President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo approved the lifting today of a week-long period of martial law in a southern Philippine province where 57 people were massacred last month in the country’s worst political violence.

Emergency rule was imposed on two Philippine provinces today as security forces found more bodies from one of the worst incidents of election violence in the nation’s history, taking the death toll to 46.

Nine people were killed in a New Year’s Eve grenade attack in the southern Philippines, including a 14-year-old.