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h communities secretary Hazel Blears announced on Wednesday she was resigning, adding to the impression that Labour prime minister Gordon Brown was losing control of his party.
   ‘Today I have told the prime minister that I am resigning from the government,’ Blears, who is responsible for local government affairs, said in a statement.
   Her resignation, on the eve of European and local elections in which Brown’s government faces a rout, added to the impression of a government in disarray amid the fallout from a scandal over politicians’ allowances and with a general election due within a year.
   Blears last month agreed to pay more than 13,000 pounds [$21,590] in tax on the sale of a property after newspaper disclosures about lawmakers and their expenses.
   A source close to interior minister Jacqui Smith said on Tuesday that she also would leave the cabinet at a government reshuffle expected soon after Thursday’s election.
   ‘The timing of this is so wounding for Brown. Who is there now to bring in to government?’ said Simon Lee, politics professor at Hull University in northern England.
   Smith’s reputation suffered in March when a leaked copy of her parliamentary expenses claims showed she had charged taxpayers for her husband’s rental of two pornographic movies.
   The resignations came as the Guardian newspaper, traditionally supportive of Labour, called for Brown to go. ‘The truth is that there is no vision from him, no plan, no argument for the future and no support,’ it said.
   Britons are furious that many members of parliament have milked the allowances system, claiming from taxpayers the cost of everything from duck houses to cleaning a moat at a time when many voters are struggling in a recession.
   Polls show support for Labour, in power since 1997, sliding to record lows and the opposition Conservatives on track to win the next national election that Brown must call by June 2010.
   Amid talk the wave of resignations could be the beginning of the end for his leadership, Brown faced a rowdy prime minister’s Questions session at which Conservative leader David Cameron urged a snap general election.
   ‘What we see is a dysfunctional cabinet, a dysfunctional government led by a prime minister who cannot give a lead,’ Cameron, tipped by opinion polls to be premier within a year, told Brown.
   ‘The government is collapsing before our eyes. Why doesn’t he take the one act of authority left to him: get down to the palace, ask for a dissolution, call that election?’
   Brown tried to hit back by saying the Conservatives, Britain’s main opposition party, were nothing but ‘talk, talk and talk’ and had no policies to address the rumbling scandal over MPs’ expenses or the recession.

Iran’s hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is seeking a second term in office, reiterated on Wednesday his anti-Israel stance by calling the Holocaust a ‘big deception.’
   Ahmadinejad also said liberal democracies of the world have degraded ‘human values,’ the Iranian state television news web site quoted him as saying.
   ‘The identity of the liberal democracy has been exposed to the world by its protection of the most criminal regime in the history of humanity, the Zionist regime, by using the big deception of the Holocaust.’
   ‘There is no doubt that the only way to replace the liberal thought is to go back to the teachings of the divine prophets,’ Ahmadinejad said.
   ‘The thoughts and the system of liberal regimes have lowered the benchmarks for human perfection ... The liberal regimes cannot solve the simplest of the political issues in the world,’ he said.
   Ahmadinejad was speaking to a gathering of 600 international scholars who have arrived in Tehran to mark the 20th anniversary of the death of the founder of the Islamic republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, which falls on Thursday.

Heavy fighting broke out in the Somali capital Wednesday as government forces intensified their offensive to drive out insurgents and widen control of key positions, officials and witnesses said.
   Fresh clashes erupted in northern Mogadishu’s Jamhuriya neighbourhood after government forces moved to recapture positions previously held by the rebels.
   ‘We are stretching the insurgents thin. Our forces took control of new locations in northern Mogadishu this morning,’ said army officer Said Mohamed.
   Somalia’s defence minister claimed late Tuesday that his forces were regaining control on Mogadishu and repelling a month-old offensive by insurgents bent on toppling the transitional administration.
   Early this week troops from the shaky transitional government recaptured two strategic police stations from the hardline Islamists within 24 hours.
   Speaking in Burundi, the defence minister, Mohammed Abdi Gandi, claimed that 14 out of 16 neighbourhoods in the seaside Somali capital were now under government control. ‘That means we are making progress,’ he said.
   ‘We presently have the situation well under control and we have enough soldiers to hold on and repel the extremist aggression on the country,’ Gandi said at a press conference in Bujumbura.
   Battles over so-called control of a district have generally boiled down to skirmishes around that area’s main police station, with neither side proving it has the ability to conquer and hold more than a handful of strongholds.
   Witnesses said Wednesday’s fighting was intense and trapping indoors any residents who wanted to flee to safety.
   ‘The fighting is intensifying minute after minute and we cannot even poke our heads out, we are trapped inside our houses,’ Abdulahi Dhubow, a resident of the Jamhuriya neighbourhood, said.
   ‘We can see insurgents reinforcing their positions near Gargurte hotel and the government forces are using heavy artillery shells to push them out,’ Abdiasis Muse, another witness, said.

A man from Yemen held at the US-run prison in Guantanamo for more than seven years without charge was found dead in an apparent suicide, the US military said on Tuesday.
   The 31-year-old inmate was identified as Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih, also known as Al-Hanashi. He had been held at Guantanamo since February 2002, US Southern Command said in a statement.
   It was the fifth reported suicide at the controversial ‘war on terror’ prison since the centre opened at the US naval base in southeast Cuba in 2002, officials said.
   ‘While conducting routine checks, the guards found the detainee unresponsive and not breathing,’ US Southern Command said.
   ‘Medical personnel were immediately summoned by the guard force. After extensive lifesaving measures had been exhausted, the detainee was pronounced dead by a physician,’ it said.
   The suspected suicide occurred ‘late Monday evening’ and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service had opened an investigation to determine the cause and circumstances surrounding the death.

The president, Jacob Zuma, vowed on Wednesday to create 5,00,000 jobs this year, insisting South Africa’s stinging recession would not alter his development goals, in his first state of the nation speech.
   In his first major address as the nation’s leader, Zuma also promised to follow through on a three-year scheme to spend $98 billion on public works, including schools and transport.
   ‘The economic downturn will affect the pace at which our country is able to address the social and economic challenges it faces. But it will not alter the direction of our development,’ he said in the nationally televised speech.
   The global economic crisis has taken a toll on the economy, which is officially in recession for the first time in the post-apartheid era after a 6.4 per cent contraction in the first quarter.
   ‘We must act now to minimise the impact of this downturn on those most vulnerable,’ he said.

Authorities in Mali named an Islamist leader Wednesday they said was behind a British hostage’s execution after an al-Qaeda cell claimed to have exacted revenge for the detention of a radical cleric.
   British prime minister Gordon Brown condemned the ‘barbaric act’ vowing to ‘confront terrorism’ while Switzerland said it would strive to secure the release of one of its citizens who was captured alongside Edwin Dyer. According to SITE Intelligence, a US-based monitoring group, al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb had posted an online statement saying it killed Dyer on May 31.
   The cell was quoted as saying that it executed Dyer after ‘finding that Britain is unresponsive and does not seem to care for its citizens.’
   Dyer was one of a group of six Westerners kidnapped by Islamic extremists in the Sahel region in December and January.
   Two Canadian diplomats and two European women tourists were released in April and flown to the Malian capital Bamako, but Dyer and Swiss national Werner Greiner were not freed.

scar court on Wednesday sentenced ousted president Marc Ravalomanana to four years in jail over his purchase last year of a $60 million presidential jet from Disney.
   The move announced by the justice minister of the Indian Ocean island’s new master Andry Rajoelina was unlikely to help reconciliation, less than three months after Ravalomanana’s army-backed ouster.
   ‘He was sentenced [in his absence] to four years in prison and $70 million in damages,’ the transitional administration’s justice minister Christine Razanamahasoa told reporters.

US president Barack Obama launched a Middle East mission on Wednesday to reach out to Muslims but was greeted by threats from Osama bin Laden who accused him of sowing fresh seeds of hatred.
   Obama arrived in Riyadh to a red-carpet welcome and a kiss on both cheeks from Saudi King Abdullah, a key regional power-broker who also serves as protector of the two holiest sites in Islam.
   But minutes after Air Force One touched down, a new tape surfaces from the al-Qaeda chief who joined a battle for the hearts and minds of the Arab world, by accusing Obama of perpetuating former president George W Bush’s policies.
   ‘He has followed the steps of his predecessor in antagonising Muslims ... and laying the foundation for long wars,’ bin Laden said, referring to deadly clashes in Pakistan between the US-backed government and Islamist militants.
   ‘Obama and his administration have sowed new seeds of hatred against America,’ said the al-Qaeda leader whose network carried out the 9/11 attacks in the United States.
   The latest tape came as Obama and King Abdullah were to hold talks at the monarch’s sprawling farm outside Riyadh, which represent Obama’s first foray into tricky personal diplomacy in the region, after a flurry of talks with Middle East leaders in Washington.
   On Thursday, Obama will travel to Egypt, another pillar of the Arab world, to deliver a personal appeal for reconciliation to the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims, and hold his first talks with the president, Hosni Mubarak.
   King Abdullah has been seeking to relaunch a 2002 Arab-backed Middle East peace initiative, which has been praised by the Obama administration.
   But it was unclear whether Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s tough stand on settlements would scupper US hopes of convincing the Arab world to make concessions towards Israel to inject momentum into the process.
   Obama signalled in a US radio interview before leaving Washington that he would keep pressing Israel on the issue, despite an emerging rift between the two close allies.
   ‘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.’
   The Saudi initiative calls for full normalisation of relations between Arab states and Israel, a full withdrawal by Israel from Arab land, the creation of a Palestinian state and an ‘equitable’ solution for Palestinian refugees.

Pakistan’s military said Wednesday that big towns could be won back within days but warned it could take another two months to defeat the Taliban in a blistering air and ground offensive.
   Pakistan launched the assault to ‘eliminate’ Islamist militants in three districts of the northwest in late April, under heavy US pressure to stem the advance of Taliban fighters to within 100 kilometres of Islamabad.
   ‘The big cities and big towns will stand clear within three days’ time,’ military spokesman Brigadier General Athar Abbas said on a hill overlooking Mingora, the main town in the Swat valley that the army claims to control.
   Describing the Taliban as an elusive enemy that shied away from pitched battles during a six-week offensive in the northwest, Abbas said it ‘may be another two months when we can say the complete area is fully secured’.
   Pakistan claims that more than 1,300 militants and around 86 soldiers have died in the operations, which UN officials say have also displaced up to 2.5 million civilians, now sheltering in government-run camps or with relatives.
   The military announced further successes Wednesday, saying government forces had secured Charbagh, located 20 kilometres north of Mingora and described as one of the most important Taliban strongholds in Swat.
   Security forces also ‘successfully secured Pir Baba and Bhai Kalay’ in the neighbouring district of Buner, where there has been heavy fighting for weeks.
   Few details given out by the military can be independently confirmed because the area of operations are largely closed to journalists and aid workers.
   
   Pakistan students missing after Taliban kidnap
   Around 40 students from an army-run boarding school were still believed to be in Taliban captivity, one day after the military said all those kidnapped had been rescued, officials said.
   ‘More than 40 students and two teachers are still missing. Militants have abducted them,’ the top administration official in the northwest town of Bannu where the students had been headed, Sardar Mohammad Abbas, said.
   Tribal elders were mediating with the militants to secure their release, the commissioner said.

Saudi Arabia said on Wednesday it has quarantined a Filipina nurse who tested positive for swine flu several days after returning from holiday, the first case reported in the kingdom.
   ‘The nurse returned on Friday from a holiday in the Philippines... On Monday symptoms started to appear... and test results came positive on Tuesday,’ the health minister, Abdullah al-Rabia, in a statement carried by the SPA state news agency.
   He said the patient has been quarantined and that the Saudi authorities are contacting those who took the same flight or have been close to her since she returned.
   Meanwhile, the world is ‘getting closer’ to a swine flu pandemic as the virus shows early signs of spreading locally in countries outside the Americas, a senior World Health Organisation official reported from Geneva on Tuesday.
   ‘Globally we believe that we are at phase five but are getting closer to phase six,’ said Keiji Fukuda, WHO assistant director-general, referring to the agency’s six-level pandemic alert system.
   Phase five signals that a pandemic is imminent. The world would be in an official pandemic, marking global spread, at phase six.
   ‘It is clear that the virus continues to spread internationally. We know there are a number of countries that appear to be in transition moving from travel-related cases to established, more established, community-type spread,’ said Fukuda.
   He noted in particular that countries like Britain, Spain Japan, Chile and Australia are showing larger numbers of influenza A(H1N1) infections, ‘with some early spread into communities.’
   Some 18,965 cases of infections including 117 deaths have been reported to the WHO by 64 countries around the world.
   A criteria for the WHO to move the highest six alert would be established community spread in a country outside the first region in which the disease was initially reported, in this case, outside the Americas.
   ‘However, we still are waiting for really widespread community activity in these countries. So I think it’s fair to say that they are in transition and are not quite there yet, that’s why we are not in phase six yet,’ said Fukuda.

Myanmar’s judiciary accepted an appeal from Aung San Suu Kyi’s lawyers Wednesday over the number of witnesses she could call, delaying closing arguments at her internationally condemned trial.
   The democracy leader’s legal team had challenged a ruling banning three out of the four defence witnesses she had asked for at the closed-door proceedings, saying it showed the military regime’s case against her was one-sided.
   Nyan Win, a spokesman for her party, said a higher court would now hear from the government and the defence on the matter on Friday, when closing arguments at the prison trial were originally due to be heard.
   ‘I think it is a positive sign, if we look at the law,’ Nyan Win, who is also a member of Aung San Suu Kyi’s legal team, said.
   ‘The Yangon divisional court accepted our revision (appeal) so both sides have to give statements to the court on Friday at 3:00pm. That means the final arguments in the trial are postponed,’ he added.
   The Nobel laureate faces up to five years in jail on charges of breaching the conditions of her house arrest after a bizarre incident in which an American man, John Yettaw, swam to her lakeside home in May.
   The three barred witnesses were Win Tin, a dissident journalist who was Myanmar’s longest serving prisoner until his release in September; Tin Oo, the detained deputy leader of her party; and lawyer Khin Moe Moe.
   The court previously heard from 14 prosecution witnesses, mostly policemen, while one witness was accepted for Aung San Suu Kyi’s defence.
   Nyan Win also said that their preparations for final arguments in the case, to be heard once the appeal is dealt with, were ‘almost finished.’

US forces in South Korea will deploy unmanned spy planes to keep closer watch over nuclear-armed North Korea amid mounting tensions on the peninsula, the deputy head of US forces in the South has said
   Lieutenant General Jeffrey Remington said the US Air Force in the South would retire decades-old U-2 spy planes and replace them with Global Hawk unmanned reconnaissance planes.
   Remington’s comments in an interview with Dong-A Ilbo newspaper were confirmed by his public affairs officer.
   The general also said South Korea should buy the Global Hawks to improve the surveillance capability of the joint force.
   North Korea on May 25 staged its second nuclear test. It followed up by renouncing the armistice in force for more than 50 years on the peninsula, firing six short-range missiles and threatening the South with possible attack.
   Pyongyang is also thought to be preparing to test medium-range missiles and a long-range Taepodong-2.
   The US stations 28,500 troops in the South to support its 680,000-strong military against any threat from the North’s 1.1 million-strong armed forces.
   Remington noted that the communist North has the world’s fourth largest military force and deploys a large force of special troops and artillery near the border.
   The lieutenant-general said last week’s nuclear test poses ‘grave threats’ to the South’s security.
   
   US journalists to go on trial in DPRK
   Two US women journalists will go on trial in North Korea’s highest court Thursday on charges that could send them to a labour camp.
   The pair were detained by North Korean border guards on March 17 along the narrow Tumen River which marks the border with China, while researching a story about refugees fleeing the hardline communist state.

A US military probe has found US staff made significant mistakes in carrying out deadly air strikes in Afghanistan last month that killed dozens of civilians, The New York Times reported Wednesday.
   ‘American personnel made significant errors in carrying out some of the airstrikes in western Afghanistan on May 4 that killed dozens of Afghan civilians,’ the report said, citing an unnamed senior US military official.
   Civilian casualties — often from US air power — have caused mounting outrage in Afghanistan and friction with the Kabul government, with US and Western officials worried about handing propaganda victories to the Taliban.
   The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, demanded a halt in air strikes after the May 4 incident at Bala Buluk, one of the deadliest such incidents of the war in which his government says 140 civilians died.
   A US military investigation admitted that 20-30 civilians were killed along with 60-65 insurgents. Afghanistan’s top rights body said 97 civilians, most of them children, were believed to have died.
   ‘The (US military) official said the civilian death toll would probably have been reduced if American air crews and forces on the ground had followed strict rules devised to prevent civilian casualties,’ the Times report said.
   
   Bombs, battles kill 27 in Afghanistan
   A suicide bomb tore through a southern Afghan town killing six security guards on Wednesday while a British soldier and 20 militants died in fighting linked to a growing Islamist insurgency.
   The bomber, who was riding a motorbike, blew himself up alongside guards from a private Afghan company escorting a convoy of logistics for international troops, the police said.
   ‘Six private Afghan guards were killed,’ said the southern Afghanistan border police commander, General Saifullah.

A strike in Indian Kashmir to protest against the deaths of two young women whose families allege were raped and killed by security forces paralysed life for a third day Wednesday.
   The strike closed shops, schools, banks and offices in the summer capital Srinagar and other towns in the revolt-hit Muslim-majority Kashmir valley and the police kept a tight watch on protesters.
   The police denied they had imposed a curfew but residents complained their movements were severely restricted.
   The police said they were investigating the deaths of the 17-year-old woman and her 22-year-old sister-in-law, whose bodies were found in a shallow stream last Saturday.

Sri Lanka is hampering international relief efforts by forcing dozens of British and other foreign aid workers to leave the country because it considers them sympathetic to the defeated Tamil Tigers, The Times reported on Wednesday.
   The policy is costing the aid organisations tens of thousands of pounds of donors’ money as they struggle to help 2,80,000 Tamil civilians in internment camps, the report said quoting aid workers.
   ‘The NGOs are all extremely scared. If you raise your voice you’ll be the next one thrown out,’ an unnamed senior member of staff in one international aid group said.
   The government deported the Norwegian head of Forut, an Oslo-based NGO, on Saturday, and stopped a British employee of Forut from re-entering Sri Lanka last month.
   It has also refused to renew visas for dozens of other foreign aid workers, citing new rules that prevent them from staying in Sri Lanka for more than three years.
   Two foreigners working for Care International, including a Briton, were forced to leave last month because their visas were not extended, The Times said quoting unnamed local sources.
   A Briton working for the Norwegian Refugee Council, an Ethiopian working for the Save the Children Fund, and three foreign members of staff for ASB, a German NGO, have been forced to leave.
   The British head of Solidar, a consortium of NGOs, was ordered to leave within seven days in December even though he had four children at school in Sri Lanka. He managed to negotiate a short extension.

Philippine lawmakers have passed a resolution to re-write the constitution, a move critics said Wednesday is aimed at giving outgoing president Gloria Arroyo another term in power.
   However, it still needs the approval of the Senate, which is dominated by her opponents.
   The resolution cleared the first hurdle after it was passed by the House of Representatives, which is full of Arroyo allies, following a marathon session late on Tuesday.
   The constitution, written in 1987, limits presidents to one six-year term in office.
   ‘It’s impossible for them to do it without the Senate,’ said Senate president Juan Ponce Enrile, labelling the measure an ‘exercise in futility.’
   The Philippines is due to hold a presidential election next May to choose a successor to Arroyo.
   Arroyo allies have been pressing to re-write the constitution for months — purportedly to make the economy more competitive by easing rules on foreign ownership in certain sectors.
   But critics charge it is a ploy to extend Arroyo’s stay in office.
   The influential Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines joined the attacks on the move.
   ‘It’s like they are betraying the people. When power corrupts, it corrupts absolutely,’ said Archbishop Angel Lagdameo, president of the CBCP.

French officials said on Wednesday they may never discover why an Air France aircraft crashed into the Atlantic killing 228 people and cautioned they might not even find the plane’s black boxes on the ocean floor.
   Officials in Brazil said search teams had spotted four more clusters of debris about 90 kilo-
   metres south of the first wreckage discovered on Tuesday in the middle of the Atlantic.
   Brazilian and French ships are heading to the area, some 745 miles northeast of Brazil’s coastal city Recife hoping to retrieve as much of the wreckage as possible.
   France is dispatching a mini submarine that can explore to a depth of 6,000 metres and will try to locate the Airbus’s flight data and voice recorders, which should shed light on a crash that has puzzled aviation experts.
   But Paul Louis Arslanian, the head of France’s air accident investigation agency, said he was not sure that the black boxes would be recovered and said the probe might prove frustrating.
   ‘I am not totally optimistic. We cannot rule out that we will not find the flight recorders,’ Arslanian told reporters, warning the inquiry could take a long time to wrap up.
   ‘I cannot rule out the possibility that we might end up with a finding that is relatively unsatisfactory in terms of certainty,’ he added.