Evening Edition

As details of the violence emerged, Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa promised to open a national dialogue once calm returns, a statement quickly backed by a royal announcement that he had been assigned to start such discussions.

US President Barack Obama condemned the violence in Bahrain, which is of vital strategic importance to Washington because the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet is based there and some 40 percent of the world’s oil passes through the Gulf.

Protesters gathered outside a hospital where the wounded were being treated to chant anti-regime slogans, while the largest Shiite opposition bloc said it was quitting parliament and called on the government to resign.

Concerned that events in Bahrain could destabilise the entire region, Gulf foreign ministers met in Manama later on Thursday and expressed their “total support for Bahrain in the areas of politics, economy, security and defence.”

Thousands of mourners in the village of Sitra, east of Manama, chanted slogans calling for the ouster of the regime of the al-Khalifa dynasty, as well as songs urging unity between the Shiite majority and Sunni compatriots.

They chanted “people want to overthrow the regime” — the slogan used by anti-regime protesters across the Arab world inspired by the uprisings of Tunisia and Egypt which brought down the former two strongmen of the Western-backed countries.

According to a toll compiled by AFP from different local sources, at least 41 people have lost their lives since demonstrations first erupted on Tuesday.

That toll does not include two policemen who were killed on Friday.

Meanwhile, clashes broke out in the city of Zentan, southwest of the capital, in which a number of government buildings were said to have been torched.

“Seven protesters were killed in the demonstrations Thursday at Benghazi,” a local medical official who requested anonymity said, without giving further details.

In a detailed account of the unrest in Benghazi and Al-Baida, the New York-based organisation — quoting unidentified witnesses — told of security forces opening fire with live ammunition on peaceful demonstrators on Thursday.

“The security forces’ vicious attacks on peaceful demonstrators lay bare the reality of Moamer Kadhafi’s brutality when faced with any internal dissent,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch.

A week on from the overthrow of Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak, hundreds of thousands flooded Cairo’s iconic Tahrir Square to celebrate his departure.

But the mood was distinctly ugly in other of the region’s capitals as deadly clashes erupted in Yemeni and supporters of the Iranian government massed to demand the execution of its leading critics.

Polls closed officially at 5:00 pm (1400 GMT), with some stations recording low turnout.

“The electoral commission is satisfied with things so far. There have been some incidents around the country but we corrected them as we went along,” Charles Willy Ochola, electoral commission spokesman, said.

“Of course I am suspicious, because the government didn’t expect to get many votes in this area,” Nasib Kasuli, 24, an opposition supporter, told AFP in Kampala’s Rubaga district.

Rubaga, like other parts of the capital, had the atmosphere of a ghost town, with few people and few cars visible in a city where stifling traffic and busy streets are the norm.

Sarkozy was talking as finance ministers and central bankers from the 20 top developed and developing economies gathered for two days of talks in Paris which host France hopes will lead to an overhaul of global finance.

But with disagreement spilling into the open over which indicators to base economic reviews of countries and make policy recommendations, the French leader issued a stark warning.

The move came as the central bank said Spanish banks’ non-performing loans ratio, a key indicator of their financial health, jumped to its highest level since 1995.

Spain’s regional savings banks are weighed down by loans that turned sour after the collapse of a housing bubble in 2008 and are at the heart of fears the country could need a much bigger rescue than those granted by the EU and International Monetary Fund to Ireland and Greece last year.

Big fish such as cod, tuna, and groupers have declined worldwide by two-thirds while the number of anchovies, sardines and capelin has surged in their absence, said University of British Columbia researchers.

Meanwhile, people around the world are fishing harder and coming up with the same or fewer numbers in their catch, indicating that humans may have maxed out the ocean’s capacity to provide us with food.

Lorgat’s comments came just a day before the 10th edition of the World Cup kicks off in Dhaka with a clash between Bangladesh and India, joint hosts of the event along with Sri Lanka.

A total of 14 teams are involved in the showpiece event — tipped to be the most open in years — including the Netherlands, Ireland, Kenya and Canada but the ICC wants to cut the numbers because it has grown too unwieldy.

Tokyo told Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands to take action against the US-based group, which has used their ports or flown their flags in its campaign to stop Japanese whalers from killing the sea mammals.

Sea Shepherd, which says its tactics are non-violent but aggressive, has hurled paint and stink bombs at whaling ships, snared their propellers with rope, and moved its own boats between the harpoon ships and their prey.

The aristocratic and suave defence minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, told reporters: “I will temporarily, I repeat temporarily, give up my doctorate title” until his former university completes an investigation into the claims.

The minister, who has been dubbed the “cut-and-paste minister” by a gleeful press, said he would reclaim his title after completion of the probe.

More than 50 amputees worldwide, many of them military veterans whose limbs were lost in combat, have received such devices since they were first developed by US doctor Todd Kuiken in 2002.

The arm uses technology called Targeted Muscle Reinervation (TMR), which works by rerouting brain signals from nerves that were severed in the injury to muscles that are working and intact.

While millions of Egyptians staged a “Victory March” feting their overthrow of autocrat Hosni Mubarak last week after 30 years, protesters elsewhere, inspired by their success, pursued struggles against their own authoritarian rulers.

The bloodshed near Pearl Square in the Bahraini capital Manama occurred a day after police forcibly swept away a protest camp from the traffic circle in the city, killing 4 people and wounding more than 230.

Amid unrest across much of the Middle East, U.S. officials have voiced concern about the violence on the island in direct talks with the government of Bahrain, which hosts a major U.S. military base and borders Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter.

“I am deeply concerned by reports of violence in Bahrain, Libya and Yemen. The United States condemns the use of violence by governments against peaceful protesters in those countries, and wherever else it may occur,” Obama said in a statement read by spokesman Jay Carney to reporters aboard Air Force One.

King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa announced he had asked the crown prince to start a national dialogue “with all parties” to resolve the crisis rocking the island kingdom.

Ali Ibrahim, deputy chief of medical staff at Salmaniya hospital, said 66 wounded had been admitted from the clash at Pearl Square in the capital. Four were in a critical condition.

Opposition activists said protesters were fighting troops for control of the nearby town of Al Bayda, scene of some of the worst violence over the past two days, where townspeople said they were burying 14 people who were killed in earlier clashes.

Residents said that by evening the streets were calm but there were conflicting accounts about whether opposition activists or security forces were in control of the town.

On an emotional day that will become a landmark in modern Egyptian history and a memorial to the 365 people who died in the uprising, many said they would carefully guard newly-won promises from the military of elections within six months.

“This is a serious message to the military,” said Mohamed el-Said, 28, who traveled to Cairo from Port Said, gesturing to the colorful sea of people from all walks of life around him who rallied to mark the stepping down of Mubarak a week ago.

Doctors said four people died from gunfire in the southern port of Aden, where resentment against rule from Sanaa runs high. One was killed by a grenade in Taiz, Yemen’s second city.

At least 11 people were wounded in Aden, where thousands of protesters angered by what they said was excessive force by security forces stayed in the streets for hours.

Clinton, in a speech on Afghanistan at the Asia Society, said the Taliban’s only option was to split from al Qaeda, accept the Afghan constitution and join peaceful dialogue on the country’s future.

“They cannot wait us out. They cannot defeat us. And they cannot escape this choice,” Clinton said in a speech that was broadcast live over the Internet.

The move against the 2010 healthcare law — one of Obama’s main legislative victories — is certain to be rejected by the Democratic-led Senate, but it has escalated tensions over federal spending that could lead to a government shutdown.

On largely party lines votes, the House approved several amendments to deny funds to federal agencies to implement the healthcare overhaul, which Republicans deride as a costly government intrusion into the marketplace.

The protests have so far been peaceful because demonstrators are overwhelmingly opposed to the proposal. But the potential for confrontation grew when the conservative Tea Party movement announced that it would hold a rally at the Capitol on Saturday supporting the Republican plan.

Wisconsin has become a flashpoint for a national struggle over states should restore their financial health after the recession. If the majority Republicans in Wisconsin prevail, other states could be emboldened to take on powerful public employee unions.

Speaking ahead of an economic summit in Paris that will include many critics of the Fed’s aggressive bond buying program, Bernanke acknowledged that strong capital flows from advanced economies to emerging markets may be having negative spillover effects.

“Capital flows are once again posing some notable challenges for international macroeconomic and financial stability,” he said in remarks prepared for delivery to a Banque de France event in Paris before meetings of the finance ministers and central bankers of the Group of 20 leading economies.

The fifth increase since October, all in increments of 50 basis points, will force the country’s lenders to lock up a bigger chunk of their deposits at the central bank from next week, removing cash from the fast-growing economy that otherwise would be pushing prices higher.

The move by the People’s Bank of China followed an acceleration in inflation to 4.9 percent in the year to January, which was accompanied by worrying signs that price pressures were spreading beyond food to property and consumer goods.

The panel’s 14 recommendations for U.S. securities and futures regulators contained some bold ideas that, taken together, would overhaul the high-speed electronic trading market.

The advisers on Friday told regulators that today’s markets can easily breed uncertainty among investors, and asked them to move urgently on the suggestions.

ECB figures showed banks borrowed more than 16 billion euros in high-cost emergency overnight funding, the highest amount since June 2009 and well above the 1.2 billion euros which banks were taking before the figure first jumped on Thursday.

The ECB gives no breakdown of the borrowing figures and declined to comment on Friday when asked for an explanation for the jump.

The International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) was tasked by world leaders to flesh out a pledge that standardized derivatives contracts should be centrally cleared and, where appropriate, traded on a platform by the end of 2012.

Derivatives in the over-the-counter (OTC) or off-exchange sector are largely transacted bilaterally among banks — making it harder for supervisors to check who is exposed to which contracts when things go wrong, such as with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008.

The chiefs of major agencies that are writing hundreds of rules mandated by Dodd-Frank told the panel at a hearing that they need more money to carry out the law, which was approved following the 2007-2009 financial crisis.

Regulators also gave some glimpses into their thinking on implementation of Dodd-Frank rules involving debit card fees and subjecting large financial firms to stricter oversight, as well as on dealing with the mortgage servicing scandal.

Carney, a former Time magazine reporter who spent years peppering White House officials with questions, is now seeing what it is like to face the television camera lights.

In his first week, the 45-year-old Carney has sounded a less partisan tone than his predecessor, Robert Gibbs, who was a top adviser in Obama’s 2008 election and who eagerly engaged in battle with Republicans from the White House podium.

“We were left with no choice,” Democratic Senator Jon Erpenbach told the online news service WisPolitics.

The proposal was to be debated and possibly come to a vote in the state Senate on Thursday. But a quorum of 20 is needed for the Senate, which has 19 Republicans.

The core Consumer Price Index increased 0.2 percent after a 0.1 percent rise in December, the Labor Department said on Thursday. It was the largest increase since October 2009.

Economists largely agreed inflation had bottomed, but said the turnaround in prices was unlikely to be so swift as to trouble policymakers at the Federal Reserve, who are still pumping money into the economy.

Officials at the main Salmaniya hospital said at least 50 people were injured, some with gunshot wounds. Some doctors and medics on emergency medical teams were in tears as they tended to the wounded. X-rays showed bullets still lodged inside victims.

“This is a war,” said Dr. Bassem Deif, an orthopedic surgeon examining people with bullet-shattered bones.

The United States also moved to support efforts to erect a new democracy in Egypt by redirecting some of the money once intended for the ousted government of Hosni Mubarak.

As with Egypt, the Bahrain crisis pointed up the limits of U.S. influence over the political upheaval that has spread rapidly and sometimes unpredictably. Despite billions in aid to strategic peacemaker Egypt and the presence of a major military base housed in usually placid Bahrain, the U.S. could do little more than admonish urge restraint.

It was the ninth straight day of protests in Yemen inspired by uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia. Demonstrators are calling for the ouster of President Ali Abdullah Saleh – a key U.S. ally in fighting al-Qaida terrorists – who has ruled the country for 32 years.

U.S. President Barack Obama condemned the reported violence in response to protests in Yemen, as well as Bahrain and Libya, he urged those governments to respect the rights of peacefully demonstrating citizens, and he expressed condolences to the families of those killed.

The military allowed – even encouraged – the celebrations. But it gave its strongest warning yet against a wave of labor strikes that erupted in parallel with the massive anti-government political protests and have hit Egypt’s economy hard the past week. In a statement, the military said it would no longer allow “illegal” demonstrations that stop production and will take action against them.

The crowd in downtown Cairo’s Tahrir Square appeared to spiral well beyond the quarter-million that massed for the biggest of the anti-Mubarak protests. The rally was called by protest leaders to press their demands on the military to take greater action to remove regime figures who still hold considerable power.

Upping the ante in the budget faceoff, the Obama administration warned that workers who distribute Social Security benefits might be furloughed if congressional Republicans force cuts in government spending.

In a letter the Social Security Administration sent to its employees’ union, agency officials said that while no decision about furloughs had been made, they were possible “given the potential of reduced congressional appropriations.”

The party’s stand against balancing the state’s budget by cutting the pay, benefits and collective bargaining rights of public workers is the boldest action yet by Democrats to push back against last fall’s GOP wave.

But the dramatic strategy that’s clogged the Capitol with thousands of protesters clashes with one essential truth: Republicans told everyone unions would be a target, and the GOP has more than enough votes to pass its plans once the Legislature can convene.

But as massive public protests and legislative boycotts in Wisconsin this week have shown, the Republican charge can be fraught with risk and unpredictable turns as politicians try to transform campaign ideas into action.

The question GOP governors and lawmakers are now facing is exactly how far they can go without possibly alienating voters they won over in the midterm elections last fall. Do they merely extract more money from school teachers, prison guards and office workers to help ease their states’ budget problems? Or do they go at the very core of union power by abolishing the workers’ right to bargain collectively? Do they try to impose changes by steamrolling the opposition, or by coming to the bargaining table?

Upping the ante in the budget faceoff, the Obama administration warned that workers who distribute Social Security benefits might be furloughed if congressional Republicans force cuts in government spending.

In a letter the Social Security Administration sent to its employees’ union, agency officials said that while no decision about furloughs had been made, they were possible “given the potential of reduced congressional appropriations.”

He also called on nations with persistent trade deficits like the United States to narrow their budget shortfalls and save more.

Both steps would help balance trade and investment flows among countries, Bernanke said in a speech at a financial conference in Paris. Many countries worry about speculative money flooding their economies and inflating assets like real estate or stocks.

Northrup’s decision garnered national publicity a day earlier, when the two were set to meet in a first-round match. Northrup, a favorite to win his 112-pound weight class, cited his religious beliefs and said he didn’t think it appropriate to engage with a girl in a combat sport that could get violent.

“He had the right to make his own choice, and he made his choice,” said Herkelman, one of two girls in this year’s tournament. “It’s not like he did what he didn’t want to do.”

Luzerne County ex-Judge Mark Ciavarella, 61, left the bench in disgrace two years ago after prosecutors charged him with engineering one of the biggest courtroom frauds in U.S. history by using juvenile delinquents as pawns in a plot to get rich.

Federal prosecutors accused Ciavarella and a second judge, Michael Conahan, of taking more than $2 million in bribes from the builder of the PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care detention centers and extorting hundreds of thousands of dollars from the facilities’ co-owner. Ciavarella insisted the payments were legal and denied that he incarcerated youths for money.

Never learned to habla or parlez? While the new research focuses mostly on the truly long-term bilingual, scientists say even people who tackle a new language later in life stand to gain.

The more proficient you become, the better, but “every little bit helps,” said Ellen Bialystok, a psychology professor at York University in Toronto.

The doctor from al-Jalaa hospital says he counted 35 bodies received at his hospital alone, starting in the afternoon Friday.

He says witnesses and survivors told him most of the victims came from an attempted protest outside the residential compound used by Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi when he visits Benghazi. He says security forces inside the compound fired on protesters demonstrating outside. The doctor spoke on condition his name not be used for fear of retaliation. He said he could not keep track of the number of wounded.

Munich prosecutor Hans-Joachim Lutz told The Associated Press on Friday the probe is based on statements from former guards that Alex Nagorny, 94, took part in shootings at the camp in occupied Poland in 1941-42.

In one statement obtained by the AP, former guard Ivan Knysh told Soviet authorities in 1948 that he remembered Nagorny from Treblinka, and that “from his statements to me I know that he participated in a shooting of 3,000 prisoners.”

Both sides agreed Thursday to mediation as they discuss a new collective bargaining agreement. The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, an independent U.S. government agency, will oversee talks in Washington beginning Friday.

After holding separate discussions with representatives from the league and the union, FMCS director George H. Cohen said both sides agreed to have the agency mediate. Mediation is not binding.

Attorney Randy Mastro instead attacked the judgment issued Monday by an Ecuadorean judge as the product of a corrupt judicial system and urged a U.S. judge to block lawyers for Ecuadoreans from trying to collect the money by getting other countries to seize Chevron assets and bank accounts.

Mastro told U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan in New York that the provision in the lengthy judgment document that allows a near doubling of the award to $18.2 billion appears to be punitive even though Ecuadorean courts supposedly do not award punitive damages.

Nearly 9,000 drug cases dating to late 2007 are currently being reviewed for signs of errors after a spot check last week of nine cases involving ketamine or ecstasy revealed that six of them were inaccurately analyzed.

Officials immediately closed the drug section. On Friday, Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice and County Executive Edward Mangano said new revelations that police supervisors were aware of problems with ecstasy testing as far back as September prompted the closure of the entire lab.

First, a white student was disciplined for yelling epithets at a black student early this month. Days after that incident, insulting messages about several racial and ethnic groups were written on campus sidewalks in chalk.

The flaps fit a pattern that’s dogged the state’s flagship school since it was integrated: Missteps along the path to greater diversity and inclusion often make more of an impression than positive strides do.

Russia is insisting on shared control of the missile defense program with the U.S. and NATO, which President Barack Obama has flatly opposed because it would essentially give Russia responsibility for protecting NATO from nuclear missile threats. The U.S. is offering Moscow a more limited role.

After years of opposition, Russia agreed last fall at least to talk about cooperating on the anti-ballistic missile plan for Europe, which the U.S. says may one day be needed if Iran develops nuclear weapons. Experts from both sides are scheduled to report on details of the proposal to defense ministers in July.

Sens. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa and Max Baucus, D-Mont., introduced a bill this week to do that. The Rural Heritage Conservation Extension Act of 2011 would allow landowners to deduct up to half of their income for 16 years in exchange for conservation easements, while farmers and ranchers could deduct all of theirs. Before the enhanced credit went into effect in 2006, landowners received only a 30 percent deduction for six years.

Since 2006, the number of acres protected each year has increased from about 750,000 to more than 1 million, according to the Washington D.C.-based Land Trust Alliance.

The bill was approved 87-8. A similar aviation bill cleared a House committee earlier this week.

Congress has been struggling for more than three years to pass an aviation bill that renews Federal Aviation Administration programs and speeds up the transition from an air traffic control system based on World War II-era radar technology to GPS technology.