World Highlights

¤ Iran insisted it would never stop uranium enrichment despite a looming UN deadline intended to ensure it cannot develop atomic weapons. "Iran will continue its uranium enrichment. We want to produce our own nuclear fuel," Iran's chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani was quoted as saying by the student news agency ISNA. "We will never stop it."

¤ Germany's top crime fighter said the country faced a serious terrorism threat even after making a series of arrests following a failed plot to detonate bombs on crowded trains. Joerg Ziercke, president of the BKA federal crime office, said he was alarmed that a group of foreign students from Lebanon and Syria had almost succeeded in carrying out their July 31 attack without being detected.

¤ Israeli security forces detained a Palestinian politician from Hamas, witnesses and the army said, as part of a two-month dragnet against senior officials from the governing Islamist faction. Witnesses said Mahmoud Musleh was taken away from his home in Ramallah, the Palestinians' cultural and political hub in the occupied West Bank.

¤ President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has pulled further ahead of his nearest rival in Brazil's presidential race, helped by middle-class fears over a new wave of criminal violence, a poll showed. The survey by Ibope polling firm for Estado de S.Paulo newspaper showed Mr Lula with 49 per cent of the vote, up from 47 per cent nine days ago, in his bid for re-election.