Syria wants peace conference details before deciding to go

By Jonathon Burch

REYHANLI, Turkey (Reuters) - Turkey accused a group with links to Syrian intelligence of carrying out car bombings that killed 46 people in a Turkish border town, and said on Sunday it was time for the world to act against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

The two car bombs, which ripped through crowded shopping streets in Reyhanli on Saturday, increased fears that Syria's civil war is dragging in neighboring states, despite renewed diplomatic moves to end it.

Damascus denied involvement, but Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said those behind the attacks were from an "old Marxist terrorist organization" with ties to Assad's administration.

"It is time for the international community to act together against this regime," he told a news conference during a visit to Berlin.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said in a speech broadcast later on Turkish television: "We will not lose our calm heads, we will not depart common sense, and we will not fall into the trap they're trying to push us into."

But he added: "Whoever targets Turkey will sooner or later pay the price."

NATO-member Turkey has fired back at Syrian government forces when mortars have landed on its soil, but despite its strong words has appeared reluctant to bring its considerable military might to bear in the conflict.

It is struggling to cope with more than 300,000 refugees but is not alone in fearing the impact of Syria's war, which is stirring the Middle East's cauldron of sectarian, religious and nationalist struggles.

"We, like Jordan, are hosting hundreds of thousands of Syrians. Security risks to neighboring countries are rising," Davutoglu said.

DIPLOMATIC EFFORTS

The bombings took place as prospects appeared to improve for diplomacy to try to end the war, after Moscow and Washington announced a joint effort to bring government and rebels to an international conference.

Officials from Syria's opposition coalition, in crisis since its president resigned in March, said it would meet in Istanbul on May 23 to decide whether to participate.

A Syrian opposition group said the toll from two years of civil war had risen to at least 82,000 dead and 12,500 missing.

Syrian Information Minister Omran Zubi, speaking on state TV, held Turkey responsible for the bloodshed in Syria by aiding al Qaeda-led rebels. He said Damascus had no hand in Saturday's bombings.

"Syria did not and will never do such a act because our values do not allow this. It is not anyone's right to hurl unfounded accusations," he said.

Authorities have arrested nine people, all Turkish citizens and including the alleged mastermind of the attacks, Turkey's deputy prime minister Besir Atalay told reporters.

Interior Minister Muammer Guler said the bombings - the deadliest incident on Turkish soil since Syria's war began - were carried out by a group with direct links to Syria's Mukhabarat intelligence agency.

The blasts scattered concrete blocks and smashed cars as far as three streets away.

LOCAL ANGER

There was a heavy police and military presence on Sunday in Reyhanli, where security forces cordoned off both blast sites while bulldozers shifted the rubble and shattered glass.

Men stood loitering around the town, looking on and discussing, often heatedly, the previous day's events.

There was palpable anger against the tens of thousands of Syrian refugees in the town, which has become a logistics base for the rebels fighting Assad just over the border.

As the conflict has dragged on, local people have grown increasingly resentful over stretched economic resources and the violence being brought to their door.

Some smashed Syrian car windows, and others railed against Turkey's foreign policy.

"We don't want the Syrians here any more. They can't stay here. Whether we even wanted them or not, they can't stay after this," said a teacher in Reyhanli, who gave his name as Mustafa.

He said the prime minister's Syria policy was to blame.

"It's Tayyip Erdogan's politics that have done this. Turkey should never have got involved in this mess. We have a 900-km (550-mile) border with Syria. They come and go in wherever they like. Everyone here is in fear."

Syrian families stayed inside their homes on Sunday, too afraid to come out.

SUNNI-SHI'ITE TENSIONS

Davutoglu said the Reyhanli bombers were believed to be from the same group that carried out an attack on the Syrian coastal town of Banias a week ago in which at least 62 people were killed.

Syria's conflict has fuelled confrontation across the region between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims, with Shi'ite Iran supporting Assad, and Sunni powers like Saudi Arabia backing the rebels.

Israel launched air strikes a week ago, aimed at stopping Iranian missiles near Damascus from reaching Tehran's Lebanese allies Hezbollah for possible use against the Jewish state.

Days later, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said his forces would support any Syrian effort to recapture the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, raising the prospect of renewed conflict after decades of calm on that border.

In a separate development on Sunday, Syrian rebels freed four Filipino U.N. peacekeepers whom they had captured on the ceasefire line between Syria and the Golan last week.

(Additional reporting by Mehmet Emin Caliskan in Reyhanli, Ece Toksabay in Istanbul and Khaled Yacoub Oweis in Amman; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)

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British banks braced for details of capital shortfall

By Huw Jones and Matt Scuffham

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's banks discover on Wednesday how much extra capital they need to keep regulators happy when the outcome of an inquiry into their financial health is revealed.

The Bank of England will release the capital requirements on Wednesday morning.

The BOE's Financial Policy Committee, tasked with spotting system-wide risks, said in November that the shortfall could be anywhere between 24 billion and 60 billion pounds. Analysts expect the final number to be around the middle of that range.

Britain's banking supervisor Andrew Bailey has been checking how banks tote up risks on their books to determine overall capital requirements. He is concerned about inadequate provisions for losses on loans, and sceptical about capital figures the banks were coming up with using their in-house models.

Hefty compensation bills for mis-selling loan insurance, over 14 billion pounds and rising, have also hit all four of Britain's biggest banks.

But the focus will be on the Royal Bank of Scotland and on Lloyds, in which the government has stakes it would like to offload by the next election in 2015. Replenishing capital buffers is an important step in making them marketable.

Analysts at Credit Suisse estimate that Britain's four biggest banks - HSBC, Barclays, RBS and Lloyds will need a total of 38 billion pounds of extra capital, though 11 billion pounds has already been raised since November when Bailey's investigation began.

Credit Suisse believes no bank will need to go cap in hand to investors and that shortfalls will be plugged by tapping discretionary capital buffers and retaining earnings, meaning limiting dividends and bonuses.

(Editing by Bob Burgdorfer)

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Arias testimony retreads details from killing

PHOENIX (AP) — Jodi Arias' defense attorney concluded his questioning of the defendant Tuesday after testimony in her Arizona death penalty case that largely repeated previous details from the day she says she killed her lover in self-defense.

Earlier in the day, Arias read from her journal as her attorneys worked to explain why she made no specific mention in her entries regarding claims that her lover physically abused her and had sexual desires for young boys.

Prosecutor Juan Martinez hammered her during his cross-examination about the fact that there was no proof of anything Arias had been telling jurors regarding her contention that Travis Alexander had become violent and abusive in the months leading up to his death.

Arias previously testified that she once walked in on Alexander viewing explicit pictures of young boys, something that has not been backed up by evidence or witnesses throughout the trial.

Martinez had pointed out repeatedly how Arias noted nearly every intimate detail of her life in her journal, yet made no reference to the incident.

"That's exactly the opposite of things I would want to note," Arias testified Tuesday under questioning by her own attorney. "I wouldn't want to remember that ... It was very shocking."

She then read another journal entry she says she wrote several days after discovering Alexander viewing the pictures.

"It still remains that I cannot marry him. I cannot quite put my finger on it, but something is just off with that boy," she read.

"What did you mean by that?" asked her defense attorney, Kirk Nurmi.

"That's kind of my indirect way of referring to his issues that were in my mind, something I couldn't look past or accept," Arias replied.

She also has testified that she didn't document negative events about Alexander because he often read her journal and would get angry.

Arias' attorneys were again working to portray the victim as a sexually deviant womanizer in an apparent effort to gain sympathy from jurors.

Arias is set to return to the witness stand Wednesday afternoon. Jurors in Arizona criminal cases are allowed to pose their own questions to witnesses via written notes provided to the judge and vetted by attorneys. The judge said the panel had about 100 questions for Arias.

Throughout her two weeks on the witness stand, Arias has made numerous assertions that Alexander owned a gun, physically abused her, and had illicit desires for children, none of which have been corroborated by testimony or witnesses.

Martinez concluded his cross-examination of Arias last week after hammering her repeatedly over her lies and efforts to create an alibi immediately after she killed Alexander.

She acknowledged that she dumped the gun in the desert, got rid of her bloody clothes, tried to clean the scene at Alexander's home, and even left the victim a voicemail on his mobile phone within hours of killing him and dragging his body into the shower. She said she was too scared and ashamed to tell the truth.

Arias' grandparents had reported a .25 caliber handgun stolen from their Northern California home about a week before the killing — the same caliber used to shoot Alexander — but Arias says she never knew her grandfather had the weapon. Authorities believe she brought it with her, though she has testified she shot Alexander with his own gun as he chased her into his closet after body-slamming her and threatening to kill her.

Alexander had also been stabbed and slashed nearly 30 times and had his throat slit.

Arias is charged with first-degree murder in the June 2008 attack in Alexander's suburban Phoenix home. She says it was self-defense, but police say she planned the killing in a jealous rage.

Arias initially told authorities she had nothing to do with Alexander's death then blamed it on masked intruders before settling on self-defense.

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White House, Congress face cuts; details lacking

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House and Congress won't be immune to the automatic cuts in federal spending scheduled to kick in Friday. But for all the grim warnings the Obama administration has been detailing about the effect on everything from meat packing plants to airports, the consequences of the cuts on the politicians who concocted the idea are much sketchier.

To be sure, the legislative branch and the executive office of the president will take a hit if, as expected, $85 billion in across-the-board reductions begin to take effect in three days. As with other agencies, the impact won't necessarily be immediate.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said this week that White House personnel, like other non-exempt agencies of government, will experience reductions in pay and "there will be furloughs." But he said he had no breakdown of those numbers. Other government agencies have said they will spread out their furloughs so that workers will have to take one or two days off without pay per pay period.

President Barack Obama himself won't be among those affected. Included in the law's long list of exemptions to the cuts, in there along with Social Security benefits and food stamps, is the compensation of the president. Also exempt are the pensions of former presidents and payments to the widows and heirs of deceased members of Congress.

Still, there will be pain at both ends of Washington's Pennsylvania Avenue. According to a document prepared last September and modified in December by the White House Office of Management and Budget, most of the White House accounts, including the $113 million in salaries and expenses in the office of administration, would take an 8.2 percent trim. Likewise, the $396 million budgeted for senators' personnel and office expense accounts and the $1.226 billion budgeted for House salaries and expenses would take the same cut.

Those figures and percentages, however, were calculated before Congress took steps to delay the effective date of the reductions from Jan. 1 to March 1. As a result, the cuts might be slightly smaller.

Each congressional office operates independently and will determine how to find the reductions. The offices are not required to make public their plans to implement the reductions.

Other administration departments, acting to pressure Congress to change the cuts, have been eager to spell out the details.

Last week, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood appeared in the White House briefing room to say that more than $600 million of Transportation Department cuts would come from the Federal Aviation Administration and that the agency's nearly 47,000 employees would have to be furloughed for about a day per pay period until the end of September. On Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told the White House press corps that the cuts would be equal to 5,000 fewer Border Patrol agents.

White House officials said the budget office is still working on how the cuts might specifically affect White House operations and personnel.

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