World News, Scottish news

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese President Hu Jintao has demanded senior Communist Party officials stifle tensions over the ousting of ambitious politician Bo Xilai and show unity as they prepare for a change of leadership, sources briefed on recent meetings said. Hu urged the party to close ranks at a meeting of about 200 officials early this month at a Beijing hotel, declaring the downfall of Bo - China's biggest political scandal in two decades - to be an "isolated case", the three sources said. ...

CAIRO (Reuters) - The Muslim Brotherhood is reaching out to rivals including politicians knocked out of the presidential race in an attempt to rally support around its own candidate who faces a runoff against Hosni Mubarak's last prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq. Warning of "determined efforts to recreate the old regime," the Brotherhood said parties that supported the uprising that swept Mubarak from power must unite "so that the revolution is not stolen from us. ...

BEIRUT/AMMAN (Reuters) - Lebanon said on Friday that a group of Lebanese Shi'ites kidnapped in Syria had been freed and were safe in Turkey, but produced no sign of the hostages at the centre of a kidnap drama heightening tensions over the conflict in neighboring Syria. The twist in a hostage drama that has inflamed political tensions in a country divided between foes and friends of the uprising in Syria came as Syrian activists said government troops killed at least 50 people in the centre of the country. ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Department of Commerce is investigating Chinese telecommunications equipment maker ZTE Corp for allegedly selling embargoed U.S. computer products to Iran. The investigation was launched following reports by Reuters in March and April that ZTE had signed contracts to ship millions of dollars worth of hardware and software from some of America's best-known tech firms to Telecommunication Co of Iran (TCI) and a unit of the consortium that controls it along with the Iranian regime. TCI is Iran's largest telecom carrier. ...

MANZANILLO, Mexico (Reuters) - Hurricane Bud weakened to a tropical storm as it churned closer to Mexico's coast on Friday, but brought heavy rains and strong winds that downed trees and closed schools and a major Pacific shipping port. The first hurricane of the 2012 season, Bud was downgraded to a tropical storm with winds up to 60 miles per hour on Friday afternoon. ...

SANAA (Reuters) - Two al Qaeda-linked suicide bombers targeting Shi'ite Muslims blew themselves up at a school and a protest march in northern Yemen on Friday killing at least 12 people, the defence ministry said. The attacks came less than a week after a suicide bomber in army uniform detonated an explosive belt at a military parade rehearsal in Sanaa, killing more than 90 soldiers and wounding at least 200 more. ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. State Department is debating the wisdom of designating the Nigerian militant group Boko Haram a "foreign terrorist organization" despite entreaties from lawmakers and the Justice Department to do so. U.S. diplomats are giving serious consideration to the arguments of a group of academics who sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this week urging her department not to apply the "terrorist" label to the al Qaeda-linked group. ...

(Reuters) - A former Mexican police officer accused of organizing a hit squad for the once-powerful Tijuana drug cartel pleaded guilty in a U.S. federal court on Friday to racketeering and drug trafficking, prosecutors said. Carlos Cosme, 36, was an officer with the Baja California State Attorney General's Office when he hired a colleague to set up a hit squad for the Tijuana cartel, which dominated trafficking to California in the 1980s and 1990s. ...

VIENNA (Reuters) - United Nations nuclear inspectors have found uranium particles refined to a higher-than-expected level at an underground site where Iran has installed more than 50 percent more enrichment centrifuges, a U.N. watchdog report said on Friday. It said Tehran had told the U.N. agency that the presence of traces of highly refined uranium - still well below potential nuclear weapons-grade material - "may happen for technical reasons beyond the operator's control". ...

PARIS (Reuters) - The French left will comfortably beat the conservative UMP party in next month's parliamentary election, a poll showed on Friday, as rivalries triggered by Nicolas Sarkozy's defeat in the race for the presidency risk splitting the right-wing vote. President Francois Hollande's Socialists and other left-wing partner parties could together win 44 percent of the vote in the June 10 first round of the election, compared with just over a third for the UMP. ...

As Greece creaks under its untenable debt and a shrinking economy, the possibility that it could stop using the euro is becoming increasingly likely. The effects of such a move would be as quick as they would be brutal for ordinary Greeks, who would essentially take a 50-percent pay cut just as prices soar.

The Muslim Brotherhood's candidate and a veteran of ousted leader Hosni Mubarak's autocratic regime will face each other in a runoff election for Egypt's president, according to first-round results Friday. The divisive showdown dismayed many Egyptians who fear either one means an end to any democratic gains produced by last year's uprising.

President Bashar Assad's forces killed at least 50 civilians, including 13 children, in central Syria on Friday, activists said, in one of the highest death tolls in one specific area since an internationally-brokered cease-fire went into effect last month.