Facing threatened investigations and sanctions from Europe, U.S. intelligence officials plan to discuss the new allegations — reported in Sunday's editions of the German newsweekly Der Spiegel — directly with EU officials.

But "as a matter of policy, we have made clear that the United States gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations," concluded a statement issued Sunday from the national intelligence director's office.

It was the latest backlash in a nearly month-long global debate over the reach of U.S. surveillance that aims to prevent terror attacks. The two programs, both run by the National Security Agency, pick up millions of telephone and Internet records that are routed through American networks each day. Reports about the programs have raised sharp concerns about whether they violate public privacy rights at home and abroad.

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Geithner traveled to the German North Sea island of Sylt for informal talks with Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, before heading on to meet Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, later Monday.

Geithner and Schaeuble praised efforts by Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy to turn their debt-ridden economies around, and voiced optimism about economic reforms meant to deepen integration among the 17 eurozone members.

The joint statement made no reference to Greece, which has struggled to implement the reform package agreed with its creditors. The country faces the possibility a chaotic exit from the common currency area if it fails to meet its bailout conditions.

Geithner and Schaeuble "emphasized the need for ongoing international cooperation and coordination" and stated that the U.S. and Germany would "continue to cooperate closely with their partners when advancing the policy agenda in autumn to further stabilize global and European economies."

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The declaration was cautiously worded, expressing "grave concern" about abuses because of sexual orientation and commissioning a global report on discrimination against gays.

But activists called it an important shift on an issue that has divided the global body for decades, and they credited the Obama administration's push for gay rights at home and abroad.

"This represents a historic moment to highlight the human rights abuses and violations that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people face around the world based solely on who they are and whom they love," U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a statement.

Following tense negotiations, members of the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Council narrowly voted in favor of the declaration put forward by South Africa, with 23 votes in favor and 19 against.

Backers included the U.S., the European Union, Brazil and other Latin American countries. Those against included Russia, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and Pakistan. China, Burkina Faso and Zambia abstained, Kyrgyzstan didn't vote and Libya was suspended from the rights body earlier.

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The U.N. investigators said they have received estimates of 10,000-15,000 people killed since February and added there is evidence that opposition forces also committed "some acts which would constitute war crimes."

The three-member panel based its finds on interviews with 350 people in government and rebel-held parts of Libya, as well as in refugee camps in neighboring countries.

It concluded that government forces committed murder, torture and sexual abuses "as part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population" before and during the conflict that started in February.

"Such acts fall within the meaning of 'crimes against humanity,'" the panel said.

It also found "many serious violations of international humanitarian law committed by government forces amounting to 'war crimes.'"

"The consistent pattern of violations identified creates an inference that they were carried out as a result of policy decisions by Col. Gadhafi and members of his inner circle," it said.

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Aid officials were still trying to confirm the fate of those people after the vessel broke apart Friday in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Libya, UNHCR spokeswoman Laura Boldrini said.

Witnesses who left the Libyan capital on another boat shortly afterward reported seeing remnants of the sunken ship and the bodies of some passengers floating in the sea, she told The Associated Press.

Other witnesses saw passengers swimming to shore but it was unclear how many survived, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Its staff on the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa interviewed a Somali woman who said she lost her four-month-old baby in the sinking. The woman swam to shore and managed to board another boat heading to Italy, the IOM said in a statement Monday.

At least three other boats that left Libya in late March have disappeared, with hundreds feared dead, Boldrini said.

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The abuse took place in nine different institutions where the unidentified man had worked as a therapist since 1982, police in the canton (state) of Bern said.

Authorities have identified 122 of the victims, with the youngest being 1 year old at the time of the crime. Forty-two of the victims were over 18.

"It's possible that in the course of the investigation more victims will come to light," the head of Bern police's special investigations unit, Gabriele Berger, told a news conference in Bern. Some 100 investigators have been assigned to the case.

The man was arrested in April 2010 and has been detained since, but police only released details of the case Tuesday to prevent the investigation from being impeded by media interest.

Evidence against the man includes photos and hours of video recording the abuse. Berger said the man had gone about his crimes deliberately, in many instances choosing victims who were unable to speak.

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"I think that we have to see how things move today and, obviously, the key here is for President Mubarak to respond to the needs of his people in a way that is more directly connected to their frustrations, much more so than apparently yesterday's speech succeeded in doing," the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee told The Associated Press Saturday on the sidelines of the Forum's annual meeting.

"I think he's got to speak more to the real issues that people feel," the Democrat from Massachusetts said. "Dismissing the government doesn't speak to some of those challenges."

Kerry's comments came just minutes after Egyptian state television reported that the Cabinet of Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif had resigned on Mubarak's orders.

Salil Shetty, the head of Amnesty International, told AP that Mubarak's decision to fire his Cabinet won't quell the anti-government protests that have shaken the country for five days.

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Even as they announced the important advance in studying antimatter, they emphasized that science fiction uses of the stuff -- like propelling the starship Enterprise in "Star Trek" or fueling a bomb in Dan Brown's book "Angels and Demons" -- remain in the realm of the imagination.

International physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, said they had overcome a basic problem in studying atoms of antimatter. While such atoms have been created routinely in the lab for years, they tend to disappear so fast that scientists don't have a chance to study them.

But in a report published online by the journal Nature, the scientists said they'd been able to trap individual atoms and keep them around for a bit more than one-tenth of a second.

To a particle physicist, that's a pretty long time.

"For us it's a big breakthrough because it means we can take the next step, which is to try to compare matter and antimatter," the team's spokesman, American scientist Jeffrey Hangst, told The Associated Press on Thursday

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The Swiss mostly blamed U.S. authorities for failing to provide confidential testimony about Polanski's sentencing procedure in 1977-1978.

The Justice Ministry also said that national interests were taken into consideration in the decision.

"The 76-year-old French-Polish film director Roman Polanski will not be extradited to the USA," the ministry said in a statement. "The freedom-restricting measures against him have been revoked."

It was unclear if Polanski had already left his Swiss chalet in the resort of Gstaad, where he has been held under house arrest since December.

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Philip Alston, the independent U.N. investigator on extrajudicial killings, called on countries to lay out the rules and safeguards they use when carrying out so-called targeted killings, publish figures on civilian casualties and prove they have attempted to capture or incapacitate suspects without killing them.

His 29-page report to the U.N. Human Rights Council will put unwanted scrutiny on intelligence operations of the United States, Israel and Russia, who Alston says are all credibly reported to have used drones to kill alleged terrorists and insurgents.

Alston, a New York University law professor, said the use of unmanned aerial vehicles by intelligence agencies such as the CIA to carry out targeted killings in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere is particularly fraught because of the secrecy surrounding such operations.

Although not illegal as such, CIA drone strikes are more likely to breach the rules of war than similar operations carried out by armed forces, who are more familiar with international law and can resort to non-lethal means because they have troops on the ground, Alston said.

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Can they also be deadly?

The frustratingly unresolved debate erupted again this week with the release of a $24 million U.N. study spanning a decade and covering 13 nations that suggests frequent cell phone use may increase the chances of developing rare but deadly form of brain cancer.

Worryingly, since glioma has a potential latency period of a quarter century -- longer than cell phones have been in widespread use -- even the study's authors say there is no way yet to tell how big the risk is, if there is one.

Experts were nearly unanimous in saying the results of the study are inconclusive. But the fact that it turned up even some evidence of a cancer risk may have profound consequences for a device that people have become accustomed to seeing as extensions of themselves.

From farmers in Africa who rely on cell phones to check crop reports to hedge fund traders obsessively checking Blackberries at trendy restaurants to suburban American kids spending hours calling their friends -- people around the world have come to rely on mobile phones as never before.

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Steven Newman ignored questions from reporters as he arrived and left the Park Hotel in the Swiss town of Zug, a few miles (kilometers) from the company's headquarters.

In a terse statement sent after the Zurich stock market closed, Transocean said it would distribute some $1 billion in dividend to shareholders, or about $3.11 per share.

The company's stock has lost about a quarter of its value since the oil spill and closed 2.6 percent lower on the Zurich exchange Friday at 74.10 Swiss francs ($65.62).

Transocean moved to Switzerland two years ago to protect its low corporate tax rate, and few in the city had heard of the company, even three weeks after the April 20 blast that resulted in more than 4 million gallons (15 million liters) of oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico from the well drilled by the BP-leased rig. Eleven workers were killed in the explosion.

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Trans-Atlantic connections were also being diverted around a larger patch of cloud stretching from southern Greenland to the coast of Portugal, adding several hours to flights between Europe and North America and causing congestion as airlines tried to squeeze their planes through remaining routes.

Weather forecasts said the ash cloud hovering over the continent will gradually dissipate as it spreads to southern parts of Germany, the Czech Republic and Austria by Sunday night. With volcanic eruptions weakening, the plume in the mid-Atlantic was also slowly clearing.

"We're expecting rain to thin the cloud, leaving only a small band left by Monday morning," said Daniel Gerstgrasser, meteorologist with Switzerland's national weather agency. No further ash drifts are expected to reach the continent in the coming 24 hours, he said.

The ash, stretching from the surface up to 20,000 feet (6,000 meters), forced the closure of airports throughout much of northern Italy until 2 p.m. (1200 GMT) Sunday. As the cloud moved northward, German authorities halted takeoffs and landings at Munich airport at 3 p.m. (1300GMT) but said high-level overflights remained possible.

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A former IT employee of Swiss subsidiary HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) SA, identified by French authorities as Herve Falciani, stole the information between late 2006 and early 2007, the bank said. The accounts, held by individuals worldwide, were all opened before October 2006 and some 9,000 have since been closed.

"We deeply regret this situation and unreservedly apologize to our clients for this threat to their privacy," said Alexandre Zeller, chief executive of the Swiss subsidiary.

The bank said it has contacted the affected customers and doesn't believe the stolen data has or will allow any unauthorized person to access the affected accounts. The stolen information only affects accounts in Switzerland with the exception of its former subsidiary HSBC Guyerzeller Bank, it said.

However, the theft could leave some of those account holders exposed to prosecution by tax authorities.

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Humanitarian officials said the proximity of the quake's epicenter, only 10 miles (15 kilometers) from the capital Port-au-Prince, and Haiti's crumbling infrastructure meant it was impossible to gauge exactly how many people might be dead or wounded.

"There's probably 3 million people potentially affected," said Paul Conneally, spokesman for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent societies.

The first airlifts to Haiti concentrated on search and rescue efforts and setting up makeshift hospitals.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the United States was offering full assistance -- civilian and military. Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Britain would provide "whatever humanitarian assistance is required," while France, Canada, China, Germany, Mexico and Venezuela pledged immediate support in terms of personnel, cash and supplies.

Germany said it would donate euro1 million ($1.45 million), while China pledged $1 million.

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Documents obtained by The Associated Press show that Algeria and Pakistan have taken the lead in lobbying to bring the matter to a vote in the U.N. General Assembly.

Such a ban would face great resistance in Western nations that enshrine freedom of expression as a fundamental right.

The countries that form the 56-member Organization of the Islamic Conference are currently lobbying a Geneva-based U.N. committee to accept its plan, a first step for it to eventually be put before the General Assembly.

If that occurs, Muslim countries and their allies in the developing world would stand a decent chance of mustering the simple majority needed in the General Assembly to adopt such a treaty.

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