ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos and his coalition partners have struck a deal on new cuts demanded by creditors to secure a vital €130 billion bailout.

A spokeswoman for the prime minister's office says the agreement with the majority Socialists and the conservatives will allow alternative cuts to those rejected early Thursday during a meeting of the three coalition party leaders.

She spoke on customary condition of anonymity.

Although all the other cuts demanded by Greece's eurozone partners and the International Monetary Fund were approved, party leaders had balked at new pension cuts.

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CAIRO (AP) — Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood is calling on the country's ruling generals to sack the current military-appointed government, saying it has failed to manage the deteriorating security and economic situation in the country.

Brotherhood spokesman Mahmoud Ghozlan says the military should appoint a Brotherhood representative prime minister, who would then form a new coalition government.

The Brotherhood controls nearly 50 percent of the seats in the new parliament.

Ghozlan said Thursday a government backed by parliament would be more empowered to handle challenging security and economic problems.

In the past week, Egypt has been rattled by a deadly soccer riot that sparked days of clashes between protesters and the police. At least 89 people have been killed since the violence began last week.

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BEIRUT (AP) — The European Union will impose harsher sanctions on Syria, a senior EU official has said, as Russia tried to broker talks between the vice president and the opposition to calm violence. Activists reported at least 50 killed in the regime's siege of the restive city of Homs.

Russia, a close ally of Syria, and the West are pushing down starkly different paths in trying to deal with Syria's nearly 11 months of bloodshed. After blocking a Western and Arab attempt to bring U.N. pressure on President Bashar Assad to step down, Russia has launched a bid to show it can resolve the turmoil.

Moscow is calling for a combination of reforms by the regime and negotiations, without calling for Assad to go. Its provisions are so far finding no traction with the opposition, which dismisses promises of reform as empty gestures, refuses any negotiations while violence continues and says Assad's removal is the only option in the crisis.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said outside forces should let Syrians settle their conflict "independently."

"We should not act like a bull in a china shop," Putin said Wednesday, according to the ITAR-TASS news agency. "We have to give people a chance to make decisions about their destiny independently, to help, to give advice, to put limits somewhere so that the opposing sides would not have a chance to use arms, but not to interfere."

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who met with Assad Tuesday in Damascus, told reporters in Moscow that the Syrian president delegated to his vice president, Farouk al-Sharaa, responsibility for holding a dialogue with the opposition.

Lavrov blamed both Assad's regime and opposition forces for instigating the violence, which the U.N. says has killed well over 5,400 people.

"On both sides, there are people that aim at an armed confrontation, not a dialogue," Lavrov said.

Rebel soldiers are playing a bigger role in Syria's Arab-Spring inspired uprising, turning it into a more militarized conflict and hurtling the country ever more quickly toward a civil war.

In their meeting Tuesday, Assad said the government was ready to talk to the opposition and would cooperate with "any effort that boosts stability in Syria."

The regime's crackdown on dissent has left it almost completely isolated internationally and facing growing sanctions. The U.S. closed its embassy in Damascus on Monday and five European countries and six Arab Gulf nations have pulled their ambassadors out of Damascus over the past two days. Germany, whose envoy left Syria this month, said he would not be replaced.

In Brussels, a senior EU official said the 27-nation bloc will soon impose harsher sanctions against Syria as it seeks to weaken Assad's regime.

The official said the new measures may include bans on the import of Syrian phosphates, on commercial flights between Syria and Europe, and on financial transactions with the country's central bank. The European Union imports 40 percent of Syria's phosphate exports.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in keeping with EU rules, said some measures would be adopted at the EU foreign ministers meeting on Feb. 27. But he stressed the nature of the measures to be adopted remained unclear since the ministers are concerned over the impact on the Syrian public.

The U.N.'s top human rights official Navi Pillay called on nations to immediately act to stop the bloodshed, saying she was "appalled" by the Syrian regime's offensive against the central city of Homs, where activists say hundreds have been killed since Saturday.

She said the killings show an "extreme urgency for the international community to cut through the politics and take effective action to protect the Syrian population."

In New York, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told reporters that the Arab League planned to send observers back to Syria and had asked the U.N. to consider a joint mission.

The U.N. chief provided no specifics, but the idea appears aimed at giving the regional group a boost after the league's earlier mission was pulled out of the country because of security concerns.

Ban called the continuing violence "unacceptable" and added: "I fear that the appalling brutality we are witnessing in Homs, with heavy weapons firing into civilian neighborhoods, is a grim harbinger of worse to come."

On the ground, Syrian forces persisted with their assault on Homs, the country's third largest city, trying to put down what has been an epicenter of the uprising.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 53 people were killed in Wednesday's shelling of the Homs neighborhoods of Bayadah, Baba Amr, Khaldiyeh and Karm el-Zeytoun. The group also said that 23 homes were heavily damaged in Baba Amr alone.

Omar Shaker, an activist in Baba Amr, said his neighborhood was under "very intense shelling" by tanks, mortars, artillery and heavy machine guns. Shaker added that he counted five bodies Wednesday in his district. The death tolls, which the groups say they gather from activists on the ground, could not be independently confirmed. Syrian authorities keep tight control on the media.

"The situation is dire. We are short of food, water and medical aid. Doctors have collapsed after treating the wounded without rest for five days," Shaker said. "We want Lavrov to come and spend a night in Homs to see what we have been passing through."

The activist urged the international community to set up a safe passage so that women and children can leave volatile areas of Homs.

The head of the Observatory, Rami Abdul-Rahman, said the regime was trying "exhaust rebels in preparation for storming neighborhoods."

The Observatory reported at least another eight civilians killed around the country.

The Assad regime says terrorists acting out a foreign conspiracy to destabilize the country are behind the uprising, not people seeking to transform the authoritarian regime.

Syria's state-run TV said gunmen fired mortar rounds at the oil refinery in Homs, one of two in Syria, setting two fuel tankers on fire. It also said attackers denoted a car bomb in the Homs neighborhood of Bayadah, killing and wounding a number of civilians and troops.

Regime forces launched assaults on the village of Tseel in southern Daraa province on the Jordanian border, and the rebel-controlled mountain resort town of Zabadani, north of Damascus, the Observatory and another activist group, the Local Coordination Committees, reported.

Troops loyal to Assad also clashed with army defectors in the northwestern province of Idlib, bordering Turkey, the two groups said.

___

Associated Press writer Mansur Mirovalev in Moscow, Slobodan Lekic in Brussels and Anita Snow at the United Nations contributed to this report.

Bassem Mroue can be reached on twitter at http://twitter.com/bmroue

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PARIS (AP) — Passengers are facing a fourth day of cancellations and delays at French airports because of a strike over labor rights.

Air France said it was canceling up to 35 percent of long-distance flights worldwide and 25 percent of other flights Thursday because of the strike by pilots and other personnel. Paris' busy Charles de Gaulle airport saw the most flights canceled.

The four-day strike is set to end before unions meet with the government Friday to discuss their dispute over a bill that would require workers to announce strikes 48 hours in advance.

Union leader Yves Deshayes threatened Thursday to resume strikes if those talks fail.

Air France has been losing up to €10 million a day because of the strike.

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KAMPALA, Uganda (AP) — Uganda's government says it does not support a parliamentarian's decision to reintroduce a bill that originally proposed the death penalty for some homosexual acts.

A government statement late Wednesday says the bill is not part of the government's legislative agenda, but that debate on it must proceed under the constitution.

The bill was reintroduced Tuesday by legislator David Bahati, who said when he first introduced the bill in 2009 that his goal was to protect Ugandan children from Western gays who lure them with money and other promises.

Advocacy groups and Western leaders have denounced the bill. Analysts say it would be passed immediately but that it hasn't been considered only because it lacks the political blessing of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni.

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MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexican troops have made an historic seizure of 15 tons of pure methamphetamine in the western state of Jalisco, the Mexican army said in a statement released late Wednesday.

Soldiers discovered the huge cache in the town of Tlajomulco de Zuniga, a suburb of Mexico's second-largest city, Guadalajara.

The statement had no other details but said it would publicly present the seizure on Thursday. Spokesmen answering the phone at the army's base in Guadalajara refused to comment further.

No one could say late Wednesday what the largest seizure was previously in Mexico.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said total meth seizures worldwide were 31 metric tons in 2009, the most recent figures available.

The find outside Guadalajra is more than four times the size of a major seizure last summer of 3.4 tons and more than twice the total amount of meth seized in Mexico in 2009, according to the U.N. report.

Mexico is the primary source of the meth sold in the United States, according to U.S. drug intelligence reports.

Methamphetamine production has been rising in Mexico, and much of the increase is attributed to the powerful Sinaloa Cartel, headed by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, who the U.S. Treasury Department calls the most powerful drug trafficker in the world.

Jalisco state has long been considered the hub of Sinaloa's methamphetamine trafficking, thought army statement didn't indicate which Mexican cartel may have been involved.

The Sinaloa cartel also is suspected of smuggling in mammoth amounts of precursor chemicals that are used produce meth in industrial-size operations. It also appears to be extending its massive production of methamphetamine into neighboring Guatemala, where remote, isolated mountains and an alliance with a key Guatemalan trafficker are making the Central American nation a new international meth production base.

Mexican authorities seized 675 tons of a key precursor chemical in December alone, and all of it was heading for Guatemala.

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LONDON (AP) — The Bank of England is injecting another 50 billion pounds ($79 billion) into the British economy, which contracted in the last three months of 2011.

The new stimulus raises the total monetary stimulus since the program started in March 2009 to 325 billion pounds.

The hope is that by increasing the amount of money in the financial system, the purchases, known as quantitative easing or QE, will loosen credit for businesses and raise asset prices. Quantitative easing can be inflationary, but analysts say the bank has room to act.

The bank also Thursday kept its main interest rate unchanged at the record low of 0.5 percent.

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FESSENHEIM, France (AP) — French President Nicolas Sarkozy is refusing to shut down an aging nuclear plant that has become a symbol of growing resistance to nuclear energy in France.

Sarkozy said Thursday while visiting the plant in Fessenheim that it would be a huge mistake and a "scandal" to close it and lay off its workers.

He insisted there was no doubt about the plant's safety.

The plant, opened in 1978 in northeast France, is the country's oldest. France relies on nuclear energy more than any other nation, with about three-quarters of electricity coming from its nuclear reactors.

The future of nuclear energy, especially after the accident at Japan's Fukushima Dai-chi plant last year, has become an issue in the campaigning for France's presidential elections in April and May.

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BANGKOK (AP) — Thailand's ruling party has proposed a controversial plan to amend the country's constitution, which was drafted after a 2006 coup that ousted Thaksin Shinawatra from power.

It contains a clause that led to the dissolution of two pro-Thaksin parties.

The Pheu Thai party headed by Thaksin's sister says the constitution is "undemocratic" because it was drafted by a military-appointed committee.

The plan submitted Thursday to Parliament calls for the creation of a constitution-drafting assembly of 99 people that would have 180 days to rewrite the charter before submitting it to a national referendum.

A similar move by a pro-Thaksin government in 2008 sparked street rallies that culminated with protesters shutting Bangkok's two airports for a week.

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MOSCOW (AP) — Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev says Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has "exhausted himself" as Russia's leader and his inability to change the Kremlin's political system might prompt more massive protests.

Putin, who was president in 2000-2008, is almost certain to win the upcoming election in March despite recent opposition street rallies, Russia's largest since the Soviet collapse.

Gorbachev said Thursday that if Putin does not change the system he built "everything will end up on city squares."

Gorbachev recently called on the Kremlin to annul the results of the December parliamentary election that triggered the rallies.

Gorbachev, whose 1985-91 rule ended with the Soviet collapse, remains admired abroad but is regarded as insignificant at home.

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