Havana and Washington just wrapped up a round of separate negotiations aimed at restarting direct mail service, which has been suspended since 1963. Both sets of talks have been on hold in recent years in a dispute over the fate of U.S. government subcontractor Alan Gross, who is serving a 15-year jail sentence in Havana after he was caught bringing communications equipment onto the island illegally.

The migration talks will be held in Washington on July 17. The State Department official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publically, spoke on condition of anonymity.

“Representatives from the Department of State are scheduled to meet with representatives of the Cuban government to discuss migration issues,” the official said, adding that the talks were “consistent with our interest in promoting greater freedoms and respect for human rights in Cuba.”

Word of the jump-started talks sparked an angry reaction from Cuban-American Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, who blasted the Obama administration for what she saw as a policy of appeasement.

“First we get news that the Obama State Department is speaking with a top Castro regime diplomat. Then comes the announcement that the administration is restarting talks with the dictatorship regarding direct mail between both countries,” Ros-Lehtinen said. “Now we hear that migration talks will be restarted. It’s concession after concession from the Obama administration.”

Since taking office, Obama has relaxed travel and remittance rules for Cuban Americans and made it far easier for others to visit the island for cultural, educational and religious reasons.

But Obama has continued to criticize the government of President Raul Castro for repression of basic civil and human rights, and his senior aides have offered little praise for a series of economic and social reforms the Cuban leader has instituted in recent years.

A nascent effort at rapprochement between Washington and Havana has stalled since Gross’s arrest, and the resumption of the two sets of bilateral talks is sure to raise speculation that there could be movement on his case.

Gross was working on a USAID democracy building program at the time of his arrest in December 2009. Washington has said repeatedly that no major improvement in relations can occur until he is released. His family has complained that he has lost a lot of weight in jail and suffers from various ailments. Cuba reportedly has agreed to allow a U.S. doctor to visit him in detention, and has also granted him conjugal visits and made him available to high-level American delegations.

Cuba, for its part, is demanding the release of four of its intelligence agents serving long sentences in the United States. A fifth agent, Rene Gonzalez, returned home to Havana earlier this year after completing his sentence and agreeing to renounce his U.S. citizenship.

Geoff Thale, a Cuba analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America think-tank , said the resumption of talks, and the moves involving Gross and Gonzalez, are a sign that long-frozen relations could finally be improving.

“These are modest but sensible steps,” he said. “What’s significant is less the steps themselves than the fact that there is movement in the relationship. It’s a real break from the status quo.”

The migration talks are intended to monitor adherence to a 16-year-old agreement under which the United States issues 20,000 emigration visas to Cubans a year.

Separately, Cuba says it objects to an American policy known as “wet foot, dry foot” — in which Cuban refugees reaching American soil are allowed to stay in the U.S., while those stopped at sea are sent home. Cuba says the policy encourages its citizens to try to flee the is

Also Wednesday, Cuba issued a statement declaring the recently concluded mail talks as “welcome” and “fruitful,” but also said its delegation had informed the Americans that “a high quality, stable and secure” mail service between the countries is impossible as long as Washington maintains its 51-year economic embargo on the communist-run island.

___

Associated Press writer Paul Haven reported this story in Havana and Matthew Lee reported from Washington. AP writer Christine Armario in Miami contributed.

___

Paul Haven on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/paulhaven

The prize organizers say the technology that allows for the stable transfer of genes into plant cells has improved yields, resistance to insects and disease, and tolerance of extreme climate variations.

Sharing the prize are Marc Van Montagu of Belgium; Mary-Dell Chilton, a researcher at biotechnology company Syngenta; and Robert Fraley, chief technology officer at Monsanto.

Van Montagu and Chilton independently developed the technology in the 1980s. Fraley genetically engineered the first herbicide-resistant soybeans, meaning farmers can spray their fields to kill weeds while leaving their soybean plants intact.

Average highs are normally in the 70s in Germany’s capital city in June, but they were in the 90s Tuesday as Obama spoke at the historic Brandenburg Gate nearly 50 years after President John F. Kennedy’s famous cold war speech there.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel introduced Obama from a stage with no cover for the bright hot sun. “We’ve chosen the best possible weather to welcome you most warmly, as it were,” she said.

“It’s so warm,” Obama replied, “and I feel so good, that I’m actually going to take off my jacket and anybody else who wants to, feel free to.”

The crowd of 4,500 broke into cheers, after waiting for hours under tight security that prohibited them from bringing in water bottles. The Red Cross said 104 people were treated at the site for dehydration and sunburn, although fortunately none were ill enough to require hospital treatment.

Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit, sitting behind Obama on the stage, took the president up on the invitation to dress down.

“We can be a little more informal among friends,” Obama said.

___

The weather wasn’t all that felt familiar to the president.

As Obama and German President Joachim Gauck greeted children waving flags from their two countries at Bellevue Palace, German photographers repeatedly shouted for Obama to turn toward them so they could get a better picture.

“The press is the same everywhere,” Obama quipped.

___

Obama told his audience at the Brandenburg Gate that his family’s absence at the speech was not a slight to Berlin, but to him.

“The last thing they want to do is to listen to another speech from me, so they’re out experiencing the beauty and the history of Berlin,” Obama said.

First lady Michelle Obama and daughters Sasha and Malia visited monuments commemorating dark eras of the country’s past. They were joined by the president’s half sister Auma, who went to university in Germany and flew in to meet them from her home in Kenya.

The family walked through the Holocaust memorial, a vast undulating field of more than 2,700 grey concrete slabs designed by American architect Peter Eisenman. The monument to the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis was opened in 2005 next to the U.S. Embassy and the site of the bunker where Adolf Hitler committed suicide.

Merkel’s husband, chemistry professor Joachim Sauer, made a rare public appearance to show the Obamas one of the few remaining sections of the Berlin Wall, which East Germany’s communist rulers built in 1961 and divided the city until 1989. Sauer, like Merkel, grew up behind the wall in the communist east.

The first lady and her daughters placed yellow roses in the gaps between the concrete slabs of the wall’s main memorial.

The first family stayed at the Ritz Carlton on the glitzy Potsdamer Platz, which was largely a vacant lot throughout the Cold War with the wall running right through it, just a few feet from where the hotel now stands.

___

Obama paid tribute in his Brandenburg Gate speech to the “airlift of hope” that kept West Berlin out of Soviet hands in the late 1940s — and to a 92-year-old veteran of the operation once known as the Candy Bomber.

Gail Halvorsen was among the crowd that braved the heat to hear the president’s speech. He got his nickname for air-dropping handkerchief-tethered chocolate and gum to the children of Berlin. “He and his comrades made it possible for the city to survive,” said Mayor Wowereit.

The airlift began on June 26, 1948, in an ambitious plan to feed and supply West Berlin after the Soviets blockaded the city, attempting to squeeze the U.S., Britain and France out of the enclave within Soviet-occupied eastern Germany. American and allied pilots flew 278,000 flights to Berlin over 15 months, bringing in food, coal, medicine and other supplies. The Soviets realized in 1949 that the blockade was futile and lifted their barricades.

Obama said the United States couldn’t be prouder of Air Force veteran Halvorsen. “I hope I look that good, by the way, when I’m 92,” the president said.

___

Germany and the United States both could claim some credit for a spectacular warm-up act by violinist David Garrett before Obama’s speech.

Garrett, the son of a German father and an American mother, was born and raised in Aachen on German’s western border and studied at Julliard in New York under famed Israeli-American violinist Itzhak Perlman.

Garrett performed songs by Obama favourite Bruce Springsteen and German composer Ludwig van Beethoven.

He also performed his version of “Smooth Criminal” by Michael Jackson, who infamously dangled his baby outside a hotel window just up the street.

___

Associated Press writers Robert H. Reid and Frank Jordans contributed to this report.

Obese adolescents suffered increased hearing loss across all frequencies.

Also, they were almost twice as likely to develop one-sided low-frequency hearing loss.

The scientists stressed that future research is needed on dangerous consequences of this early hearing loss on social development, academic performance, behavioural and cognitive function.

KING OR QUEEN?

Royal officials can’t say — and it’s not because they are being coy, it’s because Kate and William have not found out — and don’t plan to.

“They don’t know the sex of the baby and have decided not to find out,” said a royal official who spoke on condition of anonymity under Palace guidelines for distributing information to the press.

PACING THE HALLWAY OR IN THE ROOM WITH HIS WIFE?

Officials said William “fully intends to be present at the birth.” The birth is expected to take place at the private Lindo Wing of St. Mary’s hospital in central London. That is the hospital where William and his younger brother, Prince Harry, were born.

WHO’S IN CHARGE?

A spokesman said the medical team will be led by royal gynecologist Dr. Marcus Setchell.

WILL THE PUBLIC KNOW WHEN KATE IS ADMITTED TO HOSPITAL?

Officials said there will be no advance notice. The public will be told once she has settled in her room in the early stages of labour, the spokesman said, anticipating that this would be within an hour of her arrival at the hospital.

HOW WILL PEOPLE FIND OUT THAT AN HEIR TO THE THRONE HAS BEEN BORN?

This will be a mix of tradition and new social media. Officials said a royal aide will emerge from the hospital with a signed bulletin on foolscap-sized paper carrying the Buckingham Palace letterhead. The bulletin will be given to an official who will be driven to the Palace, where it will be posted on an easel in public view in front of the building. At the same time the bulletin is posted, there will be an announcement on Twitter and the media will be formally notified. The document will give the baby’s gender, weight and time of birth.

AND THE NAME?

Not so fast. Officials said they don’t know how quickly a name will be chosen. When William was born, a week passed before his name was announced.

VISITING HOURS?

Officials said royals and members of the Middleton family are likely to visit, but Queen Elizabeth II is not expected to visit at the hospital because she will be on her summer vacation at the Balmoral estate in Scotland.

In a wide-ranging speech that enumerated a litany of challenges facing the world, Obama said he wanted to reignite the spirit that Berlin displayed when it fought to reunite itself during the Cold War.

“Today’s threats are not as stark as they were half a century ago, but the struggle for freedom and security and human dignity, that struggle goes on,” Obama said at the city’s historic Brandenburg Gate under a bright, hot sun. “And I come here to this city of hope because the test of our time demands the same fighting spirit that defined Berlin a half-century ago.”

The president called for a one-third reduction of U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles, saying it is possible to ensure American security and a strong deterrent while also limiting nuclear weapons.

Obama’s address comes nearly 50 years after John F. Kennedy’s famous Cold War speech in this once-divided city. Shedding his jacket and at times wiping away beads of sweat, the president stood behind a bullet-proof pane and read his remarks from text before a crowd of about 6,000.

It was a stark contrast to the speech he delivered in the city in 2008, when he summoned a crowd of 200,000 to embrace his vision for American leadership. Whereas that speech soared with his ambition, this time Obama came to caution his audience not to fall into self-satisfaction.

“We must acknowledge that there can at times be a complacency among our Western democracies,” he said. “Today people often come together in places like this to remember history, not to make it. Today we face no concrete walls or barbed wire.”

The speech came just one week shy of the anniversary of Kennedy’s famous Cold War speech in which he denounced communism with his declaration “Ich bin ein Berliner” (I am a Berliner). Obama, clearly aware that he was in Kennedy’s historic shadow, asked his audience to heed the former president’s message.

“If we lift our eyes as President Kennedy calls us to do, then we’ll recognize that our work is not yet done,” he said. “So we are not only citizens of America or Germany, we are also citizens of the world.”

The president has previously called for reductions to nuclear stockpiles. But by addressing the issue in a major foreign policy speech, Obama signalled a desire to rekindle an issue that was a centerpiece of his early first-term national security agenda.

The president discussed non-proliferation with Russian President Vladimir Putin when they met Monday on the sidelines of the Group of 8 summit in Northern Ireland. During Obama’s first term, the U.S. and Russia agreed to limit their stockpiles to 1,550 as part of the New START Treaty.

In Moscow, Russian foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov said that plans for any further arms reduction would have to involve countries beyond Russia and the United States.

“The situation is now far from what it was in the ’60s and ’70s, when only the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union discussed arms reduction,” Ushakov said.

Obama’s calls for co-operation with Moscow come at a time of tension between the U.S. and Russia, which are supporting opposite sides in Syria’s civil war. Russia also remains wary of U.S. missile defence plans in Europe, despite U.S. assurances that the shield is not aimed at Moscow.

Germany’s foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, is a strong advocate of nuclear disarmament and has long called for the removal of the last U.S. nuclear weapons from German territory, a legacy of the Cold War. The Buechel Air Base in western Germany is one of a few remaining sites in Europe where they are based.

Under an agreement drawn up when they formed a coalition government in 2009, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives and Westerwelle’s Free Democratic Party agreed to press NATO and Washington for the nuclear weapons to be withdrawn, but did not set any timeframe.

Nuclear stockpile numbers are closely guarded secrets in most nations that possess them, but private nuclear policy experts say no countries other than the U.S. and Russia are thought to have more than 300. The Federation of American Scientists estimates that France has about 300, China about 240, Britain about 225, and Israel, India and Pakistan roughly 100 each.

___

Associated Press writer Frank Jordans contributed to this report.

___

Follow Julie Pace at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC

The former “Harry Potter” star plays the title role in a Michael Grandage-directed production of McDonagh’s scabrous tragicomedy at London’s Noel Coward Theatre.

First staged in 1996, the play is a raucously dark take on Irish identity from the writer-director of plays including “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” and movies “In Bruges” and “Seven Psychopaths.”

Radcliffe stars as Billy, a 17-year-old orphan on a remote island in 1930s Ireland, who sees a chance of escape from a life of boredom and mockery when an American film crew arrives on a neighbouring island to shoot the film “Man of Aran.”

The 23-year-old actor had to master the part’s taxing physical demands, its emotional shifts — and a strong Irish accent.

The Guardian’s Michael Billington said Wednesday the performance proved that Radcliffe “is a fine stage actor with a gift for playing social outsiders,” while Times of London critic Libby Purves praised his “still, melancholy intensity and resolve.”

In The Independent newspaper, Paul Taylor hailed Radcliffe’s “honest, sensitive, unshowy performance” — though he said “Radcliffe may not have the most convincing Irish accent in Grandage’s vividly quirky ensemble.”

“Unlike many child stars, Daniel Radcliffe has grown up gracefully,” said the Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer, who thought “the former boy wizard lends this disconcertingly cruel play what little heart it has.”

Radcliffe has taken on a series of challenging stage and screen roles as he’s moved on from a decade as J.K. Rowling’s magical hero.

“I didn’t just want to take an easy way out of this,” he told The Associated Press in a March interview. “I wanted to really try and take risks and make a career for myself.”

His 2007 stage debut in Peter Shaffer’s “Equus” required him to bare all, emotionally and physically. He made his Broadway debut singing and dancing in the musical “How To Succeed in Advertising Without Really Trying.”

His movie roles have included Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in “Kill Your Darlings” and a bereaved man who mysteriously grows devilish horns in “Horns,” by French horror auteur Alexandre Aja.

And he told the London Evening Standard newspaper on Tuesday that two of his dream roles are musical satirist Tom Lehrer and rocker Iggy Pop.

“The Cripple of Inishmaan,” which runs to Aug. 31, is part of a West End season of plays overseen by Grandage, who has assembled an A-list company of actors that includes Radcliffe, Ben Whishaw, Judi Dench and Jude Law.

___

Online: www.michaelgrandagecompany.com

Jill Lawless can be reached at http://Twitter.com/JillLawless

Somali police officer Abdi Hassan said gunmen had breached the compound and were inside, while the militant group al-Shabab said on its Twitter feed shortly after the attack that its fighters “are now in control of the entire compound and the battle is still ongoing.”

A U.N. official said that African Union troops and Somali security forces were responding to the attack. The official said the senior U.N. representative was not at the compound during the attack and is safe at the airport.

The U.N. was trying to figure out the status of its other workers, though. One U.N. official in Mogadishu and in contact with people inside the besieged compound said the gunmen had not been able to get inside. The official said there had been no casualty reports among U.N. staff but that some guards had been wounded.

“We were actually holding a meeting close to the compound when we heard the explosion,” the official said.

A second U.N. official said the staff inside the building had been moved to bunkers and he suggested the staff wouldn’t actually know if the gunmen were inside the compound or not. Both U.N. officials insisted on anonymity because they are not authorized to be quoted by name.

“All I know is that it’s sustained fire and they’re inside so they don’t know what’s going inside,” said one U.N. official. “We have bunkers so all staff have been moved to the bunkers where it’s safe.”

The official said the staff had described “several” explosions. An Associated Press reporter at the scene said one of those blasts included a car bomb.

Al-Shabab said that members of its martyrdom brigade were carrying out the attack.

The compound under attack lies just across the street from the secure airport complex, where African Union military forces are based. The U.N. compound is used by agencies like UNICEF, WHO and UNDP.

The top U.N. official on Somalia, Nicholas Kay, also works out of the building. He was not inside the compound when it was attacked and is safe inside the airport compound, one of the U.N. officials said.

Mogadishu fell into anarchy in 1991 and is just beginning to move past years of sustained conflict. The U.N. and foreign embassies were absent from Mogadishu for close to two decades.

But African Union forces pushed al-Shabab out of Mogadishu in August 2011, meaning residents didn’t have to live through daily battles for the first time in years. An international presence slowly began to return.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon visited Mogadishu last December and announced that the U.N. would re-open its offices in the seaside capital. The U.N. began the process of moving its personnel from the nearby capital of Nairobi, Kenya, back to Mogadishu, a process that has accelerated in recent weeks.

International embassies — from Turkey and Britain, for example — followed. Wednesday’s attack, though, underscores the fragile security situation and will force the U.N. and embassies to review their safety plans and decide if they have enough defences to withstand a sustained al-Shabab assault.

Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry appealed to him in recent talks. He said he told them security for the Filipino forces should be bolstered for the Philippines to consider to keep them in the volatile buffer zone between Syria and Israel.

Last month, del Rosario recommended the withdrawal of the Filipinos from the Golan Heights to Philippine President Benigno Aquino III following two separate abductions of Filipino peacekeepers and the wounding of another in fighting between Syrian government and rebel forces.

Austria announced recently that it would remove its 377 peacekeepers from the 911-member U.N. peacekeeping force, which also includes troops from India. That will leave the Philippines as the largest single contributor.

Croatia withdrew in March for fear its troops would be targeted. Japanese forces have also withdrawn, according to del Rosario.

“This, of course, will create a vacuum in the Golan, that separation stretch which keeps Israel away from Syria,” del Rosario said in a news conference in Manila. He said Kerry and Ban told him that if the Philippines also withdraws, that would “create maximum volatility for the area.”

In talks with Ban and Kerry, “I mentioned that we thought that the exposure was beyond tolerable limits for our people but we’re willing to reconsider and make a new assessment if the security and safety of our peacekeepers would be upgraded,” he said.

Ban has proposed expanding the peacekeeping force to 1,250, and British Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant, president of the U.N. Security Council, said Tuesday there is strong support in the council for the idea.

The Filipino troops now in the Golan Heights will stay in the region up to Aug. 3, when they need to be replaced by a fresh batch. But del Rosario said the Philippines may withdraw from the peacekeeping mission if no additional safeguards are put in place to ensure their safety.

The Philippines has deployed an assessment team to the Golan Heights to take “a good look as to under what conditions we may be able to stay and not withdraw,” del Rosario said.

The team would submit an assessment later this week before Aquino makes a final decision, he said.

Bulent Arinc told reporters Wednesday that the protest by hundreds of people standing motionless for hours in streets and squares were peaceful and “pleasing to the eye.” He urged protesters, however, not to obstruct traffic and not to endanger their health.

It was the first government comment on the passive protest that was started by a lone protester who stood still for some eight hours on Istanbul’s Taksim Square on Monday.

A police crackdown that began May 31 against environmentalists and other activists in Taksim Square set off more than two-weeks of anti-government protests.

Police dispersed pockets of protesters who set up barricades in two cities overnight Tuesday.