By Dominic Evans BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syria's opposition and the government of President Bashar al-Assad seem to be preparing to take part in an international peace conference against a background of some of the worst fighting this year. On Tuesday, Lebanese Hezbollah fighters and Syrian soldiers, backed by air strikes and artillery, renewed an offensive aimed at driving Syrian rebels from the town of Qusair near the Lebanese border, opposition activists said. ...

By Marcus George DUBAI (Reuters) - Iranian authorities on Tuesday barred former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a relative moderate, from running in the June 14 election, along with a protégé of the current president, leaving mainly hardliners left to contest the vote. Rafsanjani and Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie, a close aide to current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, failed to make it onto a list of candidates approved by the Guardian Council, state news agencies and television reported. ...

By Arshad Mohammed MUSCAT (Reuters) - Secretary of State John Kerry flew to Oman on Tuesday for Raytheon Co's signing of an estimated $2.1 billion arms deal and to consult on Syria and Iran, U.S. officials said. Oman is expected to sign a letter of intent to purchase a ground-based air defence system that would help protect against cruise missile, drone or fighter aircraft attacks, a senior U.S. State Department official told reporters aboard Kerry's plane. Part of the sale has been previously disclosed. In October 2011, the U.S. Defense Department notified Congress of a proposed $1. ...

By Adrian Croft BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Britain said on Tuesday it had asked the European Union to put Hezbollah's military arm on its list of terrorist organizations, urging Europe to respond robustly to evidence of the Islamist group's involvement in an attack that killed five Israelis. Britain's request came after Bulgaria accused the Lebanese militant movement in February of carrying out a bomb attack on a bus in the Black Sea city of Burgas that killed the Israelis and their Bulgarian driver in July last year. ...

By Tom Miles GENEVA (Reuters) - The World Bank plans substantial new funds to help Jordan cope with the influx of refugees from the civil war in Syria, and hopes new funds for central Africa will cement a peace deal there, the bank's President Jim Yong Kim said on Tuesday. "There will be significant amounts of new funding going to Jordan in the very near future to deal with this crisis," he said in an interview, after a speech at the U.N. World Health Assembly in Geneva. ...

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran's election overseers removed potential wild card candidates from the presidential race Tuesday, blocking a top aide of outgoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and a former president who revived hopes of reformers.

The eight candidates approved Tuesday for Iran's June 14 presidential election to replace Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who cannot run again because of term limits.

BEIRUT (AP) — Despite recent rebel setbacks in Syria's civil war, the main opposition bloc signaled a tough line Tuesday on attending possible peace talks with President Bashar Assad's regime.

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Is Pope Francis an exorcist?

HAVANA (AP) — The meeting on a sunny Havana square was a little bit revolutionary for Cuba's revolution. And for U.S. diplomacy as well.

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — One Pistorius brother is free of charges — acquitted Tuesday of culpable homicide in the death of a woman in a road accident. The famous younger brother, Olympian double-amputee Oscar Pistorius, still must face his day in court for shooting and killing his girlfriend.

CANNES, France (AP) — Associated Press journalists open their notebooks at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. has identified five men who might be responsible for the attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, last year, and has enough evidence to justify seizing them by military force as suspected terrorists, officials say. But there isn't enough proof to try them in a U.S. civilian court as the Obama administration prefers.

By Myra MacDonald ALGIERS (Reuters) - Algeria's prime minister, reacting to reports that President Abdelaziz Bouteflika is seriously ill, said the 76-year-old was recovering in France but had been ordered by his doctors to rest. Since he was rushed to hospital in Paris on April 27 with what was officially described as a minor stroke, Bouteflika has been neither heard nor seen in public, raising widespread speculation about his state of health. ...

COALCOMAN, Mexico (AP) — Mexico's top security officials gathered Tuesday in the western state of Michoacan to launch a campaign with thousands of army troops to rescue towns besieged, sometimes for months, by the powerful Knights Templar drug cartel.

CAIRO (AP) — Egyptian troops and police mistakenly fired on a Bedouin funeral in the Sinai Peninsula on Tuesday, security officials said, in the opening salvo of a sweep searching for security personnel kidnapped by suspected militants.

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Francis criticized what he called "savage capitalism" on a visit to a food kitchen on Tuesday, in an address in which he called for the values of generosity and charity to be revived. "A savage capitalism has taught the logic of profit at any cost, of giving in order to get, of exploitation without thinking of people... and we see the results in the crisis we are experiencing," the pope said. Francis greeted the men and women coming to the 'Gift of Maria' food kitchen, located at the walls of the Vatican. ...

By Carey Gillam and Ian Simpson MOORE, Oklahoma (Reuters) - Emergency workers pulled more than 100 survivors from the rubble of homes, schools and a hospital in an Oklahoma town hit by a powerful tornado, and officials lowered the death toll from the storm to 24, including nine children. The 2-mile (3-km) wide tornado tore through Moore outside Oklahoma City on Monday afternoon, trapping victims beneath the rubble, wiping out entire neighborhoods and tossing vehicles about as if they were toys. ...

BAGHDAD (AP) — New attacks in Iraq killed 13 people and wounded dozens on Tuesday, officials said, after a bloody day that claimed more than 100 lives across the country.

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Boruch Spiegel, one of the last remaining survivors of the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising by poorly armed Jewish insurgents against the powerful Nazi German force that occupied Poland, has died. He was 93.

CAIRO (AP) — Egyptian troops and police mistakenly fired on a Bedouin funeral in the Sinai Peninsula on Tuesday, security officials said, in the opening salvo of a sweep searching for security personnel kidnapped by suspected militants.