inevitable after the Open VLD Flemish liberals walked out of his five-party coalition government as the country’s linguistic faultline threatens to split the country in two.

Okinawa governor Hirokazu Nakaima, the speaker of the Okinawa assembly and most of the mayors of the Okinawa prefecture’s 41 towns joined the huge protest near Kadena Air Base, the Asia-Pacific region’s largest US military facility.

Under a blazing sun at an athletics ground on the subtropical island, protesters applauded and whistled as speakers addressed them from a podium.

The 12,000-tonne corvette Cheonan sank after being split in half in a mystery blast in the Yellow Sea on March 26, leaving 40 sailors confirmed dead and six still unaccounted for.

“A bubble jet caused by a heavy torpedo (attack) is thought to be one of the most likely things to be blamed, but various other possibilities are also under review,” Defence Minister Kim Tae-Young said Sunday.

Is it the Daliesque darkness of the religious visions? The fighting bulls like Picasso’s? More likely, it’s the story of the artist behind them: Pal Sarkozy, the 82-year-old father of France’s president, Nicolas.

“You must understand that it’s not just a naked woman or a portrait. Every picture tells a story,” Pal Sarkozy told AFP, strolling round the Espace Cardin gallery where the show opened Saturday, a stone’s throw from his son’s offices in the Elysee palace.

With the government planning to ban the full Islamic veil in public, the fining of the French woman in Nantes took a political turn when a minister threatened to punish her Muslim husband for offences including polygamy.

The woman has challenged the fine as a breach of her human rights.

“Red-shirt” protest leaders called on their supporters in the countryside to confront the army and police. Their backers responded by blockading police convoys in at least two areas.

The stalemate rekindled fears of more unrest and a heavier toll on Southeast Asia’s second-biggest economy as more retailers shut their doors and tourist numbers dwindle.

Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou said bailout talks with the International Monetary Fund and European partners went well and he was confident Greece would secure help in May to finance its crippling public debt.

Papaconstantinou also sent a warning to investors who have been betting that Greece will default: “All I can say is that they will lose their shirts.”

A bipartisan group of senators led by Democrat John Kerry had been aiming to outline details of their climate change bill on Monday.

That plan was canceled after Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a member of the working group, threatened to pull out if Democrats pushed for a debate on an overhaul of immigration before doing the huge environmental and energy legislation.

The judge will decide what evidence can be used against Omar Khadr, 23, one of six prisoners at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo in eastern Cuba that the Obama administration has designated for trial by military tribunal.

The base’s detention center currently holds 183 captives.

President Barack Obama, who took the unusual step of publicly criticizing the ruling in his State of the Union address in January, has warned it will give corporations and special interest groups undue influence in elections.

The bill would require the leaders of corporations, unions and other groups to put their names on television ads and would ban election spending by government contractors, companies with more than 20 percent foreign ownership and recipients of taxpayer-funded bailout money.

The tension comes just as the government is seeking to secure its allies’ support for a possible vote in parliament over high food prices. The government would fall if it loses the vote.

The controversy is the latest blow for a coalition that was expected to capitalize on its re-election to promote policies to boost investment and ailing infrastructure as well as reform welfare and subsidies.

High seas forced cleanup crews trying to vacuum and disperse the oily mess to take a second consecutive day off. Airplanes, boats and equipment were mobilized, but on standby as waves stopped them from trying to prevent the spreading oil from washing ashore beaches, barrier islands and wetlands.

What appeared to a manageable spill a couple of days ago after an oil rig exploded and sank off the Louisiana coast, has now turned into a more serious environmental problem. The new leak was discovered Saturday, and as much as 1,000 barrels – or 42,000 gallons – of oil is leaking each day, Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry said.

That’s the single biggest unanswered question about President Barack Obama’s new health care overhaul law – and its weak spot.

Many experts believe the law falls short on taming costs, and that will force Congress to revisit health care in a few years.

The so-called Red Shirts urged their supporters in provincial areas to confront the security forces, and many of them began setting up roadblocks outside Bangkok to prevent police reinforcements from entering the city.

Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva spoke in a nationally televised interview alongside the army chief Sunday, in an apparent effort to dispel persistent rumors that there is a rift between him and the military.

“I’m trading a product which a month ago was worth $100 and today is only worth $93,” wrote Fabrice Tourre, who was charged along with the bank in a civil complaint filed this month by the Securities and Exchange Commission. “That doesn’t seem like a lot but when you take into account … (the investments) are worth billions, well it adds up to a lot of money.”

Tourre was talking about investment products like the one at the heart of a federal complaint against his firm. For Tourre, the investments were like an invention gone awry: He had started arranging them when the market was on the upswing. But he continued selling them after the market turned – now with Goldman betting against them, in one case allegedly misleading investors about a deal’s origin.

Voicing regrets, Sen. John Kerry said Saturday he is postponing the much anticipated unveiling of comprehensive energy and climate change legislation scheduled for Monday. The Massachusetts Democrat made his announcement after a key partner in drafting the bill, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, threatened to withhold support if Senate Democratic leaders push ahead first with an immigration bill.

Graham is angry that Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada is considering that. Legislation to overhaul immigration laws and grant legal status to millions of long term immigrants unlawfully in the country could create problems for Republicans in the midterm elections. It’s a top priority for Hispanic voters – and most Republicans are opposed. Reid’s idea amounts to a “cynical political ploy,” Graham asserted.

She believes the murder was spurred by a warped hatred of homeless people, yet she has managed to find forgiveness for Ben Martin, a former barber who has pleaded guilty to the October 2008 killing.

“It’s awful, when I think of my brother burning to death…,” she said amid tears, “… just awful. Ben Martin was sick, mentally sick. He had a thing against homeless people and he took it out on my brother.”

But it was old maps, not GPS or Google Earth, that ultimately found the common ground for the towns of St. George and neighboring Shelburne. The process has pointed up the art of trying to read the minds of the original surveyors and land granters to establish where the lines were drawn.

“It’s a matter of ‘let’s get this defined,'” said Phil Gingraw, chairman of the St. George Select Board. “Two-hundred-and-fifty years ago, people would not really have cared. Today, I think, things have changed a lot, and that’s why we need definition.”

In North Carolina, an appeals court ruled last month that the registry there is unconstitutional because alleged abusers had no chance to defend themselves before being listed.

In New York, a class-action settlement is taking effect on behalf of thousands of people who were improperly denied the chance for a hearing to get removed from the state registry.

“There’s a big fear still of seeing black boys with white girls,” said Priscilla Sterling, whose grandfather was a cousin of Till’s mother. “There’s still this concept of they’re going to look at you and they’re going to get you.”

“Even though my brother and his white wife live in California, where things are supposed to be better, I still have this fear that something might happen to him,” she added, her voice cracking and tears streaming down her face.

Commemorating Armenian Remembrance Day on Saturday, Obama called the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians during World War I “one of the worst atrocities” of the 20th century and “a devastating chapter” in history. But he did not call it genocide.

Obama’s statement, issued as he and first lady Michelle Obama spent a weekend getaway here in western North Carolina, earned him criticism from all corners. The Turkish foreign minister said it was “unacceptable,” and activists took issue with the president’s tone in marking the 95th anniversary of the start of the slaughter of Armenians by Ottoman Turks.