Manuel Zelaya, the president of Honduras ousted in a coup, has vowed to fly to the country on Thursday to try to reclaim his office after winning the support of US President Barack Obama. As troops surrounded the presidential palace in the capital, Tegucigalpa, following clashes on Monday night, Mr Zelaya said that he planned to travel to Washington, where Mr Obama has denounced the coup as illegal. “I go to Tegucigalpa on Thursday,” he added. Depending on whether he is allowed to enter the country, his planned return to Honduras sets up a potentially explosive showdown with the newly installed administration of the congressional leader Roberto Micheletti. For Daily Telegraph full article, click here.

BBC (follow link): The US army says it has launched a major offensive against the Taliban in south Afghanistan's Helmand province. The US military says about 4,000 Marines as well as 650 Afghan troops are involved, supported by Nato planes. Brigadier General Larry Nicholson said the operation was different from previous ones because of the "massive size of the force" and its speed. The offensive is the Marines' first major operation since their recent deployment to Afghanistan. It is also the first such operation under President Barack Obama's presidency. The operation - codenamed Khanjar or Strike of the Sword - began when units moved into the Helmand river valley in the early hours of Thursday. Helicopters and heavy transport vehicles carried out the advance, with Nato planes providing air cover. UK-led forces in Helmand launched their own operation to combat the Taliban insurgency last week, in what the Ministry of Defence described as one of the largest air operations in modern times. Thousands of British forces under Nato command have been fighting the Taliban in Helmand since 2006, but there has been criticism that they have been overstretched and under-resourced. Southern Afghanistan is considered a Taliban stronghold. Where we go we will stay, and where we stay, we will hold, build and work toward transition of all security responsibilities to Afghan forces," said Brig Gen Nicholson in a statement. At a briefing at the US military's Camp Leatherneck last week, he told personnel and embedded reporters: "One of the most critical things is to tell people why we're there, and we are going to have a limited opportunity to gain their trust." The operation would have an initial highly aggressive stage lasting 36 hours, AFP news agency reported. It aims to improve security ahead of presidential elections on 20 August, allowing voter registration where before there was none, Gen Nicholson said...

Sky News: Coup leaders in Honduras have defied international pressure and vowed there was "no chance at all" of ousted President Manuel Zelaya returning to office.Heads of state, from US President Barack Obama to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, have told the new rulers of the Central American country to restore Mr Zelaya. The ousted leader is a leftist who was toppled by the army on Sunday and sent into exile after a dispute over presidential term limits. The Organisation of American States gave Honduras an ultimatum early on Wednesday to allow Mr Zelaya back into office by this weekend or face suspension.But the interim government's response indicated there was little immediate hope of a negotiated solution to the crisis in Honduras, an impoverished coffee and textile producer. Interim foreign minister Enrique Ortez said Mr Zelaya would be arrested if he came home and that the interim authorities were sure he had been removed in a legal process."We are not negotiating national sovereignty or the presidency," Mr Ortez told reporters in an interview. "There is no chance at all" of Mr Zelaya coming back to power, he said. The Honduran Congress voted in a new government more favourable to the traditional business and ranching elite to replace Mr Zelaya, who was toppled before a referendum on extending his time in office. The president also upset the army, judiciary and members of his own Liberal Party for taking Honduras to the left. Newly appointed President Roberto Micheletti said it would take a foreign invasion to put Mr Zelaya back in power...

AP: In fresh displays of defiance, Iran's opposition leader told supporters Wednesday "it's not yet too late" to push for their rights, and he joined a reformist ex-president in condemning the regime for a post-election crackdown both said was tantamount to a coup. Iran's standoff with the West escalated with the European Union considering pulling out all 27 of its ambassadors in retaliation for the recent detentions of several local employees of the British Embassy in Tehran, despite Iranian claims that all but one had been released. Embattled opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi said he considered Iran's cleric-led government illegitimate, and he demanded that it release all political prisoners and institute electoral reforms and press freedoms. Former President Mohammad Khatami, meanwhile, lashed out at what he termed "a poisonous security situation" in the wake of violent street protests. In boldly worded statements posted on their Web sites, Khatami accused Iran's leadership of a "velvet coup against the people and democracy," and Mousavi said the government's crackdown on demonstrators was "tantamount to a coup." Wednesday's confrontations with the regime came as Iran's feared Basij militia accused Mousavi of undermining national security and asked a prosecutor to investigate his role in the protests. Khatami, an ally of Mousavi — who contends the June 12 election was marred by widespread fraud and insists he was robbed of victory — scorned the government for declaring incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner in a landslide. "Given what has been done and declared unilaterally, we must say that a velvet revolution has taken place against the people and democratic roots of the system," Khatami said. "People's protests were suppressed, those who were required to protect people's rights humiliated the people ... yet it (the government) speaks of national reconciliation and peace." Mousavi said he was troubled by "the bitter, widespread distrust of the people toward the declared election results and the government that caused it." "It's not yet too late," said Mousavi, who has slipped from public view in recent days. "It's our historic responsibility to continue our complaint and make efforts not to give up the rights of the people." (AP note: based on witness reports, due to Iran ban on foreign journalists.)

The AFP: Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd described as "devastating" a report showing conditions for Aboriginals were worsening despite efforts to improve them. Rudd's government, which made a historic apology to Aborigines for past injustices last year, released the report showing indigenous children were six times more likely to be abused or neglected than their non-Aboriginal counterparts. The Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage report found abuse and neglect of Aboriginal children had doubled since 2000, with 35 in every 1,000 suffering compared with six in 1,000 non-Aboriginals. It also found the indigenous homicide rate was seven times higher than in the rest of the community, with hospitalisations from domestic violence 34 times higher and Aborigines 13 times more likely to be imprisoned. "This report on indigenous disadvantage is a devastating report," Rudd said. "The fact that despite all the efforts in the past, when it comes to such basic things as literacy and numeracy standards, that we have achieved no effective progress, means that we have to redouble and treble our efforts to make an impact." "It is unacceptable and it requires decisive action."

Bulgaria might host Formula 1 race in a period from 2011 to 2015 year, says the press-centre of Bulgaria Organizing Committee for the Grand prix. The chairman of the organization Rumen Petkov is invited to meet Bernie Ecclestone, the president of Formila One. The meeting will be during the German Grand Prix from July 10 to 12. According to the press-centre there will be contract, which will sign an agreement for future hosting of F1 in Bulgaria.

Times Online: Ban Ki Moon, the UN secretary-general, flew to the remote stronghold of Burma’s ruling generals this afternoon to demand the release of the democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, and the country’s two hundred political prisoners. In a high risk visit, which will be denounced by human rights groups if it fails to achieve results, Mr Ban travelled to Naypyidaw, the new capital built in the jungle three years ago, to meet directly with Burma’s Senior General Than Shwe. “It is a very tough mission,” he said as he arrived. “I'm going to urge (the generals) to accelerate their political process ... and release all political prisoners, including Aung San Suu Kyi … The genuine will of the Myanmar people should be reflected.” But it was not clear whether he would even be allowed to meet Ms Suu Kyi, who has been on trial since May because of a bizarre clandestine visit from an eccentric American. The trial of 64-year-old Ms Suu Kyi has caused outrage around the world. Critics of Burma's military government have dismissed it as a ruse to keep the opposition leader locked up until after next year's election. The BBC's Jonathan Head (follow link) says the failure of many previous UN missions to Burma has at least lowered expectations of this one. But Mr Ban needs to come away with something more than a few token prisoner releases if he is to avoid charges that his visit is merely being used by Burma's military rulers to boost their legitimacy. Mr Ban has called for the immediate release of all Burma's political prisoners, thought to number more than 2,000. "Through my meetings... I will convey exactly what the international community expects and wishes [regarding] the way they want to see changes in Myanmar [Burma]," he told reporters in Singapore before his departure. It is not clear if Mr Ban will be allowed to meet Ms Suu Kyi - he would be the first UN secretary general to do so if that happens.

Xinhua says Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, on Thursday rejected accusations by an international rights group that the Islamic movement violated the laws of war during Israel's recent offensive to the enclave. In a 117-page report, Amnesty international accused Israel of committing war crimes in its military operation in Gaza, killing as many as 1,400 Palestinians in a three-week assault started on December 27, 2008. But the London-based organization also accused Hamas of killing three Israeli civilians by firing rockets indiscriminately from Gaza during the Operation Cast Lead. "Hamas rejects all the accusation made against it in Amnesty's report," said Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, in a news conference. "instead of publishing such reports, those murderers (Israelis) should have been taken to court for trial," he added. Moreover, Hamas said the report, which is the first in-depth study of the parties' conduct of hostilities during Gaza offensive, "was unfair and unbalanced since it puts the victim and executioner on an equal footing," according to Abu Zuhri. Though the report finds Israel guilty, it is still unprofessional because Amnesty "haven't met or heard from any of Hamas' leaders," Abu Zuhri continued. The report also called for stopping arms shipments from reaching Hamas, implicitly urging Egypt, which borders the Gaza Strip, to increase security measures along the borders to prevent underground smuggling of weapons. "This call aims at expanding the list of accusations against Hamas to incite international parties not to deal with Hamas and to tighten the blockade on Gaza," Abu Zuhri said. Meanwhile, AFP reports Israel rejected an Amnesty International report that accused it of committing war crimes in the Gaza Strip, and said the human rights group was manipulated by Hamas. "The slant of their report indicates that the organisation succumbed to the manipulations of the Hamas terror organisation," the Israeli military said in a statement. London-based Amnesty accused Israeli forces of war crimes, saying they used civilians, including children as human shields and conducted wanton attacks on civilians during the December-January Gaza offensive. Israel called the report "unbalanced" and said it presented "a distorted view of the laws of war that does not comply with the rules implemented by democratic states battling terror." "It ignores the efforts of the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) to minimise as much as possible harming uninvolved non-combatant civilians," it said. It insisted Israeli forces used "various fighting methods and advanced technology to minimise harm to the civilian population while engaging terrorists who were operating from densely populated areas and using the local population as 'human shields'." Amnesty said it found no evidence the Hamas rulers of Gaza had used civilians as human shields, but claimed Israeli forces forced Palestinian families to remain in one room of their home while using the rest of the house as a base and sniper position. Israel accused the rights group of ignoring "the blatant violations of international law perpetrated by Hamas." Thirteen pages of the 117-page report are devoted to the conduct of Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups and points out the rocket attacks they carried out against Israel "constitute war crimes." More than 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis died during the massive offensive launched by Israel in response to rocket fire from Palestinian militants.

The BBC (follow link) reports a top Latin American diplomat due to visit Honduras says he will demand the restoration of the country's deposed President, Manuel Zelaya. Miguel Insulza, Secretary General of the Organization of American States, said he would not negotiate with the interim government. To meet those behind last Sunday's coup would be seen as giving them legitimacy, he argued. The interim government says that it may agree to early elections. It says Mr Zelaya is a criminal who was seeking to rule indefinitely but world leaders including President Barack Obama have said he remains the country's democratically elected leader. Mr Zelaya was forced into exile last weekend after the coup, which was authorised by the Honduran supreme court. Recent days have seen large demonstrations in Honduras both for and against the exiled president. "I will do everything I can but I think it will be very hard to turn things around in a couple of days," Mr Insulza said at a summit of Caribbean leaders in Georgetown, Guyana. "We are not going to Honduras to negotiate. We are going to Honduras to ask them to change what they have been doing." The OAS earlier gave Honduras until the weekend to act or face suspension from the group. Mr Zelaya delayed his planned return home on Thursday in response to the deadline.

The AP: The question of when and where a public memorial service will be held for Michael Jackson has finally been answered. But how city officials will handle the likelihood of a massive crowd remains to be settled. A public memorial for the late singer has been set for 10 a.m. Tuesday at the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles, according to a press release from the office of the Jackson family's publicist. A press conference to announce further details was planned for Friday. Randy Phillips, chief executive of AEG Live, which owns the Staples Center and was Jackson's promoter, said tickets would be free. He was not sure how they would be distributed. Los Angeles City Councilman Dennis Zine said plans for the memorial are clearly moving forward, but he wished there had been more time to work out the logistics for such a huge event. "If you can imagine 100,000 people show up and you have 20,000 capacity (at the Staples Center), there is not sufficient room. Now you have a crowd-control problem," he said. With the July Fourth holiday weekend "it's the worst time ... to work something out." He also said he's concerned about the cost of police overtime for the cash-strapped city. Jackson's brother Jermaine told Larry King during Thursday's broadcast of CNN's "Larry King Live," that there will be a private ceremony for family and some special guests before the public memorial, according to show transcripts. He added the family wants to have other memorials around the United States...

The Zimbabwe government says it will re-evaluate all mining contracts for companies operational in the country and introduce a "use it or lose it" policy, a government minister said Friday. "The government... is working on a new mining law, amendments to the mining laws, so that we comply with new standards for the extractive industries, which the World Bank is insisting on," Finance Minister Tendai Biti said. He said the law will introduce the concept of 'use it or lose it' with respect to... mining claims. "It will also introduce the re-evaluation of every mining contract that has been signed in Zimbabwe."

The AFP: 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, told AFP 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, Frence Prime Minister Francois Fillon tasked a former French ambassador to Sudan, Christine Robichon, to help the families of those killed in the crash.

Xinhua: President Dmitry Medvedev said Saturday he hopes next week's meeting with his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama would bring new prospects for Russian-U.S. ties. "We believe that our summit will achieve concrete results which will open up new prospects for the development of our relations for the benefit of Russian and U.S. citizens and in the interests of peace and progress,” Medvedev said in a letter to congratulate Obama on the U.S. Independence Day holiday.  "I sincerely hope that together, in a spirit of mutual respect and trust, we will be able to give the Russian-American partnership new momentum and bring it to a qualitatively new level," he said in a statement released by the Kremlin. The Russian president also called for cooperation between the two countries, saying it is particularly important to address critical issues such as nuclear proliferation, terrorism and regional conflicts.

Al-Jazeera English: Armed men have abducted two foreign female aid workers in Sudan's western Darfur region, United Nations officials have said. The two women, one Irish and one Ugandan, both working for the Irish aid croup Goal, were abdutced late on Friday from their compound in the northern Darfur town of Kutum, officials from the UN-African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur said. A Sudanese guard was also abducted but later released, officials said. John O'Shea, the chief executive of Goal, named the two women as Hilda Kawuki, 42, from Uganda, and Sharon Commins, 32, from Ireland. "We don't know who took them. There are so many splinter groups in the area you'd only be guessing," O'Shea told the Reuters news agency.

VOA: South Korea's Defense Ministry says North Korea launched five missiles off its eastern coast Saturday, following similar tests earlier this week. The Yonhap news agency quotes military officials as saying the missiles appear to be a type of short-range Scud missile. The missiles were fired over several hours from Saturday morning, with the fifth missile launched in the afternoon. South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff released a statement saying the military is fully ready to counter any North Korean threats and provocations. Japan's Foreign Ministry has condemned the latest missile launches as a serious act of provocation against the security of neighboring countries. The United States and North Korea's neighbors have described four North Korean missile tests Thursday as provocative, and called on the communist country to return to negotiations on de-nuclearization.

Prospects for an early resolution to the showdown over the ouster of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya appear grim as a deadline for his reinstatement approaches this weekend. The Organization of Americans States had given the coup leaders until Saturday to restore Zelaya to office, but they appear unlikely to comply. Responding to unanimous international condemnation of the military raid that sent the leftist Zelaya into exile last Sunday, interim Honduran leader Roberto Micheletti summoned all his tin-pot bravado this week to warn that "if there is any invasion of our country, 7.5 million Hondurans will be ready to defend our territory." But the onslaught Honduras is likely to face is not from troops, but from constitutional law professors. The Honduran crisis is, perhaps, a reminder of how little progress democratic institutions have made in the poorer (and sometimes not so poor) pockets of Latin America since the Cold War. No doubt, the region has come a long way since the age of dictators. But since the 1990s, from Bolivia to Haiti, when faced with explosive constitutional challenges such as the one confronting Honduras last month, power brokers and sometimes the masses on the street still default to forceful overthrow over legal process. "There isn't yet enough confidence in legal or institutional solutions to your really big problems, so you continue to revert to the military or mobs," says Javier Corrales, a Latin American politics expert at Amherst College in Massachusetts. For Ioan Grillo's Time full article, click here.

The AP: Honduras braced for a threatened confrontation Sunday as ousted President Manuel Zelaya insisted he was coming home to reclaim his post, urging his supporters to mass at the airport for a showdown with the interim government in power since the army sent him into exile a week ago. The poor Central American country's Roman Catholic archbishop urged Zelaya to stay away, warning that his return could spark bloodshed. The interim government stuck to its threat to arrest Zelaya and put him on trial despite near-universal international condemnation of the coup that removed him over his campaign to revise the constitution. In Washington, the Organization of American States suspended Honduras as a member late Saturday, but Zelaya's replacement, Roberto Micheletti, already pulled the country out of the group over its ultimatum to restore Zelaya. As more than 10,000 of his supporters protested Saturday near the heavily guarded presidential palace, Zelaya posted an audio message on the Internet urging loyalists to greet his arrival. "We are going to show up at the Honduras International Airport in Tegucigalpa ... and on Sunday we will be in Tegucigalpa," Zelaya said in the taped statement carried Saturday on the Web sites of the Telesur and Cubadebate media outlets.

The BBC: A signal has been detected from the flight data recorders of the Yemenia airliner that crashed in the Indian Ocean on 30 June, officials say. The AFP news agency was quoting Comoran and French investigators. The Airbus 310, going to the Comoros Islands from Yemen, came down in bad weather with 153 on board. A 12-year-old girl was the only survivor. Many passengers had started their journey with Yemenia Air in France, before changing planes in Yemen. "Investigators from the BEA [France's accident investigation agency] have detected a signal from the flight recorders," Comoran lead investigator Ali Abdou Mohamed said in a statement that was received in Paris, the AFP reports.

Reuters: President Barack Obama heads to Moscow on Sunday promising a far-reaching effort to "reset" U.S.-Russia relations that hit a post-Cold War low under the Bush administration. Obama is expected to clinch summit deals on the outlines of a new nuclear arms pact and improved cooperation in the Afghan war effort, but deep divisions will remain over U.S. missile defense, NATO expansion and the 2008 Russia-Georgia war. Traveling to Moscow for the first time since taking office, he hopes to keep building pragmatic ties with President Dmitry Medvedev but is likely to have a more strained introduction to Vladimir Putin, who still dominates Russian politics. Obama set the stage with a pre-trip assessment that Putin still had "one foot" planted in the Cold War. Putin, who hand-picked Medvedev as his successor last year and has stayed on as prime minister, rejected Obama's criticism and insisted it was U.S. policy that needed to be updated.

The BBC: A bomb blast outside a Roman Catholic cathedral in the southern Philippines has killed five people and injured at least 26 others, officials say. The military immediately blamed the attack in the town of Cotabato, Mindanao, on a militant group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. The group has been fighting to establish a separate Islamic state. One of its leaders denied any involvement in the attack, saying there was no religious conflict in the south. The bomb went off outside the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception as people were leaving Mass, the army said. Police told AFP news agency that two of the dead were soldiers guarding the cathedral. A military spokesman, Col Jonathan Ponce, said rogue MILF militants were suspected of planting the bomb. "The rebels are getting desperate and they are no longer choosing their targets," he said. "They are now attacking even places of worship." But a leader of the MILF, Mohaqher Iqbal, denied his group had been involved in the attack. "Who needs a Christian-Muslim conflict?" he told Reuters news agency in a mobile phone text message.

BBC (follow link): Violence in China's restive western region of Xinjiang has left at least 140 people dead and more than 800 people injured, state media say. Several hundred people have also been arrested after the violence erupted in the city of Urumqi on Sunday. Xinhua news agency said police restored order after demonstrators attacked passers-by and set fire to vehicles. The protest was reportedly prompted by a deadly fight between Uighurs and Han Chinese in southern China last month. The BBC's Chris Hogg in Shanghai says that if the numbers of dead are to be believed - and state media say they may rise - these look like the bloodiest protests in China since Tiananmen Square 20 years ago. Uighur exiles said police had fired indiscriminately on a peaceful protest in Urumqi.The Xinjiang government blamed separatist Uighurs based abroad for orchestrating attacks on ethnic Han Chinese. Eyewitnesses said the violence started on Sunday with a few hundred people, and grew to more than 1,000. Xinhua says the protesters carried knives, bricks and batons, smashed cars and stores, and fought with security forces. Wu Nong, news director for the Xinjiang government, said more than 260 vehicles were attacked and more than 200 shops and houses damaged. An overnight curfew was imposed. BBC sources in China report they have been unable to open the Twitter messaging site in Shanghai and that message boards on Xinjiang on a number of websites were not taking posts. Reports from Xinjiang suggest some internet and mobile phone services have been blocked. Urumqi resident Han Zhenyu told Reuters news agency there was no access to the internet. A representative of the China Mobile phone service told Associated Press its service was suspended in the region. The Uighurs were reportedly angry over an ethnic clash last month in the city of Shaoguan in southern Guangdong province.A man there was said to have posted a message on a local website claiming six boys from Xinjiang had "raped two innocent girls". Police said the false claim sparked a vicious brawl between Han and Uighur ethnic groups at a factory. Two Uighurs were killed and 118 people were injured. However, the Xinjiang government has blamed the latest unrest on businesswoman Rebiya Kadeer, the Uighurs' leader who is living in exile in the United States. "An initial investigation showed the violence was masterminded by the separatist World Uighur Congress led by Rebiya Kadeer," the government said in a statement, according to Xinhua. It said the violence had been "instigated and directed from abroad". The vice-president of the US-based Uighur American Association, Alim Seytoff, condemned the "heavy-handed" actions of the security forces. "We ask the international community to condemn China's killing of innocent Uighurs. This is a very dark day in the history of the Uighur people," he said...

Reuters: A suicide car bomber killed at least two civilians in an attack outside a major international military base on Monday in Afghanistan's southern Kandahar province, a Taliban stronghold, army officials said. The bomber apparently targeted a group of Afghan soldiers and truck drivers providing supplies for foreign troops at the sprawling Kandahar air field south of Kandahar city. "It was a suicide car attack which killed two truck drivers and wounded 10 more of them, along with two (Afghan) army soldiers," said General Sher Mohammad Zazai in Kandahar. Another army officer, who requested anonymity, said four Afghan soldiers were also killed. No other details were immediately available. The were no casualties among the foreign troops, the two officers said. Attacks by insurgents have reached their highest level since the Taliban were ousted in 2001, U.S. military commanders say. In an attempt to regain the initiative, thousands of U.S. Marines last week launched a major new offensive in neighbouring Helmand province, another Taliban stronghold and the centre of the opium poppy trade that funds the insurgency. The Helmand offensive is the first major operation under U.S. President Barack Obama's new regional strategy to defeat the Taliban and its allies and stabilise Afghanistan.Suicide attacks and roadside bomb blasts are the most common weapons used by the Taliban in their campaign to drive out almost 90,000 U.S. and NATO-led troops and to destabilise President Hamid Karzai's Western-backed government. Afghanistan voters go to the polls on Aug. 20 in the country's second presidential election. U.S. troops, with the help of armed Afghan groups, overthrew the Taliban in 2001 after the hardline Islamists refused to hand over al Qaeda leaders wanted by Washington over the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States that year.

Iran’s biggest group of clerics has declared President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election to be illegitimate and condemned the subsequent crackdown. The statement by the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qom is an act of defiance against the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has made clear he will tolerate no further challenges to Mr Ahmadinejad’s “victory” over Mir Hossein Mousavi. “It’s a clerical mutiny,” said one Iranian analyst. “This is the first time ever you have all these big clerics openly challenging the leader’s decision.” Another, in Tehran, said: “We are seeing the birth of a new political front.” Professor Ali Ansari, head of Iranian Studies at St Andrews University, said: “It’s highly significant. It shows this is nowhere near resolved.” The association’s statement also shows how deeply the political establishment is divided, and the extent to which the Supreme Leader now derives his power from military might, not moral authority. It makes it much harder for the regime to arrest Mr Mousavi and other opposition leadersAt the weekend a top aide to Mr Khamenei demanded that Mr Mousavi and other opponents be tried for “terrible crimes”, and the elite Revolutionary Guards accused them of “trying to overthrow the Islamic establishment”. In other developments, David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, said yesterday that he expected the eighth of the nine British Embassy employees arrested ten days ago to be released soon but a lawyer representing the ninth — a political analyst named Hossein Rossam — said he would be charged with threatening national security. Mr Miliband expressed “cold anger” at the way the nine had been treated. The regime freed Iason Athanasiadis, an Anglo-Greek journalist arrested on June 19. However, a lawyer for Maziar Bahari, a Canadian-Iranian journalist working for Newsweek, said he faced charges of “instigating riots and acting against national security”. The Association of Researchers and Teachers is based in Qom, the clerical nerve centre of Iran, and includes many leading ayatollahs with impeccable revolutionary credentials and big personal followings. The association did not support a candidate in the election, but has now lined up firmly behind Mr Mousavi. In a rebuke to the regime it declared on its website: “Candidates’ complaints and strong evidence of vote-rigging were ignored . . . Peaceful protests by Iranians were violently oppressed . . . Dozens of Iranians were killed and hundreds were illegally arrested . . . The outcome is invalid.” It called on other clerics to speak out, demanded the release of all those arrested in the past three weeks, and directly challenged the authority of the Guardian Council, a body of 12 senior clerics that has openly backed Mr Ahmadinejad and his patron, Mr Khamenei. “How can one accept the legitimacy of the election just because the Guardian Council says so?,” it asked. On Wednesday, a day after the Guardian Council said that the election result was final, Mr Mousavi talked of forming a new political grouping to fight an illegitimate government. With the popular former president Mohammad Khatami and Medhi Karoubi, another defeated candidate, challenging the Government’s legitimacy, and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, another former president, pointedly meeting the families of those killed in street demonstrations, that coalition is beginning to take shape. “The fact that anyone dares to condemn the election when people were calling for Mousavi and Karoubi’s heads is remarkable,” said the analyst in Tehran. “It shows there is depth to Mousavi’s support. They have not been bullied into silence, there are factions forming and this is not over.”

BBC (follow link):The centre-right opposition party led by Sofia Mayor Boiko Borisov has won Bulgaria's parliamentary election by a wide margin, preliminary results show. With 99.88% of ballots counted, the Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (Gerb) have 39.7% of the vote, 22% more than the governing Socialists. But a BBC correspondent says that while it is a remarkable win, it is not enough for Gerb to govern alone. Mr Borisov has vowed to end corruption and tackle the economic downturn. "Those who have stolen should be very afraid... The thieves will go to jail," the 50-year-old former bodyguard told reporters, adding that "updating the budget was the first thing" his government would do. Last year, Bulgaria lost access to more than 500m euros (£430m) of EU funding for failing to deal with corruption and organised crime. The BBC's Nick Thorpe says Bulgarians have a habit of voting governments out of office, doing so at each general election for the past 19 years.In the first election since joining the EU two years ago, the pattern was repeated with Prime Minister Sergey Stanishev's Socialists winning only 17.72% of the votes. In the last election in 2005, they won 33.98%. Mr Stanishev conceded victory to Gerb and congratulated Mr Borisov after nationwide exit polls were published on Sunday night. "The results show that the Socialist Party has suffered a serious loss," he said. The ethnic Turkish Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF), a junior coalition partner in the outgoing government, came third with 14.47% and the ultra-nationalist Ataka party fourth, with 9.37%. Mr Borisov's preferred coalition partner, the Blue Coalition, won 6.73%, followed by the Order, Lawfulness, Justice party with 4.13%. Gerb also won 26 additional seats in the 240-member parliament in the first direct elections in each of the 31 constituencies. The remaining 209 seats are allocated on a proportional basis. The electoral commission said on Monday that the provisional results gave Gerb 116 seats in parliament, five short of a majority. Mr Borisov later said he would form a coalition government.

Piloting monorail trains at Walt Disney World had been Austin Wuennenberg's dream job. He talked about it all the time after joining Disney three years ago and worked doggedly to earn the opportunity to do it, co-worker Shannon Feldman recalled. Word that Wuennenberg, 21, died Sunday in a crash of two trains at the world-famous resort left her and other friends stunned. A college student from Kissimmee, Wuennenberg had always been so smart, so good at his job and so diligent about not making mistakes, she said. "It's shocking it happened," Feldman said, "but it's even more shocking it happened to him. He was keen on safety." Disney shut down its iconic monorail system Sunday after the 2 a.m. crash that killed Wuennenberg and injured another monorail driver at Disney's Transportation and Ticket Center -- the main station for visitors boarding trains for the Magic Kingdom. Disney World spokesman Mike Griffin said it was unclear what happened in the crash, which occurred on one of the monorail's last runs at the close of the busy July Fourth holiday. The Orange County Sheriff's Office and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration are investigating the case. It was the first fatal accident involving a monorail in the Florida resort's 38-year history. However, Disneyland in California has had at least one death on its monorail system, according to park historians. "Our heart goes out to the cast member and the family," Griffin said. Wuennenberg was pronounced dead at the scene, the Sheriff's Office said. The driver of the other train was transported to Florida Hospital Celebration. His injuries were not serious, Griffin said. Six park guests on the train were evaluated by paramedics and released, the Sheriff's Office said. One witness to the collision, Gary Vinson Jr., said in an e-mail to the Orlando Sentinel that it was "the most horrific thing I have ever personally experienced." Vinson said he was in line waiting for a parking-lot tram when he heard something that sounded like a terrible automobile accident. "I could see a passenger banging on the window. ... All of the bystanders kept yelling, 'Don't jump' and 'Stay in the train.' Then the train backed up toward the bay, tearing off more pieces that were protruding," Vinson said. An apparent tourist video posted on ClickOrlando.com shows guests gathered on the station platform as riders exit the monorail after the crash. "Is there somebody in here?" a one guest said, referring to the crushed front of one train. "Yes. The driver," says a man who appears to be a Disney World employee. The video also shows park guests attempting to free the trapped driver, banging on the windows before emergency workers could arrive. Click here for more on the story from the Orlando Sentinel.