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| Hezbollah, Syrian army make big gains in border battle | | | By Tom Perry, Mariam Karouny and Laila Bassam BEIRUT (Reuters) - Lebanon's Hezbollah and the Syrian army made big advances against insurgents in mountains north of Damascus on Wednesday, Hezbollah and Syrian state media said, shoring up President Bashar al-Assad's grip on a crucial border zone. The gains in the Qalamoun region close to Lebanon against groups including the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front come at a time when Assad has suffered significant defeats elsewhere, notably in Syria's northwest near the Turkish border. Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Shi'ite group with a powerful militia, has been a vital ally for Assad in the four-year-long conflict that has become a focal point for the struggle between Tehran and Sunni Saudi Arabia that has backed the insurgency. |
| UK Prince Charles' letters to ministers finally made public | |  Prince Charles said British troops were under-resourced during the war in Iraq, according to letters from him published on Wednesday which the government had tried to keep secret in case they cast doubt over the future king's political neutrality. The comment about the armed forces came in a letter from the 66-year-old prince to former Prime Minister Tony Blair in 2004, one of 27 letters he wrote to former ministers in 2004 and 2005 which were released to the public after a decade of government attempts to block publication. "I fear that this is just one more example of where our Armed Forces are being asked to do an extremely challenging job (particularly in Iraq) without the necessary resources," the prince wrote in the letter to Blair.
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| Gunmen kill 43 in bus attack in Pakistan's Karachi | |  By Syed Raza Hassan KARACHI, Pakistan (Reuters) - Gunmen on motorcycles boarded a bus and opened fire on commuters in Pakistan's volatile southern city of Karachi on Wednesday, killing at least 43, police said, and militants affiliated with Islamic State claimed responsibility. Police Superintendent Najib Khan told Reuters there were six gunmen and that all the passengers were Ismailis, a minority Shi'ite Muslim sect. Pakistan is mostly Sunni. Militant group Jundullah, which has attacked Muslim minorities before, claimed responsibility.
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| Israel's vulnerable governing coalition passes first test | |  By Maayan Lubell JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's emerging government scraped by its first parliamentary test on Wednesday, paving the way for the new cabinet to be sworn in after two months of difficult coalition building. By a narrow 61-59 vote, parliament ratified a legislative amendment allowing Netanyahu to increase the number of ministers he can appoint to his cabinet, enabling him to meet demands from his own Likud party and other coalition partners. The guidelines of the right-leaning government, released on Wednesday, made no mention of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - the foundation of U.S.-led peace efforts, which collapsed in April last year.
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| Scottish nationalists to PM Cameron: You cannot rule out another referendum | |  Scottish nationalists cautioned British Prime Minister David Cameron on Wednesday that he could not rule out giving Scotland another independence referendum if Scots voted for one in a parliamentary election. On Sunday, Cameron ruled out another independence referendum despite spectacular gains by Scottish nationalists in the May 7 election, saying Scots had "emphatically" rejected a breakaway in last year's referendum. Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) leader Nicola Sturgeon said there could only be another independence vote if Scots voted for a party which proposed one in a Scottish parliamentary election.
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| Burundi army officer says he has deposed president as crowds celebrate | |  By Njuwa Maina BUJUMBURA (Reuters) - A Burundian general said on Wednesday he had deposed President Pierre Nkurunziza for seeking an unconstitutional third term in office, and was working with civil society groups to form a transitional government. With President Pierre Nkurunziza abroad at an African summit in Tanzania to discuss Burundi's crisis, the presidential office swiftly rubbished the declaration by Niyombare, who had been fired as Nkurunziza's intelligence chief in February. "We consider it as a joke, not as a military coup," presidential aide Willy Niyamitwe told Reuters, while a statement on the presidency's Facebook page said the attempted coup had been "foiled". Niyombare made his declaration to reporters at a barracks in Bujumbura after more than two weeks of street protests against Nkurunziza's attempt to win a third term.
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| Rajasthani child bride, now 19, faces $25,000 fine for rejecting marriage | | | By Nita Bhalla NEW DELHI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The family of a 19-year-old girl has been ostracised and fined 1.6 million rupees by a village council after she rejected a marriage arranged when she was a baby, the girl and her parents said on Wednesday. Santadevi Meghwal, from Rajasthan, said she was married off at 11 months old to a nine-year-old boy in her village, 60 km south of Jodhpur. Meghwal became aware of her marriage at the age 16 and, with the support of her parents, refused to go and live with her husband and in-laws as they demanded. Meghwal's family said her husband's family refused to annul the marriage and took the matter to the council in Rohichan Khurd village, which imposed the fine and banished the family from the community. |
| Flak for childhood tea seller Modi over plans for some young labour in India | |  By Rajesh Kumar Singh NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Prime Minister Narendra Modi has decided to exclude some family jobs from a revamped child labour law in a move with an unmistakable echo of his own childhood, when he helped his father sell tea from kettles at a railway station. The cabinet on Wednesday approved amendments to a 1986 child labour law, aimed at imposing a broader ban on childhood work but also introducing a loophole for family businesses that critics say undermines efforts to end the practice.
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| France's Sarkozy accused of pandering to racist sentiments | |  By Brian Love PARIS (Reuters) - France's ruling Socialists accused conservative former president Nicolas Sarkozy on Monday of appealing to racist sentiments in criticising the country's Morocco-born education minister. Sarkozy, expected by many to run for election in 2017, used no explicitly racist words but came under fire for singling out two non-white female ministers in a largely white government for charges of gross incompetence. Sarkozy's main target was Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, a young Franco-Moroccan minister in charge of a post-primary schooling reform plan that has irked many teachers and been slammed by many in Sarkozy's UMP opposition party. UMP chief Sarkozy weighed in at a political rally north of Paris last Monday, saying: "In the unrelenting quest for mediocrity, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem is in the process of overtaking Christiane Taubira." Taubira is justice minister and was pilloried by political opponents when shepherding a bill through parliament to legalise same-sex marriage in 2013, with some of the invective mocking the racial origin of the French Guiana-born justice minister.
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| Slipper factory fire kills 31, dozens missing in Philippine capital | |  A fire at a Philippine rubber slipper factory killed 31 workers on Wednesday and dozens were missing and feared dead, government and fire officials said. Ariel Barayuga, head of bureau of fire protection, said investigators were trying to determine the cause of fire in the capital, Manila, that trapped workers at the two-storey factory building of Kentex Manufacturing Inc, which makes flip-flops and slippers. Thirty-nine workers had been accounted for, but 65 were reported missing and feared dead.
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| Gunmen kill seven in attack on Muslim council in Afghan south - police | | | Gunmen opened fire on a gathering of Afghan Muslim clerics in the southern province of Helmand, killing seven people, police said on Wednesday. The Ulemma Council, the highest religious authority in a deeply conservative country, came under attack after it had repeatedly announced its support for security forces fighting the hardline Islamist Taliban insurgents. "The meeting was ongoing when two Taliban gunmen attacked the gathering," police official Jan Aqa said. The Afghan Taliban, ousted from power in 2001, have been fighting to bring down the U.S.-backed government in Kabul, and stepped up attacks after most foreign forces pulled out at the end of last year. |
| Delayed reforms, market woes tarnish end to Modi's first year | |  By Manoj Kumar and Abhishek Vishnoi NEW DELHI/MUMBAI (Reuters) - A surprise delay to India's new goods and services tax (GST) marks one of the most painful setbacks suffered by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government as it nears the end of a first year in power, with markets falling and farmers braced for a poor monsoon. Investors had hoped that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party's majority in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament, would ensure Modi could push through reforms far more smoothly, but that assumption has taken a battering. The introduction of the GST would constitute India's biggest tax reform since independence. The delay to the bill is a blow to a government that is already dealing with rural discontent over proposed land reforms, which have also still to be sent to the upper house for approval.
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| Asia boatpeople pushed back to sea as U.N. calls for rescue | |  By Amy Sawitta Lefevre and Fransiska Nangoy BANGKOK/JAKARTA (Reuters) - Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia will continue to push boats holding thousands of migrants back to sea, a senior Thai official said on Wednesday, despite a U.N. appeal for a rapid rescue operation to avoid a humanitarian crisis. Several thousand migrants, many of them hungry and sick, are adrift in Southeast Asian seas in boats that have been abandoned by smugglers following a Thai government crackdown on human trafficking, the United Nations has said. "Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand have decided not to receive boat people, as far as I am aware," Major General Werachon Sukhondhapatipak, spokesman for Thailand's ruling junta, told Reuters.
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