World briefs

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s
pro-euro Civic Platform party is likely to cement its grip on power in a presidential election that must now be held by June after President Lech Kaczynski died in a plane crash. Polls taken before the April 10 tragedy showed Civic Platform’s Bronislaw Komorowski, was running ahead of Mr Kaczynski in a poll scheduled for October. The crash, which killed 96 including Left Democratic Alliance party candidate Jerzy Smajdzinski, leaves Mr Komorowski as sole surviving contender of the three major parties.

A US bankruptcy judge rejected a Barclays bid to throw out Lehman Brothers Holdings’ motion to recover an alleged $US11 billion ($11.8 billion) “windfall" the bank made on the purchase of the firm’s North American brokerage. Barclays had argued that if the judge reopened the sale contract he previously approved, buyers of distressed bank assets would be scarce in the future. Bloomberg

UBS, Switzerland’s biggest bank, reported the highest quarterly profit in almost three years after a rebound at its debt trading unit. The bank said pretax profit was at least 2.5 billion Swiss francs ($2.53 billion) in the first-quarter, the highest level since the second quarter of 2007. Bloomberg

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown ’s campaign program, to be published tomorrow, proposes a law giving the government the power to block foreign takeovers of infrastructure and utility companies.Bloomberg

BAE Systems has topped a list of the world’s 100 largest arms makers, the first non-US company to do so. It sold $US32.4 billion of arms in 2008.

The Guardian

Two big South Korean steel makers, Hyundai and Posco, are rushing to add more blast furnaces and bolster annual production capacity. Hyundai Steel, an arm of Hyundai Motor Group, plans to move up the date for firing up its second blast furnace by a month and a half. Posco will start building a new plant in India by the end of the year.Nikkei

The US military says surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015. “By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day," it said. The Guardian

The Australian Financial Review