New Syrian envoy to France named

FRENCH President Francois Hollande and the new Syrian opposition leader have announced plans to install an ambassador to represent Syria in France.

The surprise move came after talks at France's presidential palace between Hollande and Moaz al-Khatib, head of the newly formed Syrian opposition coalition. France recognised the coalition days after it was formed on Sunday - and is so far the only Western country to do so.

Hollande also confirmed that French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who was at Saturday's talk, will raise the issue of lifting the EU arms embargo against Syria at a meeting on Monday in Brussels among European Union foreign ministers.

Fabius has suggested supplying defensive weapons so Syrian rebels can protect themselves from attacks by the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

More than 36,000 people have been killed since the Syrian uprising against Assad began in March 2011 and the new coalition is pressing for the means to defend Syrian civilians.

Since May 2011, the EU has imposed a ban on the export of weapons and equipment to Syria that could be used for "internal repression".

France has taken the lead in efforts to oust Assad's regime, and Hollande reiterated on Saturday that the Syrian National Coalition for Opposition and Revolutionary Forces is for France the sole representative of the Syrian people and a future provisional government.

Fabius will also press EU partners to recognise the coalition, Holllande said.

"We have no hidden agenda," al-Khatib said in a bid to reassure other nations.

Hollande said al-Khatib, a preacher-turned-activist, reassured him that the coalition he leads seeks unity of the Syrian people and France's aim in moving quickly is to "assure its legitimacy and credibility".

The United States and other EU nations have said they prefer to wait and see whether the coalition truly represents the variety of people that make up Syria.

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49 children killed in Egypt bus tragedy

AT least 49 nursery school children have been killed when a train smashed into their bus in central Egypt after a railway signal operator fell asleep, officials say, prompting protests and resignations.

Transport Minister Rashad al-Metini stepped down after the tragedy, which also killed the bus driver and his assistant, saying he "accepts responsibility".

President Mohamed Morsi accepted the Egyptian Railway Authority head's resignation.

"There are now 49 deaths and 18 injuries," with almost all of the casualties children, Assiut provincial governor Yehya Keshk told state television.

"There is a team of 45 doctors looking after the injured children."

The bus taking about 60 children aged between four and six on a school trip organised by their nursery was struck on a railway crossing in Manfalut, 356 kilometres south of Cairo, police said.

The worker manning the level crossing - which had been left open - was asleep when the bus tried to cross the tracks, Keshk said. "He has been arrested, of course."

Parents of the children were staging angry demonstrations near the scene of the horrific accident, demanding the death penalty for those responsible, police said.

A state television correspondent described the scene as "terrifying" with the blood-splattered bodies of children on the ground, before they were taken to nearby Manfalut hospital.

In a brief television address, Morsi offered his condolences to the families and said those responsible would be referred to the public prosecutor.

"On my and the Egyptian people's behalf, I offer my sincerest condolences to the families," the president said. "I am referring all those responsible to the public prosecution."

Earlier, Morsi ordered the prime minister, the defence and health ministers, and the Assiut governor "to offer all assistance to the families of the victims", the official news agency MENA said.

Prime Minister Hisham Qandil and his interior minister headed to Assiut, MENA said.

Activist groups have called for the resignation of Qandil's cabinet.

"This accident proves the failure of Qandil's government and strengthens the demands for the resignation of a government that has failed, over several months, to produce anything to improve the suffering of Egyptians," the April 6 movement said.

Keshk has ordered the "formation of a fact-finding committee" to probe Saturday's accident, but in similar tragedies in the past, such panels have done little to shed light on the details and less still to bring about accountability.

In a separate road accident, 12 people were killed and three injured when a truck smashed into a minibus near the Egyptian capital on Saturday.

Officials said a speeding truck driving on the wrong side of the road crashed into a minibus carrying 15 passengers. The truck driver was arrested at the scene in the 6th October area, as rescue services worked to extract the bodies, police said.

Egyptians have long complained that the government has failed to deal with the country's chronic transport problems, with roads as poorly maintained as train lines.

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Mali's north tense after Tuareg offensive

AL-QAEDA-LINKED fighters have gathered reinforcements in the tense Gao region of northeastern Mali and are waiting to see if the Tuareg rebels that launched a failed offensive a day earlier would regroup for a fresh assault.

The desert area of Gao has been a focus of Islamist and Tuareg activity since the once-allied fighters seized the region, along with much of Mali's arid north, following a coup and military collapse in Bamako March.

Though the dusty town of Gao and its surroundings were initially under the control of Tuaregs, who are fighting to establish an independent state, the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO) ousted them at the end of June.

On Friday, Tuaregs with the Azawad National Liberation Movement (MNLA) attacked the Islamist fighters but suffered a heavy defeat that saw about a dozen of their men killed, regional security sources said.

To prepare for a possible new offensive, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which is linked to MUJAO, sent about 300 reinforcements from Timbuktu, about 300 kilometres west of Gao, witnesses told AFP.

By Saturday morning an uneasy calm had settled over the region as locals waited to see if the MNLA would again try their luck, witnesses said.

According to Moussa Salem, an MNLA fighter, "our goal remains to retake Azawad from the hands of AQIM and its allies. We can fall back, but it's only to be able to better push forwards after."

Azawad is the Tuareg name for all of northern Mali.

MUJAO spokesman Walid Abu Sahraoui said his group would continue to pursue the MNLA across the entire region.

"We are in control of the situation," he said.

Since their defeat at the hands of the radical Islamists on June 27, the more secular Tuaregs have no longer controlled any town in this massive desert region that spans two-thirds of Mali's territory.

In the regions under their control, Islamist groups have implemented sharia law and carried out brutal punishments of transgressors, including the stoning to death of an unmarried couple and the amputations of hands and feet of accused thieves.

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ASEAN urges China 'hotline' over sea row

SOUTHEAST Asian nations will propose opening a "hotline" with China aimed at defusing tensions over the South China Sea, ASEAN's chief says.

Surin Pitsuwan, secretary-general of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, said after a meeting of the bloc's foreign ministers on Saturday that they had agreed to back the plan first mooted by Indonesia.

"This of course will be brought up to our Chinese friends," Surin told reporters ahead of a gathering of leaders from the region that begins in Cambodia on Sunday.

"We can call it a red line, we can give it a sense of urgency that if there is anything developing that we all will be phoned ... trying to consult, trying to coordinate, trying to contain any possible spillover of any ... incident, accident, miscalculation, misunderstanding," he added.

ASEAN members Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei, as well as Taiwan, have claims to parts of the sea, home of some of the world's most important shipping lanes and believed to be rich in fossil fuels.

China insists it has sovereign rights to virtually all of the sea, and the Philippines and Vietnam have expressed concerns that their giant Asian neighbour has become increasingly aggressive this year in staking its claim.

Philippine and Chinese vessels engaged in a standoff at a remote shoal in the sea in April, escalating the dispute between their countries dramatically.

The proposal comes as ASEAN and China struggle to make progress on a code of conduct (COC) to ease tensions in the sea that was first envisaged a decade ago.

"What Indonesia is now looking for while we are working on the COC is a commitment on the part of ASEAN and China to open a hotline of communication," Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa told reporters in Phnom Penh.

"So that if there were to be an incident in the future ... we can commit to have communication and have dialogue if there were to be disputes."

ASEAN leaders will hold their annual summit in Phnom Penh on Sunday. This will be followed by a two-day East Asia Summit involving Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, US President Barack Obama, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard and the leaders of five other countries.

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Sirens go off in Tel Aviv, 1 dead in Gaza

AIR raid sirens have gone off in Tel Aviv for a third day running, sending people scuttling for cover as TV images showed the Iron Dome anti-missile system firing on an incoming rocket.

AFP correspondents at the scene on Saturday said people could be seen running to find shelter as the sirens wailed, a day after a rocket crashed into the sea off central Tel Aviv.

In Gaza City, one man was killed on Saturday in a fresh Israeli strike on Rafah in southern Gaza, taking the overall Palestinian death toll from three days of Israeli raids to 40, medics said.

"Osama Qadi, 25, was killed and two others were wounded in an air strike on Rafah," emergency services spokesman Adham Abu Selmiya told AFP.

In a separate strike, another eight people were wounded in a raid on the southern city of Khan Yunis, he said.

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Obama heads for Asia with stop in Myanmar

PRESIDENT Barack Obama heads to Asia for a tour of three countries on his first foreign trip since winning re-election that will see him make a once unthinkable stop in Myanmar (Burma).

The first trip by a US president spent entirely in Southeast Asia since the Vietnam War, the visit that will also take in Thailand and Cambodia aims to emphasise the Obama administration's focus on the dynamic and largely US-friendly region where several nations worry about a rising China.

But his tour also comes at an awkward time amid a spiralling conflict between Israel and the Islamist movement Hamas with the Jewish state poised to launch its first ground offensive on the Palestinian territory in four years.

At home, Obama is in tough negotiations with legislators to avoid steep automatic budget cuts and tax hikes that could send the country back into recession.

Obama launched a so-called "pivot" to Asia in his first term that included greater military cooperation with Australia, Thailand and Vietnam and a plan to shift the bulk of the US navy to the Pacific by 2020.

Virtually no nation has seen a greater shift towards the United States under Obama than Myanmar. The nation formerly known as Burma was for years a close ally of China and treated as a pariah by Western nations.

Surprising sceptics, Myanmar launched reforms after its nominal end to nearly half a century of army rule last year.

President Thein Sein, a former general, released political prisoners, opened dialogue with ethnic rebels and allowed once-confined opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi to run for parliament.

Thailand is the oldest US ally in Asia, famously offering elephants to Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War. But the kingdom has been consumed by internal disputes, which escalated in 2010 into violence that left more than 90 people dead.

Obama will be the first sitting US president to visit Cambodia, a staunch China supporter.

On the sidelines of an East Asia Summit there, Obama will meet China's outgoing premier, Wen Jiabao, and Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda of Japan, amid a dispute between the two countries over islands in the East China Sea and the oil and gas fields in the disputed waters.

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Hamas chief in Cairo for talks

HAMAS chief Khaled Meshaal is in Cairo to confer on ending the Gaza conflict, but the Islamist group is reluctant to agree a ceasefire without guarantees Israel will honour it, a senior Hamas official says.

Meshaal was scheduled on Saturday to meet with Egypt's intelligence chief as well as Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and Qatari Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, both visiting Cairo, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Hamas, now its fourth day of conflict with Israel around the Gaza Strip, doubts that any country could guarantee terms for a ceasefire, he said.

"Through Egyptian mediation, we reached an understanding for a truce and it was broken in about 48 hours," he said of an Israeli air strike on Wednesday that killed the Hamas military chief, after rockets were fired from Gaza.

"Egypt now cannot say: 'I guarantee a truce'," he said, adding it would require a stronger effort by the "international community".

Hamas's last sustained conflict with Israel in December 2008-January 2009 ended with an Egyptian mediated truce that was meant to guarantee a loosening of Israel's blockade of Gaza.

Palestinian medics said 40 Gazans have been killed and more than 350 wounded since Israel launched an air campaign on the enclave on Wednesday. Three Israelis were killed by a Hamas rocket.

Since Israel's last major offensive on Gaza, the Arab Spring uprisings that brought an Islamist to power in Cairo have put more pressure on Israel to halt its campaign before it expands into a ground operation.

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