Evening Edition

Soldiers and tanks were deployed around the capital Tunis after extensive looting of shops and homes and vandals set fire to the main railway station.

The crackle of gunfire echoed in the largely deserted streets of the city centre, which was sealed off by security forces to prevent protests.

In a solemn address on state television after a day of riots, Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi announced that he had taken over as interim president.

He invoked an article in the constitution that allowed him to take over temporarily if the president was not able to carry out his duties.

The army locked down central Tunis to prevent further demos and AFP reporters saw soldiers and plainclothes security personnel dragging dozens of suspected looters out of their cars at gunpoint and taking them away in trucks.

The crackdown followed a night of looting in Tunis and its suburbs.

Ben Ali signed a decree handing interim presidential powers to Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi and flew out of the capital Tunis to refuge in Saudia Arabia after failing to quell growing public anger against his regime.

There were scenes of looting overnight in the suburbs of Tunis, witnesses said on state television, but the streets were mostly empty on Saturday with shops shuttered and army patrols in the city centre visibly stepped up.

“Secession. Secession. Secession,” the returning officer intoned as he carefully unfolded each ballot paper cast at a polling station in a school in the southern regional capital of Juba before pronouncing the voter’s choice.

There was the odd vote for unity with the mainly Arab, Muslim north but they were dwarfed by the huge pile in favour of turning the mainly Christian, African south into the world’s newest nation and putting the seal on five decades of conflict.

BP chief executive Bob Dudley and Rosneft President Eduard Khudainatov flew into London on Friday to sign the agreement, which allows them to jointly exploit the vast untouched oil and gas resources of Russia’s Arctic region.

Dudley hailed the “historic” deal, which has the backing of the Russian and British governments, telling BBC radio: “This is one of the last great unexplored hydrocarbon basins in the world.

In what BP chief executive Bob Dudley said was a “historic” deal, the firms will explore and develop Rosneft’s three licensed blocks on the Russian Arctic continental shelf for what are expected to be major reserves of oil and gas.

The deal puts BP — still recovering from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill last year, which is set to cost the firm 40 billion dollars — at the forefront of the race to exploit the potentially huge energy reserves in the Arctic.

“Turkmenistan’s adhesion to the WTO would exert positive influence on economic development in the country and its attraction for investors,” Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso said after talks with President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov.

“The European Union urges Turkmenistan to apply for WTO membership,” he added, while on his first official visit to the country.

The long-awaited indictment and Hassan Nasrallah’s speech come with Lebanon in deep crisis after the collapse of the government on Wednesday when Hezbollah and its allies resigned over the probe.

Daniel Bellemare, prosecutor of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) based in The Hague, is due to submit the chargesheet to pre-trial judge Daniel Fransen on Monday, the French newspaper Le Monde reported.

Versatile Al-Attiyah, who helped Qatar to a shooting gold medal at the Asian Games last November and has also appeared at the Olympics, had virtually wrapped up the title on Thursday when Sainz’s hopes were shattered by a broken suspension.

That cost the former double world rally champion, a Volkswagen teammate of the Qatari, 80 minutes in lost time.

A trade union source said around 2330 GMT Friday that only a quarter of the votes had been counted and the “no” votes were slightly ahead. Final results were not expected before the early morning hours.

The Mirafiori plant has been at the heart of Fiat for more than 70 years but Fiat-Chrysler boss Sergio Marchionne has threatened to close the factory and take production to the United States if workers vote against the deal.

According to a final tally of the vote, those supporting the deal obtained 54.05 percent. Turnout was 94.2 percent, with 5,119 of the plant’s 5,431 employees taking part.

Counting went on all night after the polls closed at 1830 GMT Friday.

It was not clear who the assailants were but a senior military source told Reuters that people affiliated to former President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali were behind the shootings.

Soldiers and tanks were stationed in the city center to restore order in the aftermath of a night of looting that broke out when Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia following a month of violent anti-government protests that claimed dozens of lives.

BP, recovering from its Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster, will swap 5 percent of its shares, valued at $7.8 billion, for 9.5 percent of Rosneft in an agreement that immediately raised concerns about U.S. economic security from at least two American lawmakers and criticism from environmentalists.

The deal covers huge areas of the South Kara Sea in the Arctic that BP said could contain billions of barrels of oil and gas and had been previously off limits to foreign companies.

It was the second change of power in this North African nation in less than 24 hours.

Amid the political instability, looters emptied shops and torched the main train station in Tunis, soldiers traded fire with assailants in front of the Interior Ministry, and thousands of European tourists sought a plane flight home.

A U.S. military official said the shooter was immediately killed by American soldiers who were running the morning drill at a training center on a U.S. base in the northern city of Mosul. The U.S. official said the exercise was not meant to involve live ammunition, and an Iraqi army officer said the shooting appeared to have been planned.

Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information. A U.S. statement confirmed that two soldiers were killed and a third was wounded by small-arms fire by what the military described as “an individual wearing an Iraqi army uniform.”

That means Congress soon will have to lift the legal debt limit to give the nearly maxed-out government an even higher credit limit or dramatically cut spending to stay within the current cap. Either way, a fight is ahead on Capitol Hill, inflamed by the passions of tea party activists and deficit hawks.

Already, both sides are blaming each other for an approaching economic train wreck as Washington wrestles over how to keep the government in business and avoid default on global financial obligations.

Giving students and teachers more flexibility is an idea with bipartisan support. Yet the debate about the overdue renewal of the nation’s chief education law, known as No Child Left Behind, is complicated by political pressures from the coming 2012 presidential campaign and disputes over timing, money and scope of the update.

While education might offer the best chance for the White House to work with newly empowered Republicans, any consensus could fade in the pitiless political crosscurrents, leaving the debate for another day, perhaps even another presidency.

From the get-go, Reince Priebus faces a ton of tough tasks in the wake of Michael Steele’s troubled tenure.

Priebus must dig the party out of a $22 million hole. He must prepare the GOP to take on President Barack Obama. He must unite a GOP in the midst of an identity crisis fueled by the tea party.

The embattled Steele dropped his re-election bid halfway through an afternoon of balloting when it became clear he could not win another two-year term after a first marked by verbal missteps and financial woes.

“We have to get on track. And together we can defeat Barack Obama in 2012,” Priebus, the chairman of the Wisconsin GOP, said in a brief victory speech, pleading for unity within the fractured 168-member Republican National Committee. “We all recognize that there’s a steep hill here ahead of us, and the only way that we’ll be able to move forward is if we’re all together.”

Officials and observers noted high turnout and praised the peaceful voting process.

Results began trickling in immediately after polls closed Saturday evening. Almost everyone expects the south to vote overwhelmingly to break away from the north, cleaving one of Africa’s larger nations in two.

In the years since, the way of naming and confirming the nation’s top officials hasn’t become much smarter. More of a problem, in fact.

President George W. Bush had only about half his political appointees on the job at the time of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in early 2009 found himself dealing with the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression without his team of deputies in place. The attempted bombing of an American airliner on Christmas Day 2009 occurred when the Transportation Security Administration was without an administrator.

The call by a commission of current and retired military officers to dismantle the last major area of discrimination in the armed services could set in motion another sea change in military culture as the armed forces, generations after racial barriers fell, grapples with the phasing out of the ban on gays serving openly.

This latest move is being recommended by the Military Leadership Diversity Commission, established by Congress two years ago. The panel was to send its proposals to Congress and President Barack Obama.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the lesson of the multimillion-dollar program is there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution for border security.

Napolitano said the department’s new technology strategy for securing the border is to use existing, proven technology tailored to the distinct terrain and population density of each region of the nearly 2,000-mile U.S-Mexico border. That would provide faster technology deployment, better coverage and more bang for the buck, she said.

Despite Boston’s deep liberal ties and an abolitionist past, many African-Americans still view Massachusetts and its largest city as a hostile place for people of color.

It’s a charge that stings, said the Boston-born Curry, a 42-year-old attorney. It’s a past he is vowing to tackle as the new president of the Boston branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the nation’s oldest.

The open house was much the same as the event held by Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords a week ago, except for one thing: In Las Vegas, five patrol cars idled in the parking lot.

At least a half-dozen lawmakers around the country met with constituents Friday at gatherings similar to the “Congress on Your Corner” meeting where Giffords was shot through the head. The events, they said, would send a message: Violence will not keep us from meeting face-to-face with our constituents at supermarkets, hardware stores or anywhere else.

Often, but not always.

Two days after the Jan. 8 attack, the conservative Tea Party Express issued a fundraising appeal that said the accused gunman’s actions in the months leading to the shooting were “more consistent with Blame America First Liberals, not the tea party movement.”

The federal government has long since called fluoridation one of the greatest public health achievements of the 20th century. But it was only a few weeks ago that Sheridan’s City Council voted to resume fluoridating municipal drinking water.

Then, On Jan. 7, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced plans to lower the recommended level of fluoride in drinking water for the first time in nearly 50 years, based on a fresh review of the science that suggested some Americans, particularly children, may be getting too much fluoride

Feisal Abdul Rauf, who co-led the effort to build an Islamic community center near the World Trade Center site, is set to begin a national speaking tour Saturday.

On the day before his first engagement in Michigan, the nonprofit group controlled by the developer of the Islamic center said it supported Rauf’s work but needed someone who could spend more time on the nitty-gritty task of building a congregation.

A member of the College Republicans at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, he rose through the state party ranks through a combination of smarts and sheer willpower. And his first date with his future wife was a Lincoln Day dinner.

The party devotion paid off Friday when the national GOP picked the tenacious 38-year-old Kenosha native as its chairman.

The AP-GfK poll found 77 percent of people interviewed say there has been significant progress toward King’s dream, about the same percentage as felt that way in 2006, before Obama was elected. Just more than one in five, 22 percent, say they feel there has been “no significant progress” toward that dream.

On Monday, the nation will mark the 25th anniversary of the federal observance of King’s birthday. The civil rights icon would have been 82.

“My whole life, I thought I was a Capricorn,” the 25-year-old publicist said. “Now I’m a Sagittarius? I don’t feel like a Sagittarius!” It felt, she said, like a rug had been pulled from under her feet.

“Will my personality change?” she mused. “Capricorns are diligent and regimented, and super-hard-working like me. Sagittarians are more laid back. This is all a little off-putting.”

“(Hispanics) will be the swing voters as they are today in the swing states. If you want to elect a center-right president of the United States, it seems to me you should be concerned about places like New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Florida, Texas, places where but for the Hispanic vote, elections are won and lost,” said former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who co-chaired the conference organized by the new Hispanic Leadership Network.

But those gathered at the South Florida conference seemed split over whether the GOP’s lack of Hispanic support is simply because of the party’s tone, or if there’s a more substantive problem with the GOP’s policies.

The scope of the effort is unusual in a non-election year, and it signals a growing concern that unions could lose significant clout in states where the political climate has changed with Republicans in control in many legislatures.

“It’s a pretty unprecedented attack on public sector workers and workers in all industries,” said Naomi Walker, director of state government relations at the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor federation.

Saturday marks the deadline for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to approve most state plans aimed at curbing pollution from coal-fired power plants and industrial sources to improve visibility at 156 national parks and wilderness areas such as Shenandoah, Mount Rainier and the Grand Canyon.

But as of Thursday, the agency hadn’t approved any state plans – or come up with its own, as required.