Evening Edition

The director of the eastern city’s Al-Jala hospital, Abdelkarim Gubeaili, told AFP that 38 people were treated for light injuries.

The Quryna newspaper said security forces and demonstrators clashed late on Tuesday in what it branded the work of “saboteurs” among a small group of protesters.

Wednesday’s call for the mass rally came as clashes erupted between regime backers and “apparent” supporters of the opposition at a funeral attended by thousands in Tehran of a student killed in anti-government protests of Monday.

“The noble people of Tehran will take to Enghelab Square after Friday prayers with their solid and informed presence,” the Islamic Propagation Coordination Council, which organises regime-backed programmes, said Wednesday.

US President Barack Obama, in one of his most direct reactions to Monday’s events in Iran, offered encouragement to protesters, saying he hoped they would have the “courage” to keep expressing their “yearning for greater freedoms.”

In a live interview on state television, Ahmadinejad said: “It is evident and clear that the Iranian nation has enemies because it is a country which wants to shine and achieve its peak and wants to change relations (between countries) in the world.

Clashes meanwhile erupted between regime backers and “apparent” supporters of the opposition at a funeral attended by thousands in Tehran of a student killed in anti-government protests of Monday, state television reported.

Iran’s prosecutor general Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejeie warned that action would be taken against opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, who reject the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and who had called for Monday’s demonstration which turned deadly.

“All I can say is that I’m not at all worried,” Berlusconi said.

“We have never been more united and more decided to continue the parliament until its mandate runs out,” a smiling Berlusconi told reporters in his first public reaction to the news Tuesday that he must stand in the dock in April.

The appointment of Jens Weidmann, 42, as the youngest ever Bundesbank chief followed last week’s surprise resignation of Axel Weber and also sparked concerns the Bundesbank’s jealously guarded independence might be undermined.

“Anyone who knows Jens Weidmann knows that has excellent professional skills, a brilliant intellect and that he has an independent mind,” Merkel told reporters, in an apparent bid to pre-empt such concerns.

Borders said it planned to close around 30 percent of its over 640 stores in the United States as part of its Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, which protects the company from its creditors while it reorganizes.

“Borders Group does not have the capital resources it needs to be a viable competitor and which are essential for it to move forward with its business strategy,” Borders president Mike Edwards said in a statement.

As sales of smartphones and tablets have started to outpace those of personal computers, criminals are increasingly targeting the devices, security companies say.

It is a menace for both consumers and businesses because many people use their smartphones or tablets to access corporate networks without authorisation.

But the Valentine’s night encounter was not easy for the US space agency’s Stardust-NExT mission spacecraft, which had to fight an onslaught of debris from the comet in order to snap dozens of revealing pictures.

“Comets, unlike any other body in the solar system, are unique when they are in the inner part of the solar system where the Earth is,” said Don Brownlee, Stardust-NExT co-investigator.

The firms said the merger would strengthen their position amid greater competition for business in emerging economies, from 24-hour trading and from smaller, more innovative trading platforms.

At the same time, NYSE Euronext chief executive Duncan Niederauer — who will be the CEO of the yet-unnamed new company — rejected suggestions that the deal was actually a takeover of the iconic but technologically outpaced New York Stock Exchange by the Frankfurt firm.

Japan’s Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara and Indian Commerce Minister Anand Sharma signed the deal in Tokyo, hoping it will boost two-way trade which totalled 900 billion yen ($10.7 billion) in 2009 — less than one percent of Japan’s total foreign trade.

“We have no doubt in our minds that this will usher in a new era of economic engagement, which will bring development, innovation and also prosperity in both societies,” Sharma said.

Activists from the US-based militant environmental group the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society have pursued the Japanese fleet for months to stop its harpoon ships from killing the giant sea mammals.

Japanese Fisheries Agency official Tatsuya Nakaoku said the factory ship “the Nisshin Maru, which has been chased by Sea Shepherd, has suspended operations since February 10 so as to ensure the safety” of the crew.

A crowd estimated at more than 1,000 people joined a winding Shi’ite funeral procession for the man, shot dead on Tuesday when fighting broke out at the burial of another protester.

Around 2,000 others were camped out at a junction in the center of the Gulf island kingdom’s capital, hoping to emulate the rallies on Cairo’s Tahrir Square. They demanded a change of government in Bahrain, where a Sunni family rules over a Shi’ite majority.

Clashes broke out between security forces and protesters when thousands of opposition supporters rallied in sympathy for popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia on Monday, reviving mass protests that shook Iran after a presidential vote in 2009.

“(Opposition leaders) Mehdi Karroubi and Mirhossein Mousavi are corrupts on earth and should be tried,” the official IRNA news agency quoted lawmakers as saying in a statement.

As unrest spread in the oil-rich region, Obama drew a distinction between Iran’s harsh treatment of opposition demonstrators and the Egyptian army’s more restrained handling of protests that drove President Hosni Mubarak from power on Friday.

“I find it ironic that you’ve got the Iranian regime pretending to celebrate what happened in Egypt, when in fact they have acted in direct contrast to what happened in Egypt by gunning down and beating people who were trying to express themselves peacefully,” Obama said at a White House news conference.

Despite a veto threat from President Barack Obama and harsh criticism from Senate Democrats, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives was on pace to pass a measure that would cut non-defense spending by 14 percent and approve about $1 trillion to keep federal agencies operating through September.

House Speaker John Boehner has characterized the cuts in a bill to fund the government from March 4 until September 30 as a downpayment on deficit-reduction that will go further next fiscal year.

The core producer price index, which excludes food and energy costs, increased 0.5 percent, the biggest advance since October 2008, the Labor Department said on Wednesday. Economists had expected a 0.2 percent gain.

Investors viewed the figures somewhat warily and bond prices slipped. Economists, however, said it was too soon to panic about inflation with stubbornly high unemployment keeping labor costs subdued.

The deal announced on Wednesday comes nine months after Sanofi Chief Executive Chris Viehbacher first put the idea to Genzyme’s Henri Termeer and gives Sanofi a new platform in rare diseases.

It is expected to boost Sanofi’s earnings from the first year after completion, offsetting revenue losses from drugs facing generic competitors for the first time.

Chief executive Marius Kloppers, yet to conclude a major deal for BHP, said the preference was to spend on expansion due to difficulties securing large acquisitions and as the commodity cycle had raised price expectations for potential assets.

“As one looks at a buy versus build equation, the clear opportunity for us is to continue to invest money in our organic portfolio,” Kloppers told analysts on Wednesday.

In his first interview for publication since his December 2008 arrest, Madoff said banks and hedge funds who dealt with his investment advisory firm demonstrated a “willful blindness” toward his activities, and failed to examine discrepancies between his regulatory filings and other information.

“They had to know,” Madoff, described as noticeably thinner and dressed in khaki prison clothing, said in a visiting room in the federal prison in Butner, North Carolina. “But the attitude was sort of, ‘If you’re doing something wrong, we don’t want to know.'”

The long-expected Chapter 11 filing will give the second-largest U.S. bookstore chain a chance to try to fix its finances and overhaul its business in an attempt to survive the growing popularity of online bookbuying and digital formats.

But the chain still faces questions about its longer term survival, in the face of competition from larger rival Barnes & Noble Inc, discounters such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc and Costco Wholesale Corp, as well as web retailer Amazon.com and Apple Inc in electronic books.

Weidmann, who at 42 will be the youngest president in the Bundesbank’s 54-year history, has spent five years as Merkel’s economic adviser, helping her lead Germany through the financial crisis, recession and euro zone debt crunch.

At a news conference at her chancellery in central Berlin, Merkel played down concerns expressed by some opposition parties that she was making an overtly political appointment by putting her close adviser at the top of the Bundesbank, the independent post-war guardian of stability in Germany.

It is the Gulf Arab state seen as most vulnerable to unrest because of deep-rooted discontent among its majority Shi’ite population against the ruling Sunni dynasty, the al-Khalifas. The populace complains of economic hardships, lack of political freedoms and discrimination in jobs in favor of Sunnis.

This has always sat awkwardly with its status as a regional banking, trading and Islamic finance hub, but its advantages, as a diversified economy and relatively liberal society, have outweighed the risks — thus far.

It is expected to take until the end of the year before the politically-charged deal, which was agreed on Tuesday, can go ahead. “We have a bumpy road ahead of us,” said Deutsche Boerse Chief Executive Reto Francioni, who would become chairman of the combined entity.

In a sign of the difficulty of keeping lawmakers and regulators on both sides of the Atlantic happy, the companies parked key questions that could threaten the accord. Foremost among those was what the merged company would be called.

Following weeks of scandal that have shaken his struggling center-right government, trial was set on Tuesday to start in a criminal court in Milan on April 6, according to a statement from the office of the city’s chief judge.

Berlusconi is not obliged to appear in person before the panel of three judges on that day, nor is there any legal obstacle to his continuing to hold office throughout any trial proceedings, which could take years before any conviction.

A naturalized U.S. citizen from Pakistan, Mohammed Junaid Babar, 35, once faced charges that could have led to a 70-year prison sentence, had he been convicted at trial.

But he walked free after less than five years in prison upon pleading guilty and becoming a star witness for British and American prosecutors.

Apple’s service allows it to keep 30 percent of customer payments to any publisher with a presence in its App Store, including blue-chip brands such as The New York Times, Netflix Inc. or Rhapsody, the popular music service.

Publishers can set the price and length of a subscription. They can also offer subscriptions through their own existing websites, but would be required to offer those same terms to anyone signing up through Apple.

Obama said Washington was working with Islamabad to secure the release of Raymond Davis, a former member of U.S. special forces who said he acted in self defense in an armed robbery in the city of Lahore last month.

Washington says Davis has diplomatic immunity and should be released but the Pakistani government, fearful of a backlash from Pakistanis already wary of the United States and enraged by the shooting, says the matter should be decided in court.

Minister Ahmed Sameh Farid said it was only a preliminary count of civilians killed and did not include police or prisoners. And while Mubarak is gone, frustration with the quality of life – from working conditions to environmental concerns – has kept demonstrators in the streets as the economy continues to falter.

Airport employees protested for better pay Wednesday, textile workers went on strike to demand a corruption probe and residents of a Suez Canal city pressed for the closing of a chemical factory they say is dumping toxic waste into a lake.

The military-led caretaker government gave its first estimate of the death toll in the 18-day democracy uprising that ousted longtime leader Hosni Mubarak. Health Minister Ahmed Sameh Farid said at least 365 civilians died according to a preliminary count that does not include police or prisoners.

Mubarak’s departure set off a chain reaction of revolt around the Middle East with anti-government demonstrations in Libya, Bahrain, Jordan, Yemen and Iraq on Wednesday.

Around 2,000 police flooded the streets of the capital, Sanaa, trying to halt protests. Firing in the air, police locked the gates of Sanaa University with chains to prevent thousands of protesting students inside from marching out join crowds demonstrating elsewhere in the city, witnesses said.

A call spread via Facebook and Twitter urging Yemenis to join a series of “One Million People” rallies on a so-called “Friday of Rage” in all Yemeni cities, demanding the ouster of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, in power for 32 years.

The widening challenges to the Arab world’s political order – emboldened by the downfall of old-guard regimes in Tunisia and Egypt – also flared in Libya for the first time, with riot police battling protesters marching against the 42-year rule of Moammar Gadhafi.

In Yemen, the embattled president flooded the ancient capital of Sanaa with security forces to try to stamp out demonstrations that began nearly a week ago. They turned deadly Wednesday in the southern port of Aden, with two people killed in clashes with police.

The discontent that has spilled into the streets of Bahrain’s capital, Manama, this week features no anti-American sentiment, but the U.S. has a lot at stake in preserving its dominant naval presence in the Gulf.

On Wednesday, protesters held their ground in an Egypt-style occupation of the capital’s landmark square, staging a third day of demonstrations that have brought unprecedented pressure on Bahrain’s rulers. Security forces pulled back, apparently on orders to ease tensions. Police helicopters, however, flew low over a major funeral procession for one of two protesters killed in earlier demonstrations.

The public uprisings that toppled the leaders of Egypt and Tunisia have ignited protests and violent clashes in Bahrain, Yemen and Iran. With strategic U.S. interests in each of those countries, Obama conceded he is concerned about the region’s stability. And he prodded governments to get out ahead of the change.

In his most expansive comments yet about the unrest spilling across the Middle East and north Africa, Obama signaled that he would stick with his Egyptian model: Prod governments to allow peaceful protests and to respond to grievances, but stay silent about who should run the countries or what change should look like.

The win by Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates was a switch from where the House stood last year under Democratic control. It reflected a sustained administration push to win over the votes of scores of Republican freshmen elected last fall on campaign promises to cut the budget.

Many taxpayer watchdog groups also weighed in against the engine program, slated to cost $3 billion over the next few years and $450 million this year alone.

It was the first public comment by the 74-year-old leader since he was indicted Tuesday on charges he paid for sex with a 17-year-old Moroccan girl and then used his influence to cover it up.

He spoke shortly before holding talks and a working dinner with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, his first international meeting since the indictment.

The 40-year-old company plans to close about 200 of its 642 stores over the next few weeks. All of the stores closed will be superstores, Borders spokeswoman Mary Davis said. The company also operates smaller Waldenbooks and Borders Express stores.

Clearance sales could begin as early as this weekend, according to documents filed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York. Borders said it is losing about $2 million a day at the stores it plans to close.

Almost a month after finishing 65th in his last competitive race in Australia, and nearly six years removed from the last of an unprecedented seven straight Tour de France titles, the 39-year-old cyclist made clear there is no reset button this time.

This time, he’s leaving professional racing behind for good.

About 8 billion shares trade every day in the United States, so this sale seems hardly worth mentioning, save for the telling outcome: The NYSE lost.

The New York exchange is losing a lot these days. The icon of American capitalism hopes that combining with another exchange will give it heft to reverse its fallen fortunes. But it won’t be easy.

Two studies in Wednesday’s issue of the journal Nature link heavy rains to increases in greenhouse gases more than ever before.

One group of researchers looked at the strongest rain and snow events of each year from 1951 to 1999 in the Northern Hemisphere and found that the more recent storms were 7 percent wetter. That may not sound like much, but it adds up to be a substantial increase, said the report from a team of researchers from Canada and Scotland.

A Scottish deerhound that loves to chase deer and rabbits on a 50-acre farm in Virginia did more than fine at Madison Square Garden this week, winning best in show at the Westminster Kennel Club on Tuesday night and the title of America’s top dog.

“She’s not used to lights, camera and noise,” handler Angela Lloyd said.

While Oklahoma is likely to maintain the nation’s largest per capita population of Native Americans, their numbers are not growing nearly as rapidly as the booming Hispanic population.

Over the past decade, the number of Hispanics has nearly doubled from 179,304 in 2000 to 332,007 in 2010. Hispanics now account for 9 percent of the state’s 3.75 million residents, compared to 8.5 percent for Native Americans.

The current and former service members – 15 women and two men – describe circumstances in which servicemen allegedly got away with rape and other sexual abuse while their victims were ordered to continue to serve with them.

The suit names Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his predecessor, Donald H. Rumsfeld. The plaintiffs say individual commanders have too much say in how allegations are handled and that they want reforms in the system.

Seventeen current and former service members who say they were raped or assaulted by fellow soldiers said they filed the federal class-action lawsuit to force the Pentagon to change how it handles such cases. One of the plaintiffs was a former Army sergeant who claimed that when she approached a chaplain at Fort Leonard Wood to discuss stress related to running into a service member who had allegedly raped her in the past, the chaplain told her that “it must have been God’s will for her to be raped” and suggested she attend church more often.

Maj. Gen. David Quantock, the commanding general of the Missouri Army post, did not specifically discuss the lawsuit, but told reporters that reports of sexual assaults at Fort Leonard Wood had declined from 57 incidents in 2009 to 28 in 2010. A Fort Leonard Wood spokesman declined to comment on the allegations against the chaplain, who was not named in the suit.

At the second and final day of the first national summit among teachers’ unions, school administrators and board members representing some 150 districts from 40 states heard glowing reports from districts that have already shifted how they evaluate and train teachers.

The summit was billed by Education Secretary Arne Duncan as a groundbreaking effort to build trust between unions and the leaders who sometimes are their adversaries. Participants spent most of the short summit hearing how great things are in the dozen school districts presenting how they achieved pay-for-performance teacher compensation and other changes that align with what federal education officials say are needed reforms.

He’s been in office just a year but fellow Republicans everywhere are highlighting the former federal prosecutor’s get-tough approach to fighting runaway spending and taking on Democratic-friendly unions. Fans argue it’s the right prescription for addressing fiscal emergencies at all levels of government and rehabilitating a party image damaged during bloated George W. Bush years.

“It’s time to do the big things – the really big things,” Christie said Wednesday, urging Republicans and Democrats alike to follow his lead in restoring fiscal responsibility to the budgetary process, addressing pension and health benefits and reforming education systems. He said state and federal governments are facing the same core issues – a decade or more of out-of-control spending and mounting debt.

After news accounts about the practice and requests from concerned lawmakers, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has jumped in, trying to figure out whether it’s a widespread tactic that could violate federal job discrimination laws.

Commissioners at an EEOC hearing Wednesday said they are investigating whether excluding the unemployed may have a greater effect on blacks, Latinos and other ethnic minorities that tend to have higher jobless rates. There are no specific legal protections for the unemployed.

The Justice Department is requesting $66.9 million to house regular federal inmates at a shuttered Illinois prison that it originally intended to be part of the plan to close Gitmo.

Suspicions in Congress that the administration really still wants to move detainees to the Illinois facility could put the new request under a shadow despite top-level assurances that the money is for renovations to accommodate traditional federal inmates.

Thousands of documents made public by the Homeland Security Department provide a behind-the-scenes glimpse of how the administration scrambled to quiet the criticism and negative publicity surrounding the immigration enforcement program known as Secure Communities.

The administration rewrote the program’s participation rules, the documents show, considered withholding federal funding and FBI information from resisters and eventually dug up case law to justify requiring cooperation.

The Quest’s third-row seats are not removable, so don’t worry about straining a back muscle lugging them out. And no matter how many seats are occupied or how much cargo is packed inside, the Quest has an extra, large, hidden storage area under the floor just before the rear bumper for sizable last-minute items.

And it’s not an earthshattering innovation, but there are 16 cupholders, more than what you’ll find in the Honda Odyssey.

The region is suffering through one of its harshest winters in years, and the lawmakers say the cuts could imperil more than 3 million families nationwide who need the money to stay warm. With no help from the White House, Northeast lawmakers expect an uphill fight as Congress takes a hard line on spending aimed at reducing the budget deficit.

Democrats from the Northeast are accustomed to having the program targeted for cuts, but the push usually comes from Sunbelt Republicans, not a Chicago Democrat.

“It’s no coincidence that the shift is happening as we encounter economic turmoil that is being felt disproportionately among blacks, such as mortgage foreclosures, loss of jobs and economic devastation in major Northern hubs,” said Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP’s Washington bureau. “With major changes and less racial devastation in the South, people are finding their way back.”

The nation’s black population grew by roughly 1.7 million over the last decade. About 75 percent of that growth occurred in the South – primarily metropolitan areas such as Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Miami and Charlotte, N.C. That’s up from 65 percent in the 1990s, according to the latest census estimates. The gains came primarily at the expense of Northern metro areas such as New York and Chicago, which posted their first declines in black population since at least 1980.

Obama insisted the “simple principle” of diplomatic immunity meant that Pakistan must release the 36-year-old U.S. official, Raymond Allen Davis. Davis has been held since the shootings almost three weeks ago.

“If it starts being fair game on our ambassadors around the world, including in dangerous places where we may have differences with those governments … that’s untenable,” Obama said at a news conference, his first public remarks on the case. “It means they can’t do their job. And that’s why we respect these conventions and every country should as well.”

The Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy ruled that Bishop Timothy McDonnell didn’t justify closing St. Stanislaus Kostka church in Adams or two Chicopee churches, St. Patrick and St. George. That means the churches will reopen for worship, though it’s not clear to what extent they can be used.

Laurie Haas, a leader of the vigil at St. Stanislaus Kostka, called the decision “monumental.”

The suit filed in U.S. District Court in Reno on Monday seeks a minimum of $5 million on behalf of at least 100 residents in the rural town of Yerington where the old Anaconda copper mine opened in 1941.

The plaintiffs say the wells they once used for drinking water are polluted with uranium, arsenic and other metals in a plume of groundwater that slowly has migrated off of the site that covers 6-square miles – an area equal to the size of about 3,000 football fields – about 65 miles southeast of Reno.

Camp Pendleton Marine Sgt. Lawrence Hutchins III will serve the remaining five years of his 11-year sentence, his defense lawyer, Babu Kaza, said Tuesday after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces denied his appeal to reconsider its decision.

Marine Corps officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the case.

Schweitzer signed an executive order to prohibit the importation of park bison into Montana for 90 days. That effectively blocks all potential routes out of the park to slaughter plants in Montana and neighboring states.

The Democratic governor told The Associated Press that he was worried the shipments could spread brucellosis to Montana livestock. And he said he was sending a message to federal officials in Washington, D.C. to rein in a diseased bison population that regularly spills out of the park and into Montana.

“It happened because people weren’t doing their jobs, plain and simple,” Corbett said.

Corbett said that four attorneys and two supervisors at the departments of Health and State were either fired or resigned on Friday and that eight other employees involved in the internal investigation remain on the state payroll. Others had previously resigned, he said.