Evening Edition

Growth slowed to an annual pace of 1.8 percent in the January-March quarter, compared with a humming 3.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010, the Commerce Department said in its first estimate for the period.

The deceleration in the world’s biggest economy was in line with analyst expectations, some of whom blamed heavy wintry weather for a key part of the figure: a downturn in investment in residential and non-residential buildings.

Heralding a second attempt to halt — and eventually reverse — stimulus spending that has helped prop up the recovery, Bernanke said the Fed would complete a $600 billion bond buy-up in June as planned.

“We’re just going to let the purchases end,” he said, hosting the first post-policy meeting press conference in the Fed’s 97-year history.

Seeking to end a diplomatic spat that was fast becoming a headache for organisers, Foreign Secretary William Hague said it was “unacceptable” for the envoy to attend because of Syria’s crackdown on pro-democracy protesters.

“In the light of this week’s attacks against civilians by the Syrian security forces, which we have condemned, the Foreign Secretary has decided that the presence of the Syrian ambassador at the royal wedding would be unacceptable and that he should not attend,” a Foreign Office statement said.

A dozen people were wounded in the attack claimed by the Taliban in Pakistan’s politically tense economic capital and southern port, where NATO ships supplies to the 130,000 US-led troops fighting in Afghanistan.

Two other navy buses were bombed on Tuesday, dealing a blow to the military just days after Pakistan’s army chief General Ashfaq Kayani claimed his forces had “broken the back” of Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants.

The sudden announcement from the world’s biggest oil producer came after Prime Minister Vladimir Putin ordered his government to tackle an issue that has been gaining increasing attention ahead of upcoming elections.

Deputy Energy Ministry Sergei Kudryashov’s comments suggested the ban would only apply for the month of May and then be followed by higher gasoline (petrol) export duties aimed at keeping most future sales within Russia.

Another report on Thursday showed a surprise jump in the number of Americans claiming unemployment benefits last week, which could cast a shadow on expectations for a significant pick-up in output in the second quarter.

Growth in gross domestic product slowed to a 1.8 percent annual rate after a 3.1 percent fourth-quarter pace, the Commerce Department said. Economists had expected a 2 percent pace.

The blast ripped through a cafe overlooking Marrakesh’s Jamaa el-Fnaa square, a spot that is often packed with foreign tourists. A Reuters photographer said he saw rescuers pulling dismembered bodies from the wreckage.

State-run 2M television said the 15 dead comprised six French nationals, five Moroccans and four foreigners whose nationality it did not give.

The ruling came amid heightened antagonism between Bahrain’s Shi’ite Muslim majority and its Sunni ruling family after the island kingdom crushed anti-government protests last month with military help from fellow Sunni-led Gulf Arab neighbours.

It was only the third time in more than three decades that a death sentence had been issued against citizens of Bahrain, a U.S. ally which hosts the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet.

Fighting spilled onto Tunisian territory at the Dehiba-Wazin border crossing, in what appeared to be part of a broader government move to root out rebel outposts beyond their eastern heartland. But Gaddafi’s soldiers apologized to their Tunisian counterparts for the incursion and returned to their posts.

Rebels said the western mountain town of Zintan also came under fire from multiple-launch Grad rockets seen as especially hazardous to civilian areas because of their inaccuracy.

Two hundred Baath members from southern Syria resigned on Wednesday after the government sent in tanks to crush resistance in the city of Deraa, where a six-week-old uprising against Assad’s authoritarian rule erupted.

Diplomats said signs were also emerging of differences within the army where the majority of troops are Sunni Muslims, but most officers belong to Assad’s minority Alawite sect.

“There will be no statement,” a Security Council diplomat told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

Instead, Western countries called a public debate on Syria, but the meeting highlighted differences in the 15-nation council, with Russia charging that it was outside interference in Arab countries that could be a threat to peace.

The insurer, 92 percent-owned by the U.S. government, joined the swelling ranks of investors and insurers who are taking on Wall Street over supposedly safe mortgage-related investments at the heart of the 2008 financial crisis.

The insurance giant sued ICP Asset Management and Moore Capital in New York State Supreme Court, but made clear that the lawsuits were the start of a campaign that would put Wall Street’s biggest banks in its sights.

Donald Longueuil, 35, is the latest to admit wrongdoing in a probe into illegal trading on corporate secrets leaked by consultants working for so-called expert network firms that help hedge funds obtain information about public companies.

He is the second former employee of the $12 billion hedge fund founded by Steven A. Cohen to plead guilty to an insider trading charge this year. SAC has not been implicated in the probe.

At a packed shareholder meeting in New York on Thursday, the Big Board owner faced mounting calls that it talk to its cross-town rival, whose $11.2 billion advances it has rejected in favor of a near $10 billion all stock merger with Deutsche Boerse.

Kenneth Steiner, who owns about 1,000 NYSE Euronext shares, called for the board to be ousted and accused the company of selling itself too cheaply by ignoring the Nasdaq-led cash and stock bid.

The board said it may sue Sokol to recover the $3 million of trading profit he made when Berkshire bought chemicals company Lubrizol Corp and could seek damages from him for harm to the company’s reputation. The company will cooperate with any government probe in the matter as well.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is probing Sokol, a person familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.

The commission on Thursday was examining whether the 104 U.S. nuclear plants have enough emergency power in place to ensure that safety systems can keep running in extreme blackouts, like when an earthquake and tsunami shut down power to the Fukushima plant in Japan in March.

Senior staff at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission explained that plants have a series of strategies including diesel generators, emergency fuel supplies, back-up batteries and battery rechargers to keep plants going when power gets knocked out.

European Commission and IMF officials have been in Portugal since mid-April, poring over the heavily indebted country’s public accounts to come up with measures in return for a bailout that is expected to reach about 80 billion euros.

“The work is proceeding in depth and in a completely normal way,” a senior source close to the talks told Reuters. “It is expected that this phase will be completed in the coming days. That means there will be a full package of measures, not just the diagnostics.”

The Confederation of British Industry reckons an extra public holiday typically costs the economy around 6 billion pounds ($10 billion) in lost output.

Even accounting for the feel-good factor the historic occasion will impart and the boost to London attractions from an influx of wealthy foreign visitors, the wedding is not the “unadulterated good news” Prime Minister David Cameron called it.

Sony shut down the network on April 19 after discovering the breach, one of the biggest online data infiltrations ever. But it was not until Tuesday that the company said the system had been hacked and that users’ data could have been stolen.

In the United States, several members of Congress seized on the breach, in which hackers stole names, addresses and possibly credit card details from 77 million users. One U.S. law firm filed a lawsuit in California on behalf of consumers.

The maker of Viera TVs and Lumix cameras said it was aiming to trim its workforce of 367,000 at the end of last month to 350,000 by March 2013. The cull comes on top of nearly 18,000 job cuts made in the past business year, for a total of around 35,000 over three years.

“The figure is huge, but so is the company, and for an old-fashioned one like Panasonic, this is a big move,” said Toru Hashizume, chief investment officer at Stats Investment Management in Tokyo.

Japan’s recovery from the quake would accelerate from October, the BOJ said in its twice-yearly outlook report on the economy. At the same time, it revised up economic forecasts for the year ending in March 2013 and raised its estimate for core consumer price inflation in the current fiscal year.

BOJ Governor Masaaki Shirakawa said the central bank still needed time to examine the effects on the economy of its monetary easing last month.

The additions made in the wake of the financial crisis, including retail lender Deutsche Postbank and wealth manager Sal. Oppenheim, helped offset a slight fall in profit from investment banking.

But even in this area Deutsche performed better than peers, seeing profit dip 5 percent from a bumper year-ago period, but rise to more than three times the previous quarter.

The Fed trimmed its forecast for 2011 economic growth in a nod to a weak start to the year and bumped up its projections for inflation, which caused some jitters in financial markets.

The central bank’s policy-setting committee said after a two-day meeting it will complete the purchase of $600 billion in bonds in June to support the economy’s recovery, and said it would keep its balance sheet, currently at $2.67 trillion, steady for a time to ensure its support does not fade.

Jobs, who is on medical leave, sought to control a firestorm that has broken out over whether Apple is monitoring the whereabouts of its customers, promising to adjust the mobile software to store less location data.

Jobs denied that it was tracking the movements of its iPhone customers during interviews with AllThingsD, a blog owned by News Corp, and others. He also said the company would look forward to testifying before Congress and other regulators.

This time, he decided he had to. In an extraordinary step, the White House produced a copy of his detailed Hawaii birth certificate Wednesday after obtaining a special waiver from the state to make it public.

For his allies and even many of his political critics, it was about time.

“I find it hard to summarize in mere words the amount of pain and rage this incident has caused,” Thurston said.

“This” would be the nation’s first black president standing in the White House, blue power suit and all, going on TV to debunk, in more detail than before, the persistent, he-ain’t-really-an-American rumors fanned anew by Donald Trump, the developer and might-be presidential candidate.

His own re-election approaching, Obama turned to a cast of familiar and respected officials for the most sweeping reworking of his national security team since the opening weeks of his presidency.

He nominated CIA Director Leon Panetta to replace Defense Secretary Robert Gates when Gates makes his long-planned retirement this summer, and he proposed sending Iraq and Afghanistan war commander Gen. David Petraeus to head the CIA.

Rockets and other artillery fire slammed into Misrata’s western Garara neighborhood, sending up deadly showers of shrapnel. At the city’s Hikma hospital, relatives shouting “God is great” collected the dead, each with the word “martyr” written in black marker on their white funeral shrouds.

The two-month battle has wrecked swaths of Libya’s third-largest city and prompted dire warnings of a humanitarian crisis. Gadhafi’s best trained forces are battling fiercely to try to uproot rebel fighters from their only major stronghold in the western half of Libya, which is home to the government’s power centers and the capital, Tripoli.

The results are expected to lead many doctors and patients to turn away from the pricier Lucentis and instead use $50 shots of Avastin for an age-related condition called wet macular degeneration.

Vision improvement after one year was the same for those given Avastin or Lucentis, the 1,200-patient study found.

The 1.8 percent annual growth rate in the January-March quarter was weaker than the 3.1 percent growth in the previous quarter, the Commerce Department reported. And it was the worst showing since last spring when the European debt crisis slowed growth to a 1.7 percent pace.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and other economists say the slowdown is a temporary setback. They generally agree that gas prices will stabilize and the economy will grow at a 3 percent pace in each of the next three quarters.

The world’s largest publicly traded company said Thursday that higher oil prices boosted profits 69 percent from a year ago. The result was Exxon’s best since earning a record $14.83 billion in 2008’s third quarter.

Wall Street had been expecting sharply higher earnings for oil companies. Oil prices rose 17 percent in the quarter. But huge oil profits will aggravate drivers with gasoline prices averaging $3.89 per gallon nationally. President Obama wants to cut into some of those earnings by eliminating $4 billion in taxpayer subsidies for oil companies.

Under the voluntary guidelines, companies would be urged to only market foods to children ages 2 through 17 if they are low in fats, sugars and sodium and contain specified healthy ingredients. The proposal sets parameters that are stricter than many companies have set for themselves.

If companies agree, children could see much less of the colorful cartoon characters used to advertise cereals or other gimmicks designed to draw their attention. If the food manufacturers wanted to continue that advertising, they would have to reduce unhealthy ingredients in their products.

At least 23 people were wounded in the blast a few minutes before noon in Djemma el-Fna square, one of the top attractions in a country that depends heavily on tourism, Moroccan Interior Minister Taib Chergaoui said.

Government spokesman Khalid Naciri told the AP it was too soon to lay blame for what he called a terrorist attack but he noted that Morocco regularly dismantles cells linked to al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb and says it has disrupted several plots.

The target of such an operation in North Waziristan would be the most violent factions within the so-called Pakistani Taliban. Their leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, is believed to be increasingly isolated after executing a prominent former Pakistani official over the objections of senior militant leaders.

Although Mehsud has been linked to attacks in neighboring Afghanistan, his main focus appears to be in plotting carnage elsewhere in Pakistan. And that makes him a prime target for the army.

Spokesman Felix Anoble confirmed that photographs posted on the Internet of a bloody-faced man with an apparent bullet wound to the heart showed Coulibaly, 47, after he was killed Wednesday night.

A commander for Defense Minister Guillaume Soro had said Coulibaly appeared to have killed himself rather than surrender when Soro’s troops seized Coulibaly’s stronghold in Abidjan.

Those killed were trainers and advisers for the nascent Afghan air force. The shooting was the deadliest attack by a member of the Afghan security forces, or an insurgent impersonating them, on coalition troops or Afghan soldiers or policemen. There have been seven such attacks so far this year.

Although the individual circumstances may differ, the incidents of Afghans turning against their coalition partners seem to reflect growing anti-foreigner sentiment independent of the Taliban. Afghans are increasingly tired of the nearly decade-long war and think their lives have not improved despite billions of dollars in international aid.

DNA tests show a match in the leprosy strain between some patients and these prehistoric-looking critters – a connection scientists had suspected but until now couldn’t pin down.

“Now we have the link,” said James Krahenbuhl, who heads a government leprosy program that led the new study.

So the next time someone tells you it’s spread by “illegals” you tell them they’re full of shit.

According to an unofficial but complete tally by the New Jersey School Boards Association, 429 of the 538 budgets up for a vote – or 80 percent – were adopted in elections statewide Wednesday as a rigid new cap was put in place to control tax hikes.

Most years, fewer than one-fifth of the state’s voters participate in school elections. Besides voting for school board candidates, citizens in most towns can vote up or down the property tax bill for their school districts. It’s the best chance New Jersey citizens have to have a direct say on their property taxes, which average more than $7,000 a year – by far the nation’s highest.

“A real threat to regional security in our view could arise from outside interference in Syria’s domestic situation including attempts to push ready-made solutions or taking of sides,” Russia’s deputy U.N. ambassador Alexander Pankin warned the U.N.’s most powerful body during a public session that followed, saying this could lead to civil war.

“It is extremely important to focus all attempts on avoiding such a dangerous turn of events, especially as Syria is a cornerstone of the Middle East security architecture,” he said. “Destabilizing this significant link in the chain will lead to complications throughout the region.”

The maneuvering was needed to pass a compromise on new rules for Missouri dog breeders that was brokered by Nixon’s administration and supported by several state-based agriculture and animal welfare groups. Nixon called the new legislation “a dramatic, important, significant step” that would improve the care of dogs while ensuring breeders can continue to operate. The industry has an estimated $1 billion impact in Missouri.

In the end, Nixon and lawmakers eliminated parts of the “Puppy Mill Cruelty Prevention Act” passed last November by voters, including a limit of 50 breeding dogs per business. Other portions were changed. The new law sought potential middle ground on the specifics of the living-space requirements, and it gives breeders more time to comply with the new rules.

That’s about a quarter of the Deepwater Horizon spill, which put 206 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. But it’s far more than Shell Oil – the major leaseholder in waters off Alaska’s northwest coast – says it could handle under its current response plan.

When applying for exploratory permits, Shell was required to prepare for a maximum spill of 231,000 gallons per day. The company says its fleet of on-site responders – including boats, barges, skimmers, and a tanker that can hold 21 million gallons of recovered liquids – can handle a spill of 504,000 gallons per day.

In the lawsuit, the Idaho Correctional Center inmates ask for class-action status and say the Boise-area prison is so violent that it’s called “Gladiator School.” They say the guards use brutal inmate-on-inmate violence as a management tool and then deny injured prisoners adequate medical care. The Nashville, Tenn.-based CCA says prisoner safety is its top priority and that it works closely with state leaders to meet the standards set by the Idaho Department of Correction.

The case has garnered widespread media attention, and in January CCA attorneys asked the judge for a gag order barring attorneys, witnesses and others involved in the case from speaking to the news media. The company said one of the ACLU attorneys representing the inmates, Stephen Pevar, made inflammatory and prejudicial statements in press releases and interviews, and CCA maintained that continued news coverage of such statements would make it impossible to find an impartial jury.

The Nevada Democrat said the trip, his first visit to China in a quarter-century, offered “an unmistakable reminder just how hard we have to work to make America competitive with the rest of the world,” particularly on manufacturing and energy.

Reid said he used to be proud that he could see dozens of construction cranes in Las Vegas and other fast-growing areas in Nevada, but said that in China, “they have 26 cranes in one block. And they have block after block of cranes.”

Business and property rights groups said the policy would stifle economic growth by generating more red tape for builders of homes and shopping centers, but environmentalists defended it as essential step to provide clean drinking water and protect waterfowl habitat.

Administration officials said their goal was to clarify which waters are subject to federal regulation under the 1972 Clean Water Act, a question that two Supreme Court rulings in the past decade have not resolved.

U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney said six Muslim groups and five individuals who sued in 2007 to gain access to records they believed the FBI was keeping do not have a right to much of the information because of national security concerns.

The ruling came amid a nearly five-year battle by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Muslim activists to obtain files they believe would show the FBI has been unlawfully targeting Muslims in Southern California.

The reviews for Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke’s unusual press conference Wednesday would have sunk a Hollywood blockbuster. As the head of the famously vague central bank, though, he nailed it.

“I would give the chairman high grades for his performance today,” said Dana Saporta, an economist at Credit Suisse. “I was a little relieved.”