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Brussels - European Union fears that a new gas row between Russia and Ukraine could come as early as July reached the highest levels Thursday, as EU leaders planned to discuss them at a summit in Brussels.

"In July this will become a real problem: Ukraine will have no money to pay for gas for storage. (The summit) is the last opportunity to give guidance to the European Commission on what to do," a top politician from an EU member state said ahead of the summit.

London - Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher will have to undergo an operation to insert a pin into her broken upper arm following a fall, her spokesman said Thursday.

The 83-year-old former "Iron Lady" was admitted to London's Chelsea & Westminster hospital last Friday, where doctors have now found that the injury she sustained is not healing as quickly as they would like.

New Delhi - A dreaded Indian bandit was shot dead in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh Thursday after a 50-hour gunbattle with over 400 armed police that saw four policemen killed, a news report said.

Ghanshyam Kewat, armed with rifles and hand-grenades, was hiding in a house in a village in the Chitrakoot region, some 280 kilometres south of state capital Lucknow when police teams surrounded him on Tuesday night, the PTI news agency reported.

Lausanne, Switzerland - The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has renewed its broadcasting deal with the Arab States Broadcasting Union (ASBU) for coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and the 2016 Summer Games.

The IOC said in a statement Thursday that ASBU will have at least 200 hours of coverage in 2016 and a daily highlight show from Sochi in 2014 in the deal covering 20 states including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates.

Dhaka - Unregistered Rohingya refugees face persecution in Bangladesh's south-eastern Cox's Bazar district, where tens of thousands of the Myanmar refugees have been living in squalid camps for years, an international aid organization alleged Thursday.

Seoul - North Korea has several thousand tons of chemical weapons, a report from a think tank published on Thursday said.

"Pyongyang's nuclear capabilities are the greatest threat, but it also possesses a large stockpile of chemical weapons and is suspected of maintaining a biological weapons programme," the report published by the International Crisis Group (ICG) said.