Prosecutor spokeswoman Gabriela Chiru told The Associated Press that Romania's National History Museum is examining the ashes found in the stove of Olga Dogaru. She is the mother of Radu Dogaru, one of three Romanian suspects charged with stealing the paintings from Rotterdam's Kunsthal gallery in a brazen daytime heist.

It was the biggest art theft in more than a decade in the Netherlands. The stolen works have an estimated value of tens of millions of dollars if they were sold at auction.

Dogaru told investigators she was scared for her son after he was arrested in January and buried the art in an abandoned house and then in a cemetery in the village of Caracliu. She said she later dug them up and burned them in February after police began searching the village for the stolen works.

Chiru indicated that authorities did not necessarily believe Dogaru's account. She said it could take months for the results of the tests to be known.

Thieves broke in Oct. 16 through a rear emergency exit at the gallery in the Netherlands, grabbed the paintings off the wall and fled, all within two minutes.

Police who arrived less than five minutes after the break-in triggered an alarm found nothing but empty spaces on the walls, broken hanging wires and tire tracks in grass behind the gallery.

The stolen paintings were: Pablo Picasso's 1971 "Harlequin Head"; Claude Monet's 1901 "Waterloo Bridge, London" and "Charing Cross Bridge, London"; Henri Matisse's 1919 "Reading Girl in White and Yellow"; Paul Gauguin's 1898 "Girl in Front of Open Window"; Meyer de Haan's "Self-Portrait," around 1890; and Lucian Freud's 2002 work "Woman with Eyes Closed."

Radu Dogaru, the alleged ringleader, as well as the two other suspects remain in custody as investigators seek the paintings and other evidence.

The stolen paintings came from the private Triton Foundation, a collection of avant-garde art put together by multimillionaire Willem Cordia, an investor and businessman, and his wife, Marijke Cordia-Van der Laan. Willem Cordia died in 2011.

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European Union governments will this week question how to best use their economic ties with Egypt to pressure Cairo's army-backed rulers into finding a peaceful compromise with supporters of deposed Islamist President Mohamed Mursi.

At stake could be a 5 billion euro ($6.7 billion) package of grants and loans promised by the EU, its member governments and international financial institutions last year, as well as various trade incentives, EU officials and experts say.

The EU's ability to exert immediate economic pressure on Cairo is limited - much of its current aid is already stopped because of inadequate democratic reforms.

But the hope is that such a signal could help end a bloody crackdown by the government against Mursi's Muslim Brotherhood, in which around 800 people have died, and prevent further bloodshed between the two sides.

President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, two of the most senior EU officials, said in a statement on Sunday the 28-member bloc should "urgently review" its relations with Cairo to try to end the violence.

Senior EU diplomats will meet in Brussels on Monday to decide which areas of economic cooperation could be targeted and prepare a possible meeting of EU foreign ministers to be held in the next two weeks.

"Egypt is a key partner of the European Union," the two officials said. "Further escalation must be prevented. It could have unpredictable consequences for Egypt and for its broader neighborhood."

In the past days, a host of European foreign ministers have raised the specter of suspending economic aid.

France's Laurent Fabius has said "nothing could be ruled out" in terms of aid policy.

"What is evident is that we must quickly stop the bloodshed and reach an inter-Egyptian dialogue. It is not easy of course. We have to mobilize all our energies so that a solution is found by Egyptians," he told reporters on Sunday.

Austria's Michael Spindelegger called on the EU to withhold its main aid deal.

"This is my demand: The 5 billion have to be held back until the process returns to democracy," he said in an interview with the newspaper Kurier published on Sunday.

Experts and officials said Brussels could also threaten to suspend a broad deal dating back to 2001, which includes provisions for free trade in industrial goods and concessionary arrangements for trade in agricultural products, as well as broader political cooperation and a cultural exchange.

TREADING CAREFULLY

The United States and the European Union have tried jointly to facilitate a peaceful, political solution to the stand-off between the army and the Muslim Brotherhood of Mursi, Egypt's first freely elected president.

But since the army crackdown on pro-Mursi protests started on Wednesday, the focus of international involvement has shifted. In choosing its next steps, the EU will have to tread carefully in who it targets with any new measures.

Along with Washington, it needs to balance the need to support democratic principles with a vital interest in the stability in the Arab world's most populous nation.

Cutting off aid completely could damage support to the civil society which now benefits from the vast majority of EU cash. Since 2012, no new funds have been approved for direct budget support in Cairo, because of a lack of reforms.

It could also damage Europe's ability to mediate between the two sides in the future. European commercial interests could weigh, as well.

"Some will say ... Why do want to push the Egyptian market into the hands of Chinese," said Daniel Levy, Middle East director of the European Council on Foreign Relations think-tank.

On the other hand, he said, the specter of severing broader commercial ties could, in time, push the Egyptian business elites to pressure the army into political dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood.

"(They) ... will also be uncomfortable and they will start sending internal signals," he said. ($1 = 0.7500 euros)

(Corrects date of EU deal with Egypt in par 13)

(Additional reporting by Robert Jan Bartunek in Brussels and Astrid Wendlandt in Paris; Editing by Alison Williams)

NEWARK, New Jersey (Reuters) - A pair of private equity executives who own a majority of the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team on Thursday reached a deal to acquire the New Jersey Devils hockey team and its arena.

Joshua Harris and David Blitzer bought the team from former owner Jeffrey Vanderbeek. They declined to disclose the purchase price, though The Record newspaper of New Jersey valued the deal at $320 million.

The deal ends weeks of negotiations between Harris, the National Hockey League and a financially strapped franchise that was struggling to meet its obligations to its lenders and had a fractured relationship with local officials, including Newark Mayor Cory Booker.

NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said the new ownership would help the revitalization of this city.

"We're now at a point in time ... where two terrific people are going to take the foundation that has been put in place and take it to the next level," Bettman told a press conference.

Harris, a billionaire managing director at Apollo Global management, and Blitzer, a senior managing director at Blackstone, led a group that acquired the NBA's 76ers in 2011 for about $280 million.

The Devils have played in the Newark-based Prudential Center since 2007, when they relocated from East Rutherford, New Jersey. The arena, championed by former Newark Mayor Sharpe James, has struggled to turn a profit due in part to a large number of competing sports and entertainment venues in the New York metropolitan area.

Billboard magazine rated the arena as the eighth-highest grossing worldwide for the first half of 2013. However, the venue, known as "The Rock," has struggled to generate enough revenue, particularly since the departure of the NBA's Nets to nearby Brooklyn.

(Additional reporting by Frank Pingue; Editing by Scott Malone, Dan Whitcomb, Catherine Evans, Maureen Bavdek and Dan Grebler)

Egypt has become increasingly polarized since the Islamists rose to power following the 2011 revolution that ousted autocrat Hosni Mubarak. Fault lines touching key and potentially explosive issues like identity, the rights of Christians and other minorities, and democratic values have never been greater.

The Muslim Brotherhood and their hard-line allies stand at one end of a bitter standoff with secularists, liberals, moderate Muslims and Christians.

That schism grew after President Mohammed Morsi, Egypt's first democratically elected leader, was ousted in a July 3 military coup. But it was Wednesday's deadly police raids with armored bulldozers and security forces plowing through two protest camps that will be remembered as a turning point when what had been primarily a political standoff erupted into bloodshed.

"The spark of civil war is out," wrote Islamist columnist and author Fahmy Howeidy in Thursday's edition of the independent al-Shorouk daily. "The nation is on the edge of an abyss."

Adding to the mix is the branding by the state media of Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood and allies as "terrorists" and growing calls for authorities to take a tougher approach on the Islamists.

In a glimpse of what may be in store for the most populous Arab state, dozens of revenge attacks and clashes spilled over into a second day Thursday in Cairo and other cities showing the capability of Islamists to strike and laying bare the depth of their anger over Morsi's ouster and the crackdown that left hundreds dead.

Angry young men attacked government and security buildings, setting some ablaze, cut off roads, damaged or torched dozens of churches and stormed more than 20 police stations.

In one particularly gruesome attack, four officers in a police station just outside Cairo were killed after the building was shelled with rocket-propelled grenades. The assailants then slit the police chief's throat, a brutality reminiscent of an Islamist, anti-government insurgency that raged in Egypt in the 1990s before Mubarak used force to suppress it, killing and jailing thousands of Islamists.

In response, the government authorized police Thursday to use deadly force against anyone attacking security forces or government installations.

While the international community largely condemned the overwhelming use of force to clear out the camps on Wednesday, the military-backed administration's fight against the Brotherhood so far has been supported by many Egyptians, who are mainly Muslim but object to hard-liners.

"The army and the police will strike hard and ordinary people will be supportive," prominent rights lawyer and activist Gamal Eid said.

To such observers, it is beyond doubt that a majority of Egyptians supports going after the Brotherhood and its hard-line allies.

Millions took to the streets for days prior to the July 3 coup to call on Morsi to step down, angry over what they saw as efforts to monopolize power for himself and the Brotherhood, failure to implement crucial social and economic reforms and his public quarrels with the judiciary, the media, the military and police.

The mass protests morphed into celebrations on the day of his ouster. And a similar number responded to a call by military chief Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi to take to the streets on July 26 to show support for his moves to tackle "violence and potential terrorism."

The military and police also have gone after the Muslim Brotherhood and like-minded groups on the legal front, arresting dozens including senior leaders.

State-run TV and newspapers, meanwhile, are filled with commentators and other content full of anti-Brotherhood sentiment, often portraying Islamists as enemies of the people and tapping into nationalistic fervor by alleging that the Brotherhood is a violent group that is secretly enlisting foreign help against the rest of Egyptians and that views Egypt as just a part in a greater Muslim nation that transcends borders.

A backlash against Mohammed ElBaradei's decision to resign as interim vice president to protest the violence illustrated how widespread is the antipathy to the Brotherhood and its allies. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former director of the U.N. nuclear agency said he quit because he did not want to be held responsible for bloodshed.

"It has become difficult for me to continue to take responsibility for decisions I disapprove of, and I fear their consequences," he said in his letter of resignation. "I regret that those who benefited today are the proponents of violence, terror and the more extreme groups, and you will remember my words to you."

His resignation earned him public rebuke from Tamarod, the youth group that engineered the mass protests preceding Morsi's ouster. It said he was dodging his responsibility at a time when his services were needed. Even the umbrella of opposition groups he led during Morsi's year in power regretted his decision and bemoaned that he did not bother to consult it beforehand.

A front-page editorial in the state-owned al-Akhbar daily on Thursday said ElBaradei's resignation "amounts to a breach of his position and, consequently, is a case of treason that should not be allowed to pass without accountability."

In anticipation of mass protests by Brotherhood supporters on Friday, Tamarod, or Rebel, has called on Egyptians to form popular committees to counter any violence by the Islamists during the demonstrations, proposing a scenario that places rivals face to face on the streets with a chance of violence breaking out.

Already, Islamist hard-liners in the strategic Sinai Peninsula are waging a worsening insurgency against security forces, with near daily attacks. Sinai has for several years now been roiled in unrest, but the dramatic increase in the number of attacks on security forces there began as soon as Morsi was ousted, leading many to deduce that the Brotherhood and militants in Sinai were somehow bonded.

"Sure civil war is a possibility," said Michael W. Hanna, an expert on Egypt from the New York-based Century Foundation. "It will be bad, with suicide bombings and assassinations but not necessarily another Syria or Iraq."

___

Hendawi is chief of bureau for The Associated Press in Cairo. He has covered the Middle East for the AP since 1995.

Mexican media put the death toll at four and said some 40 others were poisoned by the leak in the southern state of Oaxaca.

Pemex said the leak was caused when the pipeline was damaged by heavy machinery operated by a private company doing road work.

Pemex has had a poor safety record in recent years.

Nearly 40 people were killed in January in a massive explosion at Pemex's Mexico City headquarters. Investigators said the blast was caused by a buildup of methane and other gases that had collected for years in the basement of the building with no ventilation.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto has proposed an overhaul of the energy sector to attract private investment to help stem a slide in oil output over nearly a decade and drag the giant Pemex into the modern era.

(Reporting by Miguel Gutierrez; Writing by Simon Gardner; editing by Christopher Wilson)

A spokesman for the California Highway Patrol confirmed it was the 87-year-old performer whose car was reported on fire on the shoulder of the Ventura Freeway with a driver seen slumped over the steering wheel.

Some off-duty nurses stopped to offer assistance, and firefighters arrived quickly and put out the blaze, said the CHP spokesman, officer Saul Gomez.

Gomez said he had no immediate information on Van Dyke's condition, or the cause of the fire.

But a six-second video clip posted on Twitter by Van Dyke's wife, Arlene, showed the performer's charred vehicle on the freeway and a brief glimpse of the actor talking to officials at the scene. Van Dyke appeared unharmed in the video clip.

A caption accompanying the clip said: "Van Dyke's melted car ... He's fine thank God!!"

Van Dyke, whose air of affability and a gift for physical comedy helped make "The Dick Van Dyke Show" one of the most beloved sitcoms in U.S. television history, received a lifetime achievement award from the Screen Actors Guild in January.

His show, which co-starred Mary Tyler Moore as his wife, ran on CBS from the fall of 1961 to the fall of 1966 and continued on in syndicated reruns for decades.

He scored another prime-time hit with the crime drama "Diagnosis Murder" in the 1990s and early 2000s.

(Reporting and writing by Steve Gorman; additional reporting by Piya Sinha-Roy; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Ken Wills)

The YouTube stream of the live chat will appear here at noon EDT. Questions may also be posted to .

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(Reuters) - A recovery in the U.S. housing market helped Home Depot Inc beat analysts' quarterly profit and sales estimates on Tuesday, prompting the world's largest home improvement chain to raise its outlook for the fiscal year.

Shares of Home Depot were up 3.3 percent at $77.70 in trading before the market opened.

The results, which came just weeks after data showed that U.S. home prices rose in May, gave more evidence that the housing market was healing after years of weakness.

A bubble in the U.S. housing market was at the core of the 2007-2009 financial crisis. During the downturn, Home Depot's sales at established stores fell more than 20 percent in such markets as Florida and California.

In recent quarters, housing has rebounded in those markets and other states where Home Depot has a heavy presence, such as Arizona and Nevada. In May, Home Depot said its sales to contractors and professional customers increased faster than those to individual homeowners and other shoppers for the first time since 2008.

Net earnings rose to $1.80 billion, or $1.24 a share in the second quarter ended August 4 from $1.53 billion, or $1.01 a share, a year earlier. Analysts on average were expecting a profit of $1.21 a share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Sales rose 9.5 percent to $22.5 billion, topping the analysts' average estimate of $21.8 billion.

For the year, the company raised its earnings forecast to $3.60 a share from $3.52. It said it expected a sales rise of about 4.5 percent, up from previous expectations of a 2.8 percent increase.

Home Depot has also benefited from its own efforts to improve customer service and attract shoppers with more compelling prices than its rivals. It has tailored its marketing to local areas, centralized distribution centers and shifted more workers to jobs where they serve customers directly.

As a result, Home Depot has gained market share from rival Lowe's Cos, which is due to report results on Wednesday.

Home Depot's sales at stores open at least a year rose 10.7 percent in the second quarter, including an 11.4 percent increase in the United States.

At Monday's close, Home Depot shares were up 22 percent since the beginning of the year, outperforming the Standard & Poor's 500 Index and Dow Jones Industrial Average.

(Reporting by Dhanya Skariachan; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)

Hannah Gastonguay and her family will fly back home Sunday after taking their two small children and her father-in-law and setting sail from San Diego for the tiny island nation of Kiribati in May.

Weeks into their journey, the Gastonguays hit a series of storms that damaged their small boat, leaving them adrift for weeks, unable to make progress. They were eventually picked up by a Venezuelan fishing vessel, transferred to a Japanese cargo ship and taken to Chile.

Their flights home were arranged by U.S. Embassy officials, Gastonguay said. The U.S. State Department declined to comment on Sunday.

The months-long journey has been "pretty exciting" and "little scary at certain points," Gastonguay told The Associated Press by telephone.

The 26-year-old mother said they wanted to go to Kiribati because "we didn't want to go anywhere big." She said they understood the island to be "one of the least developed countries in the world."

Kiribati is a group of islands just off the equator and the international date line about halfway between Hawaii and Australia. The total population is just over 100,000 people of primarily Micronesian descent.

Hannah Gastonguay said her family was fed up with government control in the U.S. As Christians they don't believe in "abortion, homosexuality, in the state-controlled church," she said.

U.S. "churches aren't their own," Gastonguay said, suggesting that government regulation interfered with religious independence.

Among other differences, she said they had a problem with being "forced to pay these taxes that pay for abortions we don't agree with." While federal law bars public funding for abortion, state attempts to block Medicaid funding for organizations that provide the procedure have met with legal hurdles. Opponents say that funding allows those groups to perform abortions.

The Gastonguays weren't members of any church, and Hannah Gastonguay said their faith came from reading the Bible and through prayer.

"The Bible is pretty clear," she said.

The family moved in November from Ash Fork, Ariz., to San Diego, where they lived on their boat as they prepared to set sail. She said she gave birth to the couple's 8-month-old girl on the boat, which was docked in a slip at the time.

In May, Hannah, her 30-year-old husband Sean, his father Mike, and the couple's daughters, 3-year-old Ardith and baby Rahab set off. They wouldn't touch land again for 91 days, she said.

She said at first, "We were cruising."

But within a couple of weeks "when we came out there, storm, storm, storm."

The boat had taken a beating, and they decided to set course for the Marquesas Islands. Instead, they found themselves in a "twilight zone," taking more and more damage, leaving them unable to make progress.

They could have used a sail called a genoa, she said, but they risked snapping off the mast and losing their radio and ability to communicate.

They had been on the ocean for about two months and were low on supplies. They were out of food and were down to "some juice and some honey." She said they were able to catch fish, but they didn't see any boats.

Still, we "didn't feel like we were going to die or anything. We believed God would see us through," she said.

At one point a fishing ship came into contact with them but left without providing assistance. A Canadian cargo ship came along and offered supplies, but when they pulled up alongside it, the vessels bumped and the smaller ship sustained even more damage.

They were getting hit by "squall after, squall, after squall."

"We were in the thick of it, but we prayed," she said. "Being out on that boat, I just knew I was going to see some miracles."

They watched the surrounding storms disperse, and "next thing you know the sun is out. It's amazing."

Eventually, their boat was spotted by a helicopter that had taken off from a nearby Venezuelan fishing vessel, which ended up saving them.

"The captain said, 'Do you know where you're at? You're in the middle of nowhere,'" she said.

They were on the Venezuelan ship for about five days before transferring to the Japanese cargo ship, where they were for nearly three weeks before landing in Chile on Friday. The Chilean newspaper Las Ultimas Noticias reported the story of their arrival.

"They were looking for a kind of adventure. They wanted to live on a Polynesian island but they didn't have sufficient expertise to navigate adequately," police prefect Jose Luis Lopez told the newspaper. Lopez took the family's statement in San Antonio, Chile, where the Japanese ship had dropped off the family.

Mauricio Araneda, the governor in Chile's San Antonio province, told the AP that the family "had zero knowledge and experience in navigation."

Sean Gastonguay's brother Jimmy, who lives in Arizona, said he had provided a description of the family's vessel to the U.S. Coast Guard and exchanged emails with them once they were picked up by the first boat.

"There was some concern, but we were hoping for the best, and they eventually popped up," he said. He was able to keep track of the family with the help of the Coast Guard as they were transferred from ship to ship.

"We're all happy. We have good peace of mind now," he said.

Hannah Gastonguay said the family will now "go back to Arizona" and "come up with a new plan."

___

Associated Press writer Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, N.M., contributed to this report.

U.S. authorities earlier this year accused Deniss Calovskis, along with suspects from Russia and Romania, of participating in a conspiracy that started in 2005 to create and disseminate the so-called Gozi virus. Once the virus was embedded on victims' computers it siphoned off passwords and bank account information.

Latvian ministers, by a vote of 7 to 5, with one abstaining, approved the extradition of Calovskis, who was born in 1985.

Martins Panke, spokesman for Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis, said the country's chief prosecutor told ministers before the vote that there was sufficient evidence to link Calovskis to the crimes.

Many Latvians were vehemently opposed to the idea of extraditing Calovskis since he faces 67 years in prison if found guilty by a U.S. court, which they feel is excessive.

The government decision is final, but Calovskis' lawyer, Saulvedis Varpins, has told Latvian media that he will appeal to the European Court of Human Rights to prevent the extradition.

It was unclear when the extradition could take place, but a Justice Ministry spokeswoman told The Associated Press that it would take at least several days.

According to documentation released by U.S. authorities in January, Romanian citizen Mihai Ionut Paunescu set up online infrastructure that allowed others to distribute the damaging programs, causing tens of millions of dollars in losses and affecting well over a million computers.

Some 200 computers of the U.S. space agency NASA were affected by the virus between December 2007 and August 2012, the documents revealed.

Paunescu was arrested in Romania in January, but the third accused co-conspirator, Nikita Kuzmin, a Russian national, was arrested in New York on various charges, including bank fraud and bank fraud conspiracy.