Beleaguered by Labor Party plotters hoping to unseat him and by the prospect of disastrous local election results for Labor that are expected on Friday morning, Prime Minister Gordon Brown chose on Thursday to send out aides avowing to reporters, anonymously, that there was “no chance” he would resign.
The prime minister’s move, reported by the BBC and the Web sites of several British newspapers, surprised nobody, given Mr. Brown’s trademark as a political pit bull. He has a reputation for fighting his corner with a tenacity born of the decade …

Dutch voters gave a populist, anti-immigrant party its first four seats ever in the European Parliament, sending a warning to incumbent European governments, according to exit polls.
The triumph for the Party for Freedom and its leader Geert Wilders kicked off four days of European Union-wide elections involving more than 12,000 candidates competing for more than 730 seats.
Mr. Wilders’s party was expected to win four of the 25 seats allocated to the Netherlands, according to exit polls by Dutch news agency ANP.

Yukio Hatoyama has been chosen as leader of Japan’s opposition Democratic Party, in the run-up to parliamentary elections later this year.
The 62-year-old grandson of a former prime minister replaces Ichiro Ozawa, who stepped down amid a fund-raising scandal on May 11.
The Democrats have promised to cut wasteful spending and bureaucracy.
General elections are due by October, and Saturday’s opinion polls suggest the Democrats may be ahead of the long-ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has ruled for about 50 years.

A conservative businessman has been elected president of Panama, promising to guide the country through the world economic crisis and an expansion of the Panama Canal.
Ricardo Martinelli swept to victory on Sunday, his business experience swaying voters worried by the global recession that has stunted Panama’s economic growth.
Martinelli, 57, representing the opposition Alliance for Change, won 61 per cent of the votes, against 37 per cent for Balbina Herrera of the ruling centre-left Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD).

Japanese opposition leader Ichiro Ozawa has long been something of a paradox.
Now his fight to keep his job despite a scandal that has ensnared a close aide has put his dual images as a bold advocate of reform and an old-style fixer under a harsh spotlight.
Ozawa, 66, on Wednesday denied any wrongdoing and said he would not resign over the arrest of the aide on suspicion of taking illegal corporate donations, and accused prosecutors of abusing their authority ahead of an election his Democratic Party looked likely to win.

The trip came after Mr Brown praised Mr Obama for following his lead in tackling the economic crisis.
Other British prime ministers had gone to America to talk about war; he was talking about the economy and “future stability”.
Mr Brown will hope to find a key ally in the drive to pull the world out of recession and pointed that America is also now having to use taxpayers’ money to halt the collapse of the country’s banks.
He said: “He is doing similar things to what we are doing in Britain.”

Posters showing sinister black crows pecking away at a map of Switzerland have added controversy to Sunday’s referendum on whether to extend the country’s free movement agreement with European Union.
The stark imagery has been used by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party, or Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP), in a repeat of the controversial racial imagery that made it Switzerland’s largest political grouping during elections last year.
The latest SVP poster echoes its Oct 2008 campaign image which played on popular resentment of immigrants by showing a group of white sheep kicking a …

President-elect Barack Obama is riding a powerful wave of optimism into the White House, with Americans confident he can turn the economy around but prepared to give him years to deal with the crush of problems he faces starting Tuesday, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.
While hopes for the new president are extraordinarily high, the poll found, expectations for what Mr. Obama will actually be able to accomplish appear to have been tempered by the scale of the nation’s problems at home and abroad.

It has been a rough ride for Viktor Yushchenko, the president of Ukraine, since his triumph in the 2004 Orange Revolution – and it is about to get much rougher.
The political conflicts and persistent headaches of dealing with Russia that have long plagued his rule are now being compounded by a global crisis, pitching one of Europe’s fastest growing economies into recession.
As a former central banker, Mr Yushchenko should be the ideal man to oversee an International Monetary Fund rescue. But, weakened by battles with Yulia Tymoshenko, prime minister, and …

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Belgium’s King Albert consulted political leaders on Saturday after the government collapsed for the third time in a year following its botched attempt to bail out financial group Fortis.
Prime Minister Yves Leterme tendered his government’s resignation on Friday after a report by the Supreme Court found signs of political meddling to sway a court ruling on the future of the bank, a victim of the credit crunch.
The king, who under the constitution must decide whether to accept the resignation, held successive talks at the palace with the …