The blasts, which were 15 minutes apart and hit the town of Reyhanli's busiest street, raised fears that Turkey could increasingly be drawn into Syria's brutal civil war.

Turkey already hosts Syria's political opposition and rebel commanders, has given shelter to hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees and in the past retaliated against Syrian shells that landed in Turkey.

Deputy Prime Minister Besir Atalay said the assailants were from Turkey, but were linked to Syria's intelligence service.

"We have to a great extent completed our work toward identifying the assailants," he told reporters. "We have established that the organization and assailants have links to the pro-regime mukhabarat (intelligence) organization."

He did not name the group, but said the aim of the attack was to pit Turks against Syrian refugees in Reyhanli.

Earlier, another deputy prime minister, Bulent Arinc said: "Our thoughts are that their mukhabarat and armed organizations are the usual suspects in planning and the carrying out of such devilish plans," he said.

Arinc said the attacks were still being investigated, but that If it's proven that Syrian was behind the attack, Turkey would "do whatever is necessary," without specifying if that included military action.

One of the car bombs exploded outside the city hall while the other went off outside the post office. Reyhanli, a main hub for Syrian refugees and rebels in Turkey's Hatay province, is just across the border from Syria's Idlib province. Private NTV television, citing unnamed security sources, said the explosions were remote-controlled and that plastic explosives were used.

Images showed people frantically carrying the wounded through the rubble-strewn streets to safety. Black smoke billowed from a tall building.

The explosions came days before Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is scheduled to travel to the U.S. for talks, which are expected to be dominated by the situation in Syria. The car bombings also follow allegations by Erdogan the Syrian regime has fired about 200 missiles tipped with chemical weapons.

Syrian mortar rounds have fallen over the border before, but if the blasts turn out to be linked to Syria it would be by far the biggest death toll in Turkey related to its neighbor's civil war.

Syria shares a more than 500-mile (800-kilometer) border with Turkey, which has been a crucial supporter of the Syrian rebel cause. Ankara has allowed its territory to be used as a logistics base and staging center for Syrian insurgents.

Atalay said 43 people were killed and 140 others were wounded in the blasts. There was no immediate information on the identities or nationalities of the victims.

The bombings" will increase the pressure on the U.S. president next week to do something to show support to Turkey when Erdogan visits him in Washington," said Soner Cagaptay, an expert on Turkey at the Washington Institute. "Washington will be forced to take a more pro-active position on Syria, at least in rhetoric, whether or not there is appetite for such a position here."

Salman Shaikh, director of the Brookings Doha Center, said the attack may force Turkey to take action.

"Itshould be a defining moment for Turkey," Shaikh said. "It has been supporting the rebels, and there has been strong rhetoric. But this may be a moment where it really has to assert itself if it is the Assad regime (behind the bombings), and it is quite conceivable it is."

Turkey's opposition criticized the government's policy on Syria, saying its active support of the rebels had put the country's security at risk.

"Erdogan's discourse of hatred toward Assad and provocations against the administration in Damascus is coming back to us in the form of attacks and provocations," said Devlet Bahceli, chairman of a nationalist opposition party.

The force of Saturday's explosions gutted some buildings, and the charred shells of cars littered the streets.

"Three buildings partly collapsed and became unusable," Talat Karaca, who witnessed the second explosion from his rooftop, told The Associated Press by telephone. "We couldn't approach the scene for a long time because of the blaze."

Khawla Sawah, the medical director of the Union of Syrian Medical Relief Organizations in Reyhanli, said the town's main hospital was full and many of the wounded were taken to the nearby city of Antakya and to a clinic set up by the Syrian medical relief group on Reyhanli's outskirts. The center received 11 wounded, including one Turk and 10 Syrians.

She said some of the injured told her that the cars that exploded had Syrian license plates.

Both Sawah and another witness, Suzan Alhasoglu, said the incident raised tension in Reyhanli with angry youths attacking Syrians cars and other targets.

"The authorities are asking Syrians to stay home and not drive around in Syrian cars," Sawah said. "Syrian doctors at the Reyhanli hospital were asked to go home too."

Turkey's military released a statement condemning the attack and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu vowed from Berlin that Turkey would act.

"Those who for whatever reason attempt to bring the external chaos into our country will get a response," he said.

The U.S. Embassy in Ankara issued a statement condemning the "murderous attack" in Reyhanli and said Washington "stands with the people and government of Turkey to identify the perpetrators and bring them to justice."

The main Syrian opposition group, the Syrian National Coalition, condemned the attack and said it stands together with the "Turkish government and the friendly Turkish people."

The coalition sees "these heinous terrorist acts as an attempt to take revenge on the Turkish people and punish them for their honorable support for the Syrian people," it said.

The frontier area has seen heavy fighting between rebels and the Syrian regime.In February, a car bomb exploded at a Syrian border crossing with Turkey, just a few kilometers from Reyhanli, killing 14. Turkey's interior minister at the time blamed Syria's intelligence agencies and its army for involvement.

Four Syrians and a Turk are in custody in connection with the Feb. 11 attack at the Bab al-Hawa frontier post. No one has claimed responsibility, but a Syrian opposition faction accused the Syrian government of the bombing, saying it narrowly missed 13 leaders of the group.

In that bombing, most of the victims were Syrians who had been waiting in an area straddling the frontier for processing to enter Turkey.

Tensions also flared between the Syrian regime and Turkey after shells fired from Syria landed on the Turkish side, prompting Germany, the Netherlands and the U.S. to send two batteries of Patriot air defense missiles each to protect their NATO ally.

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Suzan Fraser reported from Ankara. Associated Press writers Ezgi Akin in Ankara, and Bassem Mroue, Yasmine Sakher and Karin Laub in Beirut contributed to this report.

How, then, did religion come to play such a significant and enduring role in public policy in the United States compared to its neighbour to the north?

Just over 67 per cent of those who participated in the 2011 National Household Survey Statistics Canada's voluntary replacement for the cancelled mandatory long-form census reported being "affiliated with a Christian religion," the agency reported Wednesday.

But among new Canadian immigrants, the number of Christians has dropped to 47.5 per cent from 78 per cent in 1971, while nearly one-quarter of the Canadian population reported having no religious affiliation at all, compared with 16 per cent in 2001.

In the U.S., meanwhile, the vast majority of Americans still consider themselves religious many of them devoutly so.

A recent Gallup survey found that throughout the U.S. in 2012, 40 per cent of Americans considered themselves to be "very religious." Twenty-nine per cent described themselves as moderately religious, while 31 per cent said they were not religious.

Because Canadians tend to be more socially liberal than their southern neighbours, organized religion pays a greater price for those perceptions in Canada than in the U.S., experts say.

South of the border, by way of contrast, abortion to name just one pet cause of the religious right remains a hot-button issue as a host of state legislatures pass increasingly restrictive anti-abortion laws. Any prospect of that debate being reopened in Canada has been snuffed out by Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

There are myriad reasons for the divergent religious makeup of the U.S. and Canada, academics say.

They run the gamut from demographic and immigration trends to the religious beliefs of the founding fathers of both nations and each country's response to the profound social and cultural shifts of the 1960s.

African-Americans, making up 12 per cent of the U.S. population, are avid churchgoers. A 2009 Pew Research study found they surpass other Americans on a host of faith fronts, including praying more often and attending church more frequently.

Hispanics, the fastest growing demographic in the country and now more numerous than African-Americans at 15 per cent of the population, are also more religious than most Americans, although they're growing less so.

And unlike Canada, there remains a large swath of the United States the South that is staunchly religious as well as politically powerful. Only pockets of similarly devout believers are scattered throughout Canada, making it harder for them to shape public policy.

The Gallup study found that eight out of 10 of the most religious states in the union are in the South, with Alabama and Mississippi in the Top 3. Utah, with its substantial Mormon population, is No. 2.

Southerners evidently still agree with the founding fathers of the United States, who not only enshrined religious freedom in the Constitution, but also, critically, protected the public exercising of religion.

"Religion has always had a significant role in American public policy, right from Day 1," said Thomas Farr, former director of the U.S. State Department's religious freedom office.

The U.S. Constitution's First Amendment was "the first major sign of the religious nature of our founders and the nature of the country," said Farr, who's now the director of the Religious Freedom Project at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs in Washington.

"We wanted to protect the exercise of religion; not just religious beliefs, but the actual exercise of religion. Why? It was because they wanted it in public policy. Exercise is an active thing. They intended it to be more than just freedom of religion, they wanted people to be actively religious. That's why they wanted it protected and accommodated."

That wasn't the case in Canada, where the fathers of Confederation had to gingerly negotiate the often bitter religious animosities between the "two solitudes" Protestant English Canada and Catholic French Canada. There was little appetite to allow religion to play a major role in determining public policy, no matter the personal religiosity of the Canadian founders.

"There was never the same impulse in Canada, understandably," Farr said.

Stuart Macdonald, a professor of church and society at Knox College at the University of Toronto, agreed.

"In Canada, you had to make peace between Catholics and Protestants," he said.

But Macdonald disputes the notion that Canada and the U.S. have always been vastly different in terms of religion and its impact on public policy, arguing the contrast is relatively recent and only truly took hold in the 1970s.

He points to a surprising figure as someone who galvanized the religious right at a time when Canada began to become secular former U.S. president Jimmy Carter.

"In Canada, we were very close to the U.S. in terms of religion well into the early 1960s, and even after that our trends were very similar, so this is an awfully recent phenomenon," he said.

After the sexual and civil rights revolutions of the 1960s, citizens of both countries changed in terms of their religiosity, Macdonald said but then came Carter, whose election in 1976 marked a milestone for evangelical Christians.

"There was this major culture shift, but then there was a rebound of religion in the United States around the time of the Carter presidency," he said.

"He ran as an evangelical Christian and he put religion right back in the spotlight in the U.S., whereas in Canada, Trudeau remained quiet about religion, even though he was personally religious."

The swiftness of the change in religious attitudes in Canada is paid short shrift, Macdonald adds, and doesn't necessarily suggest that the new normal will be a permanent state of affairs.

"In 1967, centennial year celebrations began with an all-Christian worship service, which we can't even imagine now," Macdonald said. "The Jewish representative wasn't even allowed to read anything. And that wasn't a very long time ago."

And does religion truly play less of a role in public policy in Canada than it does in the United States?

Don Hutchinson of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada isn't so sure.

There's a long tradition in Canada of co-operation between the church and state in areas like education, health care and social welfare, he points out.

Hutchinson, the director of the organization's Centre for Faith and Public Life, says Canada's religious groups are more careful indeed, more Canadian about the language they use while attempting to influence public policy.

"In the U.S., there's still an openness to quoting the Bible as a stand-alone, reliable source as the position being taken on some issues," he said.

"In our culture, we have come to the conclusion that the language of public policy development is a language that we have to learn how to communicate .... In Canada, religious organizations have effectively engaged in public policy by identifying the principles we have found in our religious beliefs, assessing them and proposing sound public policy based on these beliefs by using a common language."

It's not that Canadian religious organizations are more clever than those in the U.S., he added with a laugh.

"We have different cultures, so we are politically attuned to communicating in our unique, polite Canadian environment."

"She did check into the rehab (center) and I will still be going through a vetting process," Santa Monica City Deputy Attorney Terry White, the prosecutor in the June 2012 car crash case, told Reuters in an email on Friday.

White did not name the rehab center, but celebrity news website site TMZ.com said Lohan, 26, had entered the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, 120 miles east of Los Angeles, early Friday morning.

Lohan must complete 90 days in a locked rehab center by July 31 to comply with a March plea bargain. Under the deal, she avoided jail by pleading no contest to reckless driving and lying to police in the seaside town of Santa Monica when she said she was not driving a car that smashed into a truck.

The "Mean Girls" star, who has spent at least five stints in rehab in the past six years, threw prosecutors into confusion earlier this week when she switched her choice of rehab from the New York area to a center in Newport Beach in Southern California.

She spent only minutes at the Newport Beach facility, White said on Thursday, before disappearing from public view.

Lohan, whose troubles began in 2007 with a drunk driving and cocaine possession arrest, spent several weeks at the Betty Ford Center in late 2010 after failing a court-ordered drug test.

White has until May 10 to decide whether the rehab program meets the requirements of Lohan's plea bargain.

(Reporting by Eric Kelsey; Editing by Jill Serjeant and Vicki Allen)

Kyrgyzstan hosts a U.S. base that is used for flying troops into and out of Afghanistan and for KC-135 tanker planes that refuel warplanes in flight.

The plane crashed Friday afternoon near the village of Chaldovar, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) west of the Manas air base, the ministry said in a statement. It identified the plane as a Boeing 707, but that is a civilian airliner on which the KC-135 tanker is based.

The plane broke into three pieces when it crashed into an uninhabited area, the head of the region that includes Chaldovar, Kuralbek Khamaliyev, told The Associated Press by telephone.

The U.S. base in Kyrgyzstan, called the Transit Center at Manas, said it had no immediate information. The base, which is adjacent to the Manas International Airport outside the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek, was established in late 2001 to support the international military campaign in Afghanistan.

The base has been the subject of a contentious dispute between the United States and its host nation. In 2009, the U.S. reached an agreement with the Kyrgyz government to use the base in return for $60 million a year.

But the lease runs out in June 2014 and the United States wants to keep the base beyond that point to aid in the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.

Considering everything that GM put into the newest Corvette, the $1,400 price increase over the current model seems pretty modest.

The 2014 Corvette goes on sale this summer. The latest version was completely redone, and shares only two parts with the current model, which is nine years old.

The car was the talk of the Detroit auto show in January because of the dramatic changes GM made to it.

The 1,000-person team at GM made the 2014 version lower and sleeker, saving weight by replacing the steel structure with aluminum. The hood is made of lightweight carbon fiber. The interior gets a more modern look with new touch screens.

Under the hood, the car gets a new 450-horsepower, 6.2-liter V-8 engine that can go to four cylinders on the highway to save fuel. A new seven-speed manual transmission is standard. Even the base model can go from zero to 60 mph in under four seconds, a few tenths of a second faster than the current model.

Dealers say customers already are putting down deposits.

"Every day you have someone coming in wanting to know about the new Corvette," says Bill Perkins, owner of two Chevrolet dealerships in the Detroit suburbs. "You have a lot of enthusiasts out there. You have a lot of people that have purchased Corvettes before. A lot of people come in wanting to know the price, how soon they can get one."

A $1,400 increase is "not that much of a change when you look at everything that's happened to the car," said John Fitzpatrick, marketing manager for Chevrolet performance cars.

The car performs similar to a Porsche 911, yet a comparably equipped 911 would cost $100,000, Fitzpatrick said.

When pricing the Corvette, GM knew it had to avoid giving sticker shock to younger buyers, who should like all the new features. The average Corvette buyer is a male around 50 years old, Fitzpatrick said.

"We want to retain that loyal Corvette customer. We also realize that we do have to attract a younger buyer and do things that make the car aspirational to them."

The car's gas mileage will be released later, but GM says it will do better than the current Corvette's 26 mpg on the highway.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A gifted scorer, Carmelo Anthony has always had the talent to put the ball in the basket but rarely has he been able to put his team deep into the playoffs.

The pressure is on the Knicks forward with the bruising inside moves and delicate outside touch to prove himself in the postseason and help erase more than a decade of playoff failures for New York.

"It seems like we're starting off with a clean plate right now," Anthony, hungry for a taste of playoff success, told reporters before the opening of second-seeded New York's first-round series against seventh seed Boston Celtics.

Anthony is off to a great start, scoring 36 points in the opener and 34 points in New York's 87-71 Game Two win that gave the Knicks a 2-0 lead in the best-of-seven series.

But that is just a start, and despite sporting a new Olympic gold medal and his first NBA scoring title (28.7 points average) on his resume, Anthony is challenged to show he can lift his team and alter a reputation as a high-scoring playoff bust.

Coming into this postseason, Anthony's playoff record with the Knicks was 1-8 after two postseason trips with New York, following a 16-30 postseason mark with the Denver Nuggets.

The Knicks, who have not won a title in 40 years, have not moved past the first round in 13 years. Anthony has advanced beyond the first round of the playoffs only once in nine tries.

"He's had this breakout year, but when the playoffs come, he's going to have to raise his level," Walt Frazier, point guard for New York's last NBA title team in 1973, told the Daily News.

"He'll have new expectations he's going to have to meet. Can he handle the pressure?"

OLYMPIC DIFFERENCE

Second-year guard Iman Shumpert said this is a new Anthony, and that a summer pursuing Olympic gold in London had changed him.

"He's definitely our leader," Shumpert told Reuters in the Knicks locker room before Game Two against Boston. "I think he's done a ton more talking this year ... in the locker room, on the court and especially on defense.

"I think he's just done a great job, an incredible job lifting us and make sure we play the same way all year.

"Definitely a difference between last year and this year," added Shumpert, saying Anthony seemed more confident.

"Any time we find ourselves about to get rattled he sort of just calms everybody down. I think a lot of that comes from him just putting the work in this summer and coming in after that gold medal on a roll already."

Following a rousing Olympics in which Anthony committed to playing tough defense alongside LeBron James against taller opponents on an undersized U.S. team, the Knicks forward came to the new NBA campaign in great shape and with a fierce attitude.

"Whatever we need him to do," Shumpert said. "This year he's been asked to guard a lot of five-men (centers) because sometimes we play small. He hasn't complained. Whatever he has to do he just goes and do it.

"He's watching a ton of film. He's been a flat-out leader. I think it's contagious," he added, pointing to J.R. Smith, who on Tuesday was presented the NBA's Sixth Man of the Year award.

"J.R. has been a bigger leader. The focus in the locker room from last year to this year has been night and day."

BEHIND CLASSMATES

For all his personal success, Anthony has languished behind illustrious fellow members of the top of the 2003 NBA Draft.

James, the No. 1 draft pick of 2003, was the man with the pressure turned up ultra high last season.

"King" James, believed to be overdue for an NBA title, got that monkey off his back with a run to the crown with fellow members of the class of 2003 Chris Bosh (No. 4) and Dwyane Wade (No. 5) joining him on the Miami Heat.

Anthony, selected No. 3 in 2003 after winning the U.S. college title as a freshman with Syracuse, is still chasing the NBA dream for New York after being swept by Boston in the first round in 2011 after joining the Knicks in a big trade with Denver, and losing in five to Miami last year.

"No, it don't, it don't," the Brooklyn-born Anthony, a six-time NBA All-Star, told reporters when asked whether the playoffs were putting added pressure on him.

No amount of denial, however, can fill the empty plate.

Only a playoff run to the Eastern Conference finals and a likely date with the Miami Heat will satisfy Madison Square Garden crowds that lavish Anthony with chants of "MVP, MVP, MVP."

(Editing by Peter Rutherford)

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Best-selling adventure author Clive Cussler, who published his first book 40 years ago, is still entertaining fans. His newest novel, "The Striker," released this month, has already sold thousands of copies.

"The Striker," Cussler's 55th book, follows detective Isaac Bell's investigation into union strikes in early 1900s coal country.

It contains many of the hallmarks of his earlier work. The story pits young Bell against another detective and his ruthless sponsor, both bent on fomenting violence between miners and industrialists. Bell does his best not to take sides as he has roughly a week to thwart a potentially bloody uprising.

Cussler, who writes with a co-author, said he will be producing more books, including one for The Fargo Adventure series, another for the underwater exploration series The NUMA Files, and a third for The Oregon Files about Juan Cabrillo and a special U.S. government sponsored group called the Corporation.

The 81-year-old author spoke to Reuters about the newest book, his method of writing and future plans.

Q: Your latest book, which is the sixth in the Isaac Bell character series, chronicles his early days as a detective at the Van Dorn agency. Why did you choose to go back in time for "The Striker"?

A: I had always wanted to do a western, just for fun. I didn't want to do one with stagecoaches, bandits and horses, and all that. So I moved it up to 1906 to get in old cars and old motorcycles, which I collect. The publisher asked me if I could continue the series because people quite like the hero Isaac Bell, which led me to write about railroads and mining for this book.

Q: The plot of the story includes great details about shipyards and coal mining. What inspired you to use this backdrop?

A: I wanted to get back to the early 1900s, when steamboats were still running on the various rivers pushing coal barges. This was an era that included the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and Carnegies, who were heavily involved in coal. Coal was and remains a pretty big deal, and the more research I did on the subject, the more fascinating it became. I looked into the Pullman strikes and strikes around Telluride, which is where I also own a house. This is really the only series that takes place around that time.

Q: The conflict between unions and corporate owners has been longstanding. It seems that the main protagonist, Isaac Bell, who comes from a privileged background, appeared more partial to the plight of the working man. Was this intentional?

A: I thought we were probably closer to 50/50. There were crooks on both sides, and I guess there still are.

Q: Can you provide a preview of what comes next in the Isaac Bell series? Do you plan to focus more on his younger days or do you see yourself reverting back to the more established version of the character?

A: We have fun moving him around. In the next book, we are going to have him get involved in Prohibition and bootlegging. That era, of course, comes in a little later.

Q: You have four books coming out this year, including this one, that involve several of the ongoing characters. How did you conceive them and what are your plans for new characters? Any plans to slow down?

A: I should slow down since I am 81. Dirk Pitt was the series that started it all, and the publishers asked if I could develop other characters given the success of that series. The Oregon came from one of the Pitt books and we began developing a storyline around mercenaries that go around the world like Mission Impossible and the captain of that ship, Juan Cabrillo.

Isaac Bell came up because the original book, "The Chase," did very well. The publishers mentioned that there are very few husband-and-wife series out there, and so I came up with a couple that looks for treasure in The Fargo series. This is as far as I am going to go with new characters, though.

Q: Can you discuss the creative process behind your books?

A: I usually sit down with my co-author, say Jack (Du Brul), for The Oregon Files and come up with the plot. When I start a book, I often have the ending in mind but not always the middle, and we work toward filling it out.

I love to do the research - it's one of my favorite things about writing. He'll start writing, say 100 pages, and I'll pump him the information. I get the pages back to do some re-writes, and that's the process. As he gets back to writing, I may start working on another book. I wish I could retire but they won't let me.

(Editing by Patricia Reaney and Philip Barbara)

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - Wanda Sykes is living up to her reputation for keeping it real. The comedian and actress has signed a first look deal for unscripted projects with NBC/Universal Television's alternative studio, a rep confirms to TheWrap.

The comedian and Page Hurwitz's Push It Productions will develop and produce the unscripted projects.

"We are very excited to be working with NBC/Universal," Hurwitz said. "We have partnered with a terrific team and we're looking forward to getting started."

To which Sykes joked, "Wait, I thought we were getting The Tonight Show.'"

Known for her comedic specials and acting gigs, Sykes has previously acted as executive producer on her Fox talk show, "The Wanda Sykes Show," Comedy Central's "Wanda Does It," and as a writer/producer on HBO's "The Chris Rock Show," among other projects.

Hurwitz brings a strong background in producing to the deal. She executive produced Rosie O'Donnell's daily talk show on OWN, as well as the reality competition, "Last Man Standing," and Jerry Seinfeld's "The Marriage Ref" for NBC.

This latest pact is the latest in the studio's big sweep of unscripted production deals, which include Jason Ehrlich ("The Bachelor"), David A. Hurwitz ("Fear Factor") and Lee Metzger ("The Voice").

Deadline first reported the deal.

The crowds were smaller and more subdued than those that turned out for Chavez, however, and the opposition boycotted the swearing-in of President-elect Nicolas Maduro, hoping that the ruling party's last-minute decision to allow an audit of nearly half the vote could change the result in a the bitterly disputed presidential election.

Opposition candidate Henrique Capriles said the audit announced Thursday night will prove he won the presidency. Government officials appear to be confident there will be no reversal of the result by a weeks-long audit that's only slated to begin days after Maduro's swearing-in.

Still, the audit was a sudden reversal for a government that insisted all week that there would be no review of Sunday's vote and took a hard line against the opposition that included allegedly brutal treatment of protesters.The announcement appeared to stem from pressure from some of the South American leaders who held an emergency meeting in Lima, Peru, Thursday night to discuss Venezuela's electoral crisis and wound up endorsing Maduro's victory.

Even if it leaves the vote standing and calms tensions, the recount will strengthen Venezuela's opposition against a president whose narrow victory left him far weaker than his widely popular predecessor Chavez, analysts said. That will complicate Maduro's effort to consolidate control of a country struggling with shortages of food and medicines, chronic power outages, one of the world's highest homicide and kidnapping rates and steep inflation that's around 25 percent and accelerating.

Hundreds of red-clad Chavistas marched through Caracas ahead of the inauguration, shouting and blowing trumpets, led by riders on horseback and even massive bulls yoked in pairs. But the showing, at least by mid-morning, was a faint echo of the rallies that drew tens of thousands to the streets during the Chavez era.

"The most significant thing to emerge from this is the political victory" for the opposition, said Maria Isabel Puerta, a political science professor at the University of Carabobo. "The opposition's role is strengthened and Capriles' leadership is consolidated."

Maduro, 50, was declared the winner of Sunday's election by a slim 267,000-vote margin out of 14.9 million ballots cast. That did not include more than 100,000 votes cast abroad, where more than 90 percent were cast for Capriles in an earlier election against Chavez last October.

Venezuelans voted on computers that issued paper receipts used to confirm the accuracy of the electronic vote. Authorities checked 54 percent of the electronic vote against the paper receipts and registers containing the names, signatures and fingerprints of each voter.

Venezuela's National Electoral Council said just before the start of the meeting in Lima that it would audit 46 percent of the vote not already scrutinized on election night. An electoral official told The Associated Press that the new process, to start next week, would replicate the one from election night.

Capriles has alleged a series of vote irregularities, some of which would be turned up by a new audit, such as charges that there was damage to 3,535 voting machines, representing 189,982 votes, and that voting rolls included 600,000 dead people. He said that many of those irregularities took place in polling locations that weren't audited on election day.

Capriles had demanded a full vote-by-vote recount but said he accepted the ruling.

"We are where we want to be," a satisfied but cautious-looking Capriles told a news conference after the Thursday night announcement. "I think I will have the universe of voters needed to get where I want to be."

Some analysts said the government-controlled recount would almost certainly confirm Maduro's victory and force the opposition to accept it. Others saw the possibility the audit could turn up enough irregularities to throw the election result into question and spawn turmoil.

"It opens a sort of Pandora's box," said Edgar Gutierrez, an independent political analyst in Caracas.

In a declaration released after the 3 1/2-hour meeting, the South American presidents asked "all parties who participated in the election to respect the official results" and said they "took positive note" of the electoral council's audit decision.

Maduro, in a Twitter message, proclaimed the meeting a "great success."

Aura Chacon, a 67-year-old retired nurse, said Chavez's backers would "never let them steal this victory from us. The opposition will never, ever come back into power. We'll push forward with Maduro, and after Maduro other fighters will come, and keep moving forward."

Maduro had never rejected the audit publicly, and it was possible pressure from the military or more moderate members of his ruling clique were a factor. Maduro heads a faction believed to be more radical.

"This is a concession to Capriles, but it is also a way of calling his bluff. It is exceedingly unlikely that such an audit will show a different result," said David Smilde, a Venezuela expert at the University of Georgia.

The so-called Chavistas control all the levers of power in Venezuela, so the electoral council's flip-flop can only be seen as having the government's imprimatur.

A petition to halt Maduro's inauguration had been rejected earlier Thursday by the country's highest court.

The late president, who succumbed to cancer last month after 14 years in power, endeared himself to the poor with generous social spending but, Capriles argued, had put the country with the world's largest oil reserves on the road to ruin.

Capriles, 40, called on his supporters to back down from confrontation and play music, preferably salsa, instead of banging on pots in protest, as they have done nightly all week since the council ratified Maduro's victory.

The man who had been calling Maduro illegitimate and belittling him as incompetent was now saying the inauguration should go forward.

"This government will continue to govern until this thing gets resolved," Capriles said. "It's a history of chapters."

As for the vote count, which will be accompanied by both sides, "we know where the problems are," Capriles said.

Electoral Council President Tibisay Lucena said 12,000 voting machines would be audited beginning next week in a process that she said would take a month to complete.

The opposition has been battered for years by Chavez and many of its members say political repression has only increased under Maduro, including the arrests of more than 300 protesters this week for staging marches against the alleged election theft.

In less than two weeks preceding the election, Maduro had squandered a double-digit lead in the polls as Venezuelans upset by the troubled economy, and other social problems turned away from a candidate many considered a poor imitation of the charismatic leader for whom he long served as foreign minister.

No independent international election monitor teams scrutinized the vote, and Capriles said some members of the military had been arrested for trying to prevent abuses.

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Associated Press writers Fabiola Sanchez, Eduardo Castillo, Christopher Toothaker and Frank Bajak contributed to this report.

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Vivian Sequera on Twitter: http://twitter.com/VivanSequera

Michael Weissenstein on Twitter: http://twitter.com/mweissenstein