SANAA (Reuters) - At least four Yemeni soldiers were killed on Tuesday when a suicide bomber detonated a vehicle laden with explosives near a checkpoint in the south of the country, a police source said, in an attack claimed by an al Qaeda-linked group. The bombing is the latest in a spate of attacks by Islamist militants, who have escalated their operations in Yemen's south since President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi took office last month vowing to fight al Qaeda's regional wing. ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Retail sales posted their largest gain in five months in February, with Americans stepping up purchases of motor vehicles and other goods even as they paid more for gasoline. Sales rose 1.1 percent last month, the Commerce Department said on Tuesday, after a 0.6 percent increase in January. The sales gains were broad-based and data for prior months' were revised higher, suggesting rising employment was cushioning consumers from a steep run-up in gasoline prices. ...

PARIS (Reuters) - President Nicolas Sarkozy overtook Socialist challenger Francois Hollande for the first time on Tuesday in an opinion poll on the first round of France's April-May election after attacking the European Union's trade and immigration policies. The poll showed that Sarkozy would still lose to Hollande in a second-round runoff, however, albeit by a narrower margin of nine points, down from 13 points a fortnight ago. ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Top banks impeded a federal inquiry into their foreclosure processes, according to a report released Tuesday, dragging their feet on turning over documents and blocking investigators' attempts to interview bank employees. The inquiry led to the wide-ranging $25 billion mortgage settlement with the five largest mortgage servicers that was announced last month and filed in federal court on Monday. ...

TACOMA, Washington (Reuters) - A man suspected of sending about 100 threatening letters to members of Congress and the media last month made his first appearance on Monday in federal court in Washington state, where a judge ordered him sent back to Oregon. The mass mailing of the menacing envelopes, which were postmarked in Portland and contained a white powdery substance later determined to be harmless, triggered a security alert on Capitol Hill and among several media outlets. Authorities have yet to discuss a possible motive for the letters. ...

RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - Of the hundreds of Palestinian children locked in Israeli jails each year, the vast majority suffer nightmares, bed-wetting and anxiety after their release, Save the Children said in a report published on Monday. The charity said that since 2000, the Israeli army had detained more than 8,000 Palestinian children in the occupied West Bank and prosecuted children as young as 12 in military courts, most of them suspected of rock-throwing. ...

KHARTOUM (Reuters) - Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir will make his first visit to South Sudan since the country gained independence last July, a government official said on Tuesday, as both sides seek to resolve a bitter and costly dispute over oil. The summit will be held in the South Sudanese capital Juba in the next two weeks, Sudan's foreign ministry said. The two countries have been at loggerheads over the position of their border, including control of the disputed Abyei territory, and the issue of what transit fees South Sudan pays its northern neighbor to export oil from Port Sudan. ...

(Reuters) - JPMorgan Chase & Co is paying the federal government $45 million to settle a lawsuit alleging it charged veterans hidden fees in mortgage refinancings. The whistleblower lawsuit, filed in 2006 in Georgia by two mortgage brokers, seeks payments on behalf of the U.S. government by eight banks and mortgage companies, a law firm involved in the case said Tuesday. JPMorgan is the first bank to reach a settlement. ...

PARIS (Reuters) - France will cut the number of its troops participating in a U.N. peacekeeping force in Lebanon by 400 to around 1,000 by the summer to speed up a transfer of responsibility to Lebanese forces, the French foreign ministry said on Tuesday. The United Nations UNIFIL operation has about 12,000 troops and naval personnel in Lebanon following its expansion under a U.N. Security Council resolution that halted the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war in southern Lebanon. "France reiterates its total support for the essential role of the (U.N. ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama vowed on Tuesday that the Pentagon would spare no effort in investigating a U.S. soldier's deadly shooting rampage in Afghanistan and said he remained committed to "responsibly" winding down the war there. "We will follow the facts wherever they lead us," Obama said at the White House. "And we will make sure that anybody who was involved is held fully accountable with the full force of law." (Reporting By Matt Spetalnick)

ROME (Reuters) - For 42 days three decades ago, U.S. General James Lee Dozier was the world's most famous hostage and his captors, the Red Brigades, were Europe's most feared and bloody terrorist organization. Dozier, now 80, has come back to Italy, perhaps for the last time, to meet the members of the police special operations unit who liberated him in one of the most daring rescue raids of those dramatic years in Italian history. ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House said on Tuesday it is not reviewing options for further U.S. troop withdrawals from Afghanistan in the aftermath of a shooting of 16 civilians there by a U.S. soldier. The New York Times reported that the Obama administration was discussing whether to reduce U.S. forces in Afghanistan by at least an additional 20,000 troops by 2013. "The White House is not currently reviewing options for further troop withdrawals and no decisions have been made. ...

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel has emerged from the past few days of fighting with Palestinians in Gaza more confident that its advanced missile shield and civil defenses can perform well in any war with Iran. "In a sense, this was a mini-drill" for Iran, an Israeli official said on Tuesday after an Egyptian-brokered truce took hold, leaving 25 dead in the Gaza Strip and three people wounded in Israel. ...

GAZA (Reuters) - An Egyptian-brokered truce between Israel and militant groups in the Gaza Strip began to take hold on Tuesday after four days of violence in which 25 Palestinians were killed and 200 rockets were fired at Israel. The number of Palestinian rocket attacks dropped sharply after the ceasefire went into effect overnight, and no major towns in southern Israel were targeted. The Israeli military said six projectiles had hit, causing no casualties, and that there had been no Israeli air strikes in the Gaza Strip. ...

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel has emerged from the past few days of fighting with Palestinians in Gaza more confident that its advanced missile shield and civil defenses can perform well in any war with Iran. "In a sense, this was a mini-drill" for Iran, an Israeli official said on Tuesday after an Egyptian-brokered truce took hold, leaving 25 dead in the Gaza Strip and three people wounded in Israel. ...

(Reuters) - The world's largest accounting and auditing firms, known as the Big Four, have been pumping more money than ever before into U.S. lobbying and political campaigns as they confront new challenges from their regulator and Congress. Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers last year spent a combined $9.4 million on in-house and outside lobbyists, according to a Reuters analysis of congressional disclosure reports. ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The number of jobs waiting to be filled dropped slightly in January, the government said on Tuesday. There were 3.46 million available jobs at the end of January, down from an upwardly revised 3.54 million in December, according to the Labor Department's Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. Job openings at the end of the month - unfilled, posted vacancies that employers plan to fill within 30 days - help describe demand for labor in the United States. ...

DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan (Reuters) - U.S. drone aircraft struck twice in Pakistan's unruly tribal regions along the border with Afghanistan on Tuesday, killing 15 suspected militants, including two senior militant commanders, security and intelligence officials said. In the first strike, a drone fired missiles at a vehicle in the Birmal area of the South Waziristan tribal region, killing eight. Among the dead were Shams Ullah and Amir Hamza, senior commanders of a pro-government militant faction led by Maulvi Nazir, one of the most influential militant leaders in the region. ...

ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkish police fired tear gas and water cannon to disperse hundreds protesting on Tuesday after a court dropped a case against five people charged with killing 37 writers and liberals in a 1993 hotel fire set by Islamist rioters. The five have never been found and the opposition blamed Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and his AK Party, which emerged from a series of banned Islamist parties, for a failure to launch a serious search. ...

MADISON, Wisconsin (Reuters) - Four more Wisconsin Republican state senators, including the Senate leader, will face recall elections this year, bringing the number of state lawmakers forced to campaign in special elections to 40 percent of the entire Senate, officials said. The state agency that oversees elections agreed unanimously on Monday that enough valid signatures by voters were submitted to require all four senators to face recall votes. ...

OTTAWA (Reuters) - A government bill to block a strike or lockout at Air Canada should pass the House of Commons by the early hours of Wednesday, said Ashley Kelahear, a spokeswoman for Labour Minister Lisa Raitt. With the threat of a simultaneous strike and lockout at the country's largest airline, Raitt is pushing the back-to-work legislation through quickly to be sure to avoid a hit to the still-fragile economy and inconvenience to travelers. ...

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Salman Rushdie will return to India this week to speak at a conference, under two months after death threats forced the Booker Prize-winning author to pull out of Asia's biggest literary festival, the event organizer said on Tuesday. Rushdie's attempt to visit India in January brought protests from some Indian Muslim groups, which consider his 1988 novel 'The Satanic Verses' blasphemous because of the way it portrayed the Prophet Mohammad. ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama will make a statement at 11:10 a.m. ET on Tuesday about new efforts to enforce U.S. trade rights with China and "level the playing field for America's businesses and workers," the White House said. The United States, along with the European Union and Japan, formally asked the World Trade Organization to settle a dispute with China over Beijing's restrictions on exports of raw materials, including rare earth elements critical to major industries. (Editing by Christopher Wilson)

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, in a deal that would allow him to keep his badge and gun, pleaded guilty on Monday to a lesser misdemeanor charge in a spousal-abuse case linked to a New Year's Eve quarrel with his estranged wife. Under terms of his plea deal, prosecutors agreed to recommend Mirkarimi serve three years on probation, attend domestic-violence counseling and perform 100 hours of community service. He would also pay a $400 fine plus minor court costs, his attorney Lidia Stiglich said. ...