VOLGINSKY, Russia (Reuters) - Russia's ability to restart long-delayed work at India's Kudankulam nuclear plant has paved the way for a deal with Delhi to build two more atomic reactors in the near future, Russia's nuclear chief said on Wednesday. The first two reactors at the plant in Tamil Nadu were meant to be operational last year, but work by Russian engineers was delayed after protesters blocked access to the site following Japan's nuclear catastrophe. Work to launch the reactors restarted on Tuesday, however, after Indian police arrested dozens of protesters. ...

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Fredde and Mickan own a waterfront mansion in the Stockholm suburbs, hire Polish help and have endless cash to spend on state-of-the-art barbecues and designer labels. They are only characters in "The Sunny Side", a popular Swedish television series, but they drew so much attention to their wealthy neighborhood that an activist group called "Everything for Everyone" chose it for a class war safari. The tour of the "rich man's ghetto" promised to "cultivate your class hatred". ...

TOULOUSE, France (Reuters) - For Mohamed Merah, the Frenchman suspected of killing four Jews and three Muslim soldiers in southwestern France, the road to radicalization ran from Toulouse to Kandahar in Afghanistan. Merah, 24, who was holed up in a suburban Toulouse apartment on Wednesday, besieged by police commandos from the elite RAID unit, claimed affiliation with al Qaeda and said he wanted to avenge Palestinian children, French Interior Minister Claude Gueant said. ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists on Tuesday announced a new phase in the search to resolve the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, saying fresh evidence from a remote Pacific island may hold clues to the fate of the renowned U.S. pilot who vanished in 1937 while attempting to circle the globe. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joined scientists and aviation archaeologists to unveil the expedition, which will set out from Honolulu in July to probe underwater areas around the Phoenix Islands in Kiribati where they believe Earhart may have crashed 75 years ago. ...

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Three Jewish children and a rabbi shot dead at a Jewish school in France were buried in Jerusalem on Wednesday in a funeral where one Israeli official said the attack was inspired by "wild animals made crazy by their hatred". Their bodies were wrapped in burial shrouds in accordance with orthodox tradition after being flown overnight from France. The funeral took place in a hill-top cemetery at the entrance to Jerusalem as police in the French city of Toulouse lay siege to a house where the suspected shooter, who claimed to be a member of al Qaeda, was holed up. ...

French school shooting suspected arrested: TV PARIS (Reuters) - A gunman suspected of killing of seven people in the name of al Qaeda was arrested by police in southwest France after a nearly 12-hour operation in the city of Toulouse, French television channels BFM TV and i-Tele reported on Wednesday. One police source who is not directly linked to the investigation confirmed the arrest to Reuters, but several other sources said they were not aware of it. The TV channels cited police sources for the information, without providing further details. It was not immediately possible to confirm ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A proposed 30 percent minimum tax on millionaires backed by President Barack Obama - dubbed the Buffett tax after investor Warren Buffett who supports it - would raise about $47 billion over a decade, according to a congressional report. The Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan body that estimates tax changes for lawmakers, on Tuesday updated an earlier report forecasting that the tax would raise $31 billion over the period, citing economic modeling errors. ...

ROME (Reuters) - Italy's largest trade union called for a general strike over labor reforms on Wednesday, escalating a confrontation with Prime Minister Mario Monti that will test his resolve to push ahead with plans to transform the economy. After weeks of negotiation, Monti announced late on Tuesday that the time for talking was over and he would press on with plans to overhaul employment protection laws dating back to the 1970s, despite stiff opposition from the left-wing CGIL union. ...

BERLIN (Reuters) - Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, whose country has so far shielded Syria from U.N. Security Council censure, said he hoped the body would approve on Wednesday a draft statement on the situation there. The 15-nation Security Council has been holding talks on the Western-drafted statement that would express "full support" for U.N.-Arab League Syrian envoy Kofi Annan's drive to end violence that has brought Syria to the brink of civil war. "The Council text reflects the reality in Syria and supports Annan's aims. ...

SANAA (Reuters) - Gunmen linked to al Qaeda shot dead an American teacher in Yemen on Sunday, accusing him of Christian "proselytizing", and officials said government forces had killed a dozen militants in clashes and attacks on their strongholds. The incidents underscore the challenges facing President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who took office last month after a year of massive protests against his predecessor Ali Abdullah Saleh. A police source in the city of Taiz said a gunman riding on a motorcycle driven by an accomplice shot the U.S. ...

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - In an effort to secure Russian support, Western powers on the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday diluted a draft statement backing U.N.-Arab League Syrian envoy Kofi Annan's drive to end violence that has brought the country to the brink of civil war. The 15-nation panel held two rounds of negotiations on Tuesday on a Western-drafted statement that would express "full support" for Annan's peace efforts while threatening Damascus with "further steps" if it failed to comply with the council's demands "in a timely manner," council diplomats told Reuters. ...

BERLIN (Reuters) - Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, whose country has so far shielded Syria from U.N. Security Council censure, said he hoped the body would approve on Wednesday a draft statement on the situation there. The 15-nation Security Council has been holding talks on the Western-drafted statement that would express "full support" for U.N.-Arab League Syrian envoy Kofi Annan's drive to end violence that has brought Syria to the brink of civil war. "The Council text reflects the reality in Syria and supports Annan's aims. ...

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's spending on its military mission in Afghanistan will be 2.4 billion pounds ($3.8 billion) less than expected in the years leading to 2015, Britain's finance minister said on Wednesday. "UK forces will cease combat operations by the end of 2014. As a consequence, I can tell the House (parliament), that the cost of operations ..... are expected to be a total of 2.4 billion pounds lower than planned over the remainder of the parliament," finance minister George Osborne told parliament during the presentation of his annual budget. ...

India pushes refiners to cut Iran imports, despite sanctions scorn NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India, publicly disdainful of sanctions to pressure Iran, has been left off a list of nations given a U.S. waiver from the measures, but is privately pushing its refiners for substantial cuts in imports from the Middle Eastern country. The United States gave exemptions on Tuesday from its crippling financial sanctions to Japan and 10 EU nations it said had cut purchases of Iranian crude, but left Asian economic giants India and China exposed to the risk of such steps. ...

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) - French school shooting suspect Mohamed Merah was jailed for bombings in Afghanistan in 2007, but escaped months later in a mass prison break organized by Taliban insurgents, a top Afghan prison official said on Wednesday. Merah, a French citizen of Algerian origin, is suspected of killing seven people in the name of the al Qaeda militant network, including three children at a Jewish school in southwestern France. ...

RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - A leading architect of Palestinian peace talks with Israel has drawn criticism from Palestinian officials by breaking with the notion of a 'two-state solution' that he said was being buried in the dust by Israeli bulldozers racing to build settlements. The two-state solution has been the cornerstone of successive Middle East peace initiatives, envisaging the creation of an independent Palestine alongside Israel. ...

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - The European Union foreign policy chief drew criticism in Israel on Tuesday over what Israeli leaders said was her comparison of the killing of four Jews at a school in France with the deaths of children in the Gaza Strip. Speaking at a conference on Palestinian refugees on Monday in Brussels, Catherine Ashton cited the tragedy of "young people who have been killed in all sorts of terrible circumstances". ...

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - The European Union foreign policy chief drew criticism in Israel on Tuesday over what Israeli leaders said was her comparison of the killing of four Jews at a school in France with the deaths of children in the Gaza Strip. Speaking at a conference on Palestinian refugees on Monday in Brussels, Catherine Ashton cited the tragedy of "young people who have been killed in all sorts of terrible circumstances". ...

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - The European Union foreign policy chief drew criticism in Israel on Tuesday over what Israeli leaders said was her comparison of the killing of four Jews at a school in France with the deaths of children in the Gaza Strip. Speaking at a conference on Palestinian refugees on Monday in Brussels, Catherine Ashton cited the tragedy of "young people who have been killed in all sorts of terrible circumstances". ...

MOGADISHU (Reuters) - A car bomb exploded in the heart of the Somali capital on Wednesday, wounding two people in an attack Somalia's al Shabaab rebel group said was carried out by its militants. The blast, which triggered bursts of gunfire in Mogadishu, was the latest in a wave of bomb attacks in the country where the embattled U.N.-backed government is struggling to secure the city against al Qaeda-linked Islamist rebels. "We were behind the car bomb explosion. We targeted security forces," Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Musab, a spokesman for al Shabaab's military operations, told Reuters. ...

LANSING, Kansas (Reuters) - U.S. authorities lack proof of what occurred the night a U.S. soldier is suspected of killing 16 villagers in Afghanistan, the lawyer representing the serviceman said on Tuesday. "I'm very concerned now they don't have much proof of anything," attorney John Henry Browne told Reuters after meeting with U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales on Tuesday for a second day in a military detention center in Kansas. ...

TOULOUSE, France (Reuters) - A gunman suspected of killing seven people in the name of al Qaeda, including three children at a Jewish school, said on Wednesday he would hand himself over to police to end an hours-long siege in southwestern France. About 300 police, some in bullet-proof body armor, cordoned off an area surrounding a four-storey house in a leafy suburb of the city of Toulouse where the 24-year-old Muslim man, identified as Mohamed Merah, was holed up on the ground floor. ...

MOGADISHU (Reuters) - Somali pirates freed British hostage Judith Tebbutt on Wednesday after a ransom was paid, with footage showing her rushing onto an airplane more than six months after gunmen killed her husband and kidnapped her from a luxury beach resort in neighboring Kenya. Tebbutt's kidnapping and the subsequent abductions of foreigners prompted Kenya to send hundreds of troops into Somalia late last year in an attempt to crush the al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab militants whom Nairobi blamed for the attacks. "After efforts today, we have succeeded in the release of the British woman. ...

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India, publicly disdainful of sanctions to pressure Iran, has been left off a list of nations given a U.S. waiver from the measures, but is privately pushing its refiners for substantial cuts in imports from the Middle Eastern country. The United States gave exemptions on Tuesday from its crippling financial sanctions to Japan and 10 EU nations it said had cut purchases of Iranian crude, but left Asian economic giants India and China exposed to the risk of such steps. ...