Women hold banners urging national talks to end the political paralysis in the south of Mali, in the capital Bamako January 10, 2013. Mali's army clashed with Islamist rebels along the front line in northern Mali on Thursday and said its forces had seized an important town, but the insurgents denied the claim.

PARIS/BAMAKO | Fri Jan 11, 2013 10:03am EST

PARIS/BAMAKO (Reuters) - France would intervene to stop any further drive southward by Islamist rebels in Mali, President Francois Hollande said on Friday, as Malian soldiers launched a counter-offensive to wrest back a key town captured by militants this week.

Western powers are worried the alliance of al Qaeda-linked militants that seized the northern two-thirds of Mali in April will seek to use the vast desert zone as a launchpad for international attacks.

Mali's government appealed for urgent military aid from France on Thursday after Islamist fighters encroached further south, seizing the town of Konna in the center of the country. The rebel advance sparked panic among residents in the nearby towns of Mopti and Sevare, home to a military base and airport.

"We are faced with a blatant aggression that is threatening Mali's very existence. France cannot accept this," Hollande said in a New Year speech to diplomats and journalists. "We will be ready to stop the terrorists' offensive if it continues."

Hollande said that France, alongside African partners, would respond to Mali's request for military aid within the framework of U.N. Security Council resolutions. A French diplomatic source said existing U.N. resolutions would permit a French military intervention in Mali, if needed.

The Security Council in December authorized the deployment of an African-led force supported by European states. However, an operation was not expected before September due to the difficulties of arranging funding, training Malian troops, and deploying during the mid-year rainy season in West Africa.

However, military experts said that escalating military tensions in Mali could force the hand of former colonial power France, the most outspoken advocate of military intervention.

"The French believe that France, and Europe, face a real security threat from what is happening in the Sahel," said Jakkie Cilliers, executive director of the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa.

He noted, however, that any French military intervention could raise hackles among regional government's wary of meddling by Paris. "If the French decide to do this they would want to make it as short, sharp and contained as possible."

REINFORCEMENTS ARRIVE

Mali's interim President Dioncounda Traore, installed after a military coup in March, was due to meet with Hollande in Paris on Wednesday, a French diplomatic source said. Traore will address the Malian nation on Friday evening.

French officials declined to comment on reports that military aircraft carrying Western soldiers landed late on Thursday at an airport at Sevare, some 60 km (36 miles) south of Konna.

Residents in Sevare also reported the arrival of military helicopters and army reinforcements, which took part in the counter-attack to retake Konna overnight on Thursday in a bid to roll back the militant's southward drive.

"Helicopters have bombarded rebel positions. The operation will continue," a senior military source in Bamako said.

A spokesman one of the main groups forming the Islamist rebel alliance said they remained in control of Konna.

Asked whether the rebels intended to press ahead to capture Sevare and Mopti, the Ansar Dine spokesman, Sanda Ould Boumama, said: "We will make that clear in the coming days."

He said any intervention by France would reveal an anti-Islam bias.

"What makes us different for them from the rebel movements in Central African Republic, or Congo. It is that we are Muslim?" he said, referring to insurgencies in other French-speaking African nations.

(Additional reporting by Richard Valdmanis in Dakar, Pascal Fletcher in Johannesburg, Alexandria Sage, John Irish and Elizabeth Pineau in Paris; writing by Daniel Flynn; editing by Philippa Fletcher)

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Wayne LaPierre, Executive Vice President of the National Rifle Association (NRA), speaks during a news conference in Washington December 21, 2012.

WASHINGTON | Fri Dec 21, 2012 7:30pm EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Any chance for national unity on U.S. gun violence appeared to wane a week after the Connecticut school massacre, as the powerful NRA gun rights lobby called on Friday for armed guards in every school and gun-control advocates vehemently rejected the proposal.

The solution offered by the National Rifle Association defied a push by President Barack Obama for new gun laws, such as bans on high-capacity magazines and certain semiautomatic rifles.

At a hotel near the White House, NRA Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre said a debate among lawmakers would be long and ineffective, and that school children were better served by immediate action to send officers with firearms into schools.

LaPierre delivered an impassioned defense of the firearms that millions of Americans own, in a rare NRA news briefing after the Newtown, Connecticut, shooting in which a gunman killed his mother, and then 20 children and six adults at an elementary school.

"Why is the idea of a gun good when it's used to protect our president or our country or our police, but bad when it's used to protect our children in their schools?" LaPierre asked in comments twice interrupted by anti-NRA protesters whom guards forced from the room.

Speaking to about 200 reporters and editors but taking no questions, LaPierre dared politicians to oppose armed guards.

"Is the press and political class here in Washington so consumed by fear and hatred of the NRA and America's gun owners," he asked, "that you're willing to accept a world where real resistance to evil monsters is a lone, unarmed school principal?"

Proponents of gun control immediately rejected the idea, hardening battle lines in a social debate that divides Americans as much as abortion or same-sex marriage.

A brief NRA statement three days earlier in which the group said it wanted to contribute meaningfully to ways to prevent school massacres led to speculation that compromise might be possible, or that the NRA was too weak to defeat new legislation.

"The NRA's leadership had an opportunity to help unite the nation behind efforts to reduce gun violence and avert massacres like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary School," said Democratic Representative Carolyn McCarthy of New York. She supports new limits on ammunition and firearms, and universal background checks for gun buyers.

WAITING FOR A COMPROMISE

Adam Winkler, author of "Gunfight," a history of U.S. gun rights, said he expected the NRA might yield on background checks. About 40 percent of gun purchasers are not checked, according to some estimates.

"The NRA missed a huge opportunity to move in the direction of compromise. Instead of offering a major contribution to the gun debate, which is what they promised, we got the same old tired clichés," said Winkler, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll on Monday showed the percentage of Americans favoring tough gun regulations rising 8 points after the Newtown shooting, to 50 percent.

Inside the NRA, though, attitudes might not change much.

"The anti-gun forces which are motivated by hysteria and a refusal to deal with the facts are going to be facing a counter-attack here that is going to be very, very effective," said Robert Brown, an NRA board member and the publisher of Soldier of Fortune, a military-focused magazine.

During the news conference, LaPierre laid out a plan for a "National School Shield" and said former U.S. congressman Asa Hutchinson from Arkansas would head up the NRA's effort to develop a model security program for schools.

The NRA is far and away America's most powerful gun organization and dwarves other groups with its lobbying efforts. In 2011, it spent $3.1 million lobbying lawmakers and federal agencies, while all gun-control groups combined spent $280,000, according to records the groups filed with Congress.

ECHOES OF COLUMBINE

Ken Blackwell, another NRA board member, said NRA leaders were discussing how to react to the Newtown shooting on the day it happened, helping LaPierre formulate a position.

"He and the team of lawyers around him are very bright and they understand the Constitution," said Blackwell, a Republican former state official in Ohio.

The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court in 2008 guarantees an individual right to own firearms, though it allows for some limits.

While LaPierre's proposal to arm schools came as a surprise to those who hoped for compromise, it is not new.

Former NRA president, the late actor Charlton Heston, made a similar proposal after the 1999 Columbine High School massacre near Denver that killed 12 students and one teacher.

"If there had been even one armed guard in the school, he could have saved a lot of lives and perhaps ended the whole thing instantly," Heston said in April 1999, according to The New York Times.

Columbine had an armed sheriff's deputy who exchanged gunfire outside the school with one of the two teenage killers, according to a Jefferson County, Colorado, sheriff's office report. The deputy was unable to hit or stop the student, who was armed with a semiautomatic rifle, from entering the school, and the deputy stayed in a parking lot with police, the report said.

Protesters at the news briefing on Friday accused the NRA of being complicit in gun deaths.

"If teachers can stand up to gunmen, Congress can stand up to the NRA," said Medea Benjamin, co-director of the peace group Code Pink, who was escorted from the news conference.

(Additional reporting by Susan Heavey, Patrick Rucker and Alina Selyukh in Washington, and Stephanie Simon and Keith Coffman in Denver, Colorado; Editing by Karey Wutkowski, Mary Milliken and Eric Beech)

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1 of 9. Gu Kailai (front, C), wife of ousted Chinese Communist Party Politburo member Bo Xilai, attends a trial in the court room at Hefei Intermediate People's Court in this still image taken from video August 9, 2012.

HEFEI, China | Thu Aug 9, 2012 10:41pm EDT

HEFEI, China (Reuters) - China pressed ahead with an offensive against ousted politician Bo Xilai on Friday, a day after the murder trial of his wife, with a separate prosecution of four police officers accused of trying to cover up the killing that she was accused of.

The dismissed officers went on trial for "bending the law to show favoritism" by shielding Bo's wife, Gu Kailai, from an inquiry into the death of Briton Neil Heywood.

Gu stood trial for poisoning the businessman over a financial transaction that went sour, according to a court statement. She did not dispute the murder charge during Thursday's seven-hour, closed-door trial hearing and a verdict will soon be delivered, the statement said.

Heywood's death in November and its alleged cover-up in Bo's stronghold of Chongqing, the southwestern municipality he ran, was central to the torrent of events that toppled him from the Politburo and exposed the ruling Communist Party to its worst upheaval in decades.

The party's priority now is ensuring top-down control before a handover of power to a new generation of leaders this year.

The legal noose is tightening fast on Bo's wife and police involved in investigating the murder case, suggesting there is a danger Bo could himself face charges of masterminding a cover-up and could risk a lengthy jail term.

The South China Morning Post said on Friday that Bo's former Chongqing police chief, Wang Lijun, would stand trial as early as next week in the southwestern city of Chengdu. Wang sought temporary refuge in Chengdu's U.S. consulate in February after sources said he told Bo that Gu was a murder suspect.

Wang's dramatic flight to the U.S. mission triggered the murder scandal that quickly led to Bo's downfall. Until then, Heywood's death had been officially attributed to a possible heart attack brought on by excessive alcohol consumption.

Chinese media stuck to the terse official account of Gu's trial on Friday, despite avid public interest in this scandal that has exposed the fusion of wealth and privilege in China's political elite, and exposed rifts in the party.

Bo, 63, has not been a focus of the proceedings so far. But most experts believe the trial and almost certain conviction of his wife Gu and the four police officers is a prelude to his punishment, which could include a criminal trial.

VERDICT WON'T BE DELAYED

The court in the eastern Chinese city Hefei did not say when it would announce any verdict against Gu. But the usual wait was about a fortnight said Chen Guangwu, a criminal defense attorney who has followed the Chongqing scandal closely.

"But they won't delay for too long, because this case is being heard in order to pave the way for dealing with Bo Xilai himself," said Chen, who is based in eastern Shandong province.

"This case is in part about testing the waters for that. That is, they will sentence her and see what reaction there is in society and public opinion."

Bo's downfall has stirred more public division than that of any other party leader for over 30 years. To leftist supporters, Bo became a charismatic rallying figure for efforts to reimpose party control over dizzying and unequal market growth. To liberal critics, Bo was a dangerous opportunist who yearned to impose his harsh policies on the entire country.

As the four sacked officers went on trial, also in Hefei, Chinese police cordoned off the courthouse and excluded foreign reporters from the hearing. Vans parked nearby were bristling with video surveillance equipment.

A court spokeswoman said the case would start at 8:30 (0030 GMT). "It's open to the public but I'm afraid all the places are full at this time," she said.

The four men on trial - Guo Weiguo, Li Yang, Wang Pengfei and Wang Zhi -- were senior police officers in Chongqing who allegedly sought to stymie an investigation into Heywood's death in a hilltop hotel villa overlooking Chongqing.

On Thursday, a court official said prosecutors believed Bo's wife, Gu, and a family aide, Zhang Xiaojun, killed Heywood by pouring poison down his throat after a business dispute led Gu to believe Heywood had threatened her son, Bo Guagua, then a student at Harvard University.

During Gu's seven-hour hearing on Thursday, it was alleged Heywood had written a letter to Guagua, threatening to "destroy" him, said a source who had been briefed on the hearing. Heywood and Guagua had fallen into dispute over Heywood's demand for a fee to help arrange a 130 million pounds ($200 million) financial transaction, the source added.

Guagua, believed to be in the United States after graduating this year from Harvard University, denied there was such a deal of that value but appeared to confirm the letter's existence.

"I cannot comment on any of the details (of the letter), but I can disclose that there is no such thing as either possessing or transferring 130 million pounds," Guagua said in an e-mail sent to Reuters. ($1 = 0.6396 British pounds)

(Writing and additional reporting by Chris Buckley in Beijing; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)

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