Evening Edition

The violence prompted US President Barack Obama, whose country is a close ally of Bahrain, to express “deep concern,” as his secretary of state said the deployment of Gulf troops to quell political unrest was the wrong response.

Early on Wednesday morning, hundreds of riot police backed by tanks and helicopters assaulted demonstrators in Manama’s Pearl Square, clearing the symbolic heart of the uprising in the strategic Gulf kingdom.

As violence escalated, close ally the United States warned that there was “no military solution” to political upheaval in Bahrain and that any violence against peacefully expressed political demands “should be stopped.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Bahrainis must “take steps now” toward a political resolution of the crisis.

With clashes raging on several fronts and casualties rising, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she hoped the UN Security Council will vote on new measures against Libya as early as Thursday that might include a no-fly zone.

Elsewhere in the troubled region, Bahraini police killed at least three protesters and wounded dozens Wednesday when they cleared a protest camp in the capital’s Pearl Square, opposition sources said.

Only minutes earlier, anti-aircraft batteries and heavy artillery fire could be heard in Benghazi, but the aim of the shooting was unclear, as no aircraft could be seen or heard.

As fighting raged in Libya, hopes of foreign air protection for the revolt faded but were still on the table, with Britain and France pressing the UN Security Council, against stiff resistance, to impose a no-fly zone.

But witnesses in the key town of Ajdabiya said fighting was still going on there after state television and officials said it had fallen on Tuesday.

Kadhafi loyalists killed two rebel fighters and two civilians in an assault on Libya’s third city of Misrata, a rebel spokesman reached by telephone said.

Meanwhile efforts to secure a no-fly zone over the country to prevent attacks by Kadhafi’s air force have faltered in the United Nations Security Council.

Elsewhere in the troubled region, Bahraini police killed at least three protesters and wounded dozens on Wednesday when they cleared a peaceful protest camp in the capital’s Pearl Square, opposition sources said.

In an address to the nation on a television station he controls, Ouattara also reached out to his rival in a bid to end a bloody tug-of-war for the country’s top job which has left some 400 dead since disputed November elections.

Ouattara has gained the diplomatic upper hand after the African Union last week endorsed his presidency, while forces backing him battle pro-Gbagbo troops for control of Abidjan, the financial capital.

The television appearance by Emperor Akihito emphasised the gravity of the crisis gripping Japan after the 9.0-magnitude quake and the monster waves it unleashed, killing thousands and crippling a nuclear power plant.

Akihito said he was “deeply concerned” about the “unpredictable” situation at the stricken Fukushima No.1 power plant, which has been hit by a series of explosions after Friday’s quake knocked out reactor cooling systems.

In London trade at 1620 GMT the Japanese currency stood at 79.98 yen to the dollar, the strongest level since April 1995, which was a postwar record.

At 1700 GMT it was at 80.25 yen to the dollar, from 80.73 late on Tuesday in New York.

Fire crews were fighting a new blaze at reactor number four at the quake-hit Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, operator Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) said.

“We are battling the fire now,” a spokesman said. The government later said the fire was under control.

Raymond Davis, remanded in jail since he shot dead two men in Lahore on January 27, said he acted in self-defence and has been backed by US authorities, who said he was an embassy employee with full diplomatic immunity.

The incident sparked protests and ruptured fragile ties between the United States and Islamabad, which had been under domestic pressure to stand up to its superpower ally and try Davis for murder.

EU taxation commissioner Algirdas Semeta’s legislative proposals, part of a drive to deepen the European Union’s single market of half a billion consumers, would theoretically let companies balance losses in one national market with profits in another.

Semeta recognises he faces a huge battle to push through ideas that have been a decade in the making.

Officials scrambled to contain the nuclear crisis with a variety of patchwork fixes. The top U.S. nuclear regulator warned that one reactor’s cooling pool for spent fuel rods may have run dry and another was leaking.

“We believe that around the reactor site there are high levels of radiation,” Gregory Jaczko, head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, told a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing.

As Japanese officials scrambled to avert a catastrophic meltdown at a nuclear plant 240 km (150 miles) north of the capital Tokyo, economists took stock of the damage to buildings, production and consumer activity.

The disaster is expected to hit Japanese output sharply over the coming months, but economists warned it could result in a deeper slowdown if power shortages prove significant and prolonged, delaying or even scotching the “v-shaped” recovery that followed the 1995 Kobe earthquake.

One nuclear expert said that there was now even a possibility that the disaster may approach the extent of the Chernobyl accident, the worst ever in the industry’s history. When the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine exploded in 1986 it spewed a radiation cloud over a large area of Europe.

And a nuclear engineer said that it may be time to consider ways to bury or cover the entire complex in some kind of material that would stop radiation from leaking into the atmosphere.

The 1986 blast in then-Soviet Ukraine, when the reactor exploded, contaminated large parts of Europe in the world’s worst nuclear disaster. At the Fukushima plant, the explosive potential within the six reactors is easing with time.

“In the worst case, a radioactive cloud would not go that far up in the atmosphere,” said Jan Beranek, head of environmental group Greenpeace’s International Nuclear Campaign.

“We believe at this point that Unit Four may have lost a significant inventory, if not lost all, of its water,” Gregory Jaczko, head of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, told lawmakers at a House energy and commerce subcommittee hearing.

Officials in Japan have not said how much water remains in the pool.

As Japanese authorities struggled to avert disaster at an earthquake-battered nuclear complex 240 km (150 miles) to the north, parts of Tokyo resembled a ghost town.

Many stocked up on food and stayed indoors or simply left, transforming one of the world’s biggest, most dynamic and densely populated cities into a shell of its usual self.

Looking somber and stoic, the 77-year-old Akihito said the problems at Japan’s nuclear-power reactors, where authorities are battling to prevent a catastrophe, were unpredictable after an earthquake he described as “unprecedented in scale.”

TV stations interrupted coverage to carry the emperor’s first public appearance since last week’s massive earthquake and tsunami that killed thousands of people.

Three police and three protesters were killed in the violence that has transformed a crisis between the island’s majority Shi’ites and minority Sunnis into a regional standoff between Sunni Gulf Arab states and non-Arab Shi’ite power Iran.

President Barack Obama called the kings of Saudi Arabia, a strategic ally of Washington in the Middle East, and of Bahrain, home to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, to urge restraint. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Bahrain and Gulf allies who sent in troops to back the Sunni royals were on the wrong track.

The crackdown by Bahrain’s Saudi-backed Sunni royal family against protesters from its Shi’ite majority has galvanized Iraq’s Shi’ite community, exacerbating the sectarian tension that led to years of war in Iraq.

The arrival of Saudi troops in Bahrain has enraged Shi’ites in the region, drawing condemnation from Iran and prompting protests in Lebanon and Iraq. Bahrain, Lebanon and Iraq are the only Arab countries where Shi’ites outnumber Sunnis.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the United States hoped for a U.N. Security Council vote aimed at ending Libya’s conflict “no later than Thursday.

Saying Muammar Gaddafi seemed determined to kill as many as Libyans as possible in his violent effort to quell a month-long uprising, she said “many different actions” were being considered not just a no-fly zone.

The Security Council met through the day behind closed doors to discuss a draft resolution authorizing a no-fly zone to halt Libyan government air strikes on rebels. But some council members, including veto powers Russia and China, are either undecided or have doubts.

British, French and Lebanese envoys distributed the draft on Tuesday after the Arab League called on the council to approve a no-fly zone in Libya.

After presidents in Tunisia and Egypt succumbed to popular revolutions, swift early gains by rebels in Libya made it look as though Gaddafi would be the next Arab domino to topple.

His initial reaction to the rebellion was defiant, but denied what was happening in plain sight on Libyan streets. There were no demonstrations, he told Western journalists. Nobody was against him and all his people loved him.

The deal, reached just hours after the American contractor had been indicted, ends a long-simmering diplomatic standoff between Pakistan and the United States.

“The court first indicted him but the families later told court that they have accepted the blood money and they have pardoned him,” Punjab Law Minister Rana Sanaullah told Reuters.

In its final report on the bank bailout, the panel attacked the government for not being transparent enough and not articulating clear goals for its foreclosure prevention program.

It also said federal intervention transformed the notion of ‘too big to fail’ into a stark reality.

As fear, confusion and unanswered questions swirled around the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex, and Japan suffered myriad other trials from last week’s earthquake and tsunami believed to have killed more than 10,000, its emperor took the unprecedented step of directly addressing his country on camera, urging his people not to give up.

“It is important that each of us shares the difficult days that lie ahead,” Akihito said Wednesday. “I pray that we will all take care of each other and overcome this tragedy.”

The advisories came as the crisis at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant in the northeast deepened in the wake of last week’s earthquake and ensuing tsunami.

Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, however, said its advice to Australians had nothing to do with the threat of nuclear contamination from the damaged plant.

The situation of the Diablo Canyon plant is not unique. Across the country, a spider’s web of faults in the Earth’s crust raises questions about earthquakes and safety at aging nuclear plants, amplified by horrific images from Japan, where nuclear reactors were crippled by a tsunami caused by a 9-magnitude quake.

The Indian Point Energy Center, for example, lies near a fault line 35 miles north of Manhattan; on Wednesday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered a safety review at the plant.

Factories, ports, roads, railways and airports in northern Japan have been shut down or damaged because of the stricken nuclear plant in the region. So auto and technology companies are cut off from suppliers in the disaster zone. Some have had to stop or slow production.

“When you’re running incredibly lean and you’re going global, you become very vulnerable to supply disruptions,” says Stanley Fawcett, a professor of global supply chain management at Brigham Young University.

“There is no water in the spent fuel pool and we believe that radiation levels are extremely high, which could possibly impact the ability to take corrective measures,” NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko said at a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing.

If Jaczko was correct, this would mean there was nothing to stop the fuel rods from heating and ultimately melting down. The outer shell of the rods could also ignite with enough force to propel the radioactive fuel inside over a wide area, widening the potential reach of any nuclear fallout.

The U.S. advisory about the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant was far more stringent than the 12 mile radius recommended by Japan. The Japanese government is also urging people within 20 miles of the plant to stay indoors if they cannot evacuate.

Presidential spokesman Jay Carney sought to minimize any rift between the two allies, saying U.S. officials were making their recommendations based on their independent analysis of the data coming out of the region following Friday’s massive earthquake and tsunami.

Female. About 50. Peanuts in left chest pocket. Large mole. Seiko watch.

Male. 70-80 years old. Wearing an apron that says “Rentacom.”

Charred vehicles, bullet-riddled pickup trucks and an overturned tank littered the desert highway where pro-Gadhafi forces had fought up to the entrance of the key eastern city of Ajdabiya. An Associated Press Television News cameraman counted at least three bodies by the side of the road, evidence of fierce battles. Government troops were bringing in a stream of truckloads of ammunition, rockets and supplies – signs of an intensified effort by the Libyan leader to retake control of the country he has ruled with an iron fist for more than four decades.

The rebels lashed out at the West as the latest international effort to impose a no-fly zone over Libya stumbled along. Supporters in the U.N. Security Council were trying to push through a resolution to impose such a move along with other measures aimed at preventing Gadhafi from bombing his people, but Russia and Germany have expressed doubts.

The nation that once led the Middle East in entrepreneurial openness went into lockdown, its government propped up by troops from Sunni Gulf neighbors fearful for their own rule and the spread of Shiite Iran’s influence.

The unrest that began last month increasingly looks like a sectarian showdown. The country’s Sunni leaders are desperate to hold power, and majority Shiites want more rights and an end to the monarchy.

In what appeared to be a carefully choreographed conclusion to the diplomatic crisis, a U.S. official said Pakistan had paid the families whose pardoning of Raymond Davis set the stage for his release. That arrangement allowed Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to assert in a news conference the U.S. didn’t pay compensation.

But the American government “expects to receive a bill at some point,” said the official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because the situation was so sensitive. The payments to families in Pakistan are roughly 400 times as high as the U.S. has paid to families of many civilians wrongfully killed by U.S. soldiers in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Testifying for a second day on Capitol Hill, Army Gen. David Petraeus described combat gains since last year’s U.S. troop buildup, and several members of the House Armed Services Committee who recently traveled to Afghanistan echoed his assessment.

“During a visit last week with U.S. troops in Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates observed, `The closer you get to this fight, the better it looks,'” said Chairman Howard “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif. “Having just returned from a fact-finding trip to Afghanistan a few weeks ago, I couldn’t agree more.”

A group hug with your teammates, handshakes for the opponents, a few postgame remarks and both teams were airborne.

Jerai Grant scored a career-best 22 points and the fast-starting Tigers built a double-figure lead and never backed off in beating Alabama-Birmingham 70-52 on Tuesday night in an NCAA tournament “First Four” game at the University of Dayton Arena.

The Drug Enforcement Administration seized Georgia’s entire supply of sodium thiopental, which defense attorneys claim came from a fly-by-night British supplier operating from the back of a driving school in a gritty London neighborhood.

DEA agents have not said exactly why they seized the drug, except that there were questions about how it was imported into the U.S.

A federal grand jury indictment unsealed Wednesday in Indianapolis charges Timothy Durham, business partner James F. Cochran and their accountant, Rick D. Snow, with 12 counts, including conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud, wire fraud and securities fraud.

The indictment, along with a separate Securities and Exchange Commission civil filing, accuses all three of defrauding about 5,000 investors in Akron, Ohio-based Fair Finance Co. of more than $200 million.

Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne’s legal challenge is the second from a county official since Gov. Scott Walker signed the bill into law Friday. Ozanne filed his lawsuit after Democrats in the Wisconsin Assembly alleged Republican leaders didn’t give enough public notice that a committee planned to meet to amend the bill.

Ozanne, a Democrat, wants a judge to void the law and issue an emergency order blocking the secretary of state from publishing the law, which would prevent it from taking effect. He also wants each Republican leader fined $300.

Jon Burge, whose name in Chicago is synonymous with police brutality and racism, turned himself in Wednesday morning to begin a 4 1/2-year sentence at Butner Federal Correctional Complex in North Carolina. Hours later in Chicago, a judge ordered 45-year-old Eric Caine released from Menard Correctional Center after prosecutors conceded that they didn’t have enough evidence to convict Caine of murder again without the suspect confession he gave police in 1986.

“On the day that Jon Burge is headed for prison, Eric Caine got word he is coming home,” said Caine’s attorney, Russell Ainsworth.

Britain and France put a draft resolution that would impose a no-fly zone in a final form late Wednesday. The text will be sent to capitals overnight and can still be changed before being put to a vote in the 15-member council.

China’s U.N. Ambassador Li Baodong, the current council president, told reporters “we hope we will have real progress tomorrow.”

The department’s Office for Civil Rights notified the University of California, Santa Cruz last week that it planned to look into allegations made by Hebrew lecturer Tammi Rossman-Benjamin dating back to 2001.

The probe “in no way implies that OCR has made a determination with regard to their merits,” Arthur Zeidman,” director of the San Francisco office, said in a letter to the instructor and campus officials.

Gary Locke also said he had agreed to give the investigator discretion to freeze pending penalties against those fishermen.

Locke had denied both requests in January, drawing protests from Northeastern lawmakers who said it was another assault by the federal government on the region’s fishing industry.

Glenn Spencer, chairman of the American Border Patrol, is set to give his assessment of the Arizona-Mexico border to the Senate’s border security committee on Thursday.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, has a three-page online profile of Spencer, in which it says he “may have done more than anyone to spread the myth of a secret Mexican conspiracy to reconquer the Southwest.”

Obama leaves Friday night for a trip to Brazil, Chile and El Salvador that will have him in South America and Central America for essentially five days. Beyond the specific economic, energy and security themes of his agenda is an overarching effort to show that Obama is engaged with the countries of his neighborhood – and, in turn, why that matters to the United States.

Presidential aides were blunt Wednesday in describing the trip as a message to the regional nemeses of the United States, mainly Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, whose anti-U.S. position and harsh rhetoric have been defining features of his presidency.

Gen. Keith Alexander, head of the Defense Department’s Cyber Command, told Congress that he would give the military a grade of “C” in its ability to protect Pentagon networks, but said things are much better than they were a few years ago and continue to improve.

“We are finding that we do not have the capacity to do everything we need to accomplish. To put it bluntly, we are very thin, and a crisis would quickly stress our cyber forces,” Alexander said. “We cannot afford to allow cyberspace to be a sanctuary where real and potential adversaries can marshal forces and capabilities to use against us and our allies. This is not a hypothetical danger.”

The struggles their famine-worn ancestors faced as new arrivals – the slurs from their neighbors, the “Irish need not apply” signs – still echo through the generations, as does the avid union support that helped lift them to positions of power, influence and ultimately acceptance.

“Union jobs, civil service jobs have always been the ladder out of poverty for working people in this country,” said Patrick J. Lynch, leader of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the union that represents New York police. “The faces may have changed. The countries they’re coming from may have changed. But the ladder is the same.”

The severity of the state’s $27 billion budget crisis was evident in the furrowed brows, sad eyes and pained expressions of legislators. They fidgeted in their seats as hundreds of teachers, parents and disabled people explained in testimony in recent weeks how proposed budget cuts would ruin their lives.

Legislatures elsewhere are facing budget problems, but most are blending cuts with asset sales, increased fees and tax modifications to soften the impact. Texas prides itself on lean government so Republicans here promised to solve the crisis here by budget cuts alone.

The lawsuit filed Wednesday in the city’s Court of Common Pleas says the man was assaulted as a boy by a priest from St. Francis Xavier parish and Roman Catholic High School in Philadelphia.

Francis Finnegan, 49, said he was molested by the Rev. John Kline at the age of 7, when the priest accompanied his family on a trip to the New Jersey shore in 1968 or 1969. He said he had repressed the traumatic event and only began to remember the abuse three years ago.

On Wednesday and Thursday, education leaders, including U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the nation’s largest teacher unions, and officials from the highest scoring countries, are meeting in New York to identify the best teaching practices.

The meeting comes after the recently released results of the Programme for International Student Assessment exam of 15-year-olds alarmed U.S. educators. Out of 34 countries, it ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math.

Environmental and medical groups praised the move, which came in response to a court-ordered deadline, saying the new regulations will remove toxins from the air that contribute to respiratory illnesses, birth defects and developmental problems in children.

Some industry groups slammed the measure, however, accusing the EPA of inflating the benefits and arguing it would cost billions of dollars annually to comply.

Testifying to Congress, the White House official assembling the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau made no apologies. Elizabeth Warren said the agency was badly needed and might have helped the country avoid the housing problems it has suffered, including abuses in the ways foreclosures have been processed.

“If there had been a consumer agency in place, the problems in mortgage servicing would have been exposed early and fixed while they were still small, long before they became a national scandal,” she told the financial institutions subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee.

The new-for-2011 Mini Cooper Countryman is some 15 inches longer, from bumper to bumper, than the diminutive, 12-foot-long 2011 Mini Cooper hatchback. The five-door Countryman also is 6 inches taller and 4 inches wider than the three-door Mini Cooper hatchback.

The new size creates a roomier back seat area that’s unheard of in previous Minis, and cargo space is larger than ever, too.