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Iran is considering pressing charges against a British embassy staffer, a Newsweek journalist and several reformist leaders, lawyers said on Saturday, as the regime intensifies its crackdown on protests over last month’s presidential election.
   The accused include key figures from reformist 1997-2005 presidency of Mohammad Khatami who oversaw a thaw in relations with the West. They are all held suspected of ‘acting against national security,’ the lawyers said.
   Any prosecutions would spark a new downturn in Tehran’s relations with the West. On Friday, European Union governments already called in Iranian envoys across the 27-nation bloc in protest at the detention of British embassy staff.
   Lawyer Abolsamad Khorramshahi said he was seeking permission to see detained embassy political analyst Hossein Rassam after being told by his family of the accusations against him.
   ‘I have not met with him yet, but I will ask the judiciary for an appointment,’ Khorramshahi said. ‘I was told by a close relative that he is accused of acting against national security.’
   On Friday, the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, said he was ‘urgently seeking clarification’ from Iran after a senior official said that some locally recruited staff of the British embassy would stand trial.
   A total of nine local staff at London’s embassy in Tehran were initially arrested late last month, but the British government said seven have since been released.
   Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, the head of the Guardians Council — the powerful watchdog body that upheld hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reelection in the disputed June 12 vote — charged on Friday that embassy staff had instigated the post-election protests and that some would face prosecution.
   A second lawyer acting for Newsweek journalist Maziar Bahari and a number of reformist leaders said he too had so far been unable to see his clients.
   ‘Bahari is accused of acting against national security, and I still have not been able to meet him despite going to the prosecutor’s office several times,’ Saleh Nikbakht said.
   Nikbakht said he is also representing former deputy foreign minister Mohsen Amizadeh, ex-government spokesman Abdollah Rame-zanzadeh, former deputy economy minister Mohsen Safai-Farahani and former vice-president Mohammad Ali Abtahi, all of whom served under Khatami.
   Behzad Nabavi, former deputy speaker of parliament between 2000 and 2004 when it was reformist-controlled, is another of his clients.
   ‘I was not able to see any of them, and Safai-Farahani and Nabavi have not been able to contact their families either,’ Nikbakht said.
   ‘Any kind of interview and confession by these people who are being held in prison is invalid under the law and the Iranian constitution,’ he added.
   Less than a week ago, the Fars news agency reported an ‘interview’ with Bahari, in which he said that he had filed ‘unreal and biased reports from Iran which were driven by greed.’

Two women aid workers from Ireland and Uganda were kidnapped Friday by armed men in Sudan’s volatile Darfur region, the scene of Africa’s longest running conflict, officials said.
   ‘Unidentified armed men came to the quarters of the (Irish) NGO Goal at Kutum in Northern Darfur,’ the source said. ‘They took a Sudanese watchman, an Irishwoman and a Ugandan woman. The watchman was later freed.’
   A UN official also confirmed the kidnapping. Ireland’s foreign ministry also confirmed that a national was abducted on Friday.
   ‘Two employees were kidnapped from our offices at 2030 local time (1930 GMT). We have no information about the identity of the abductors or their motives,’ Flora Hills, the head of Goal in Sudan, said.
   Hills confirmed the nationalities of the two workers. Sudanese officials were unavailable for comment and no group has yet claimed responsibility for the abduction.
   Goal has been present in Kutum since, some 200 kilometres from the Chadian border, since February 2004. It distributes seeds and constructs pit latrines and wells for thousands displaced by the conflict.
   It was the third kidnapping of foreign humanitarian workers in Darfur since a March 4 arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court against the Sudanese president, Omar al-Beshir, for alleged war crimes in Darfur.
   The United Nations says up to 300,000 people have died and 2.7 million have fled their homes since ethnic minority rebels in Darfur rose up against the Arab-dominated regime in Khartoum in February 2003.

Ten Chechen police were killed Saturday when militants fired on their convoy in the neighbouring Russian region of Ingushetia, one of the deadliest recent attacks in the increasingly volatile Caucasus.
   The convoy of six vehicles came under grenade and gun fire from unknown individuals hidden in a forest as it travelled on a road in Ingushetia at around 0530 GMT, security officials said. One vehicle burst into flames.
   ‘Forty-five members of the Chechnya police force were returning from a joint special operation when their convoy came under fire. Ten were killed and ten were wounded,’ an Ingush security source said.
   The Chechen police were in Ingushetia to conduct a joint special operation against militants with their Ingush colleagues close to the regional border, the source added.
   The investigative committee of Russian prosecutors said nine police had been killed and 10 wounded.
   Concerns have grown in the last weeks about the stability of Ingushetia, one of Russia’s most violent regions, after its leader Yunus-Bek Yevkurov was gravely wounded in a car bombing on June 22.

Russia was Saturday preparing to welcome Barack Obama for the first time as US president, heartened by his description of the country as an equal but also stunned by criticism of Vladimir Putin.
   Obama arrives in Russia on Monday on a visit to mend ties frayed by a series of disputes. He is set to sign a deal on the transit of US military goods to Afghanistan and a framework on replacing a key Cold War-era weapons treaty.
   The US president is due to have several hours of talks with his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev as well as a shorter breakfast meeting with the strongman former Kremlin chief and current prime minister Putin.
   Russia has been eagerly awaiting the visit as proof of a change in the US attitudes towards Moscow but observers were astonished by a pre-summit interview in which Obama said Putin still had ‘one foot’ in the Cold War.
   In an interview with The Associated Press, Obama said he believed ‘Putin has one foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the new.’ By contrast, Obama said he had ‘a very good relationship’ with Medvedev.
   The mass-circulation Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper said Obama was trying to break up the hitherto tight Russian ruling ‘tandem’ of the president and the prime minister by taking sides.
   ‘It seems that the Americans are undertaking a head-spinningly risky game with an unpredictable outcome,’ it said in a front-page article.
   ‘Washington has openly interfered in Russian political life and is stretching the ruling Kremlin tandem to breaking point.

Yemenia is suspending all flights to the Comoros in the aftermath of Tuesday’s crash of an Airbus A310 near the islands’ capital Moroni in which 153 died, the airline said Saturday.
   ‘In light of serious incidents in recent days and major risks that some passengers posed to airport staff, our company and passengers, Yemenia has decided to no longer serve Moroni for an indefinite period from July 3 until the situation eases,’ it said in a statement.
   Yemenia’s lawyer in France, Laurent-Franck Lienard, said that only flights to Moroni were affected, and that the airline would continue to fly to other destinations — including Paris-Sanaa, Paris-Kuala Lumpur and Paris-Jakarta — as normal.
   Since the crash, in which a 12-year-old girl was the only survivor, members of the Comoran community in France have been up in arms over the condition of the Airbus that Yemenia used on its Moroni service.
   They have notably blocked check-in desks in Paris and Marseille for Yemenia flights to Moroni, prompting the airline on Thursday to suspend services from Marseille — home to a large Comoran expatriate community.
   In a separate development Saturday, the France prime minister, Francois Fillon, tasked a former French ambassador to Sudan, Christine Robichon, to help the families of those killed in the crash.
   In a statement, he said Robichon would act as a go-between between the families and relevant agencies, and also oversee ‘good cooperation’ between Comorans, Yemeni officials and Yemenia airlines.

A three-week-old baby and two children were among six people killed when a fire tore through a 12-storey block of flats in southeast London on Friday, emergency services said.
   The blaze broke out at on the fourth floor of the flats on the Sceaux Gardens Estate in Camberwell and rapidly spread, the London Fire Brigade said.
   Eighteen fire engines were sent to the scene and more than 100 firefighters tackled the fire. A brigade spokesman said the blaze swept up to the 11th floor and 30 people had to be rescued.
   The police said the baby, a seven-year-old child and a woman died in hospital. A child, aged about 6, a woman and another adult died at the flats.
   Paul Woodrow, of the London Ambulance Service, told Sky News 18 people, including 11 children, had been taken to hospital. Some were in a serious condition.
   The fire brigade said that despite extremely difficult conditions, firefighters had rescued everyone else who had been inside and the fire had been brought under control.
   ‘The building is still being searched, but we are confident there won’t be any more people involved. We’re doing a systematic floor by floor search,’ he said.
   It was too soon to say what caused the fire. Witness George Maddocks said he had seen a room of one of the local authority-run flats engulfed by flames before windows began to shatter.
   ‘The height may have been something of a problem,’ he told BBC TV, adding that much of the building was charred and blackened.

Public support for Japan’s prime minister Taro Aso has plunged below 20 per cent as his party faces losing its grip on power in upcoming elections, according to a poll.
   The rating of 19.7 per cent was down from 22.9 per cent in June and is the third consecutive decline, the Yomiuri Shimbun said in its latest snapshot of voter sentiment.
   On Wednesday, Aso named two new cabinet ministers as he explores ways to improve his sagging popularity ahead of elections which he must call by September.
   But the poll showed 56 per cent of respondents did not support the move, which was backed by just 16 per cent of those questioned.
   Twenty-four per cent said they wanted Aso to stay in power following the elections, while 41 per cent said they wanted opposition leader Yukio Hatoyama as prime minister.
   Aso’s Liberal Democratic Party has been out of office only once since 1955, when a coalition of several opposition groups took power for just 10 months in 1993-94.

Pakistani helicopter gunships attacked Taliban militants on Saturday in a northwestern region where a military helicopter crashed the previous day killing 26 soldiers on board, a government official said.
   Fighting has intensified sharply in northwest Pakistan over the past two months since the army went on the offensive to push back an expanding insurgency that raised fears for the stability of the nuclear-armed US ally.
   The helicopter crashed on Friday because of a technical fault about 20 km from the city of Peshawar on the mountainous border of the Orakzai and Khyber ethnic Pashtun tribal regions, the military said.
   On Saturday, army helicopters attacked a militant position in the same area, a government official said.
   ‘They struck a militant bunker on a peak. We went there after the attack and found 10 bodies lying there,’ Khaista Rehman, a government official based in Kallay, the main town in the Orakzai region, told Reuters.
   All of the bodies from the crashed helicopter had been recovered, the military said.
   Soldiers have been fighting Taliban militants in the Swat valley, northwest of Islamabad, since early May and have stepped up pressure on Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, in his South Waziristan stronghold near the Afghan border.
   Pakistan’s civilian government has said it is determined to fight militancy and defeat Mehsud.
   US officials have welcomed the offensive after earlier voicing fears about Pakistan’s stability and the safety of its nuclear arsenal.
   As fighting intensifies in northwest Pakistan, US-led forces in Afghanistan have also gone on the offensive.
   Thousands of US Marines and some British troops launched a big push against the Afghan Taliban in the southern Afghan province of Helmand on Thursday.
   Helmand shares a 200-km desert border with the southwestern Pakistani province of Baluchistan and the Pakistani army has sent soldiers there to block any Taliban fleeing.
   The Pakistani military says it is nearing the end of the offensive in the former tourist valley of Swat, although soldiers are encountering pockets of fighters, and it has been prepar#ing for an offensive against Mehsud.

Residents of Afghanistan’s Helmand are sceptical about US and British operations underway in their southern province, uncertain they can end Taliban attacks and intimidation.
   It is not just the insurgency that contributes to a dire situation but also official corruption, the drugs trade and unemployment, they said as 4,000 Marines pushed south and hundreds of British soldiers were busy further north
   Landowner Abdullah Khan was dismissive of the assault that saw hundreds of Marines helicopter into his home district of Nawa, along the Helmand River.
   ‘For several years there have been operations and bombings and explosions, but the Taliban were not destroyed,’ the 48-year-old said by telephone while he was visiting the provincial capital Lashkar Gah.
   Instead, ‘Fighting increased and, now, also, I don’t think that this operation can succeed,’ he said.
   International soldiers deployed after the removal of the Taliban regime in 2001 had only brought instability which was ‘increasing day by day’, he said, criticising ‘useless’ bombings, arrests and searches of private homes.
   In Helmand, it is a case of Taliban rule by night and the soldiers by day, he said. ‘If we take this side, that side will beat us,’ he said. ‘And we don’t have power to do anything.’
   Khan was critical of the Afghan police and intelligence services, which he said were corrupt, a common complaint in Afghanistan where government officials at the highest levels are alleged to be involved in opium and heroin traffic.
   He said it was unlikely he would vote in August 20 presidential and provincial council elections, the focus of a recent series of Afghan and international operations aimed at clearing out insurgent strongholds.
   
   Two US soldiers, 7 Afghan cops die in explosions
   Two US soldiers and seven Afghan policemen were killed in separate explosions Saturday, highlighting the level of violence faced by Marines pressing one of the biggest assaults in eight years.
   In another incident, one security guard died and four others were wounded when a suicide bomber detonated an explosives-packed vehicle near a private security company’s four-vehicle convoy in Gereshk district, Daud Ahmadi, a spokesman for the Helmand provincial administration said.

Universal access to a swine flu vaccine remains a ‘critical question,’ the World Health Organisation said Friday.
   Speaking during a summit on the A(H1N1) virus, WHO assistant director-general Keiji Fukuda said guaranteeing the vaccine is distributed to underdeveloped nations will require ‘political goodwill.’
   Fukuda was speaking at the close of the summit, which began Thursday at the Mexican beach resort town of Cancun. The American continent remains the world region worst affected by the swine flu, which first appeared in Mexico in late April.
   The virus has infected 89,921 people in 125 countries and territories and caused 382 deaths worldwide, according to the WHO’s latest figures.
   ‘One of the important results (of the summit) was that we recognised that we face technical problems, but also problems of political will,’ Fukuda said.
   Access to a future A(H1N1) vaccine was a central theme of the specially-convened WHO summit, which brought together experts and ministers from about 50 countries.
   Cuauhtemoc Ruiz, coordinator for the Pan-American Health Organisation, said the vaccine is likely to be available in ‘three or four months,’ but it could be up to a year before ‘sufficient quantities’ are produced.
   The laboratories working to produce the vaccine, he said, can make 2.5 billion doses in six months.
   WHO director-general Margaret Chan said laboratories are looking at various possibilities, including creating a vaccine by adding a new component to the existing vaccine used for seasonal flu.
   If it works, the method could triple production.
   But there are fears that most of the stock that will be produced has already been reserved by the United States and European countries.
   Summit host Mexico appealed for ‘solidarity’ in providing access to any future vaccine. The Mexican health minister, Jose Angel Cordova, said that money should not be ‘the only factor taken into consideration’ in distributing the vaccine, so that poor nations are not penalised.
   The Mexican president, Felipe Calderon, also called for guarantees that developing countries would have access to the vaccine once it becomes commercially available.

The political and diplomatic crisis around Honduras deepened Saturday after the country’s coup leaders announced they were pulling out of the Organisation of American States in the face of an almost certain suspension by the international body.
   The OAS secretary general, Jose Miguel Insulza, said here late Friday that those who ousted president Manuel Zelaya last weekend did not plan to reverse the situation, and denounced a ‘military coup.’
   The interim government responded by pulling out of the OAS, a day before the body was due to vote on suspending the Central American country after it refused to listen to its demands to return Zelaya to power.
   Honduras ‘ceases its compliance with the charter of the Organisation of American States ... with immediate effect,’ deputy foreign minister Marta Lorena Alvarado said on national television, standing beside interim leader Roberto Micheletti.
   ‘There is not an institutional crisis in Honduras. It has applied its own law to solve its problems,’ Alvaredo added.
   The statement also said new Honduran leaders could not accept what they described as inaction of the OAS in the face of ‘threats to use force against Honduras issued by some of its member-nations.’
   The Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, has threatened to use all available means to return Zelaya to power.
   Soldiers bundled Zelaya into a plane at dawn Sunday and sent him to Costa Rica after a dispute with the courts, politicians and army over his attempts to change the constitution.
   ‘They have no intention of reversing this situation,’ Insulza told a news conference after meeting on the crisis with politicians and legal and religious figures, but not the interim president or attorney general.

Los Angeles city officials are faced with a massive security operation for Michael Jackson’s public memorial service next week, and on Friday urged fans who do not win a ticket in a random drawing to stay away from the basketball arena where the singer will be memorialised.
   Organisers have set aside a total of 17,500 tickets through an internet-based lottery for the televised service at the Staples Centre, and for a closed-circuit screening at the nearby Nokia Theater.
   Within minutes of the system being announced at a news conference, the computer system crashed. Officials warned additional disruptions were likely as fans from around the world applied for tickets.
   ‘You might want to consider watching this from the comfort of your own home,’ said Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jan Perry, who is doubling as the city’s acting mayor.
   A wide area around the venues in downtown Los Angeles will be blocked off for the 10:00am (1:00pm EDT) event. Both local and state law-enforcement agencies have been marshalled for duty.
   A local news-radio station reported that more than 1,400 officers from the Los Angeles Police Department alone have been asked to volunteer for duty on Monday and Tuesday. The LAPD, which has about 9,000 officers in total, declined to comment on the report or to reveal a staffing number.
   A Jackson family spokesman also declined to provide details of the memorial service, but said there would not be a funeral procession and Jackson’s body would not be at the memorial.
   Funeral arrangements have not been disclosed, but security has been beefed up at the Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills mortuary, where his body is believed to be held.
   Officials were also tight-lipped about the cost of the memorial service, and who would pay for it.
   Like other US cities, Los Angeles is strapped for cash in the global recession and similar questions about public tax revenues being spent for such an elaborate ceremony surfaced last month when a $2 million celebration was given for the champion Los Angeles Lakers professional basketball team.
   That event, which attracted over 500,000 people, was eventually funded through private donations.
   The city has already budgeted for LAPD overtime, Perry said, adding that officials would ‘deeply appreciate’ help to offset incremental costs, such as transportation, sanitation and staging.
   Winners of the tickets will be contacted on Sunday and directed to pick up a pair of tickets and wristbands on Monday. No tickets will be sold.
   The massive demand raised the question of counterfeiting or scalping, drawing pleas from organisers for fans to act responsibly.
   ‘For those that would try to take advantage of this, shame on them,’ said Tim Leiweke, the president and CEO of AEG, the closely held entertainment concern that owns the venues and was backing Jackson’s planned comeback concerts in London.

The African Union refused to act on an international war crimes warrant for Sudan’s president, at a summit that also yielded a deal on the powers of a new regional Authority.
   The refusal to arrest the Sudan president, Omar al-Beshir, granted a continent-wide reprieve to a leader accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur.
   While the measure was backed by Libya and other nations that sympathise with Sudan, the text also voiced Africa’s frustration at the UN Security Council’s failure to consider a request to suspend the warrant for one year, delegates said.
   ‘They are showing to the world community that if you don’t want to listen to the continent, if you don’t want to take into account our proposals... if you don’t want to listen to the continent, as usual, we also are going to act unilaterally,’ the top AU official Jean Ping said.
   Thirty African nations are party to the treaty that created the International Criminal Court, but even advocates of the ICC said they sensed a bias by the tribunal’s prosecutor against Africa.
   The United Nations says up to 300,000 people have died and 2.7 million have fled their homes since ethnic minority rebels in Darfur rose up against the Arab-dominated regime in Khartoum in February 2003.

The Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, ordered local officials Saturday to step up flood control work in south China after over 150,000 people were forced to evacuate following torrential rains.
   Wen issued the orders after watching a video of workers furiously repairing damaged dykes in an effort to prevent a dam burst on the Kama reservoir in south China’s Guangxi province, the Guangxi government said on its web site.
   ‘You must ensure the safety of the people and do everything to ensure the safety of the dam,’ the report cited Wen as saying.
   Xinhua news agency reported that 7,500 people have been evacuated from below the reservoir’s dam after the heaviest rains in years led to flooding and swollen rivers throughout the nation’s south.
   Another 47,000 people were evacuated in Guangxi’s Rongshui county after the Rong river flooded its banks, inundating farmlands and destroying homes, the report said.

More than a thousand Muslim rebels have been killed in the southern Philippines over the past year, despite the recovery of only 278 bodies, according to a military spokesman.
   Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Ponce also said he knew of only 22 soldiers killed in the fighting, despite claims by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front that its rebels had killed 500 soldiers in its current offensive.
   In August three MILF commanders broke a 2003 ceasefire and began attacking Christian communities in Mindanao, after the Supreme Court suspended a draft accord on Muslim self-rule in the southern Philippines.
   In Manila, armed forces spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Romeo Brawner earlier issued a statement saying that military fatalities against the rebels ‘do not even reach a hundred.’
   Speaking during a military patrol in Banasilan, in central Mindanao, Ponce pointed out MILF positions on hills in the distance.
   Despite having the MILF in their sights, Ponce said, the military was not actively attacking the rebels.
   ‘We are on a defensive stance. We are not conducting offensive operations. We are just conducting law-enforcement operations,’ he said.
   The last gunbattle had been five days ago, although there had since been instances of bombs and mortar attacks, Ponce said.

Indonesia’s presidential candidates held their final rallies Saturday ahead of only the second direct elections for the country’s head of state since the fall of the Suharto dictatorship in 1998.
   Incumbent Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is riding high after his centrist Democratic Party tripled its vote in April’s general election to become the largest party in parliament.
   He is hoping to win a clear majority in Wednesday’s vote and avoid a run-off in September against either of the other two candidates — opposition leader Megawati Sukarnoputri or vice president Jusuf Kalla.

The high court in Indian-administered Kashmir Saturday directed the police to exhume the bodies of two women whose alleged rape and murder last month sparked massive anti-India demonstrations.
   ‘The high court has ordered exhumation of the bodies for fresh post mortem and collection of DNA samples,’ Mian Qayoom, the president of Kashmir bar association told reporters.
   However, the court has ordered that prior consent of the family be sought before the bodies are exhumed. The high court has intervened in the case after being petitioned by the bar association.
   The Muslim-majority Kashmir valley has witnessed a series of protests since the deaths last month of two young women who, local residents say, were raped and murdered by members of the Indian security forces.
   The protests over the incident have left two people dead and over 400 others injured so far. On Saturday, the high court also directed that the four police officers who have been suspended for destroying evidence be subjected to drugs tests.
   ‘The court has issued instructions for a similar test for two key witnesses in the case,’ Qayoom said.

Amidst Maoist claims that they would form a new national government under their leadership within weeks, a grim Nepali prime minister, Madhav Kumar Nepal, on Friday expanded his 30-member cabinet yet again, with two minor party leaders taking oath of office.
   While Rajendra Mahato, leader of Terai’s Sadbhavana Party, who was sworn in as commerce and supplies minister, is a veteran politician who had held the same ministry in the Maoist government, the new face is that of Prem Bahadur Singh’s, whose Samajwadi Prajatantrik Janata Party is one of the most obscure parties in the republic with one lawmaker who was nominated courtesy the proportional voting system. Singh becomes Nepal’s new law and justice minister.
   However, nearly 20 more fringe parties are still in talks over joining the government and yet another expansion, if not several more, are likely.