The president of the Syrian National Council (SNC), the country’s main opposition bloc, has offered to resign after a key activist group accused him of monopolising power, just two days after he was re-elected for a third three-month term.

Burhan Ghalioun told Al Jazeera on Thursday that he would give up his post to avert division within the opposition bloc through fresh elections.

— al-Jazeera

Vermont’s governor has signed a bill making it the first U.S. state to ban fracking, the controversial practice to extract natural gas from the ground.

“This is a big deal,” Gov. Peter Shumlin said Wednesday. “This bill will ensure that we do not inject chemicals into groundwater in a desperate pursuit for energy.”

— CNN

The Obama administration has named the first full ambassador toBurma in more than two decades as US political ties warm with the former south-east Asian pariah state.

As has been long expected, the White House tapped its current special envoy for Burma to become a full ambassador. Derek Mitchell has overseen US engagement with Burma as the country also known as Myanmar has undergone startling political reform.

— The Guardian

The US state of Texas is likely to have executed an innocent man due to careless handling of the case, a report by US law students claims.

Carlos de Luna was killed by lethal injection in 1989 for the brutal murder of a single mother six years earlier.

Right up until his execution, de Luna maintained a fellow Hispanic called Carlos Hernandez was the real culprit.

— BBC

The trial of General Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb army chief accused of orchestrating war crimes and a campaign of genocide, has begun at a special UN court at The Hague in the Netherlands.

Prosecutors at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia made their opening statements against Mladic on Wednesday almost a year after his arrest in Serbia and subsequent deportation after years on the run.

— al-Jazeera

Just days before a NATO summit that leaders had hoped would present a carefully scripted display of unity on Afghanistan, the inauguration of a French president committed to an early drawdown has instead intensified a rush for the exits from an unpopular war.

In advance of this weekend’s summit in Chicago, the Obamaadministration and senior North Atlantic Treaty Organization officials have been scrambling to ensure that alliance members remain committed to keeping troops in Afghanistan until the end of 2014, and to paying billions of dollars after that to prop up the Afghan government.

— Los Angeles Times

The debate over updating a law that protects victims of domestic abuse has become the latest battleground over immigration policy.

Republicans in Congress are proposing to strip away existing protections for immigrants who are the victims of domestic violence.

The Republican-drafted version of the Violence Against Women Act, originally passed in 1994, is scheduled to be debated on the House floor on Wednesday and could be brought to a vote this week.

— Los Angeles Times

Queen Sofia of Spain has cancelled a visit to the UK to mark Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee because of disputes over Gibraltar.

A Spanish government statement said it was “hardly appropriate” for Queen Sofia, 73, to attend a lunch on Friday.

The UK and Spain have been in dispute over fishing rights off Gibraltar, a UK territory which Spain also claims.

At least seven people have been killed in clashes between armed men and residents of a Libyan town on the border with Algeria, officials said, underlining the insecurity that still plagues the country one month before elections.

“There were clashes in the city of Ghadames,” Nasser al-Manaa, Libya’s government spokesman said on Wednesday.

— al-Jazeera

Chuck Brown, known as the “Godfather of Go-Go,” a genre blending funk, jazz and soul and other musical forms, died Wednesday, his manager said.

Brown, 75, died at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, manager Tom Goldfogle said. The performer, whose career spanned four decades, died of multi-organ failure from sepsis.

— CNN