Seventeen years after the end of a civil war that saw hundreds of their villages razed and thousands of their loved ones killed, the Ixil people still live in mud-and-wood houses in the most rugged and isolated parts of northwestern Guatemala. Most of them have no drinking water, paved roads or basic services such as health and education.

Largely ignored by authorities for centuries, the Ixil came under the spotlight after a Guatemalan court found former dictator Efrain Rios Montt guilty of genocide on May 10 for the scorched-earth policies used against the Ixil during his 17 months in power in the 1980s.

The conviction was annulled 10 days later following a trial that did nothing to change their lives of the Ixil people.

Byron Garcia, a social anthropologist who has worked in the area for a decade, said Ixil Mayans live in the same poverty as always.

"People have been relegated to less productive places, places where you can't grow food, to the mountains made of stone," Garcia said. "The young people who can, sow plots of land. And when they can't, they migrate."

Feliciana Cobo was 8 when soldiers attacked her village. She and her family separated and ran into the mountains, where they hid for several days with nothing to eat.

Cobo said her mother was killed when the army bombed the village and surrounding area, and her grandmother died later after growing sick from the cold and bad living conditions. Her family eventually lost their land and their poverty deepened.

Now a single mother of three children, the 40-year-old Cobo borrows electricity from a neighbor and supports her kids by washing the clothes of neighbors and weaving garments to sell.

"I grew up during the civil war and I don't know how to read or write. I didn't go to school," Cobo said. "All I know is to weave."

Forensic experts are now exhuming bodies from the cemeteries that the Ixil people created to bury loved ones who died of starvation, hypothermia and disease as well as munitions while they hid from the soldiers in the mountains.

"I helped exhume my mother," Cobo said. "I don't know if it was the smoke or the impact of the bombs planes were dropping on us but we all left running and when we got back together, my mother had already died."

Garcia, who now lives in the Guatemalan capital, said that victims feel a need to tell their stories, to be heard, to be indemnified, to find the bodies of their loved ones and be able to bury them.

Cobo said she doubts justice will be done, but is glad some fellow Ixil Mayans could travel to Guatemala City to tell their stories at the trial.

"We're not inventing the dead," she said.

SEVILLE, Spain/THE HAGUE, The Netherlands (Reuters) - Nurse recruiting firm Roca-BHR drew more than 800 applicants in Spain last year when it offered guaranteed jobs in the Netherlands caring for the elderly to those who were willing to take an intensive course in Dutch.

Of the 20 young nurses accepted to the program - financed by Dutch companies that need nurses - 11 completed the seven months of training and tests in the southern city of Seville and flew to The Hague, where they start work in July.

With full nursing degrees, they are all over-qualified for their nursing aide positions. But given that more than 18,000 nurses are out of work in Spain, the compromise is worth it.

Hiring is frozen in Spain's national health system and almost at a standstill in private hospitals and clinics thanks to drastic spending cuts to trim the public deficit. Some 1,000 trained nurses have never found work in their field, according to Spanish nursing union Satse.

"It's very, very difficult to find a job in Spain," said Maria Angeles Luque, 25, one of the group of 10 women and one man who will be working in the Netherlands for 1,784 euros ($2,300) a month.

Maria Jose Marin, who joined the training group with her twin sister Maria Teresa, said that when they began nursing school several years ago, most graduates found jobs the summer after they graduated.

"But the situation got worse and worse. I never imagined things would end up like this," the 23-year-old told Reuters. The two have been looking for work since they graduated in 2011.

A Reuters photographer accompanied the twins for a week as they traded the room they shared in their parents' home for a dorm in a temporary residence in The Hague. From a family of eight siblings in the town of Paradas, 50 km (30 miles) outside Seville, it was their first visit to the Netherlands.

"This is at least an opportunity to do something. For better or for worse, it's an opportunity," said Maria Jose.

The chance these nurses have seized is a solution for many young people around Europe trying to weather a recession and joblessness currently at 23.5 percent - moving to where the jobs are, often helped by their employers-to-be and now, possibly the European Union itself.

One of the worst-off in the EU, with more than half of its 16-24 year olds out of work, Spain is calling on Europe to speed up the disbursement of 6 billion euros earmarked to help young people find jobs.

The European Commission has backed the idea of spending the funds over the next two years, rather than the next seven.

Among its recommendations - which EU leaders will review at a June 27-28 summit - is to spend money to help young people move for jobs, and to encourage employers to take on young people and train them while they start to work.

Youth joblessness is costing the EU up to 150 billion euros a year, or around 1.2 percent of economic output, the Commission calculates. The lost productivity and unemployment benefits are more costly than training programs and job subsidies.

PLENTY IN SPAIN, DEARTH IN NETHERLANDS

Just five years ago, there was full employment for Spanish nurses and new graduates immediately stepped in to jobs covering summer holidays for established nurses, said a spokesman at Satse, who asked not to be named in line with union policy.

Now, when a nurse goes on holiday, the other nurses in the hospital do double shifts to cover, he said. Satse recently identified 4,000 nursing jobs available around Europe and published a "practical guide" to help members find work abroad.

But while there is a nursing oversupply in Spain, the Netherlands has the opposite problem, especially when it comes to filling jobs for less-qualified care professionals known as nursing aides or health care assistants, such as those that often work with the elderly.

This is despite the fact that the Netherlands has more than 10 nurses per 1,000 people, compared to just under five per 1,000 in Spain, according to Eurostat data from 2008.

When caregiving personnel such as nursing aides are included, the Netherlands' ratio still doubles Spain, with 21.4 per 1,000 people, compared with 10 per 1,000.

"It's very difficult in the big cities in Holland to find enough nurses with the right level of qualification," said Theo Stoffels, a manager at private healthcare group Respect Zorggroep Scheveningen.

"Today when nurses leave school, they prefer to go to work in a hospital. It's more interesting, more exciting, whereas care of elderly people is a different kind of work."

Stoffels' company will hire the Spanish nurses trained by Roca-BHR to work at hospices and nursing homes that it operates in and around Scheveningen, a seaside resort district of The Hague.

Olof Craenen, Spain director for Roca-BHR, has recruited nurses in Latvia, Poland and Bulgaria to work in the Netherlands for companies that pay his company a fee to give them language training.

The nurses that traveled on June 4 from Seville are in the first Roca-BHR group from Spain.

Maria Jose and her sister spent three hours a day in Dutch class in Seville, and up to nine additional hours practicing their spoken Dutch with a computer program. They did not pay for the courses, but had to commit full-time to the program and not work elsewhere, and be prepared to pay for housing in the Netherlands.

Craenen said his training focused on language and culture and that he selected nurses whose families were supportive of their move abroad, to reduce the likelihood they would abandon their new jobs.

After two years working in the Netherlands the nurses will be eligible for higher-paying professional nursing jobs, he said.

In an email exchange from The Hague, Maria Teresa said the most frustrating things about the first few weeks in her new country has been struggling to make herself understood and getting used to an early-to-bed-early-to-rise schedule.

Her Dutch colleagues have made all the difference, always willing to help out and answer questions, she said.

"They all encourage me and tell me 'maakt niet uit, komt goed,' which means 'don't worry, everything will be fine.' Their attitude has surprised me and that has cheered me up."

($1 = 0.7612 euros)

(Additional reporting by Carlos Ruano in Madrid; Writing by Fiona Ortiz; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Federal Reserve pledged to draft tough rules for Wall Street while shielding smaller banks from some of the harshest impact of the global Basel III capital rules it adopted on Tuesday.

The central bank voted in favor of the long-awaited U.S. version of the global rules that require banks to use more equity capital to fund their business, to make them more robust after the 2007-09 credit meltdown.

It provided some flexibility to benefit the housing recovery and smaller banks in its final rule, but said it would write four new rules in the coming months to address concerns about the risk the eight largest U.S. banks pose to the financial system.

"The headline here is (that) community banks are getting significant relief," said Allison Breault, an associate at law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton in Brussels.

"The largest banking organizations are going to be subject to even stricter requirements than they had originally anticipated," she said.

The Basel III accord, named after the Swiss city that is home to its overseer, the Bank for International Settlements, was drawn up to make banks more stable in the wake of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

The pact, which will be phased in starting next year, will force most banks to hold about three times as much top-quality capital as is required under existing rules, to reduce their risk and protect taxpayers from costly bailouts.

Analysts at Barclays said there were no major negative surprises in the rules, and the KBW Bank Index of bank stocks was up 0.6 percent in early afternoon trading in a market that was slightly weaker overall.

Nearly 95 percent of banks with more than $10 billion in total assets were already meeting the Fed's minimum requirement of 7 percent common equity tier 1 capital, with a modest total capital shortfall of $2.5 billion.

LITTLE TO CHEER

The final rule - which numbers 972 pages - drops a provision from the original proposal that would have forced banks to set aside more capital to fund their residential mortgage business.

"The mortgage industry ... fared incredibly well in the final Basel III rulemaking," said Isaac Boltansky, a policy analyst with Compass point Research and Trading, adding it was a "significant win" for the mortgage industry.

Small banks can also opt out of a costly requirement that would have forced them to adjust the value of securities in their trading book on a frequent basis.

But the largest firms did not get any notable carveouts.

"For the biggest banks, there is little to cheer," said Jaret Seiberg, a financial analyst at Guggenheim Partners, a financial services firm.

The Fed said it was drafting four new rules that would go beyond what the Basel accord called for, including a hard cap on how much banks can borrow to fund their business, known as a leverage ratio, and more capital surcharges.

There has been rising concern among U.S. politicians that the Basel pact, which still allows banks to measure risk using their own mathematical models, does not do enough to prevent a repeat from the most recent crisis.

The Fed appears to have taken some of that on board, as Daniel Tarullo, in charge of financial supervision at the Fed, said bank regulators are working on four new rules for the country's biggest banks in the coming months.

Much of the debate has focused on the leverage ratio, which does not take into account banks' risk-weightings and is set at 3 percent in Basel, which many critics of Basel say makes it an unambitious goal. Tarullo agreed.

"The Basel III leverage ratio seems to have been set too low to be an effective counterpart to the combination of risk-weighted capital measures that have been agreed internationally," he said.

SYSTEMICALLY IMPORTANT

U.S. bank regulators are also working on a rule to address risks in short-term wholesale funding, a rule on combined equity and long-term debt, and a capital surcharge for banks that pose a potential threat to the entire system.

These Systemically Important Financial Institutions (SIFI) are: JP Morgan; Citigroup; Bank of America; Wells Fargo; Goldman Sachs; Morgan Stanley; Bank of New York Mellon and State Street.

Two other U.S. bank regulators - the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation - also must approve the Basel rules, which they had proposed together with the Fed.

The OCC's head, Thomas Curry, said in a press release that he intends to sign the rule next week. The FDIC has scheduled a meeting for July 9, and will be the first to put out a proposed rule for a bank leverage ratio.

The FDIC's second-in-command, Tom Hoenig, is an outspoken critic of Basel III, which he says allows lenders to appear well-capitalized when they are not.

He has said the rules are flawed because they give the banks latitude to use complicated measurements of how risky their loans are to determine the capital they must hold.

The Fed's final rule made no major changes to the timeline with which the Basel rules will be introduced compared to the proposed rule, nor to the minimum capital that banks need to hold as a percentage of their total assets.

(Additional reporting by Margaret Chadbourn, Peter Rudegeair and David Henry; editing by Karey Van Hall, Chizu Nomiyama, G Crosse)

TORONTO (Reuters) - The Canadian government will review all sales of wireless airwave licenses and reject any deals that would lead to undue concentration, it said on Friday in its latest move to weaken the dominance of the country's three big wireless carriers.

The new rules come after two of Canada's biggest telecom companies - Rogers Communications Inc and Telus Corp - tried to acquire spectrum owned by smaller operators.

By making it tougher for the dominant three - Rogers, Telus and BCE Inc's Bell - to buy additional airwaves, the rule changes could help clear the path for U.S.-based Verizon Communications Inc as it considers entering the Canadian market.

Ottawa has sought to break open the once-cozy Canadian telecom industry by keeping some spectrum out of the hands of the three biggest operators and making it easier for foreign companies to enter the market.

Canada's Conservative government has said it wants four viable wireless options for consumers in each region of the country.

The spectrum holdings of Rogers, BCE and Telus already dwarf those of newer, smaller entrants.

BLOCKED BIDS

The government effectively blocked Telus' C$380 million ($362 million) bid for struggling wireless upstart Mobilicity earlier this month by rejecting the transfer of its spectrum licenses.

In January, Rogers struck a deal giving it an option to buy rival Shaw Communications' unused spectrum, a move that Ottawa signaled disapproval of in April.

Shaw executives said on Friday they were not yet exploring alternatives to the Rogers option deal, which they described as irrevocable. The deal has not yet been sent to Ottawa for approval.

Just last month, Rogers announced a similar option deal to buy Quebecor Inc's unused spectrum in the Toronto area.

Rogers said the new rules were in line with its expectations and it would provide whatever information the government needs for its review. Both Rogers and Telus urged the government to let them put unused spectrum to work.

Canaccord Genuity analyst Dvai Ghose said he expects the government will block both attempts by Rogers to buy more spectrum, given Ottawa's preference for it to go to a new entrant.

EYES ON VERIZON

Mobilicity, Quebecor and Shaw all purchased the spectrum licenses in a 2008 auction in which the federal government set aside some airwaves for operators other than Rogers, Telus and BCE, which together control about 90 percent of the market.

The rules released on Friday are likely to get a close examination from Verizon. The company is in talks to acquire Mobilicity and has offered between $600 million and $800 million to buy another new entrant, Wind Mobile, sources familiar with the deals said on Wednesday.

Verizon's large holdings of U.S. spectrum would probably not work against it under the latest guidelines, which only apply to Canadian airwaves.

The policy would likely encourage Verizon and other outsiders to bid in an upcoming auction of much sought-after 700 megahertz airwaves, in which BCE, Telus and Rogers already face limits on how much spectrum they can buy.

The low-frequency spectrum is highly valued for its ability to penetrate buildings and travel long distances. It also lines up with two blocks of similar spectrum Verizon Wireless - a joint venture of Verizon and Britain's Vodafone Group Plc - is using in the United States to built a high speed network.

The prospect of Verizon entering the Canadian market sent shares of Rogers, Telus and BCE tumbling this week, prompting complaints from some executives.

"It is odd to say the least that a giant like Verizon would come into Canada and be given by the government the ability to buy twice as much spectrum as Bell, Rogers or Telus at a fraction of the price," BCE's head of regulatory affairs, Mirko Bibic, said on the BNN television channel, which BCE owns.

BCE repeated the sentiment in a statement sent to Reuters, calling it a "massive loophole" that a major international company could take advantage of rules intended for small Canadian startups.

Analysts have speculated Verizon's participation in the auction could add C$500 million to the combined amount Canada's big three ultimately pay for the airwaves they want.

The new rules announced on Friday, which also cover spectrum sharing, strategic alliances and joint ventures, will take into account existing spectrum used by a company in a particular region and at a particular frequency.

The Canadian government said that in simple cases, it could approve spectrum transfers within four weeks of the announcement of a deal. If a detailed review is required, the process may take another four months.

(Industry Canada document: http://r.reuters.com/hyj39t )

($1 = $1.0491 Canadian)

(Editing by Jeffrey Hodgson, Lisa Von Ahn and Chris Reese)

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Veteran heavy-metal band Black Sabbath landed its first No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 album chart on Wednesday, more than four decades after the rockers debuted their first album in the United States.

"13," the 19th studio album from Black Sabbath, sold 155,000 copies in its first week, according to figures from Nielsen SoundScan, knocking last week's No. 1 album by Queens of the Stone Age off the top spot on the weekly U.S. album chart.

Black Sabbath, an English rock band fronted by lead singer Ozzy Osbourne, released their debut self-titled album in North America in 1970, but were never able to notch the top spot on the Billboard 200 album chart in a career spanning 43 years.

"The news is absolutely amazing - we couldn't have imagined this would happen," guitarist and founding member Tony Iommi said in a statement. Osbourne added, "to finally have our first No. 1 album in the U.S. is another incredible milestone for Black Sabbath."

French electronic duo Daft Punk held steady for the second week at No. 2 with "Random Access Memories," which has sold 543,000 copies since its release on May 18.

Justin Timberlake's "The 20/20 Experience" saw a surge in sales last week after the album was discounted for Father's Day, with 35,000 copies sold and climbing from No. 9 to No. 3.

Country band Florida Georgia Line also benefited from Father's Day promotion sale prices, as their album "Here's to the Good Times" climbing back into the top 10 at No. 5.

Black Sabbath was one of five new debut albums in the top ten this week.

Boy band Big Time Rush came in at No. 4 with "24/Seven," alternative-rockers Goo Goo Dolls landed at No. 8 with their latest record "Magnetic," and movie score maestro Hans Zimmer's soundtrack for Superman movie "Man of Steel" flew into No. 9.

Comedy trio The Lonely Island, fronted by former "Saturday Night Live" cast member Andy Samberg, rounded out the top 10 with their latest collection of parodies, "The Wack Album."

Overall album sales totaled 5.25 million for the week ending June 16, down 10 percent from the comparable sales week in 2012, according to Billboard.

Next week's chart is likely to see a high debut from rapper Kanye West, who released his latest record "Yeezus" this week and is currently at the top of the iTunes album chart.

(Reporting by Piya Sinha-Roy; Editing by Eric Kelsey and Jackie Frank)

ROME (Reuters) - A senior Catholic cleric with connections to the Vatican bank was arrested on Friday for plotting to help rich friends smuggle tens of millions of euros in cash into Italy from Switzerland, in the latest blow to the Vatican's image.

Monsignor Nunzio Scarano, 61, who worked as a senior accountant in the Vatican's financial administration, was arrested along with an Italian secret service agent and a financial intermediary in a tale that reads like a spy novel.

It involves police wiretaps, a private plane rented to collect the cash from Locarno, burned cell phones and an allegedly corrupt secret services agent who promised to get the money past customs.

Details of the case against Scarano will come as an acute embarrassment to Pope Francis, who, since his election in March, has pointedly eschewed many of the trappings of office and sought to stress the importance of a simple life of devotion.

Only two days ago, the Vatican announced he had set up a commission of inquiry into the Vatican bank, formally known as the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), which has been hit by a number of scandals in the past decades.

Scarano, who was arrested in a Rome parish and taken to Rome's Queen of Heaven jail, had hatched a plot to bring up to 40 million euros ($52 million) into Italy for a family of shipbuilders in his hometown of Salerno in southern Italy, magistrate Nello Rossi told reporters.

Rossi is already investigating the Vatican bank for money laundering, and the latest arrests stemmed from that.

Rossi and fellow magistrate Stefano Pesci said there was no indication so far that the bank was directly involved in the attempt to bring the money into Italy, but that the investigation was continuing and more searches were underway.

Scarano is under separate investigation in southern Italy in relation to his accounts in the Vatican bank.

CELL PHONES DESTROYED

According to Rossi, in July last year Scarano engaged Giovanni Zito, a paramilitary Carabiniere policeman on loan to the secret services, to help him get the money, which was in a Swiss bank, into Italy without tax and customs controls.

The third person arrested was Giovanni Carenzio, a financial broker with offices in Switzerland and the Canary Islands and who was acting as the fiduciary for the owners of the money.

It was not clear how or when the money got to Switzerland in the first place.

The three originally planned to bring back 40 million euros in cash but later reduced it to 20 million euros. A private plane went to Locarno from Rome and waited several days before returning to Rome without the money.

The cash never left Switzerland because of disagreements and nervousness among the three, Rossi said, adding that cell phones that were used were later destroyed by being burned.

Zito had promised to use his position in the secret services to avoid customs controls. The plane was to have been met on the runway of a Rome airport and the cash taken under armed escort to Scarano's home in Rome, Rossi said, calling the plot "intricately planned".

Even though the money never left the Swiss bank, Zito, who is now in a military prison, demanded the payment he had been promised for his services.

Scarano gave Zito two checks, one for 400,000 euros and another for 200,000 euros. Zito cashed the first check but Scarano blocked the second before Zito could cash it by filing a false report that it had been lost.

VATICAN READY TO COOPERATE

Asked if money laundering was involved, Rossi said that would depend if the continuing investigation determined that the original source of the money was criminal activity.

"We are trying to determine the origin of the vast amount of money that was at the disposal of Scarano, who is the holder of several accounts at IOR," Rossi said.

Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said Vatican authorities stood ready to cooperate with the Italian investigation, but had so far received no official request.

He said the FIA, the Vatican's own financial intelligence authority, was following the case and would take action if necessary.

Rossi said his office would seek permission from the Vatican, which is a sovereign state, to question officials. "This is just a piece in a much larger mosaic," he said.

Scarano, who Rossi said had worked for a German bank before he became a priest, was for years a senior accountant for a Vatican department known as APSA, whose official title is the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See.

He was suspended from his duties several weeks ago when he was placed under investigation by magistrates in Salerno.

In that investigation, his lawyer Silverio Sica said wealthy friends had donated money to Scarano in order for him to build a home for the terminally ill.

According to Sica, his client wanted to use that money to pay off his mortgage so he could sell a property in Salerno and use the proceeds to build the care home.

Apparently to cover his tracks, Scarano has been accused of taking 560,000 euros in cash out of his account in the Vatican bank and giving various amounts to friends who gave him checks in exchange. He then deposited the checks into an Italian bank account to pay off the mortgage.

"Scarano was able to use the bank for his personal reasons" Rossi said. ($1 = 0.7691 euros)

(Additional reporting by Antonella Cinelli and James Mackenzie, Editing by Mike Collett-White)