Iran upbeat on nuclear talks, West still wary

ALMATY (Reuters) - Iran was upbeat on Wednesday after talks with world powers about its nuclear work ended with an agreement to meet again, but Western officials said it had yet to take concrete steps to ease their fears of a secret weapons program.

The United States, China, France, Russia, Britain and Germany offered to ease sanctions slightly in return for Iran curbing its most sensitive work, but had made clear they expected no breakthrough in the talks in Kazakhstan, the first in eight months.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the talks had been "useful" and that a serious engagement by Iran could lead to a comprehensive deal in a decade-old dispute that has threatened to trigger a new Middle East war.

Iran's foreign minister said in Vienna he was "very confident" a deal could be reached and its chief negotiator said he believed the Almaty meeting could be a "turning point".

The two sides agreed to hold expert-level talks in Istanbul on March 18 to discuss the offer, and return to Almaty for political discussions on April 5-6, when Western diplomats made clear they wanted to see substantive movement by Iran.

"Iran knows what it needs to do, the president has made clear his determination to implement his policy that Iran will not have a nuclear weapon," Kerry said in Paris.

A senior U.S. official in Almaty added: "What we care about at the end is concrete results."

ISRAELI WARNING

Israel, assumed to be the Middle East's only nuclear-armed power, was watching the talks closely. It has strongly hinted it might attack Iran if diplomacy and sanctions fail to ensure that it cannot build a nuclear weapon. Iran denies any such aim.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said economic sanctions were failing and urged the international community to threaten Iran with military action.

Western officials said the offer presented by the six powers included an easing of a ban on trade in gold and other precious metals, and a relaxation of an import embargo on Iranian petrochemical products. They gave no further details.

In exchange, a senior U.S. official said, Iran would among other things have to suspend uranium enrichment to a fissile concentration of 20 percent at its Fordow underground facility and "constrain the ability to quickly resume operations there".

This appeared to be a softening of a previous demand that Iran ship out its entire stockpile of higher-grade enriched uranium, which it says it needs to produce medical isotopes.

Iran says it has a sovereign right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, and wants to fuel nuclear power plants so that it can export more oil.

But 20-percent purity is far higher than that needed for nuclear power, and rings alarm bells abroad because it is only a short technical step away from weapons-grade.

Iran's growing stockpile of 20-percent-enriched uranium is already more than half-way to a "red line" that Israel has made clear it would consider sufficient for a bomb.

ELECTION LOOMING

The U.S. official said the latest proposal would "significantly restrict the accumulation of near-20-percent enriched uranium in Iran, while enabling the Iranians to produce sufficient fuel" for their Tehran medical reactor.

Iran had previously indicated that 20-percent enrichment was up for negotiation if it received the fuel from abroad instead.

Chief negotiator Saeed Jalili suggested Iran could discuss the issue, although he appeared to rule out shutting down Fordow. He said the powers had not made that specific demand.

Western officials were aware that the closeness of Iran's presidential election in June is raising political tensions in Tehran and made rapid progress unlikely.

One diplomat in Almaty said the Iranians appeared to be suggesting at the negotiations that they were opening new avenues, but that it was not clear if this was really the case.

"Everyone is saying Iran was more positive and portrayed the talks as a win," said Iran expert Dina Esfandiary of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. "I reckon the reason for that is that they are saving face internally while buying time with the West until after the elections."

The Iranian rial, which has lost more than half its foreign exchange value in the last year as sanctions bite, rose some 2 percent on Wednesday, currency tracking web sites reported.

(Additional reporting by Fredrik Dahl in Almaty, Georgina Prodhan in Vienna, Zahra Hosseinian in Zurich, Gabriela Baczynska in Moscow, Dan Williams in Jerusalem and Marcus George in Dubai; Writing by Timothy Heritage and Fredrik Dahl; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

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US Supreme Court takes up voting rights law

WASHINGTON: The US Supreme Court Wednesday took up the US voting rights law, a cornerstone of efforts to guard against a resurgence of racial discrimination in American states with a segregationist past.

At issue is the 1965 law's Section 5, which requires nine mainly southern states and local governments in seven other states to obtain Justice Department approval for any changes in their electoral codes.

The nearly half-century-old law, which bars all racial discrimination at the polls, is opposed by some states as outmoded, but a number of civil rights organizations argue it is still needed.

"Though there have been improvements, this past election has shown that the law is not outdated and sadly continues to be extremely necessary," said Caroline Fredrickson, head of the American Constitution Society.

Texas, for one, has faced repeated Justice Department challenges to its election redistricting laws as well as a state law requiring voters to present photo identification.

In both instances, a federal appeals court in Washington ruled that the provisions were "discriminatory," and now Texas is waiting to argue its position before the Supreme Court.

Several states are challenging the law's Section 5, but the Supreme Court is considering just one complaint brought by Shelby county in Alabama.

It comes immediately after the re-election of the United States' first black president, Barack Obama -- something critics point to as evidence that the law is unnecessary.

"The violence, intimidation, and subterfuge that led Congress to pass Section 5 and this court to uphold it no longer remains," Shelby County's brief says.

The county points out that 83 percent of its 200,000 inhabitants are white, a demographic mix that it contends puts it above suspicion of racial discrimination.

It maintains that Section 5 should be simply thrown out, complaining that the Obama administration is enforcing it with greater zealousness than in the past.

More than 20 religious, civic and human rights organizations have joined in calling on the top court to confirm Section 5's constitutionality as "the heart of the voting rights act," as the NAACP, the country's most prominent black civil rights organization, put it.

The law "has played a key role in protecting our democracy and ensuring the vitality of the right of minorities to vote and fully participate in the political process", said NAACP president Sherrilyn Ifill.

Defenders of the law rested their arguments on the Constitution's 15th amendment, which bans racial discrimination at the polls.

The nine-member court, which has a conservative majority, left the law alone the last time they reviewed it in 2009, but strongly urged the Congress to reform it on grounds that "things have changed in the South."

It also expressed concern that it puts states' rights at the mercy of the federal government, despite protections afforded by the 10th amendment to the constitution.

The federal government for its part calls on the justices to consider that the Congress in 2006 extended the law for another 30 years.

This time, however, the top court could prove deaf to those appeals because the Congress failed to heed its warning.

-AFP/ac

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Tim McGraw samples new system to sell album in a status update

Tim McGraw turns to Facebook to sell his latest album.

(Credit:
Screenshot/Jennifer Van Grove)

Country singer Tim McGraw wants you to buy his album -- on Facebook. Tuesday, the recording artist became one of the first people to try out a new system for selling through status updates on the social network.

McGraw's team used e-commerce platform Chirpify to encourage Facebook fans to type "buy" in the comments section of a post to instantly purchase a special edition of the star's "Two Lanes Of Freedom" album.

The in-stream album sale marks the start of Chirpify's foray over to Facebook. Chirpify was founded in 2011 and initially started by turning tweets into instant transactions. The Portland-based company has since expanded to include support for selling on Instagram, and is now working on perfecting buying through Facebook comments.

"Chirpify is enabling in-stream commerce by comment on Facebook for select top tier brands and musicians before a wider rollout and official launch," Chirpify Chief Executive Chris Teso told CNET.

Chirpify integrates with Facebook so that social network users need only type "buy" -- but only "buy," and nothing more -- in the comments section on a for-sale post to grab the item offered. The transaction is a one-step process if the person is already a Chirpify user.

Though novel, Chirpify's in-stream approach to e-commerce will likely be a little too avant-garde for most social networkers, especially those who want to avoid the process of signing up for another service. Thankfully, the company has the help of notable celebrities such as McGraw, Kat Von D, and Green Day to help it acclimate people to the idea of spending via tweet or Facebook comment.

[via Digital Trends]

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Anti-virus firm makes new revelation on Stuxnet

Updated at 11:22 a.m. ET

LONDON The sophisticated cyberweapon which targeted an Iranian nuclear plant is older than previously believed, an anti-virus firm said Tuesday, peeling back another layer of mystery on a series of attacks attributed to U.S. and Israeli intelligence.

The Stuxnet worm, aimed at the centrifuges in Iran's Natanz plant, transformed the cybersecurity field because it was the first known computer attack specifically designed to cause physical damage. The precise origins of the worm remain unclear, but until now the earliest samples of Stuxnet had been dated to 2009.

Security experts generally agree that Stuxnet was an attempt to sabotage Iran's uranium enrichment centrifuges, which can be used to make fuel for reactors or weapons-usable material for atomic bombs. Iran maintains its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

Play Video

Stuxnet: Computer worm opens new era of warfare

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Stuxnet copycats: Let the hacking begin

As "60 Minutes" correspondent Steve Kroft reported last year, Stuxnet was incredibly complicated and sophisticated, beyond the cutting edge. By the time it was first detected in June 2010, it had been out in the wild for a year without drawing anyone's attention, and seemed to spread by way of USB thumb drives, not over the Internet.

By the fall of 2010, the consensus was that Iran's top secret uranium enrichment plant at Natanz was the target and that Stuxnet was a carefully constructed weapon designed to be carried into the plant on a corrupted laptop or thumb drive, then infect the system, disguise its presence, move through the network, changing computer code and subtly alter the speed of the centrifuges without the Iranians ever noticing, Kroft reported.

"Stuxnet's entire purpose is to control centrifuges," Liam O Murchu, an operations manager for Symantec, told Kroft. "To make centrifuges speed up past what they're meant to spin at and to damage them. Certainly it would damage the uranium enrichment facility and they would need to be replaced."

Last June, The New York Times traced the origins of the top-secret program back to 2006.

In a new report issued late Tuesday, Symantec Corp. pushed that timeline further back, saying it had found a primitive version of Stuxnet circulating online in 2007 and that elements of the program had been in place as far back as 2005.

One independent expert who examined the report said it showed that the worm's creators were particularly far-sighted.

"What it looks like is that somebody's been thinking about this for a long, long time — the better part of a decade," said Alan Woodward, a computer science professor at the University of Surrey. "It really points to a very clever bunch of people behind all of this."

Nuclear Iran: Sites and potential targets

A look at the locations where Iran carries out work linked to its suspected pursuit of nuclear weapons

The Times reported that President George W. Bush ordered the deployment of Stuxnet against Iran in a bid to put the brakes on its atomic energy program, detailing how the worm tampered with the operation of Natanz's centrifuge machines to send them spinning out of control.

President Obama, who succeeded Bush shortly after the first attacks, expanded the campaign, the report said.

U.S. and Israeli officials have long declined to comment publicly on Stuxnet or their alleged involvement in creating and deploying the computer worm.

Symantec's report suggests that an intermediate version of the worm — Stuxnet 0.5 — was completed in November 2007. That worm lacked some of the sophistication of its descendant, Symantec said, and was designed to interfere with the centrifuges by opening and closing the valves which control the flow of uranium gas, causing a potentially damaging buildup in pressure.

That approach was dropped in later, improved versions of the Stuxnet code.

Symantec said the servers used to control the primitive worm were set up in November 2005, suggesting that Stuxnet's trailblazing authors were plotting out their attack at a time when many parts of the Internet now taken for granted were not yet in place. Twitter did not exist, Facebook was still largely limited to U.S. college campuses, and YouTube was in its infancy.

Woodward said that had troubling implications.

"Clearly these were very forward-thinking, clever people that were doing this," he said. "There's no reason to think that they're less forward-thinking now. What are they up to?"

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Bring on the Cuts: Some Want the Sequester

Mark Lucas wouldn't mind seeing America's defense budget cut by billions.

"There's quite a bit of waste within the military," Lucas, who serves as Iowa state director for the conservative group Americans for Prosperity (AFP), told ABC News. "Being in there for 10 years, I've seen quite a bit of it."

With the budget sequester set to kick in on Friday, the former Army ranger is among a small chorus of conservatives saying bring on the cuts.

Read more: Bernanke on Sequester Cuts: Too Much, Too Soon

Lucas cited duplicative equipment purchases, military-run golf courses and lavish food on larger bases -- unlike the chow he endured at a combat operations post in Afghanistan with about 120 other soldiers.

"These guys would have very good food, and I'm talking almost like a buffet style, shrimp and steak once a week, ice cream, all this stuff," Lucas said. "They had Burger Kings and Pizza Huts and McDonald's. And I said to myself, 'Do we really need this?'"

Lucas and AFP would like to see the sequester modified, with federal agencies granted more authority to target the cuts and avoid the more dire consequences. But the group wants the cuts to happen.

"We're very supportive of the sequestration cuts but would prefer to see more targeted cuts at the same level," said the group's spokesman, Levi Russell.

As President Obama and his Cabinet members are sounding the sequester alarm bells, AFP's willingness shows that not everyone is running for the hills.

Charles Dharapak/Pool/AP Photo

Speaker Boehner Hopes Senate 'Gets Off Their Ass' Watch Video

Sequester Showdown: Automatic Spending Cuts Loom Watch Video

President Obama Details Consequences of Sequester Cuts Watch Video

Read more: 57 Terrible Consequences of the Sequester

Obama traveled to Norfolk, Va., on Tuesday to speak at a shipyard about cuts and layoffs to defense contractors. In his most recent weekly radio address, he told Americans that the Navy has already kept an aircraft carrier home instead of deploying it to the Persian Gulf. And last week, he spoke before national TV cameras at the White House, warning that first responders would be laid off.

Homeland Security Secretary Jane Napolitano has warned that the sequester will "leave critical infrastructure vulnerable to attacks." Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has warned that air travel will back up after the Federal Aviation Administration furloughs air traffic controllers. And the heads of 18 other federal agencies told Congress that terrible things will happen unless the sequester is pushed off.

Some Republicans have accused the president of scaremongering to gin up popular support for tax hikes. Obama has warned of calamity and demanded compromise in the next breath, and a few Republicans have rejected this as a false choice.

Read more: Boehner Hopes Senate 'Gets Off Their Ass'

"I don't think the president's focused on trying to find a solution to the sequester," House Speaker John Boehner told reporters at a press conference on Tuesday. "For 16 months, the president's been traveling all over the country holding rallies, instead of sitting down with Senate leaders in order to try to forge an agreement over there in order to move the bill."

After Obama spoke to governors at the this week, Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal told ABC News' Jonathan Karl outside the White House that the president is exaggerating the sequester's consequences.

"He's trying to scare the American people," Jindal said. "He's trying to distort the impact."

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Egypt opposition to skip polls over transparency fears

CAIRO: Egypt's main opposition coalition, the National Salvation Front, said Tuesday it will boycott upcoming parliamentary elections due to a lack of guarantees of a transparent process.

"The decision of the Front, unanimously, is to boycott the elections," NSF member Sameh Ashour told a news conference in Cairo after a meeting of the alliance grouping mainly liberals and leftists.

Ashour said the decision had come after its demands, including the formation of a new government "to save the country", had been ignored.

"There can be no elections without a law that guarantees the transparency of the electoral process... without a real independence of the judiciary," Ashour said as opposition activists broke out into chants against President Mohamed Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood.

Officials in the opposition alliance had been locked in heated debate in recent weeks over whether or not to take part in the staggered elections, members said.

Mohamed ElBaradei, a prominent member of the Front and former head of the UN atomic agency, had issued his own boycott call on Saturday.

"Called for parliamentary election boycott in 2010 to expose sham democracy. Today I repeat my call, will not be part of an act of deception," the Nobel Peace laureate wrote on Twitter.

The NSF also shunned a national dialogue called for by President Morsi aimed at putting in place "guarantees for the transparency and fairness of the elections."

"Of what guarantees can we speak today, while we have been refused an impartial government able to apply these guarantees," said Ashour.

He accused the Muslim Brotherhood of wanting to "politically kidnap Egypt, to monopolise its institutions and dominate all the state organs."

The Brotherhood and its Islamist allies had clinched an overwhelming majority in the legislative polls in the winter of 2011 and 2012, but the parliament was later dissolved when a court found irregularities in the voting system.

The NSF organised massive protests against Morsi in November and December after he adopted now-repealed powers that shielded his decisions from judicial review.

But anti-Morsi protests have slowed since he pushed through an Islamist-drafted constitution in a December referendum, with the mass rallies giving way to smaller, and often violent, protests.

The opposition, less organised than the Muslim Brotherhood, has insisted the president appoint a new government before the election while the presidency says the new parliament should have the right to appoint the cabinet.

-AFP/ac

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Ubuntu Touch OS heading to slew of smartphones, tablets

The Ubuntu Touch home screen on a tablet.

(Credit:
Ubuntu/Canonical)

The Ubuntu Touch operating system is being ported to more than 20 types of smartphones and tablets.

The developer preview of the Linux-based OS was released for the Galaxy Nexus and
Nexus 4 smartphones and
Nexus 7 and
Nexus 10 tablets last week.

And developers are working to port the OS to a far greater range of devices, including the Asus Transformer series, HTC One handsets, the LG Optimus 4x HD, the Motorola Xoom, the Samsung Galaxy Note and S series, and Sony Xperia phones. They're also working on ports for the Nexus S and Nexus One devices.

The work to adapt the OS is being carried out as part of the Ubuntu port-a-thon initiative to get the developer community to bring Ubuntu Touch to a wider range of hardware.

"We want to port Ubuntu Touch to all kinds of devices," says the porting guide for Ubuntu Touch.

"If you have experience in porting code to Android devices or are generally knowledgeable in terms of porting, working with the kernel and other core bits and pieces of a distribution, this might be interesting to you."

The ports are at various stages of progress and though the OS reuses some of the drivers and other hardware compatibility code used by Android, it will likely take some time to get each port in working order.

Users have been warned not to use the developer preview as their primary OS, and the preview's release notes highlight various issues when running on Nexus devices.

These included problems when using the OS with some 3G and 4G networks, such as CDMA and LTE, and the possibility that the Nexus 4 would refuse to boot if the battery was drained.

This story originally appeared on ZDNet under the headline "Ubuntu Touch prepped for 20+ smartphones and tablets."

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GOP Rep.: Cheney probably will go to hell for Iraq war

Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., the congressman who went from coining the term "freedom fries" to becoming an outspoken critic of the Iraq war, said that there's probably a spot in hell for former Vice President Dick Cheney because of his responsibility for the conflict.

"Congress will not hold anyone to blame," Jones said Saturday at an event hosted by the libertarian group Young Americans for Liberty. "Lyndon Johnson's probably rotting in hell right now because of the Vietnam War, and he probably needs to move over for Dick Cheney."

Jones voted for the Iraq war and even pushed for the U.S. House cafeteria to serve "freedom fries" rather than french fries to protest France's opposition to war. At Saturday's event, however, Jones -- whose district is home to the Marine Corps' Camp Lejeune and other military bases -- said he voted for the war because he "was more concerned about getting reelected, and I regret that, and I will to the day I die."

Jones also criticized President Obama for bypassing Congress in his decision to intervene in Libya and kill Muammar Qaddafi, calling it "a breach of the Constitution."

"Mr. Obama didn't even come to Congress -- Mr. Bush, I'll at least give him that," he said.

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Boehner Pressures Dems to Get 'Off Their...'

Feb 26, 2013 12:48pm

House Speaker John Boehner used some choice words to pressure Senate Democrats to avert the looming sequester — $85 billion of arbitrary across-the-board cuts — insisting that “the House has done its job” and the burden to offer an alternative before the cuts strike Friday is on the president’s party.

“We have moved the bill in the House twice,” Boehner, R-Ohio, said. “We should not have to move a third bill before the Senate gets off their asses and begins to do something.”

House Republicans voted twice during the 112^th Congress to narrowly pass legislation to offset sequestration with alternative savings, but those measures languished in the Senate and expired with the end of the session.

Read More About Sequestration

Boehner also criticized President Obama for taking a Virginia road trip “to use our military men and women as a prop in yet another campaign rally to support his tax hikes.”

“I don’t think the president’s focused on trying to find a solution to the sequester,” he said. “For 16 months, the president’s been traveling all over the country holding rallies, instead of sitting down with Senate leaders in order to try to forge an agreement over there in order to move the bill.”

Considering Republicans have not acted in the current session of Congress on any legislation to replace the sequester, House Democrats question whether there is sufficient support to pass the old GOP proposal.

“I don’t think I need to give the Speaker a lesson in legislating or how government runs, but whatever was done last year that didn’t get signed into law has evaporated. It is gone. It does not exist,” California Democratic Rep. Xavier Becerra, the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said today. “This is a new year, a new session of Congress and it’s time for everyone to get to work.”

Boehner deflected a question whether he believes his weakened majority could pass the Republican bill again, and returned his attention to pushing for a vote in the Senate.

“It’s time for the Senate to act. It’s not about the House,” he responded. “We’ve acted.”

Related: Sequester Timeline – When Will Cuts Kick In?

“Where’s the president’s plan to avoid the sequester? Have you seen one? I haven’t seen one. All I’ve heard is that he wants to raise taxes again. Where’s the president’s plan? Where’s the Senate Democrat plan? I want to see it.”

Senate leaders are expected to introduce and vote on their respective plans later this week, perhaps by Thursday.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid accused Congressional Republicans of being “part of the problem” in finding a solution to the upcoming cuts, pressing for new tax increases to help offset the sequester.

“We want to work with Republicans to come to a balanced responsible way to reduce this sequester, the impact of it.  My republican colleagues are standing in the way,” Reid, D-Nev., said on the Senate floor. “They only want cuts and more cuts.”

Related: States Prepare for Sequester

Although Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he is not interested in a last-minute deal, Boehner said “If the Senate acts, I’m sure the House will act quickly.”

The House is meeting for legislation business today, although no action to avert the sequester is expected. The House also meets Wednesday and Thursday, but is currently not expected to be in session on Friday.

ABC News’ Arlette Saenz contributed to this report

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Italy election forecasts point to political gridlock

ROME (Reuters) - Conflicting early forecasts of the result of Italy's election on Monday raised the specter of deadlock in parliament that could paralyze a new government and re-ignite the euro zone crisis.

Officials from both centre and left warned that such gridlock could make Italy ungovernable and force new elections.

Opinion polls have long pointed to the center-left of Pier Luigi Bersani winning the lower house, but projections from RAI state television showed Silvio Berlusconi's center right in front in the Senate - which has equal lawmaking power - but unable to form a majority.

RAI showed the center-left well short of a majority in the Senate even in coalition with Monti, who was seen slumping to only 19 out of 315 elected Senators against a massive 65 for the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement of comedian Beppe Grillo.

Senate votes are counted before the lower house.

The latest projections ran counter to earlier telephone polls that showed the center left taking a strong lead in the Senate as well as the lower house.

Italian financial markets took fright after rising earlier on hopes for a stable and strong center-left led government, probably backed by outgoing technocrat premier Mario Monti.

Such government is seen by investors as the best guarantee of measures to combat a deep recession and stagnant growth in the euro zone's third largest economy, which is pivotal to stability in the currency union.

Berlusconi's declared aim is to win enough power in the Senate to paralyze a center-left administration.

The benchmark spread between Italian 10-year bonds and their German equivalent widened from below 260 basis points to above 280 and the Italian share index lost all its previous gains.

"These projections suggest that we are heading for an ungovernable situation", said Mario Secchi, a candidate for Monti's centrist movement.

Stefano Fassina, chief economic official for Bersani's center-left, said: "The scenario from the projections we have seen so far suggest there will be no stable government and we would need to return to the polls."

The earlier telephone polls on Sky and Rai television after voting ended at 3 p.m. (1400 GMT/9 a.m. ET) had shown the center left 5-6 points ahead of the center right in both Senate and lower house, with Grillo taking third place.

Adding to the confusion, official results from more than 50 percent of polling stations showed the center-left ahead with 32.7 percent against 29.5 for the center-right in the Senate race. The partial official count is often not representative because of the order in which votes are counted regionally.

Italy's electoral laws guarantee a strong majority in the lower house to the party or coalition that wins the biggest share of the national vote.

However the Senate, elected on a region-by-region basis, is more complicated and the result will turn on four key battleground regions. Projections from LA 7 showed Berlusconi winning in three of them: Lombardy, Sicily and Campania.

A Sky television projection showed him strongly ahead in the rich northern region Lombardy, which returns the largest number of Senators, with 38.8 percent against 27.6 for the center left.

BITTER CAMPAIGN

A bitter campaign, fought largely over economic issues, has made some investors fear a return of the kind of debt crisis that took the euro zone close to disaster and brought the technocrat Monti to office, replacing the scandal-plagued Berlusconi, in 2011.

Monti helped save Italy from a debt crisis when Rome's borrowing costs were spiraling out of control, but the polls and projections suggested few Italians now see him as the savior of the country, in its longest recession for 20 years.

A surge in protest votes for Grillo's 5-Star Movement had raised uncertainty about the chances of a stable government that could fend off the danger of a renewed euro zone crisis.

Grillo's movement rode a huge wave of voter anger about both the pain of Monti's austerity program and a string of political and corporate scandals. It had particular appeal for a frustrated younger generation shut out of full-time jobs.

"I'm sick of the scandals and the stealing," said Paolo Gentile, a 49-year-old Rome lawyer who voted for 5-Star.

"We need some young, new people in parliament, not the old parties that are totally discredited."

Bad weather, including heavy snow in some areas, was thought to have hampered the turnout in Italy's first post-war election to be held in winter. This could have favored the center left, whose voters tend to be more committed than those on the right, which has strong support among older people.

Berlusconi, a 76-year-old media tycoon, pledged sweeping tax cuts and accused Monti of being a puppet of German Chancellor Angela Merkel in a media blitz that halved the lead of the center left in opinion polls since the start of the year.

Whatever government emerges will inherit an economy that has been stagnant for much of the past two decades and problems ranging from record youth unemployment to a dysfunctional justice system and a bloated public sector.

(Additional reporting by Stefano Bernabei, Steve Scherer, Gavin Jones and Giuseppe Fonte in Rome and Lisa Jucca in Milan; Writing by Barry Moody; Editing by Robin Pomeroy and Philippa Fletcher)

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