It also preceded the expected return to Bahrain of Hassan Mushaimaa, leader of the hardline Shi'ite Haq party, one of two people tried in absentia for his part in the alleged coup plot. Mohammed al-Tajer, a lawyer for the 23 activists, told Reuters that about 250 prisoners had been released. Most were detained as part of a crackdown launched on some Shi'ite opposition groups last August and during subsequent protests.

The opposition describes youngsters arrested during clashes with security forces in Shi'ite villages as political prisoners. Tajer said detainees picked up in last week's confrontations between security forces and protesters had been freed earlier.

King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa was in Riyadh to welcome home Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah from an extended absence due to ill-health, a sign of tight ties between the Bahraini royals and their far stronger Saudi counterparts. Saudi Arabia is concerned unrest in Bahrain might spread to its own Shi'ite minority.

When German state governors, former chancellors or cabinet ministers visit the emirates and kingdoms along the Persian Gulf, the ambassadors in the respective countries like to say: "We are living in the eye of the hurricane here." The states are seen as an oasis of stability, surrounded by rogue regimes and failed states. Or rather, they were. As of last week, even the Gulf nations are no longer as calm as they used to be. Following the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, as well as popular protests in Libya, Jordan and Yemen, the sea change in the Arab world has now reached the sheikhs.

Tanks have been out on the streets of Manama, the capital of Bahrain. The city had been due to host two rounds of the GP2 Asia Series car race - one last weekend, and one as part of the Formula One Grand Prix weekend from March 11-13 - but both have been cancelled. Hence the sound of engines roaring through the city's financial district in the early morning hours on Thursday did not come from race cars, but from heavy diesel-powered trucks carrying police riot squads. Their destination was the capital's Pearl Square, where a few dozen tents had been set up beneath a 90-meter (295-foot) monument to Bahrain's pearl divers.

The protesters had hoped that the roundabout surrounding the Pearl Monument would become Bahrain's version of Tahrir Square in Cairo. But now the events there are more reminiscent of what happened in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989. Within a few hours, what had been a tolerated forum for demonstrators seeking more democracy had turned into a monument of mourning, as the tiny country of 1.23 million became the latest combustion point in the Arab revolution. The situation in Bahrain clearly poses a potential threat to the region - and to the West's oil supply.

That would be the most expensive calamity since the $19.9 billion loss from Hurricane Ike, which struck the US in 2008, according to the Insurance Information Institute, a New York-based trade group. The 6.3 magnitude quake killed at least 75 people, toppled buildings and trapped workers in Christchurch, New Zealand's second-largest city. It followed a 7.0 magnitude temblor that shook the city of 400,000 people on September 4, costing insurers an estimated $6 billion, according to Huttner.

"Even buildings which are still standing may have hidden structural damage and could then need to be rebuilt," he said in the note. "This is a very conservative assumption on our part and in support of this we note that all reinsurers revised" cost estimates for the previous earthquake.

The scale of yesterday's quake remains unknown and will be treated as a separate event, New Zealand Prime Minister John Key said in a press conference from Wellington today. "We think there may be another 100,000 claims," Key said. "There were 180,000 claims I think in the first earthquake. We know that different properties have been affected. Some properties that had no impact in the last earthquake have been severely damaged."

The House came into session twice this morning, with only three of the 40 Democrats present. Those were needed to make a motion, and a seconding motion, for any procedural steps Democrats would want to take to ensure Republicans don't do anything official without quorum. With only 58 legislators present, there was no quorum present to do business. The House needs 67 of its members to be present.

House Speaker Brian Bosma said he did not know yet whether he would ask the Indiana State Police to compel the lawmakers to attend, if they can be found. Today's fight was triggered by Republicans pushing a bill that would bar unions and companies from negotiating a contract that requires non-union members to kick-in fees for representation. It's become the latest in what is becoming a national fight over Republican attempts to eliminate or limit collective bargaining.

House Minority Leader B Patrick Bauer, Democrat for South Bend, "has taken a page out of the Wisconsin Senate playbook apparently" by keeping his caucus in hiding, Bosma said. "They are shirking the job that they were hired to do." In Wisconsin, Senate Democrats have fled to Illinois to deny Republicans the quorum they need to pass legislation limiting collective bargaining for many public employees.

Asked at what point he would call in the Indiana State Police to attempt to round up the Democrats, Bosma said: "We'll see how the day goes."

Investors said they are gauging the impact of Libyan unrest on the global economy and corporate profit growth. Libya is the world's 12th-largest exporter of oil. "Global investors are now trying to decide if the Middle East crisis means a major shift of geopolitical balance of power in the region," said Masayuki Kubota of Daiwa SB Investments. He added that there could be "more instability and possible further oil price rises".

In Asian trade, US light sweet crude for April delivery was 2% higher at $95.45 a barrel. On Tuesday, the March contract had jumped almost 9% in value. Brent crude rose 58 cents to $106.36 a barrel, after going as high as $106.58 earlier. On Monday, Brent hit a two-and-a-half-year high of $108.70.

"The major underlying fear in the market is that these protests spread in the region to even larger producers like Saudi Arabia," said Andy Lebow, a trader at MF Global in New York. "While that might not look likely right now, even a hint of real problems there could send prices vertical."

"The situation is that we don't believe this site is now survivable," said police area commander Inspector Dave Lawry near the remains of the Canterbury Television building. "It was a hard choice and my heart goes out to all the families." He said rescuers now needed to concentrate their resources elsewhere in areas where survivors were more likely to be found.

About 100 people are believed to be inside. Earlier, the head of the fire service denied reports that 15 people trapped inside had been rescued. The building housed a language school and Insp Lawry said some foreign students would be among the dead there. At the Pyne Gould Guinness building, office worker Ann Bodkin was pulled out alive on Wednesday afternoon, after being trapped for more than 24 hours, and was reunited with her waiting husband.

The authorities have imposed a night-time curfew in the worst-affected areas of the city. The earthquake struck at a shallow depth of 5km (3.1 miles) on Tuesday lunchtime, when the South Island city was at its busiest. It was Christchurch's second major tremor in five months, and New Zealand's deadliest natural disaster in 80 years.

Nearly 300 people have been killed so far, according to Human Rights Watch. Earlier, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi urged his supporters to attack the "cockroaches" and "rats" protesting against his rule. Anyone who took up arms against Libya would be executed, he warned.

Interior Minister Abdel Fattah Younes al-Abidi - who is considered Colonel Gaddafi's number two - later resigned and called on the armed forces to "join and heed the people's demands". The BBC's Jon Leyne, in eastern Libya, says people there reacted with anger and derision to Colonel Gaddafi's speech. They fear the veteran leader is out to destroy the country before he is finally deposed.

Our correspondent says that the belief in Libya is that government control is down to a few strongholds, including parts of the capital Tripoli and the southern city of Sabha; but Colonel Gaddafi is clearly not going to give up the fight. The UN Security Council's statement came after a day of debate on the uprising in Libya, amid reports foreign mercenaries have been attacking civilians and warplanes bombing protesters.

Tourists of Glacier Explorer boats say the icefall caused waves of up to 3.5 meters in height which swept up and down the lake for 30 minutes. The glacier is about 120 miles from Christchurch on the west coast. The powerful earthquake struck Christchurch on Tuesday, toppling tall buildings and churches, crushing buses and killing at least 65 people.

"It is necessary to remove the US from the Islamic world," the all-powerful cleric and Islamic republic's commander-in-chief said, adding that the country's arch-foe was currently weak. Khamenei urged Muslims worldwide to preserve the "people's movement in Egypt," saying it was the duty of both the people and dignitaries of Arab nations and the entire Islamic community.

He reiterated that THE ARAB REVOLTS WERE "ISLAMIC" AND MUST BE CONSOLIDATED. "The enemies try to say that the popular movements in Egypt, Tunisia and other nations are un-Islamic, but certainly these popular movements are Islamic and must be consolidated," he said. Khamenei also urged that "THE CONSPIRACY OF ENEMIES TO CREATE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN SUNNIS AND SHIITES" be confronted.

On February 4, in his Friday prayer sermon, Khamenei called for an Islamic regime to be installed in Egypt, a week before that country's strongman Hosni Mubarak was ousted. Iranian officials expressed support for the uprising in the Arab world's most populous nation.

The pilots reportedly told Maltese officials they were based in Tripoli and ordered to attack protesters in Benghazi. After seeing fellow pilots begin bombing, the colonels changed course and headed for Malta, according to Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera had been relaying eyewitness reports of airstrikes Monday, but cautioned that the bombings could not be verified. Clashes in the Libyan capital of Tripoli on Monday left 160 dead, Al Arabiya network quoted eyewitnesses as saying.

The mayor of New Zealand's second-biggest city says at least 200 people are believed trapped under rubble. The country's deadliest natural disaster in 80 years struck at 1251 (2351 GMT on Monday), 10km (6.2 miles) south-east of the city. The damage is said to be far worse than after the 7.1-magnitude quake on 4 September, which left two people seriously injured but no fatalities. That quake's epicentre was further away from the city and deeper underground, but still caused an estimated $3 billion (1.9 billion pounds) in damage.

TV pictures of the aftermath of Tuesday's disaster showed scores of collapsed buildings in the South Island city of nearly 400,000 people. People could be seen wandering the rubble-strewn streets in distress. Police said that among the dead were people on two buses which had been crushed by falling buildings. Helicopters have been used to put out fires caused by the quake.

Officials said up to 30 people were feared still trapped inside the Pyne Gould Guinness building, where screams have been heard from beneath the wreckage. Christchurch Cathedral, an iconic stone building in the centre of the city, was partly destroyed, its spire toppling into the square below. Concrete in Victoria Square had risen at least a metre in some places and there are signs of liquefaction around the Avon river, RNZ added. Power and telephone lines were knocked out, and pipes burst, flooding the streets with water. The suburbs of Lyttleton and New Brighton are reportedly "unliveable".

The military has been deployed to help the rescue effort, and the government has accepted an offer of specialist help from Australia. Two large magnitude-5 aftershocks have already rattled the stricken city, and officials warned residents to brace for more. One Christchurch resident, Jaydn Katene, told the New Zealand Herald: "We've had friends in town call us and say there are just bodies lying around; lots of dead bodies outside shops just lying there just covered in bricks."

New Zealand lies at the southern end of the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire, and above an area of the Earth's crust where the Pacific Plate converges with the Indo-Australian Plate. The country experiences more than 14,000 earthquakes a year, of which only around 20 have a magnitude in excess of 5.0. The last fatal earthquake was in 1968, when a 7.1-magnitude tremor killed three people on the South Island's western coast. Tuesday's tremor was the country's worst natural disaster since a 1931 quake in the North Island city of Napier killed 256 people.

The National Institute for Astronomical and Geophysical Research reported that tremors from the 3am quake lasted for 27 minutes, but caused no damage. The ships had originally been expected to enter the Suez today (Monday), but Egyptian officials announced the delay this morning, without explanation.

Iran inexplicably announced Sunday morning that two of its warships had crossed the Suez, a report that was thoroughly denied by Egyptian authorities. Iranian media did not mention the ships on Monday, and the false report may have been for local consumption. No Iranian ship has been allowed to pass through the Suez Canal since Iran's 1979 overthrow of the Shah and Egypt's signing of a peace treaty with Israel the same year.

The huge plume of grayish smoke shot up to more than a mile (2 kilometers) toward the blue sky, with the ash drifting southwest toward four farming towns in Sorsogon province, where about 1,200 villagers fled to emergency shelters and houses of relatives, said Benito Ramos, who heads the government's disaster-response agency.

Army trucks helped villagers move from communities hit by the ashfall and emergency teams handed out protective masks, Ramos said. There have not been any government orders to evacuate communities near the mountain. While many scrambled to safety, residents streamed out of houses in Irosin town to gaze or take pictures of the mid-morning spectacle using their cellphones.

The House of Representatives voted on Saturday to cut federal spending by $61 billion through September. But the Republican measure will likely die because Democrats who control the Senate oppose it and President Barack Obama vowed to veto it. Obama has outlined his own plan for less severe spending cuts in 2012, and has warned that tightening the belt too much too soon could harm the slow economic recovery.

Democratic Senator Charles Schumer criticized House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell over talk among some Republicans that they would rather shut down the government than relent on their spending cut demands. "Unfortunately Speaker Boehner seems to be on a course that would inevitably lead to a shutdown... That's reckless," Schumer said on CNN's "State of the Union" program.

"We have said shutdown is off the table... Boehner, Mitch McConnell, other Republican leaders have not taken it off the table when asked, and there are lots of people on the hard right clamoring for a shutdown." With the government funded only through March 4, the government could run out of money if lawmakers fail to act, but both sides have been urging compromise. That was seen as the likeliest outcome, even by one of the House's new breed of small-government, deficit slashing freshman Republicans.

The message, posted on an overseas website on Saturday, was titled: "The jasmine revolution in China". The swift crackdown underlined the anxiety of authorities in the wake of the Egypt uprising and protests across the Middle East. The Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy estimated that more than 100 activists across the country were taken away by police, prevented from leaving home or were missing.

The message linked it to the jasmine revolution and I guess that made the government nervous," she said. "It really shows us how much the government has identified with regimes in the Middle East where people are so aggrieved about social injustice." Despite a huge police presence at the proposed demonstration locations, there were signs that at least a handful of people in Beijing and Shanghai had hoped to protest.

It is not clear who posted the call for demonstrations on the Boxun website, and the message may well have come from abroad. Many mainland activists appeared to have been unaware of it until police contacted them. The message said: "You and I are Chinese people who will still have a dream for the future... we must act responsibly for the future of our descendants." It urged people to shout demands for food, work, housing and fairness.