The announcement came shortly after Poroshenko returned to Kiev from Brussels where he signed a landmark free trade deal at a European Union summit.

The ceasefire extension had been undertaken, it said, in line with a deadline set by EU leaders for Ukrainian rebels to agree to ceasefire verification arrangements, return border checkpoints to Kiev authorities and free hostages including detained monitors of the OSCE rights and security watchdog.

At a separate meeting, Poroshenko and national security chiefs said that during the next 72 hours recruitment centers for Russian fighters across the border in Russia should be closed.

Movements of rebel forces around the east and the setting-up of rebel checkpoints or barricades should also cease.

Ukrainian government forces would have the right to end the ceasefire ahead of time in any areas where ceasefire conditions were not being implemented, the announcement said.

(Writing by Richard Balmforth; Editing by Ken Wills)

Ukraine extends cease-fire by 72 hours

The Ukrainian president says fighting is halted to line up with a deadline set by EU leaders.
Reserves right to end deal early

By Jonathan Stempel

(Reuters) - BP Plc has asked a U.S. judge to direct what it called a "vast number" of businesses to repay hundreds of millions of dollars it says were wrongly awarded as compensation on claims stemming from the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

In a Friday court filing, BP asked U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier in New Orleans to require businesses to make restitution plus interest of excess payments, which it called "windfalls." It also requested an injunction to stop the businesses from spending these excess sums.

BP said letting the overpayments stand would create discrepancies that reward some businesses whose awards were made sooner. It also said "there is no public interest in permitting dissipation of assets to which claimants had no right."

Friday's request escalates BP's legal battle over how to interpret its 2012 settlement to resolve claims by businesses who said they suffered economic losses because of the spill.

BP has long said the businesses' lawyers and claims administrator Patrick Juneau have misinterpreted the settlement, allowing recoveries without proof that the spill caused losses.

The London-based oil company has said the uncapped settlement could cost $9.2 billion, higher than its original $7.8 billion estimate, and that this amount could grow.

On June 9, the U.S. Supreme Court said BP must continue to pay claims as it pursues legal challenges to the payouts.

Friday's filing came six months Barbier directed Juneau to change his policy in reviewing claims applications, and ensure that claimants be able to "match" revenues with costs for the purpose of calculating financial losses.

BP said Juneau's new policy, which won court approval on May 5, will lead to "dramatically different calculations of lost profits," and justifies recouping earlier, inflated awards.

To illustrate the potential changes, BP said a seller of animal skins would have under the new policy been paid $14 million less than it was awarded, while a construction company located hundreds of miles from the Gulf would have been paid $8.4 million less.

Juneau's earlier interpretation "resulted in claimants receiving awards well in excess of what they are entitled to under the settlement agreement - in some cases by millions of dollars - or awards that weren't warranted at all," BP spokesman Geoff Morrell said. "Letting these erroneous awards stand uncorrected would violate basic principles of fairness and equity."

Steve Herman and Jim Roy, the lead lawyers for business claimants, said in a statement: "This is just another attempt by BP to back out of the commitment it made to the Gulf."

A spokesman for Juneau did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The April 20, 2010 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and rupture of BP's Macondo oil well led to 11 deaths and the largest U.S. offshore oil spill. BP has said it has taken $42.7 billion of pretax charges for the spill.

The case is In re: Oil Spill by the Oil Rig "Deepwater Horizon" in the Gulf of Mexico, on April 20, 2010, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Louisiana, No. 10-md-02179.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Bernard Orr)

BP wants to recoup Gulf spill payments

The company asks a judge to force businesses to repay hundreds of millions of dollars it says were wrongly awarded.
Injunction requested

GAUHATI, India (AP) — Indian authorities rushed food and drinking water Saturday to thousands of people marooned by monsoon rains and mudslides that left at least 11 dead in the remote northeast.

Residents waded through waist- and knee-deep water in several parts of the Assam state capital, Gauhati, which was hit by nearly 60 millimeters (2.3 inches) of pounding rain on Thursday night. The average four-month monsoon rainfall is 89 centimeters (35 inches).

"Inflatable boats and makeshift banana rafts have become a mode of transport in the heart of Gauhati. This is something I didn't imagine," said Rani Das, a researcher who could not reach her office on Saturday.

Loose patches of earth rolled down the hills around Gauhati as light rain continued on Saturday. Authorities closed schools for the day in the city.

India's Meteorological Department said the rains were caused by a strong monsoon, while other parts of the country were experiencing 30 to 40 percent deficiency in rainfall in June. India's monsoon season lasts from June to the end of September.

All the 11 deaths in the past two days have been reported from Gauhati. Police said they included a family of three who were buried when a portion of a concrete house caved in on their tin-roofed home early Friday. Another person died in a mudslide and five others were electrocuted.

Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi, Assam state's top elected official, waded through the deluge to reach some of the worst-hit areas, but was booed by residents angry over the lack of food and drinking water.

Elsewhere in Assam state, monsoon rain fed the mighty Brahmaputra and other rivers, flooding at least six of the state's 27 districts, including vast swathes of crop area.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is poised to deliver its verdict in a case that weighs the religious rights of employers and the right of women to the birth control of their choice.

The court meets for a final time Monday to release decisions in its two remaining cases before the justices take off for the summer.

The cases involve birth control coverage under President Barack Obama's health law and fees paid to labor unions representing government employees by workers who object to being affiliated with a union.

Two years after Chief Justice John Roberts cast the pivotal vote that saved the health care law in the midst of Obama's campaign for re-election, the justices are considering a sliver of the law.

Employers must cover contraception for women at no extra charge among a range of preventive benefits in employee health plans.

Dozens of companies, including the Oklahoma City-based arts and crafts chain Hobby Lobby, claim religious objections to covering some or all contraceptives.

The methods and devices at issue before the Supreme Court are those that Hobby Lobby and furniture maker Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. of East Earl, Pennsylvania, say can work after conception. They are the emergency contraceptives Plan B and ella, as well as intrauterine devices, which can cost up to $1,000.

The Obama administration says insurance coverage for birth control is important to women's health and reduces the number of unwanted pregnancies, as well as abortions.

The court has never recognized a for-profit corporation's religious rights under federal law or the Constitution. But even some supporters of the administration's position said they would not be surprised if the court were to do so on Monday, perhaps limiting the right to corporations that are under tight family control.

Several justices worried at the argument in March that such a decision would lead to religious objections to covering blood transfusions or vaccinations.

Prominent Washington lawyer Paul Smith said another important question is how the decision would apply to "laws that protect people from discrimination, particularly LGBT people."

In the Hobby Lobby case, even if the court finds such a right exists, it still has to weigh whether the government's decision to have employee health plans pay for birth control is important enough to overcome the companies' religious objections.

It is no surprise that this high-profile case, argued three months ago, is among the last released.

The other unresolved case has been hanging around since late January, often a sign that the outcome is especially contentious.

Home health care workers in Illinois want the court to rule that public sector unions cannot collect fees from workers who aren't union members. The idea behind compulsory fees for nonmembers is that the union negotiates the contract for all workers, so they all should share in the cost of that work.

The court has been hostile to labor unions in recent years. If that trend continues Monday, the justices could confine their ruling to home health workers or they could strike a big blow against unions more generally.

Supreme Court set to rule on birth-control dispute

The case weighs employers' religious rights and women's right to the birth control of their choice.
A sliver of Obamacare

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MOSCOW (AP) — Russia's foreign minister on Saturday accused the United States of encouraging Ukraine to challenge Moscow and heavily weighing in on the European Union.

Speaking in televised remarks Saturday, Sergey Lavrov said that "our American colleagues still prefer to push the Ukrainian leadership toward a confrontational path."

He added that chances for settling the Ukrainian crisis would have been higher if it only depended on Russia and Europe.

Lavrov spoke after Friday's European Union summit, which decided not to immediately impose new sanctions on Russia for destabilizing eastern Ukraine, but gave the Russian government and pro-Russian insurgents there until Monday to take steps to improve the situation.

Ukraine on Friday signed a free-trade pact with the EU, the very deal that a former Ukrainian president dumped under pressure from Moscow in November, fueling huge protests that eventually drove him from power. Moscow responded by annexing the mainly Russian-speaking Crimean Peninsula in March, and a pro-Russian insurgency in eastern Ukraine erupted the month after, leading to the developments that have brought Russia-West relations to their lowest point since the Cold War times.

The U.S. and the EU have slapped travel bans and asset freezes on members of Russian President Vladimir Putin's inner circle and threatened to impose more crippling sanctions against entire sectors of Russia's economy if the Kremlin fails to de-escalate the crisis.

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Pro-Russian fighters stand next to a truck with a Russian flag, inside a captured Ukrainian National …

The EU leaders on Friday said Russia and the rebels should take steps to ease the violence, including releasing all captives, retreating from border checkpoints, agreeing on a way to verify the cease-fire and launching "substantial negotiations" on Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko's peace plan.

The weeklong cease-fire, which both sides have been accused of violating, expired at 10 p.m. local time (1900 GMT), but Poroshenko quickly declared its extension until 10 p.m. local time Monday. He warned, however, that the cease-fire could be terminated in areas where rebels violate it.

A leader of the insurgents, Alexander Borodai, promised to abide by the extended cease-fire after Friday's troika talks that included a former Ukrainian president who represented the Kiev government, the Russian ambassador and an OSCE envoy.

He rejected the EU leaders' demand to retreat from three checkpoints on the border with Russia captured by the rebels, but invited OSCE to send its monitors to the border crossings and any other areas in the east.

Borodai also said that the rebels have offered the government that the conflicting parties free all the captives they hold. He demanded that the Ukrainian government pull back its forces as a condition for holding meaningful talks to settle the crisis.

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A pro-Russian fighter smokes as he guards an entrance of a captured Ukrainian National Guard unit in …

Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Koval was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying that the situation in the east was largely quiet overnight and there were no casualties among Ukrainian troops despite sporadic shooting. But later on Saturday, Ukrainian military spokesman Olexiy Dmitrashkovskiy said that three Ukrainian soldiers were killed and four others were wounded in a rebel shelling near Slovyansk, a key flashpoint in the insurgency, Interfax reported.

Rebels, in turn, claimed that Ukrainian troops tried to capture one of the checkpoints on the Russian border, which they control, but were rebuffed.

Russian officials said that several Ukrainian shells landed on Russian territory early Saturday, and one shell fragment hit the border checkpoint on the Russian side of the border, but there were no injuries.

The insurgents also descended on a Ukrainian National Guards unit in Donetsk, demanding that the troops leave or join the rebels' ranks. None of the troops voiced a desire to switch sides. There was no fighting there.

As part of his peace plan, Poroshenko this week also submitted a set of constitutional amendments that would give broader powers to the regions and allow local authorities to have more say on such issues as language and culture. In an address to the nation Saturday, he voiced hope that the move would strengthen the country's unity.

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A pro-Russian fighter sits under a Russian flag as he guards the entrance of a captured Ukrainian Na …

Lavrov acknowledged that Russia has some leverage with the rebels, pointing at their move this week to release four observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe after weeks of captivity, but claimed that Moscow's influence is limited.

"There are reasons to believe that they hear us on other aspects of Russian position regarding the crisis in Ukraine, but that doesn't mean that they immediately move to heed our calls," he said. "These people have their own vision, it's their land and they want to be its masters, they want to negotiate with the central government on what terms it can be done."

Four other OSCE observers are still being held, but Borodai promised Friday to free them "in the nearest days."

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Balint Szlanko contributed to this report from Donetsk, Ukraine.