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The prime minister, Gordon Brown, faces the threat of an electoral bloodbath this week as Britain votes in European and local elections, amid fresh questions over his future.
   Meanwhile, The home secretary, Jacqui Smith, is to stand down in a cabinet reshuffle by embattled prime minister Gordon Brown, expected within days, reports said Tuesday.
   Smith will resign as part of a ministerial shake-up which is also expected to see finance minister Alistair Darling replaced, according to the BBC and Sky News television.
   Brown, who must call a general election within a year, is under intense pressure amid an expenses row which has rocked parliament and led to a string of resignation announcements by lawmakers.
   The reshuffle is widely expected to take place in the wake of Thursday’s local and European Parliament elections, either on Friday or early next week. Polls indicate that Brown’s governing Labour Party faces an electoral bloodbath.
   Voters mired in recession and angered at a political expenses scandal look set to punish his ruling Labour Party, polls indicate, while there are growing signs Brown will reshuffle his cabinet after Thursday’s ballots.
   Labour’s opinion poll fortunes have been at record lows for months, and there is talk Brown could face a leadership challenge in the wake of the dual election result.
   But he seems in no mood to give up. Asked whether Labour MPs were calling for him to step aside after the polls, Brown said he was focused on cleaning up politics and fighting Britain’s recession.
   ‘They’re not, because I’ve got a job to do,’ he told Sky News television Monday, denying that some Labour MPs were talking of him quitting. ‘We’ve got work to do, we have got to clean up the system.’
   A Sunday Telegraph/ICM poll this week suggested Labour would come third in the European elections with just 17 per cent, behind David Cameron’s main opposition Conservatives and the third party, centrist Liberal Democrats.
   This was the worst Brown’s party had done in an opinion poll since 1987 and surveys on the local elections also predict a weak performance.
   And a new poll Monday showed Labour’s support plunged by 10 per cent in the last month: the Ipsos Mori survey put the Conservatives on 40 per cent, while Labour was level with the Liberal Democrats on 18 per cent.
   Experts say it is fringe parties who could benefit, like the far-right British National Party — tipped to gain its first member of the European parliament — and the Europhobic UK Independence Party.
   Professor Patrick Dunleavy of the London School of Economics told reporters at a briefing ahead of the vote that the expenses scandal had caused a ‘remarkable and in fact unprecedented constitutional crisis’.
   ‘We are in a very strange position that has become like the death of Princess Diana, a very gripping-the-nation type emotion,’ he said.
   If Brown does face a leadership challenge, his most likely challenger seems to be Alan Johnson, a charismatic former postman who is currently health secretary.
   But most commentators predict he will hang on until the next general election, due by the middle of next year, and ignore Cameron’s calls for a snap national poll.

North Korea’s ailing Kim Jong-Il has named his youngest son to succeed him eventually as leader of the communist state, which appears to be preparing another volley of missiles, reports said Tuesday.
   The North’s missile launches have defied international condemnation of its weapons programme, after its tested a nuclear bomb last week, and analysts believe Kim may be trying to bolster his authority ahead of a succession.
   There has been intense speculation about who would succeed North Korea’s ‘Dear Leader’ since he was reported to have suffered a stroke last August. Kim, now 67, is thought to have since recovered and resumed most of his duties.
   South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported Tuesday that the North seems to be preparing to test-fire several medium-range missiles from its southeast coast.
   Tensions have been running high since the North tested a nuclear bomb for the second time on May 25. It then launched a series of short-range missiles and renounced the 1953 truce that ended fighting in the Korean war.
   South Korea’s navy stepped up its defences near the tense sea border with North Korea Tuesday, sending in a high-speed patrol boat armed with guided missiles and vowing to ‘punish’ any attacking forces.
   The North is reported to have stepped up naval drills near the western maritime border — the site of deadly skirmishes between the two Koreas in 1999 and 2002 — after threatening to attack the South.
   Pyongyang has warned of ‘elf-defence measures’ in response to any tougher international sanctions for last week’s nuclear test.
   US and South Korean officials say the North also appears to be preparing to test-fire a long-range missile capable in theory of reaching Alaska.
   Washington warned North Korea Monday not to fire such a missile, saying it would further worsen tensions.

A US man who swam to the home of Aung San Suu Kyi was not paid by or taking orders from any outside organisation, his lawyer said ahead of final arguments in the trial of Myanmar’s democracy icon.
   Myanmar’s military regime has expressed scepticism over John Yettaw’s explanation for his visit to the Nobel laureate’s lakeside home, with one official suggesting that the American was a ‘secret agent or her boyfriend.’
   But lawyer Khin Maung Oo said the devout Mormon was a ‘sincere and pious’ person who believed God had told him to warn Aung San Suu Kyi and the government after he had a vision that she would be assassinated.
   ‘There is no issue of him acting on someone’s instruction to him or that some organisation provided money to him to do so,’ Khin Maung Oo said of his client, who like Aung San Suu Kyi faces up to five years in jail.
   ‘As far as I know, he’s a very sincere and pious person. He cooperated with the court. He answered the same during the interrogation and at the trial,’ he said.

Iraq’s ex-trade minister Abdel Falah al-Sudani has been quizzed on graft allegations for two days but pressure is growing for him to be released on bail, an anti-corruption official said on Tuesday.
   Sudani, who resigned last week amid corruption charges linked to Iraq’s food assistance programme, was arrested last week after his plane was dramatically ordered back to the Iraqi capital as he tried to flee the country.
   ‘He has been interrogated for a second day by an anti-corruption judge,’ an official from Iraq’s Commission for Public Integrity said.
   ‘He is accused of causing damage to public finances.’
   Sudani is being held in Samawa, 250 kilometres miles south of Baghdad and the capital of Muthanna province where the accusations of corruption and embezzlement have been levelled.
   ‘There is strong pressure from the local and federal government for him to be released on bail,’ the official said, although Sudani had been given the ‘necessary accommodation’ in custody.
   Sudani was on board a flight to Dubai, which authorities turned back to the capital on Saturday so that he could be arrested.

Heavy fighting erupted Tuesday in a previously quiet part of the Somali capital sending hundreds of residents, some of them already displaced from elsewhere, fleeing, officials and witnesses said.
   Clashes broke out in Dharkinley in southwest Mogadishu around 10:00am (0700 GMT) when Somali loyalist forces attacked checkpoints manned by hardline Islamists.
   ‘Fighting is going on in several locations in the capital and the heaviest broke out this morning in Dharkinley district, our forces are gaining ground in the battle,’ colonel Mohamed Hashi, one of the Somali police commanders said.
   The interim Somali government launched a counter-offensive on May 22 to try regain control of swathes of the capital captured earlier by the rebels.
   Terrified residents on Tuesday started flooding out of Dharkinley, one of the most poverty-stricken districts of the capital.
   ‘Many people are fleeing the battle zones to avoid the crossfire,’ added Hashi.
   ‘There has been military movement in our neighbourhood in the past days, but this morning heavy clashes erupted near Abagedo area, everybody is fleeing for their lives because they (the Islamists) are using heavy machineguns and mortar shells,’ a resident Mohamed Ibrahim said.
   Dharkinley has been one of the rare calm districts of Mogadishu in recent years in Somalia’s protracted cycle of violence and has sheltered many displaced from other hotbeds.
   ‘This district has been calm in the past years and hosted many people who also fled other neighbourhoods, but now the time has come for us to flee too,’ another resident Abdi Nure said.
   There have been no reports on casualties yet.
   Mogadishu has been engulfed since May 7 by fierce fighting between the two sides, killing more than 200 people and forcing more than 62,000 others out of their homes.
   The rebel onslaught is led by the Shebab, an extremist faction accused of links to al-Qaeda; and Hezb al-Islam, a more political radical group loyal to opposition leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys.
   The groups want to topple the president, Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, a moderate Islamist who came to power in January under a UN-backed deal.

Search aircraft found debris on Tuesday believed to be from an Air France flight that disappeared over the Atlantic with 228 people on board, but officials say what brought down the plane remains a mystery.
   Brazilian air force aircraft located a seat from a plane, an orange buoy and kerosene slicks floating 1,100 kilometres off Brazil’s northeast coast — in a remote stretch of the Atlantic Ocean where the flight going from Rio de Janeiro to Paris disappeared early on Monday.
   But an air force spokesman, Colonel Jorge Amaral, cautioned that no item with a serial number or other identification had yet been found that could definitely confirm the debris was from missing Air France flight AF 447.
   ‘The search is continuing because it’s very little material in relation to the size’ of the Air France Airbus A330, he said.
   He added that there was no chances of survivors being found among the debris.
   Three cargo ships nearby, two Dutch-flagged and one French, have been asked to go where the debris was found and should arrive ‘in the next few hours,’ a Brazilian navy official, Lieutenant Henrique Afonso Lima, said.
   If it is confirmed all those on flight AF 447 perished, it would be the deadliest civilian aviation accident since 2001 and the worst in Air France’s 70-year history.
   The possible discovery of what was left of the Air France airliner held the promise that the enigma of what brought the plane down might be solved if its black boxes could be recovered from the bottom of the ocean.
   The plane vanished Monday four hours into its 11-hour flight, as it was beyond the reach of radar midway over the Atlantic between South America and Africa, in an area known for its tropical storms.
   The pilots issued no mayday. But automatic data signals — received from the zone where the debris was discovered — told of multiple electric and pressurisation failures.

The president, Barack Obama, voiced confidence Tuesday that the United States can help get serious Middle East peace talks back on track, as he prepared for his maiden trip to the region.
   In an interview with the BBC before heading to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Europe, the US leader added that he hoped for progress in direct talks with Iran by the end of this year.
   More broadly, he said a keynote speech in Cairo would aim to broach relations between the West and the Muslim world, and to overcome some mutual misapprehensions eight years after the September 11 attacks.
   ‘No one speech is going to solve every problem,’ he said, but added his trip was ‘an opportunity for us to get both sides to listen to each other a little bit more and then hopefully learn something.’
   On Middle East peace talks, he said the United States believes it is ‘going to be able to get serious negotiations back on track’ between Israel and the Palestinians.
   ‘Not only is it in the interest of the Palestinian people to have a state, it’s in the interest of the Israeli people to stabilise the situation there,’ he added.
   Obama’s remarks come as he prepares to embark late Tuesday on a visit to the Middle East, where he is scheduled on Thursday to make a high-profile speech at a university in the Egyptian capital.
   ‘What we want to do is open a dialogue,’ said Obama.
   While not apologising for US policy under his predecessor George W Bush, he said that in the wake of 9/11, Washington had sometimes not been ‘careful to distinguish our very real need to hunt down extremists ... and broader policy differences or cultural differences that exist.’
   ‘There are misapprehensions on the part of the West about the Muslim world, and obviously there’s some big misapprehensions about the Muslim world when it comes to those of us in the West,’ he added.

Kuwaiti lawmakers on Tuesday urged the government to recall the emirate’s ambassador from Baghdad in protest at ‘attacks’ by Iraqi MPs and demands to halt the payment of reparations.
   ‘If this is how Iraqi MPs deal with their neighbour Kuwait, I think we should recall the Kuwaiti ambassador from Baghdad,’ independent Islamist MP Falah al-Sawwagh said.
   Kuwait posted an ambassador to Baghdad last October for the first time since Iraq invaded the emirate in 1990.
   ‘The issue of Kuwaiti debt and war reparations can be decided only by the Kuwaiti parliament through a law,’ Sawwagh said. ‘These are obligations under UN resolutions.’
   Islamist MP Waleed al-Tabtabai also called in a statement for the withdrawal of the Kuwaiti ambassador from Iraq ‘until voices that attack Kuwait stop.’
   Several other Kuwaiti lawmakers strongly rebuffed what they called ‘provocative’ statements by their Iraqi counterparts, especially on debt, war reparations and the demarcation of borders.
   Iraqi MPs on Monday urged a halt to reparation payments to Kuwait for Saddam Hussein’s 1990 occupation, with some wanting the emirate to compensate Iraq for its role in the US-led 2003 invasion.
   ‘We request a parliamentary debate to seek financial compensation from Kuwait for having allowed American forces to use its territory for the attack on Iraq and to cause damage and destruction here,’ said Sunni MP Ezzedine al-Dawla of the National Concord Front.
   Sawwagh said that he and other lawmakers plan to ask the Kuwaiti parliament to debate the developments in relations with Iraq, adding he expects the debate to take place soon.
   Kurdish MP Mahmud Othman said Iraq ‘cannot accept the new border with Kuwait because it was imposed on us’ by the United Nations in 1991 after Saddam’s forces were driven out of Kuwait.
   Iraq has been pushing to exit from chapter seven of the UN charter imposed after Iraqi forces invaded the oil-rich emirate in August 1990 before they were driven out seven months later by a US-led international coalition.
   Kuwait on its part launched a diplomatic offensive last week when a senior Kuwaiti envoy handed letters to the five UN Security Council permanent members.

Chinese researchers said on Wednesday they had created versatile stem cells from pigs, a ground-breaking achievement that could open up new paths for combating human disease.
   Doctors led by Lei Xiao, of the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, took adult cells taken from a pig’s ear and bone marrow and reprogrammed them so that they became so-called pluripotent stem cells.
   These are cells that, like the coveted stem cells found in embryos, can differentiate into any type of cell in the body.
   It is a technical exploit because until now, no-one has been able to achieve reprogramming using somatic cells — cells that do not come from sperm or eggs — from a hooved animal.
   But the main interest lies in fundamental medical research, as it offers the hope of using the pig as a test bench for disease and a source of transplant material, Xiao said.
   The pig is close to the human in many biological functions and with some organs that are similar in size.
   ‘We could use embryonic stem cells or induced stem cells to modify the immune-related genes in the pig to make the pig organ compatible to the human immune system,’ he said in a press release.
   ‘Then we could use these pigs as organ donors to provide organs for patients that won’t trigger an adverse reaction from the patient’s own immune system.’
   Another possibility would be to modify genes in lines of pig stem cells so that they replicate flaws in human genes that cause diabetes and other diseases, he suggested.
   The modified stem cells could then be used to generate pigs with the same disorder, thus providing researchers with a model on which to test new therapies.
   The Chinese team tucked a basket of reprogramming genes inside a virus to infect the adult cells and return them to their naive, versatile state.
   Tests on the cells showed they were capable of differentiating into the three fundamental layers of tissue in an early embryo.
   The paper is published in the Journal of Molecular Cell Biology.
   Work on similar lines is being carried out on human cells, first achieved in 2007 by Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University.

A Pakistan court Tuesday ordered the release of the head of a charity blacklisted in the West as a terror group and linked by India to the deadly Mumbai attacks, hiking tensions in the region.
   Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, head of Jamaat-ud-Dawa and founder of the banned Lashkar-e-Taiba group accused by India and Washington of killing 172 people in the Indian financial capital last year, has been under house arrest.
   The order, as announced by a lawyer, sparked swift reprimand from nuclear rival India and was likely to ruffle relations with the United States, which has made rooting out Islamist extremism in Pakistan its key foreign policy.
   ‘The arrest violated the constitution, therefore Hafiz Saeed and his colleagues are being released,’ lawyer AK Dogar told reporters after three judges presided over a session at the high court in the eastern city of Lahore.
   Pakistan put Hafiz and three of his co-leaders under house arrest in early December and publicly shut offices of the charity after the UN Security Council blacklisted the organisation a terror group.

A Sri Lankan journalist was recovering in hospital Tuesday after being beaten up near the capital Colombo as rights groups expressed renewed concern for the safety of the island’s media.
   Poddala Jayantha, secretary of the Sri Lanka Working Journalists’ Association, was abducted near his home and severely attacked with sticks before being dumped in a suburb of Colombo, his colleagues said.
   ‘He is conscious and is out of danger,’ Colombo National hospital director Hector Weerasinghe said, explaining the activist had been hit on his head and legs.
   There was no claim of responsibility for the attack, but colleagues said Jayantha’s media activism had been criticised by state authorities in recent weeks.
   The Asian Human Rights Commission said news of the assault came as a group of media rights activists were meeting in Colombo with the president, Mahinda Rajapakse. It said the president immediately called for a police investigation.

An Iranian Sunni insurgent group claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing on a Shia mosque in Iran last week that killed 25 people, a US group monitoring Islamist web sites reported.
   Jundallah (Soldiers of God) said the bombing was a revenge attack for the hanging last year of people from Iran’s Baluch minority that adheres to Sunni Islam, SITE Intelligence said on Monday.
   The group also denied that three people hanged by Iran over the bombing on Thurs-day in the southeastern city of Zahedan were involved in the attack, one of a spate of violent incidents ahead of Iran’s June 12 presidential election.
   ‘The resistance movement declares that this operation comes as vengeance for the blood of our martyrs... who were executed last year,’ Jundallah said, SITE reported.
   ‘The movement warns that any execution of its members will result in severe retaliation.’

Indian authorities Tuesday deployed thousands of police in Kashmir to prevent more demonstrations over the alleged rape and murder by security forces of two young Muslim women, witnesses said.
   The police said they were probing the deaths of the 17-year-old woman and her 22-year-old sister-in-law, whose bodies were found in a shallow stream Saturday.
   Their families said the corpses bore marks of violence and their clothes were torn. They have accused security forces of abducting, raping and killing the women.
   But the state government said that according to initial investigations the deaths appeared to have been caused by drowning and no foul play was involved.
   A judicial probe has been ordered by the chief minister, Omar Abdullah, but it has failed to cool tempers.
   The police and paramilitary forces shut down parts of the summer capital Srinagar and southern Shopian town, where the deaths were reported, after separatists called for more protests and extended a strike call by two days.

Even as the Australian government continues to promise strict action against those who attack Indians in their backyard, a television report suggests that another attack took place in Melbourne on 20-year-old Nardeep Singh, who was on his way to attend college.
   The victim of the attack, who came to Australia just a month back, hails from Lud-hiana. He is a nursing student at the Chisholm Technical Institute in the city and was attacked on his way to college on Tuesday morning.
   He was reportedly assaulted by at least five men, which included two Australians. He was attacked at a car park, where these five men asked him for cigarettes. When he replied that he was a non-smoker, the group asked him for money. When Nardeep refused to give them, one of the attackers stabbed him in his chest.
   Nardeep, however, escaped further assaults and reached the police station, where his statement was recorded. Nardeep’s roommate said that he was stabbed, which was followed by excessive bleeding. Nardeep is currently under observation in a Melbourne hospital.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, defying president Barack Obama’s call for a settlement freeze, said on Monday Israel would continue to build in existing Jewish enclaves in occupied territory.
   ‘Freezing life would not be reasonable,’ Netanyahu told lawmakers.
   But in an apparent gesture to Obama, who has sought to revive stalled peace talks and plans to address Muslims from Egypt on Thursday, Israeli officials said Netanyahu might ease Israel’s crippling blockade of the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.
   In Washington, Obama said he believed a full settlement freeze was part of the steps both Israel and Palestinians have to take to achieve peace.
   ‘I’ve said very clearly to the Israelis both privately and publicly that a freeze on settlements, including natural growth, is part of those obligations,’ Obama told NPR News.

Thailand’s ‘Yellow Shirt’ protest movement officially renamed itself Tuesday the New Politics Party, six months after leading an economically devastating blockade of Bangkok’s airports.
   The royalist grouping announced in May that it was forming a political party and senior members said that they would register with the Election Commission on Thursday under the new name.
   Formerly known as the People’s Alliance for Democracy, they helped topple premier Thaksin Shinawatra in 2006 before launching the airport siege in late 2008 to drive Thaksin’s allies from government.
   ‘Our policy is to support good, honest people with accountable track records who hate corruption,’ said Somsak Kosaisuk, who was nominated on Tuesday the temporary head of the New Politics Party.