The Turkish government submitted a reform bill to parliament on Thursday to revive the stalled peace talks with Kurdish militants, in an apparent bid to seek votes from Turkey's biggest minority group in August presidential polls.

The six-article package of reforms will put the peace process under legal protection and grant legal immunity to the key actors -- including politicians, bureaucrats and the spy agency -- involved in the peace talks with Kurdish rebels, a parliamentary source told Agence France Presse.

A public prosecutor on Thursday appealed against fraud charges that could bring Spanish King Felipe's sister Cristina to trial, accusing a judge of pursuing her on "mere suspicions".

Just a week after Felipe became Spain's new king, an investigating judge on Wednesday brought the 49-year-old princess a step closer to trial by upholding tax fraud and money-laundering charges against her.

Thailand's army rulers will appoint a national assembly stacked with military officers to pick an interim government leader, officials said Thursday, as they seek to retain their influence over the kingdom's political transition.

In the first real hint of the shape the politically fraught country's next administration may take, army sources told AFP that the military will select the 200 assembly members and that the junta itself will not be dissolved.

The United States warned Russia on Thursday it had only "hours" to prove it was helping disarm Ukrainian insurgents whose separatist drive has reopened a Cold War-style chasm in East-West ties.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry's warning came a day before Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko signs the final chapters of an historic EU accord that nudges his country toward eventual membership and pulls it firmly out of Russia's reach.

Pakistan's military shelled a strategic town Thursday in the latest round of its offensive against Taliban militants in the country's restive northwest, as aid agencies scaled up relief efforts for refugees.

The heavy bombardment of Miranshah, the main town of North Waziristan tribal district, began at 6:00 am (0100 GMT), according to local intelligence and military sources.

Al-Qaida-linked Shebab commandos on Thursday attacked an African Union military base in central Somalia dressed in stolen government army uniforms, killing at least two soldiers from Djibouti, the AU force said.

The Shebab said their gunmen stormed the compound of a hotel where Djiboutian troops with the AU force were based in the town of Bulla Burde, some 200 kilometers (125 miles) north of the capital Mogadishu, their spokesman Abdulaziz Abu Musab told AFP.

A French court on Thursday ordered the extradition to Belgium of a man suspected of carrying out a deadly shooting at the Jewish Museum in Brussels on May 24 that killed four people.

The court in Versailles, west of Paris, said Franco-Algerian Mehdi Nemmouche, 29, who was detained several days after the attack, should be handed over to Belgian authorities for "killings with a terrorist connotation."

Kenyan police have arrested the governor of the coastal Lamu district in connection with three recent massacres in which over 60 people were killed, officers said Thursday.

Governor Issa Timamy was arrested late Wednesday in connection with killings last week over two consecutive nights in the town of Mpeketoni and a nearby village that claimed nearly 60 lives. Another attack this week left at least five dead, officials said.

Investigators looking into the disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines plane are confident the jet was on autopilot when it crashed in a remote stretch of the Indian Ocean, Australian officials said Thursday as they announced the latest shift in the search for the doomed airliner.

After analyzing data between the plane and a satellite, officials believe Flight 370 was on autopilot the entire time it was flying across a vast expanse of the southern Indian Ocean, Australian Transport Safety Bureau chief commissioner Martin Dolan said.

A senior Thai general has rejected reports the army planned to rid the kingdom of the influence of controversial former premier Thaksin Shinawatra years before it seized power in May. 

"So far as I know there was no advanced planning, because if it were planned that would be illegitimate," Lieutenant General Chatchalerm Chalermsukh told the BBC in an interview published Thursday.