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British prime minister Gordon Brown’s deputy warned Saturday that he would likely face a renewed threat to his leadership after surviving serious blows last week.
   Lord Peter Mandelson predicted that rebels would likely try to dislodge Brown at the governing Labour Party’s annual conference in September.
   Brown endured the worst week of his rocky premiership after Labour suffered historic losses in the June 4 European and local elections which saw the resignation of 11 ministers amid calls for him to quit and savage critiques of his leadership.
   The turmoil left Brown’s authority seriously weakened, newspapers said, with rebels still convinced Brown will steer Labour to defeat in the next general election, which must be held by June 2010.
   Mandelson, Brown’s de facto deputy, told The Daily Telegraph newspaper: ‘There’s a small group who keep coming back. They won’t be reconciled to the prime minister’s leadership.’
   However, he said he would not ‘lose any sleep’ over the threat posed by them.
   Branding the attempts to unseat Brown a ‘small earthquake, not many dead’, Mandelson hinted that Brown should show more leadership — and lighten up his demeanour.
   ‘I believe in leadership and in being decisive,’ he said. ‘Secondly, in listening to people and respecting official advice you receive. And thirdly, introducing a bit of humour and jollity to your work.
   ‘You don’t have to be too grey or serious the whole time. You can do your work and enjoy it at the same time and include people along the way.’
   Meanwhile, the foreign secretary, David Miliband indicated that he considered quitting in the wave of resignations which left Brown fighting for his job last week.
   Some commentators say that had Miliband — reportedly behind a plot against Brown last year — gone, Brown would have had to follow.
   ‘I’d made my decision on Thursday (June 4),’ Miliband told The Guardian newspaper.
   ‘Sometimes you can make your decisions with great planning and calculation and sometimes you have to make them rather more quickly. ‘I made my decision in good faith... we all have to live with our decisions.’
   He added: ‘I know what we stand for. I know what our instincts are, but the voters don’t,’ while calling for a period of ‘competent, effective, stable government’.
   Opinion polls suggest Labour will be defeated by the main opposition Conservatives, led by David Cameron, in the next general election.
   The Brown government’s popularity has been hit hard by a scandal over lawmakers claiming generous expenses from the public purse for the upkeep of their homes, which has dominated news headlines here for several weeks.
   One of the most prominent Brown critics in the Labour ranks, former interior minister Charles Clarke, warned that the prime minister’s survival ‘depends entirely on Gordon’.

An American member of al-Qaeda urged Islamist militants to attack Zionist and Western interests worldwide, in a new videotape posted online on Saturday.
   ‘The Zio-Crusader interests everywhere are legitimate targets for us,’ said Adam Gadahn, who is also known as Azzam the American, in a tape provided by the US-based SITE Intelligence Group, which said was posted on Islamist web sites.
   ‘By striking them, we aggravate the enemy’s wounds, bleed its crumbling economy, and reduce the load on our brothers the mujahedeen (holy warriors),’ said Gadahn who spoke in Arabic for the first time, in the message titled ‘Let’s Continue Our Jihad and Sacrifice’ and addressed to the Palestinians.
   ‘To describe the targeting of these interests outside Palestine as illegitimate is a mistake that cannot be accepted by a reasonable Muslim,’ said bearded Gadahn, who is listed among the most wanted by the United States, with a reward of up to one million dollars for information leading to his capture.
   In October 2006, he became the first person to be charged in the United States with treason since the Second World War era.
   The charge carries a minimum of five years in prison on conviction and a maximum penalty of death.
   Gadahn has appeared in several videotapes for al-Qaeda since 2004, praising the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington and threatening new terror onslaughts.

The US president, Barack Obama, plans to pursue attempts to engage Tehran whether hard-line president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or his moderate rival Mirhossein Mousavi ultimately emerges as the winner of Iran’s election.
   ‘The president’s decision to engage Iran was not based on a particular electoral result. We are going to engage the Iranian government whether it is led by one faction or the other,’ a senior State Department official said.
   State media declared Ahmadinejad the winner but challenger Mirhossein Mousavi alleged irregularities and claimed victory for himself after the hotly contested election.
   Washington hoped that, whoever wins, the election will end the acerbic tone from Iran and reduce tension as major powers seek to curb Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
   Experts said a second term by Ahmadinejad would make it tougher for Obama to change the tone but they also cautioned against excessive optimism if former prime minister Mousavi wins.
   ‘This is going to be hard and complex, regardless of who is elected president.

Britain is most at risk to the spread of an influenza pandemic, closely followed by The Netherlands, Germany, Italy and South Korea, according to a ranking of 213 countries released Friday.
   Russia, Canada, Israel, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan are also classified as being at ‘extreme risk’ of a flu virus spreading within their borders due to some mix of dense populations, busy airports, and high levels of tourism and urbanisation.
   The World Health Organisation declared Thursday that the A(H1N1) swine flu that has swept across 74 countries since April — infecting tens of thousands and claiming 145 lives — had become a pandemic, the first in four decades.
   But even if most rich countries are vulnerable the rapid transmission of the disease, they are far better equipped to cope with its impact, said Alyson Warhurst, a professor at Warwick Business School in Britain and main architect of the global ranking.
   ‘Capacity to contain the spread is going to be much weaker in poor countries with very poor infrastructure and lack of education. That would be much of sub-Saharan Africa,’ she said.

Heavily-armed Ethiopian soldiers crossed into central Somalia on Friday and entered a town controlled by a pro-government militia nearly 30 kms from the border, residents said.
   ‘They came with battle wagons and trucks all full of soldiers and guns,’ said Hassan Abdi, a resident in the town of Balanbale in Galgadud region. ‘Everybody is very worried.’
   Residents said the Ethiopian troops were setting up positions in the centre of the town. Central Somalia has been the scene of heavy fighting between hardline Islamist insurgents and the moderate Islamist group Ahlu Sunna Waljamaca.
   ‘We are ready to fight the Ethiopians if they come close to our forces, we will give them a lesson,’ Hassan Maalin Takow, an al Shabaab commander said.
   Al Shabaab and allied group Hizbul Islam is trying to oust the government of president Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, a former Islamist rebel who was elected in January, and impose a strict version of Islamic law throughout the Horn of Africa nation.
   The insurgents control large swathes of the south and parts of the capital Mogadishu. They have been battling pro-government forces this month in a bid to stamp more authority on the centre of the Horn of Africa nation.
   Ethiopia sent thousands of troops into Somalia in 2006 to help topple an Islamist movement holding Mogadishu and most of the south.
   That drew protests from some in the Muslim world and enraged the Islamists, who regrouped to launch an insurgency.
   The Ethiopian soldiers withdrew in January but residents, insurgents and humanitarian organisations have reported several incursions in the past few months.

NASA cancelled plans to launch space shuttle Endeavour on a construction mission to the International Space Station on Saturday due to a potentially dangerous hydrogen leak.
   The leak was found as technicians neared completion of the loading of 500,000 gallons (1.9 million liters) of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen into the shuttle’s fuel tank for a launch attempt at 7:17am EDT.
   ‘There’s no way we could have continued,’ said NASA launch director Mike Leinbach. ‘Hydrogen is a very volatile commodity.’
   The problem is similar to a hydrogen leak that occurred while shuttle Discovery was being prepared for launch in March. NASA discovered a problem with a line that vents gaseous hydrogen from the fuel tank.
   Technicians replaced the faulty equipment and the shuttle was successfully launched four days later.

A defiant North Korea vowed Saturday to build more nuclear bombs and to start enriching uranium for a new atomic weapons programme after the UN Security Council imposed sanctions for its nuclear test.
   The North, describing Friday’s sanctions resolution as a ‘vile product’ of a US-inspired campaign, said it would never abandon nuclear weapons and would treat any attempt to blockade it as an act of war.
   The 15-member Council voted unanimously Friday to slap tougher sanctions on the North to cripple its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes.
   The hardline communist state, in a foreign ministry statement reported by its official news agency, said all new plutonium it extracts would be weaponised.
   One third of used fuel rods from the Yongbyon reactor have so far been reprocessed into weapons-grade plutonium, it said.
   ‘Secondly, we will start uranium enrichment,’ it said in its first admission that it has such a programme — a second route to a nuclear bomb.
   In 2002, the North denied US claims that it was operating a secret uranium enrichment programme in addition to its admitted plutonium-based operation.
   The plutonium-producing plants were shut down under a 2007 six-nation disarmament deal. But Pyongyang vowed to restart them after the Security Council in April condemned its long-range rocket launch.
   ‘It has become an absolutely impossible option for the North Korea to even think about giving up its nuclear weapons,’ the statement said, adding that any attempted blockade would be considered an act of war ‘and met with a decisive military response.’
   It added: ‘No matter how hard the US-led hostile forces may try all sorts of isolation and blockade, the DPRK, a proud nuclear power, will not flinch from them.’
   Resolution 1874 passed Friday, which does not authorise the use of force, calls on UN member states to expand sanctions imposed after the North’s initial nuclear test in October 2006.
   It calls for tougher inspections of cargo suspected of containing banned missile- and nuclear-related items, a tighter arms embargo and new targeted financial curbs to choke off revenue for the nuclear and missile sectors.
   It also ‘demands that the DPRK not conduct any further nuclear test or any launch using ballistic missile technology’ and abandon all nuclear weapons and programmes ‘in a complete, verifiable and irreversible manner.’
   US ambassador to the UN Susan Rice said it would be no surprise if North Korea ‘reacted to this very tough sanctions regime in a fashion that would be further provocation.’
   US intelligence officials believe it will respond with a third atomic test, according to sources quoted by American TV networks.
   Pyongyang followed up its May 25 nuclear test by launching short-range missiles, renouncing the armistice on the Korean peninsula and threatening possible attacks on South Korea.
   Seoul has sent some 600 Marine reinforcements to two border islands.
   It denounced the North’s statement as ‘a grave challenge’ to international efforts to promote peace in the region.
   ‘The government, together with the international community, will sternly deal with North Korea’s uranium enrichment programme as well as its plutonium,’ the foreign ministry said in a statement.

The new US assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs called here Saturday for concrete progress in Nepal’s peace process and the speedy formation of a new government.
   Robert Blake warned that the international community did not have ‘unlimited patience’ as he urged rival parties to work together to achieve peace in Nepal, where Maoist rebels fought a decade-long civil war with the army.
   ‘It is very important for there not to just be rhetorical support for the peace process, but for everybody to act together to complete this process,’ Blake told journalists here after meeting the president and prime minister on Friday.
   The Maoists took power in Nepal last year after winning a general election, but their government fell in May following a failed attempt to sack the head of the army, plunging the country into fresh political chaos.
   More than a month later, the new ruling coalition has still not agreed on the distribution of ministerial portfolios, further delaying the fragile peace process launched when the civil war ended in 2006.
   This requires the integration of Maoist former fighters with the army — a controversial process that has yet to begin.
   Blake said he had urged the new ruling coalition to ‘proceed as quickly as possible to name all new ministers and their portfolios’ to allow the peace process to move forward.
   ‘Nepal should not think there will be unlimited patience on the part of the international community,’ he said, responding to a question on the future of the United Nations mission set up to support the peace process.

The president, Asif Ali Zardari, said Saturday that Pakistan was battling for its ‘sovereignty’ a day after scores of people were killed amid an escalating offensive against the Taliban.
   Zardari said Pakistan would fight ‘until the end,’ as US defence officials in Washington confirmed that Islamabad was stepping up its operations against militants in the country’s troubled northwest.
   ‘We are fighting a war for our sovereignty,’ Zardari said in a television address. ‘We will continue this war until the end, and we will win it at any cost.
   ‘The Taliban are the enemies of innocent people. They want to terrorise the people and to take control of the country’s institutions.’
   Zardari’s pledge came after suicide bombings targeting Friday prayers at two mosques killed at least six people, including a prominent Muslim cleric, and wounded more than 100.
   The explosions confirmed fears that Taliban militants would avenge an offensive against them in the northwest, where the military said Friday 39 insurgents and 10 soldiers had been killed in fresh fighting.
   Religious scholar Sarfraz Naeemi, who had spoken out against Taliban suicide bombings, was among two people killed in one of the mosque attacks, in the eastern city of Lahore, the police said.
   The Lahore police chief Pervez Rathore said a suicide bomber had entered the room where Naeemi was sitting with others after Friday prayers, and blew himself up.
   Naeemi had issued a fatwa (edict) against suicide bombings carried out by Taliban militants.
   Shops, offices, banks and schools in Karachi and Lahore, Pakistan’s two largest cities, were closed Saturday in protest at Naeemi’s killing, officials said.
   Protests to condemn the killing were also held by religious groups in several Pakistani cities. In the other mosque attack, four people died and at least 105 were wounded when an explosives-filled car ploughed into a mosque in the northwestern garrison town of Nowshera, the police said.
   Meanwhile, security officials said that jets pounded militant hideouts in the Mohmand tribal district bordering Afghanistan, killing at least seven rebels. Jets also attacked the northwestern tribal districts of South and North Waziristan, they said.
   The tolls could not be verified independently as the areas are out of bounds to journalists due to the ongoing military operations.
   Separately, a roadside bomb targeting a police vehicle in the northwestern garrison town of Kohat killed a policemen and a civilian and six others on Saturday, senior police official Dilawar Khan Bangash said.
   A spokesman for militant leader Baitullah Mehsud’s Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan claimed responsibility for Friday’s two mosque attacks, as well as Tuesday’s bombing of Peshawar’s Pearl Continental hotel that killed nine people.

Around 250 people protested on Saturday the indictment of 12 Israeli Arabs for lynching an Israeli soldier after he opened fire on a bus and killed four people in a deadly rampage in 2005.
   ‘This is an expression of anger and protest,’ said Nahed Khazim, the mayor of the town who helped organise the sit-in, as protesters waved Palestinian flags and signs denouncing the ‘horrible massacre’ four years ago.
   The 12 were indicted earlier this month for their role in the lynching. Seven were charged with attempted murder and five with other crimes including obstruction of justice, assault on police and rioting.
   In August 2005 an AWOL Israeli Jewish soldier, Eden Natan Zada, opened fire with his automatic rifle on a bus in Shfaram, killing four people and wounding more than 20.
   Zada, a far-right activist virulently opposed to the withdrawal of soldiers and settlers from Gaza that was then under way, was beaten to death by an angry mob following his shooting spree.
   Nisrin Turki, whose two sisters were shot dead on the bus, said she attended the demonstration to protest the ‘oppression’ suffered by Israel’s 1.2 million Arab citizens.
   ‘As Arabs, it is impossible for us to be happy,’ she said. ‘The (Israeli) authorities only bring us sorrow and agony.’
   The High Follow-up Committee, the main representative organisation for Arabs in Israel, has accused Israel’s judiciary of going after ‘the victims of the massacre instead of the Israeli policies that have inspired these criminals.’
   Israel’s Arab community makes up around 20 per cent of the country’s population of seven million. It is descended from the 160,000 Palestinians who remained in the Jewish state after its creation in 1948.

Abu Moataz has never been a member of the Islamist Hamas movement, but two years after their takeover of the Gaza Strip he happily patrols the streets in the uniform of their paramilitary police.
   ‘I have a wife and four children. I am a son of Fatah and I have my beliefs, but I cannot say this government is not good. They feed my children,’ the 32-year-old says.
   In the two years since Hamas seized power in Gaza, the territory’s residents have endured crippling economic sanctions and a devastating war with Israel, but the Islamist group’s grip on power is as tight as ever.
   Abu Moataz always supported the Fatah party of the Western-backed Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, and even fought for its armed wing during the 2000 Palestinian uprising.
   But when Israel slapped sanctions on Gaza in the wake of Hamas’s June 15, 2007 defeat of Abbas’s forces, the factory where he worked shut down and he turned to the Islamist group, now Gaza’s most reliable employer.
   He estimates that Fatah supporters like himself make up as much as a third of the employees of the Hamas-run government.
   ‘International, regional and local opposition to Hamas has backfired,’ says Mukhaimer Abu Saada, a professor of political science at Gaza’s Al-Azhar University. ‘Instead of squeezing Hamas, it has become stronger.’
   Israel’s decision to seal Gaza off from all but basic goods has spawned a vast and lucrative trade through smuggling tunnels under the Gaza-Egypt border, one that is regulated and taxed by the Hamas-run government.
   ‘Hamas is crying that we are under siege, the Palestinians are dying as a result of the siege and sanctions, but in the meantime it is Hamas and Hamas men, mainly, who are making money out of the tunnels,’ Abu Saada says.
   The taxes Hamas collects from the tunnel trade, along with aid from international patrons such as Iran have allowed it to consistently pay some 20,000 government employees’ salaries and maintain extensive charity network.
   At the same time it has decimated Gaza’s private sector and choked off customs taxes Israel used to collect at the border crossings and transfer to the Palestinian Authority.
   The dingy walls of Abu Moataz’s sparsely furnished flat are decked with posters of Hamas fighters killed during the war.
   ‘They were my friends, I worked with them,’ he says.
   When his own mentally disabled brother was shot dead in the final days of the conflict, one of 1,400 Palestinians killed in the fighting, Hamas paid for the funeral.
   Ahmed Yusef, a senior Hamas official, admits his group’s finances have not suffered from the sanctions but denies that they have helped the government.
   ‘I don’t think anyone would say we are benefiting from the siege. We care about our people. You have to accommodate 1.5 million people, it is not just about the people who are working in the Hamas government.’

Myanmar’s high court has set a date for a hearing on Aung San Suu Kyi’s appeal against a ban on two witnesses in her trial on charges of breaking her house arrest rules, the opposition leader’s party said.
   The Supreme Court will hear the application on June 17 after previously saying this would be postponed to a later date, said Nyan Win, one of Aung San Suu Kyi’s lawyers and spokesman for her National League for Democracy.
   ‘The Supreme Court announced the date on the notice board Friday... We have to give our arguments for admission (of the appeal) on that day,’ he said.
   The 63-year-old Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi faces up to five years in jail if convicted on charges that she allowed an uninvited American man to swim to hear lakeside home in May.

The crisis in BJP deepened Saturday with Yashwant Sinha quitting all party posts, including vice president, and hit out at the leadership demanding resignation of all office bearers of party and Parliamentary Party owning collective responsibility for the electoral defeat.
   Sinha, former external affairs minister, raised the banner of revolt just before BJP chief Rajnath Singh addressed a press conference imposing a gag order on leaders from airing their views in public failing which he threatened disciplinary action.
   The MP from Hazaribagh in Jharkhand sent a four-page letter to Rajnath Singh and other members of the party’s core group in which he said it was difficult to avoid impression that in BJP ‘we put a premium on failure.’
   He said he was also resigning from being in-charge of Karnataka affairs and as head of the Foreign Affairs Cell of the party in response to senior leader Jaswant Singh’s suggestion at a core committee meeting that there should be collective responsibility for failure.
   ‘Our reluctance to introspect and introspect comprehensively and openly is unacceptable to a large number of people within the party. So is the rat race for posts. If we are a party with a difference, let us set an example in abnegation,’ Sinha said in the letter.

Suspected Muslim militants shot dead a counter-insurgency policeman and a civilian at a busy bus terminal in Indian Kashmir on Saturday, the police said.
   The attack took place in northern Sopore town, about 50 kilometres from the summer capital Srinagar.
   ‘The killings sparked panic in the busy terminal as people ran for cover fearing police retaliation,’ a police spokesman said, adding the dead officer was a member of the force’s special operations group.
   No group has claimed responsibility for the killings. Rebels often target security forces and civilians they suspect of working as informers.
   Violence has dropped in Kashmir since India and Pakistan launched a peace process in 2004 to resolve disputes including the one over Kashmir — a scenic Himalayan region that both hold in part but claim in full.

An Air India passenger jet heading to Frankfurt was forced to return to Mumbai after a bag of curry powder set off smoke and fire alarms, it was reported Saturday.
   Pilots on the Boeing 747-400 plane activated fire extinguishers after receiving a cockpit warning about a fire in the cargo hold early Friday morning, the Mumbai Mirror newspaper said.
   But on the plane’s return to India’s financial and entertainment capital, engineers said the alert had been triggered by the escape of particles from a bag containing two to three kilogrammes of curry powder.
   The bag, belonging to a passenger from the western Indian state of Gujarat, was removed before the plane took off again after a 12-hour delay.
   ‘On taking off for the second time, the pilot apologised for the delay and announced that a bag containing curry powder had caused the problem,’ Air India spokesman Jitendra Bhargava was quoted as saying.

Afghanistan’s electoral authority unveiled a final list of 41 candidates for August 20 presidential elections that includes the incumbent, president Hamid Karzai.
   The number is down from a provisional list of 44 people, most of them unknown, after two men were disqualified and one dropped out, the Independent Election Commission president, Azizullah Lodin, told reporters.
   Still in the running are former finance minister Ashraf Ghani and former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, seen by many observers as the strongest challengers to Karzai who is going for a second term.
   Lodin complained that many of the candidates should not be on the ballot paper because they were not qualified to be president, lacking a profile and education.
   ‘Unfortunately I have to announce that we have this long list,’ he told reporters, pointing to the names of candidates for second presidential election in Afghanistan’s history.
   Eighteen people ran in the first presidential elections, held in 2004 and won by Karzai with 55.4 per cent of the vote.
   Lodin said would-be candidate Mohammad Daud Miraki, one of the unknowns, had announced he was dropping out the race.