Evening Edition

While Martelly, a former singer and carnival entertainer, courted vital foreign investment in the United States, violence erupted in several towns back home following the announcement overnight of definitive poll results.

Demonstrators burned vehicles and blocked roads, and at least one person was killed in protests linked to legislative results confirming the ruling Unity party’s long-time grip on parliamentary power.

The United States, meanwhile, said it would deploy armed drones over Libya.

The capture of Wazin border post was cheered by several hundred rebels who raised the flag of the Libyan monarchy after between 150 and 200 pro-Kadhafi soldiers abandoned their weapons and fled into Tunisia.

In the besieged city of Misrata, Tim Hetherington, an Oscar-nominated British film director and war photographer, was killed and three colleagues were wounded by mortar fire, the local hospital said.

Vanity Fair, for which Hetherington was working, confirmed the death of the 41-year-old from Liverpool, the second journalist killed covering Libya’s two-month-old conflict.

Human rights groups said the demonstrations on Friday would prove a test case for Assad and his reforms.

Assad, in power since replacing his father Hafez as president in 2000, issued the order to scrap the state of emergency and decrees to abolish the state security court and allow citizens to hold peaceful demonstrations.

Curfews and military patrols have largely restored calm after rioting broke out in northern Nigeria following southerner Jonathan’s win over northerner Muhammadu Buhari at the weekend and quickly spread across the region.

A Nigerian rights group says more than 200 people were killed, but authorities have refused to provide a death toll, fearing it could provoke reprisals. The number of displaced has risen to 60,000, the Red Cross says.

Aid workers rushed to help nearly 40,000 displaced, many of whom had taken refuge in military and police barracks, while victims being treated in hospitals spoke of being hacked with machetes and beaten with clubs.

Authorities say many were killed in the violence, which saw corpses burnt beyond recognition and bodies reportedly thrown into wells, but have refused to give a toll, saying it could spark reprisals and would be inaccurate.

The ban, which gives legal weight to an existing exclusion zone, comes after police found more than 60 families living in the area and residents returning to their abandoned homes to collect belongings.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan announced the no-entry area, due to be enforced from midnight (1500 GMT), on a visit to Fukushima prefecture, where thousands now live in evacuation shelters, almost six weeks after the March 11 quake.

Foreign Minister G. L. Peiris asked UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon not to release the study compiled by a panel of experts who looked into alleged rights abuses and crimes against humanity during fighting which ended in 2009.

“The publication of this report will cause irreparable damage to the reconciliation efforts of Sri Lanka. It will damage the UN system too,” Peiris told reporters in Colombo. “This UN report is preposterous.”

The deal — part of a strategy by Fiat to use the effective rescue of Chrysler as a route to a global presence — was cheered by investors but trade unions said it meant Fiat management was turning away from Italy.

Fitch ratings agency also warned it could downgrade Fiat’s credit rating because of “the potential increase in net debt in relation to the transaction.”

While the Times Co. described the early numbers for digital subscribers to the newspaper’s website as “encouraging,” first quarter results for the media giant were less so and shares in the company fell sharply on Wall Street.

The Times Co., which includes the flagship New York Times, Boston Globe, International Herald Tribune, 15 other dailies and About.com, said net profit plunged 57.6 percent to $5.4 million on continued print advertising weakness.

President Barack Obama vowed to do “whatever is necessary” to restore the US Gulf Coast and to “hold BP and other responsible parties fully accountable for the damage they’ve done and the painful losses that they’ve caused.”

Oil-coated dolphin carcasses and sticky tar balls continue to wash up on beaches a year after the April 20, 2010 explosion which killed 11 workers and sank the Deepwater Horizon some 50 miles (80 kilometers) off the coast of Louisiana.

But the results, which followed a series of better-than-expected earnings reports from top U.S. manufacturers, failed to impress investors and shares of the largest U.S. conglomerate fell 2 percent on Thursday.

The world’s biggest maker of jet engines and electric turbines also raised its dividend for the third time since July, though Chief Executive Jeff Immelt warned investors that GE does not plan to keep up that pace of increases.

Other data on Thursday showed steep declines in home prices in February, underscoring the challenges confronting the economy, but the recovery is expected to remain on track.

The reports came a week before government data is expected to show growth slowed significantly in the first quarter. The economy grew at a 2.0 percent annualized rate, according to a Reuters survey, after a 3.1 percent pace in the last three months of 2010.

In his closing argument, chief defense lawyer John Dowd also fired back at the prosecution’s contention that Rajaratnam had corrupted his friends and colleagues. He said it was the people who testified against the Galleon Group founder who were corrupt or had lied.

Mostly reading from a lectern, with an unemotional Rajaratnam sitting five feet behind him, Dowd presented dozens of e-mails, trading records and excerpts from trial testimony to argue that Rajaratnam made trades based on public reports, not on tips about nonpublic information.

BP has sued Transocean Ltd, Halliburton Co and Cameron International Corp, in one of the biggest legal moves since last year’s blowout. It is seeking up to the full cost of the disaster — estimated at $42 billion — plus costs, interest and punitive damages from each of the companies that helped it drill the doomed well.

So far, BP has met the full cost of the clean-up effort alone and is paying compensatory damages to fishermen, shrimpers, property owners and others in the Gulf area affected by the spill.

London-based BP also sued Cameron International Corp for negligence, saying a blowout preventer made by Cameron failed to avert the catastrophe.

Both complaints were filed Wednesday in federal court in New Orleans.

It is still too early to know the long-term damage to the Gulf’s rich and complex ecosystem. But, so far, predictions made at the height of the spill of an impending environmental Armageddon appear well overstated.

“We’re inviting America to come down here, have a great time, enjoy our seafood and be part of the greatest rebirth you will ever see,” said Louisiana’s Republican Governor Bobby Jindal at a ceremony to mark the event’s anniversary.

The oil giant last June established a $20 billion compensation fund for victims such as shrimpers, fishermen and property owners, with certain incentives for those who agreed not to sue the company and partners.

In an interview, Kenneth Feinberg, who oversees the fund, said it is “working as intended.” Some 280,500 claimants have applied for the final phase of the process, of whom roughly 126,500 have been paid for a total of about $1.3 billion. Virtually all claims from an earlier, emergency phase have been resolved for a total of $2.6 billion. “The sheer volume of claims processed demonstrates the success of the program, and the fact that almost $4 billion has gone out in less than nine months,” Feinberg said.

Antigua and Barbuda, which licenses Internet gambling companies, has waged a long battle in the WTO over U.S. efforts to keep Americans from patronizing offshore betting sites. Last week’s shutdown of the three biggest online poker sites has the Caribbean nation ready to go another round.

It contends U.S. crackdowns against foreign betting sites are illegal and protectionist, since gambling for money is permitted in U.S. casinos and since online betting is allowed for state-regulated horse racing in the United States.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said troops loyal to Gaddafi were carrying out “vicious attacks” on the city and might have used cluster bombs on civilians.

In Misrata. rebels and Gaddafi loyalists were fighting a ferocious battle, often at close quarters. Streets were barricaded with orange dump trucks, parts of cars and even bed frames and tree trunks.

Thirteen Libyan officers and soldiers, including a general, handed themselves over to the Tunisian military at the border, Tunisia’s state news agency TAP reported, apparently seeking refuge after clashes with the insurgents.

Witnesses said some wounded Libyan soldiers were treated at a nearby Tunisian hospital.

An earthquake with a magnitude of 6.3 hit eastern Japan on Thursday evening, the U.S. Geological Survey said, but no tsunami warning was issued and there were no immediate reports of any casualties or damage.

Tens of thousands of people left the zone after the March 11 quake smashed the Fukushima Daiichi power station, operated by Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO), but some have gone back to collect belongings as the utility struggles to contain the world’s most serious nuclear crisis since Chernobyl in 1986.

Bernanke holds the first regularly scheduled briefing by a Fed chief in the central bank’s 97-year history next Wednesday, kicking off what is to be a four-times-a-year event.

The news conferences will allow Bernanke to demystify the notoriously secretive Fed, which has faced sharp criticism for its unconventional crisis-fighting efforts.

That’s when S&P announced that it was revising the credit outlook for the United States to “negative.” Its message was simple: the country could lose its gold-plated AAA credit rating if Washington could not agree on a plan to slash the budget deficit within the next couple of years.

History does not favor the United States keeping its prized rating.

The first is the date by which Congress will likely have to act in order to ensure that the United States doesn’t default on its $14 trillion in accumulated debt.

The second deadline is when President Barack Obama and most members of Congress will face voters.

The fiscally conservative freshmen are under intense pressure to vote to raise the cap on U.S. borrowing so that the United States can continue to pay its bills after May 16. The Obama administration has expressed confidence that a deal can be reached with Republicans but Wall Street is less sure.

Yet there are signs the intense lobbying effort is falling flat. Many freshmen still insist they will not vote to raise the debt ceiling unless it comes with legislation to slash America’s $1.4 trillion deficit.

Democrats acknowledge that Obama will need to rally many of the same forces that propelled him into the White House in order to win re-election in 2012: an army of young, energetic voters as well as a sizable showing from independent voters.

By visiting Facebook headquarters in California’s Silicon Valley, where 26-year-old founder Mark Zuckerberg is a folk hero, Obama sought to connect to tens of millions of people who have adopted social media as a prime method of communications.

An adviser had to pry the politician’s attention from his mountain of summit paperwork to relay the story hitting the news wires that Friday afternoon in October: the Singaporean and Australian stock exchanges were in takeover talks.

Swan was stunned.