In October, an Italian appeals court overturned the young Seattle woman’s murder conviction in the 2007 death of her British roommate in Perugia. But the same court upheld Knox’s conviction for slander — for falsely accusing bar owner Diya “Patrick” Lumumba of involvement in the slaying.

Lumumba was freed after two weeks in prison for lack of evidence.

Knox later said she was “manipulated” during her lengthy police interrogation.

An appeal of the slander conviction was filed Monday, Knox family spokesman Dave Marriott confirmed. He doesn’t know when the Italian court might consider it.

Knox returned to Seattle after her murder conviction was overturned. The former exchange student had been in custody since 2007.

In its ruling last fall, the Italian appeals court also acquitted Knox’s then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, in the murder of Meredith Kercher.

A third defendant, Ivory Coast-born drifter Rudy Guede, was convicted in a separate trial of sexually assaulting and stabbing Kercher. His 16-year prison sentence — reduced on appeal from an initial 30 years — was upheld by Italy’s highest court in 2010.

In a lengthy court document explaining the ruling that cleared Knox and Sollecito, presiding appeals court Judge Claudio Pratillo Hellmann wrote that Knox implicated Lumumba after hours of intense police questioning because “she was convinced that was what the police wanted her to do; to name a guilty person.”

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Santorum largely bypassed Florida and Nevada to blanket the two caucus states with criticism of Romney and lay the groundwork among conservatives who have great sway in the process. RivalNewt Gingrich praised Santorum’s strategy as shrewd even as he signaled he had no interest in exiting the four-way race, which also includes Ron Paul.

“I think that Santorum’s going to have a pretty good day,” Gingrich told reporters on the eve of the caucuses. “He targeted differently than I did. I stayed in Florida to fight it out. … He took the same amount of time and energy and he came to Minnesota and Missouriand Colorado. For him, that was the right decision.”

Missouri’s GOP primary, also scheduled for Tuesday, promised Republicans a chance to show their allegiance to a candidate, but the effort is largely for show. No delegates will be awarded based on the outcome of the primary vote. Instead, Missouri will select delegates through a system of GOP caucuses and conventions that starts with local caucuses in mid-March. Moreover, Gingrich failed to get on the ballot in Missouri, which meant the vote there couldn’t be read as a referendum on the former House speaker’s viability.

Santorum, who for weeks has hammered Romney and Gingrich, seemed optimistic at his final campaign event before the contests got under way.

“This is a big day for us to see whether all the work that we put in in the past few weeks, when not so much attention was paid here as to Florida and Nevada, pays off,” Santorum said at a Denver rally.

Santorum seemed to spare Gingrich after the former House speaker suffered back-to-back losses to Romney in Florida and Nevada. With stepped-up intensity, Santorum castigated Romney as an unfit candidate and warned that Republicans were heading toward defeat if Romney were the nominee.

“A Romney nomination would not be in the best interest of us wining the general election and we need to have a conservative alternative. And my feeling is that Speaker Gingrich sort of had his chance in the arena and came up short in Florida and Nevada,” Santorum told reporters in Golden on Monday. “And now it’s our turn hopefully to get a one-on-one in Missouri.”

Romney sensed a possible threat from Santorum on Monday and went after Santorum’s time in the Senate as “not effective” because of his past support for spending on pork-barrel projects. Santorum flatly countered that Romney was “uniquely unqualified.”

Clearly mindful of the late shift in the race, Santorum has been working aggressively in Minnesota and in conservative areas of Colorado in the past two weeks while Romney campaigned in Florida and Nevada. It was clear Monday that Santorum saw an opportunity to rise in the GOP race.

But he was also facing coordinated criticism from Romney’s headquarters for the first time.

“Any time someone challenges Gov. Romney, Gov. Romney goes out and instead of talking about what he’s for … he just simply goes out and attacks and tries to destroy,” Santorum said.

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Polls suggest he should triumph easily in the western US state — where he scored 60 percent in 2008 — although there is a tighter race in Minnesota, where last-placed Rick Santorum is hoping to snatch a win.

Romney’s main rival, former House speaker Newt Gingrich, is battling to stay in the race after two heavy losses in a row to the former Massachusetts governor, who won in Florida last week and Nevada over the weekend.

Romney is on a roll in his bid to become the Republican Party’s nominee to take on President Barack Obama in the general election in November, having taken three of the five state polls so far.

His financial and campaigning muscle were on display on the eve of Tuesday’s caucuses, when he held a rally in a packed school sports hall.

“Mitt, Mitt, Mitt!” chanted several thousand supporters packed into the Arapahoe High School hall, with others forced to listen through loudspeakers in a neighboring hall as Romney gave a cheer-buoyed version of his stump address.

By contrast Gingrich spoke to a few hundred supporters in a barely half-full hotel ballroom in Golden, west of Denver, drawing cheers with an attack on a Romney gaffe from last week about poor Americans.

“He said last week that he didn’t really worry very much about the very poor because after all they had a safety net,” Gingrich said, calling Romney’s verbal stumble “backwards” in terms of traditional conservative thinking.

The candidates are battling for the biggest share of the 1,144 delegates at the Republican Party’s convention in Tampa, Florida, in August. With Nevada, Romney has 99, against 33 for Gingrich, 15 for Paul and 11 for Santorum.

Tuesday’s non-binding caucuses in Colorado and Minnesota will be the last contests before Maine’s week-long straw poll begins on February 11 and Michigan Republicans vote in a February 28 primary.

The caucuses begin at 7 pm (0100 GMT in Minnesota and 0200 GMT in Colorado) and results may not immediately be available.

Full results for Nevada published on Monday gave Romney 50 percent of the vote, more than twice his nearest rival Gingrich, with 21 percent. Paul came in third with 19 followed by Santorum with 10.

In Colorado Romney’s win might not be that crushing, but should still be comfortable: a Public Policy Polling (PPP) survey on Sunday put Romney at 40 percent, Santorum at 26, Gingrich at 18 and Paul at 12.

While the Colorado result is barely in doubt, Romney could see his momentum slowed by a narrow victory — or even a loss — in the heartland state of Minnesota.

He was in a statistical tie with conservative darling Santorum, who is hoping to carry Minnesota’s caucuses on Tuesday with the help of the state’s large base of evangelical Christian and ultraconservative Tea Party voters.

Santorum, who has seen his campaign flag after scoring an early victory in Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucus, is hoping for another upset in Minnesota’s non-binding caucus, where turnout is expected to be low.

Romney — who carried Minnesota in 2008 with 41 percent of the vote — has not returned to the midwestern state since last week, relying instead on former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty to press his cause.

“The only candidate in the race who hasn’t spent the bulk of his adult life either in Washington, DC or in a parasitic relationship with Washington, DC is Mitt Romney,” Pawlenty told a group of around 40 supporters gathered at Romney’s suburban Minnesota headquarters.

While the Republicans slug it out on the ground, Obama saw his approval rating soar Monday to the 50-percent mark, with a solid lead over Romney, seen as his likely Republican opponent in November.

Obama leads Romney 52 to 43 percent among all Americans, and a narrower 51 to 45 percent among registered voters, according to a poll by the Washington Post and ABC television.

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The former Massachusetts governor, who scored a major win in Florida on Tuesday, was back on track a day after stumbling with an ill-judged remark about poor Americans, as the new Nevada poll gave him a 20 point lead.

The survey of likely Republican voters put Romney on 45 percent and Gingrich on 25 percent in the western battleground state, which holds caucuses on Saturday as the GOP poll race spreads west.

But in a new development, Gingrich announced possible party appeal action over the results in Florida, where Romney won big, in theory claiming all its 50 delegates. Gingrich said the delegates should be award proportionately.

The developments came as Romney, who has an estimated $250 million fortune, won the endorsement of real estate mogul and celebrity TV star Trump, who briefly flirted with a presidential run last year.

“Mitt is tough, he’s smart, he’s sharp, he’s not going to allow bad things to continue to happen to this country that we all love,” Trump said. “Governor Romney, go out and get ‘em, you can do it.”

Romney, whose campaign has been plagued by a string of wealth-related gaffes and issues, betrayed no qualms about accepting the support of a super-rich benefactor at a glitzy Las Vegas press event.

“There are some things that you just can’t imagine happening in your life. This is one of them. Being in Donald Trump’s hotel and having his endorsement is a delight,” he said, with wife Ann and Trump standing alongside.

Romney, 64, came second in the first Republican contest in Iowa, then swept the second contest in New Hampshire before Gingrich, 68, thumped him South Carolina in mid-January.

Gingrich’s support however sank fast in the larger and more diverse state of Florida, and Romney now has all the momentum.

But the former House speaker signaled in Las Vegas that his backers may challenge the Florida results.

“I’m told by the lawyers that it’s pretty clear, that it’s supposed to be proportional,” he told Fox News television.

“That means that Romney’s advantage, instead of being 50 delegates, will be about a net of 10, and that makes a huge difference. I suspect it’ll be a fight,” he said.

Romney pitches himself as a successful entrepreneur with the business acumen to create jobs and turn around a US economy he claims has been ruined by President Barack Obama’s policies.

Critics say he is a son of wealth and privilege who spent much of his business career in the cut-throat world of venture capital and had a questionable record as a job-creator when he was governor of Massachusetts.

Only last April, Trump painted Romney as a corporate vulture during his time at Bain Capital, the venture capital firm where he made his millions.

“He’d buy companies, he’d close companies, he’d get rid of jobs,” Trump said in a CNN interview.

Romney triggered immediate criticism for a comment on Wednesday about America’s poorest citizens, which threatened to slow his growing momentum.

“I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it,” he told CNN.

Nevada Republicans hold caucuses on Saturday to pick 28 delegates to the Republican National Convention in the first of the party’s nominating contests in the western United States.

Romney, who won handily in Nevada in the 2008 White House race, can expect a boost from fellow Mormons. Four years ago, 26 percent of Nevada Republican caucus voters were Mormon and 95 percent of them backed Romney.

The Nevada poll, carried out by the Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper and 8NewsNow, showed former senator Rick Santorum trailing with 11 percent and Texas congressman Ron Paul with nine percent.

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The company proposes to end its traditional pension plans, a move strongly opposed by the airline’s unions and the U.S. pension-insurance agency, and to stop paying for retiree health benefits.

AMR Corp. said Wednesday that it must cut labor costs by 20 percent. It will soon begin negotiations with its three major unions, but the president of the flight attendants’ union quickly rejected the company’s ideas as unacceptably harsh.

CEO Thomas W. Horton said Wednesday that the company hopes to return to profitability by cutting spending by more than $2 billion per year and raising revenue by $1 billion per year.

AMR lost $884 million in the first nine months of 2011, and $904 million for December alone. It has lost more than $11 billion since 2001.

“We are going to use the restructuring process to make the necessary changes to meet our challenges head-on and capitalize fully on the solid foundation we’ve put in place,” Horton said in a letter to employees.

AMR’s 88,000 employees have braced for bad news for weeks. AMR, American and short-haul affiliate American Eagle filed for bankruptcy protection in November. Horton said in December that the company would emerge from bankruptcy with fewer workers.

Laura Glading, president of the Association of Professional Flight Attendants, said the proposal was more drastic than she expected. She claimed that the annual reduction in employee costs, which AMR put at $1.25 billion, would be closer to $2.8 billion.

“This is an absolute outrage,” Glading said. “There’s nothing in here that’s remotely acceptable.”

Transport Workers Association President James Little declared, “We’re going to fight this.” His union represents American’s mechanics and bag handlers, who would be hit hardest — 40 percent would be laid off.

The job cuts would include 4,600 maintenance workers, 4,200 baggage handlers, 2,300 flight attendants, 1,400 management and support employees and 400 pilots.

If American and its three unions can’t agree on changes, the company could ask a bankruptcy judge in New York to throw out existing labor contracts and impose the company’s conditions on workers. Federal law requires the company to first make a good-faith effort to negotiate agreements with its workers.

Besides fewer workers and reduced benefits, company officials said that other cost-cutting moves would include restructuring debt and aircraft leases and grounding older planes. A maintenance-overhaul facility in Fort Worth, Texas, would close and some maintenance would be outsourced, a move that American has long resisted. Aircraft-cleaning and fueling work would also be outsourced, and pilots and flight attendants could work more hours.

Ray Neidl, an analyst with Maxim Group LLC, said for American to win support for its plan, it would have to offer employees a goal — a carrot — and not just a stick. He said an AMR proposal for a new profit-sharing plan might help.

“It’s hard to see a carrot right now,” he said, “but you have to convince them that this is part of a plan to return to profits and secure jobs.”

The company also wants union approval to drop its traditional pension plans, which cover 130,000 employees and retirees. It would replace them with 401(k)-type plans under which the company contributes to workers’ retirement accounts.

The pension plans were once standard in the airline industry. AMR’s are underfunded by billions of dollars and the company said on a new website Wednesday that it could no longer afford them. This week, the U.S. Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. slapped liens on $91 million in AMR property after the company paid only $6.5 million of a required $100 million contribution to the plans.

PBGC Director Joshua Gotbaum said that before American “takes such a drastic action as killing the pension plans of 130,000 employees and retirees, it needs to show there is no better alternative.” He said the company had failed to provide even basic financial details.

American said the cost of traditional pensions and retiree health benefits saddled AMR with higher labor costs than its rivals. Through the first nine months of 2011, labor was 29 percent of operating costs at AMR compared with 22 percent at United and 20 percent at Delta.

Horton said AMR also plans to go ahead with orders to buy hundreds of new aircraft to replace older gas-guzzlers. That would cut fuel use — high fuel costs have been a major drag on American and other airlines. The bankruptcy judge hasn’t approved those new orders, but he has allowed the company to take delivery of some new jets.

American plans to increase flights in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas and Miami by 20 percent over the next five years to raise revenue, Horton said.

AMR, which barely avoided bankruptcy in 2003, is the latest of several large U.S. airlines to go through Chapter 11 in an effort to reduce costs and debt. United, Delta and US Airways did so in the past decade, and Continental — now part of United — in the 1990s.

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If the court rejects his case, the 40-year-old Australian will have exhausted all his options in Britain but he could still make a last-ditch appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, prosecutors have said.

The Supreme Court, England’s highest, granted Assange permission to appeal in December.

It said his case raised an issue of “great public importance”, namely whether Sweden’s state prosecutor had the right to sign the European arrest warrant under which he was held.

The case will be considered by seven judges, rather than the usual five.

The Supreme Court usually takes about 10 weeks to deliver a judgement but the parties have requested that this case be speeded up.

Wednesday marks 421 days since the arrest of the former computer hacker, who has been living under tight bail conditions at the country mansion of a wealthy supporter in Norfolk, eastern England.

Assange was arrested in Britain in December 2010 after two women made allegations of sexual molestation and an accusation of rape in Sweden, which he strongly denies.

He says the sex was consensual and claims the allegations are politically motivated, linked to WikiLeaks’ release of hundreds of thousands of classified US files about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as diplomatic cables.

Assange’s extradition to Sweden was initially approved by a lower court in February. An appeal to the High Court was rejected in November, but it subsequently granted him permission to appeal to the Supreme Court.

If this appeal fails, the WikiLeaks founder will have only one other option to stop his extradition — an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

“If the ECHR takes the case then his current bail conditions would remain in force and he would remain in the UK until the proceedings at the ECHR have concluded,” the Crown Prosecution Service said in a commentary on the case.

“If the ECHR declines to take the case then he will be extradited to Sweden as soon as arrangements can be made,” England’s state prosecutor said.

Concerning Assange’s case before the Supreme Court, Julian Knowles, an extradition law specialist with the Matrix Chambers law firm, said the question of whether a public prosecutor was a valid judicial authority had been comprehensively tested.

“The courts have always reached the clear answer that while it may look odd to English eyes … European systems don’t have the same structure,” he was quoted as saying Tuesday in The Guardian newspaper.

“The courts have always said that to make extradition work, you have to be flexible in your approach to what extradition is.”

Were Assange to win, the consequences would be “very profound”, he said.

“It would basically mean, until the law is rewritten, that extradition to Europe (would) become very difficult, if not impossible.

“Because in the vast majority of European extradition requests, the arrest warrant is issued not by a court, as it would be in England, but by a prosecutor.”

Assange announced last week that he was launching his own television chat show and promised interviews with “key political players, thinkers and revolutionaries”.

No guests have been unveiled, but a statement on the WikiLeaks website said the show would go on air in mid March in 10 weekly half-hour episodes.

Russian state television channel RT said it had the rights to show the episodes first.

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According to NYSE Euronext chief executive Duncan Niederauer, there is only a “glimmer of hope” that the tie-up, which would create the world’s largest market operator, will be approved by European competition authorities.

EU competition authorities opened a probe into the deal in August over concerns that the merged company would control 90 percent of the European derivatives market.

A final decision is expected on February 1.

In November, the companies proposed to separate some of their derivatives operations to allay EU concerns, but sources said Brussels remained unsatisfied.

The proposed merger has also sparked controversy in the United States as it would hand over the New York Stock Exchange to foreign owners.

A deal would see Deutsche Boerse shareholders own 60 percent of the new combined, Netherlands-incorporated firm.

Investors, too, seem unfazed by the likely failure of the deal, with Deutsche Boerse shares rising in recent days.

At a dinner with journalists last week, the head of the company that operates the Frankfurt stock exchange, Reto Francioni, preferred to talk instead about “organic growth” and insisted his company was optimistic about 2012, merger or no merger.

“It was the shareholders of NYSE Euronext who would have stood to gain more from the tie-up,” said LBBW analyst Martin Peter.

“Deutsche Boerse is better positioned than the Americans.”

The Frankfurt-based group is indeed active across the whole range of activities, from its Xetra electronic stock-trading platform, to its Eurex derivatives market and its Luxembourg-based clearing subsidiary, Clearstream.

In the case of NYSE Euronext, the highly competitive, low-margin stock-trading unit accounts for around half of overall business, while at Deutsche Boerse “it only plays a minor role,” the LBBW analyst said.

In the first nine months of 2011 and the whole of 2010, Xetra accounted for just 12 percent of the group’s overall revenues.

That means it has relatively small exposure to competition from alternative exchanges such as BATS and Chi-X, which teamed up to combine their stock trading platforms in Europe last year.

However, the German group would find itself “in danger” if alternative exchanges moved into the financial derivatives sector, warned Equinet analyst, Philipp Haessler.

Thanks to Clearstream and Eurex Clearing, however, Deutsche Boerse is well placed to benefit from the expanding post-market settlement and clearing sector, which plays a central role in both the regulated and over-the-counter markets.

The London Stock Exchange is hoping to challenge Deutsche Boerse in this area by taking over the other large European clearing house, LCH.Clearnet.

If, contrary to all expectations, the tie-up does go ahead, NYSE Euronext and Deutsche Boerse would become the world’s leading stock market and would benefit from vast cost synergies and become more profitable, said Philipp Haessler at Equinet.

However, the long-anticipated global consolidation in the sector is proving ephemeral: last year, an alliance between the London and Toronto stock exchanges ran aground and Australia also vetoed a merger between the Sydney and Singapore stock exchanges.

“National interests and regulation are proving bigger obstacles than expected,” Haessler said.

Christian Muschick, analyst at Silvia Quandt, said the EU Commission’s reservations about a tie-up between Deutsche Boerse and NYSE Euronext are probably of a more political nature.

Europe “feared ceding control and being dominated by the Americans,” he said.

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Washington attorney Robert Bennett said Friday that he will represent the company, which was indicted in federal court in Alexandria Thursday on copyright infringement and other charges.

The U.S. government shut down Megaupload’s file-sharing website on Thursday, alleging that the company facilitated illegal downloads of copyrighted movies and other content. Seven individuals — including the company’s founder, who had his name legally changed to Kim Dotcom — were also charged. Dotcom and three others were arrested in New Zealand; three others remain at large.

New Zealand police raided several homes and businesses linked to Dotcom and seized guns, millions of dollars and nearly $5 million in luxury cars, officials said.

In Hong Kong, where Megaupload is based, customs officials said they seized more than $42.5 million in assets. They said the company operated out of luxury hotel space costing more than $12,000 a day, and they seized high-speed servers and other equipment from the offices.

The shutdown and indictment generated headlines around the world in part because of the size and scope of Megaupload’s operation. Sandvine, Inc., a Canadian company that provides equipment to monitor Internet traffic, said the website alone accounted for about 1 percent of traffic on U.S. cable and DSL lines. The site is even more popular in many foreign countries.

Bennett said that “we intend to vigorously defend against these charges” but declined to comment on the case in detail.

Bennett is best known for serving as President Bill Clinton’s attorney when he was accused of sexual harassment by Paula Jones. He has also represented Defense Secretaries Clark Clifford and Caspar Weinberger.

Megaupload was no stranger to accusations that its website existed for the sole purpose of mass copyright breach. Before its website was taken down, Megaupload offered a more detailed defense of its operations, claiming in a statement that such accusations are “grotesquely overblown.”

The company said it had a clear, easy-to-follow procedure if movie studios or other copyright holders saw that their products were being illegally shared on Megaupload, and said that it responded to those “takedown notices” as required by law.

“Of course, abuse does happen and is an inevitable fact of life in a free society, but it is curbed heavily and efficiently by our close cooperation with trusted takedown partners. It is just unfortunate that the activities of a small group of ‘black sheep’ overshadows the millions of users that use our sites legitimately every day,” the statement said.

Indeed, sites like megaupload.com, known as cyberlockers, can fulfill legitimate needs and are used every day by people looking for an efficient way to share or transfer large files that can’t easily be sent by email.

In their indictment, however, federal prosecutors offered a detailed glimpse of the internal workings of the website. They allege that Megaupload was well aware that the vast majority of its users were there to illegally download copyrighted content.

According to the indictment, in a 2008 email chat session, two of the alleged coconspirators exchange messages, with one saying “we have a funny business . . . modern days pirates ” and the other responds, “we’re not pirates, we’re just providing shipping services to pirates ”.

In another instance, one of the defendants allegedly laments in colorful language that an episode HBO’s “The Sopranos” has been uploaded to site, but the dialogue is in French, limiting its appeal.

In fact, prosecutors allege that the entire website was specifically designed to encourage piracy. The website provided cash bonuses to users who uploaded content popular enough to prompt mass downloads — such content was almost always copyrighted material.

Stefan Mentzer, an intellectual property partner with the White and Case law firm in New York, said it’s likely that Megaupload will try to argue at least two defenses: One is that its service qualifies as a so-called “safe harbor” under Digital Millennium Copyright Act — the federal law governing copyright infringement — if they can show, for instance, that they had no actual knowledge that infringing material was on their system. Another possible defense would be jurisdictional — specifically, that a case can’t be brought in the Eastern District of Virginia against a Hong Kong-based company like Megaupload without evidence that they directed criminal activity related to the district.

But Mentzer said both defenses would be a challenge, given the evidence that prosecutors appear to have collected.

“The Department of Justice doesn’t just cavalierly file these lawsuits,” Mentzer said.

Federal prosecutors have made Internet piracy a priority in the last decade, especially in the Eastern District of Virginia, which can claim jurisdiction over many such cases because large portions of the Internet’s backbone — servers and other infrastructure — are physically located in northern Virginia’s technology corridor.

The vast majority of those cases have resulted in guilty pleas and prison time. On Friday, a day after announcement of the Megaupload case, a federal judge sentenced Matthew David Howard Smith, 24, of Raleigh, North Carolina, to 14 months in prison for his role in founding a website called NinjaVideo. That site was one of many shut down in 2010, at a time when it facilitated nearly 1 million illegal downloads a week.

NinjaVideo was what prosecutors called a “linking site” to Megaupload. Casual users of Megaupload would be unable to find popular movies and TV shows on the site without the proper links. Sites like NinjaVideo allowed users to easily search for the desired movies or music and provided the links that enabled them to download the content from Megaupload.

The other co-founder of NinjaVideo, Hana Beshara, was sentenced earlier this month to 22 months in prison. While she admitted guilt, she portrayed herself as a sort of Robin Hood of the online world, stealing from greedy movie studios to provide entertainment downloads to the masses in the form of free films, TV shows, videogames and music.

While the legal defense for piracy may be difficult, accused Internet pirates clearly have their supporters, as evidenced by the millions of people who use their sites as well as the response to Thursday’s Megaupload shutdown. Within hours of the indictment being unsealed, the loose affiliation of hackers known as Anonymous caused temporary shutdowns of the Justice Department website as well as the websites of the Motion Picture Association of America and other industry groups that support a tougher piracy laws.

It could be months before the criminal case against Megaupload gets underway. The four defendants arrested in made an initial appearance in a New Zealand court Friday and are scheduled to make a second appearance on Monday. Authorities have said it could take a year or more to bring them to the U.S. if they fight extradition.

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With Republican White House hopefuls telling voters they will prevent America from sinking into a European-type malaise, Guido Westerwelle sought to dispel the notion of a region collapsing on the back of social welfare.

“When I look at the American debate over the past weeks I see mostly a caricature of Europe, the image of a continent mired in gloom and self-absorption,” he told an audience at Brookings Institution.

“I beg to differ. First point: We actually overcame socialism in Europe 20 years ago,” he said, offering that the United States helped that achievement.

Westerwelle told reporters that he saw the “necessity to speak up” in the face of “stereotypes” of Europe coming out in the hard-fought battle over which Republican will square off against President Barack Obama in November’s election.

In a time-honoured tradition for the American right, Europe-bashing has been rife in the Republican nomination contest.

Candidates have repeatedly referred to Obama following the “socialist” path of Europe, while pointing to the current eurozone crisis as the result.

In one debate, the leader in the race, Mitt Romney, called Obama “a big-spending liberal” who “takes his political inspiration from Europe and from the socialist democrats in Europe.

“Guess what? Europe isn’t working in Europe. It’s not going to work here,” he said.

Romney has also accused Obama of trying to create a “European-style entitlement society,” saying the current administration reflects “the worst of what Europe has become.”

Westerwelle’s protests aside, “socialist” is a powerful slur in US politics. A Pew Research poll in December found 60 percent of people saw the word negatively, compared to 39 percent for “liberal” and 30 percent for “conservative.”

Rick Santorum, another Romney challenger, has also warned of taking the European socialist path, but he has acknowledged some positives across the Atlantic.

“I just read a recent study that actually income mobility from the bottom two quintiles up into the middle income is actually greater… in Europe than it is in America today. We need to change that,” he said in one debate.

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A spokesman for 24-year-old Elizabeth Smart says she got engaged last weekend and will likely marry in the summer.

No details about the groom-to-be were disclosed. The spokesman says Smart plans to keep her personal life private.

Smart’s father, Ed Smart, tells The Associated Press his future son-in-law is a “fine young man.” Ed Smart says he’s pleased for his daughter and hopes she has a happy life.

Onetime itinerant street preacher Brian David Mitchell was convicted in 2010 of Smart’s 2002 kidnapping and sexual assault. He’s serving a life prison sentence

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