MANCHESTER, ENGLAND – Prime Minister Theresa May will tell her Conservative Party on Wednesday it is not her style “to give up and turn away” when things get tough, trying to persuade critics she can lead Britain and secure a strong Brexit.

Striking a more personal tone, the 61-year-old May will describe her political drive to try to win over and rally a party that is disillusioned by rifts in her top team of ministers and by a June election when the party lost its parliamentary majority.

In a speech to the party faithful at their conference when May will unveil a plan to build more homes, the prime minister wants to reset her agenda and assert her authority after coming under pressure from her foreign minister Boris Johnson over her plans to leave the European Union in March 2019.

Her address could be make or break for the prime minister, whose attempt to present a united front at the conference has been undermined by Johnson, a possible leadership contender who received rousing applause for his speech on Tuesday.

Calling on the party to concentrate on voters instead of its internal wrangling, May will say she was in politics “to make a difference. To change things for the better. To hand on to the next generation a country that is stronger, fairer and more prosperous”.

“None of this will be easy. There will be obstacles and barriers along the way. But it has never been my style to hide from a challenge, to shrink from a task, to retreat in the face of difficulty, to give up and turn away,” she will say, according to excerpts of the speech.

OVERSHADOWED

The run up to May’s speech, however, was overshadowed by Johnson who once again dominated the airwaves after he stunned some party members at the conference in the northern English city of Manchester by saying Libya could become a new Dubai if it could clear the dead bodies away.

Again there were calls for Johnson to resign or be sacked, demands that May had hoped had been put aside after the foreign minister pledged his loyalty to her after setting out his own Brexit plan in a local newspaper.

May must also contend with a resurgent opposition Labour Party which accuses the government of mismanaging the economy and worsening social divisions. She and her ministers have sought to depict the Labour leadership as dangerous Marxists.

One senior Conservative said May must show “personality, vision and confidence” in her speech and offer “delegates hungry for ideas” something new.

Her deputy, First Secretary of State Damian Green, said May wanted to take the focus away from what he described as “a lot of drama” this week and onto helping people with their daily lives.

“What you will hear today from the prime minister is a very personal statement of the lessons she’s learnt from the election and what she derives from that in terms of what the government needs to do in the months and years to come,” Green told the BBC.

May will tell the party: “Let us shape up and give the country the government it needs.”

“For beyond this hall, beyond the gossip pages of the newspapers, and beyond the streets, corridors and meeting rooms of Westminster, life continues – the daily lives of ordinary working people go on. And they must be our focus today.”

The World Bank warned Wednesday that surging tensions over North Korea’s nuclear programme could be a threat to robust growth in Asia.

The bank predicted that developing East Asia and the Pacific would expand 6.4 per cent this year, 6.2 per cent next year and 6.1 per cent in 2019, slightly better than their last forecasts in April.

“Developing East Asia and the Pacific is doing better than most other developing regions of the world and is likely to continue to do so,” said Sudhir Shetty, the bank’s chief regional economist.

He cited “a favourable external environment and robust domestic demand” for the improved picture in the institution’s latest report.

But Shetty warned that tensions over North Korea could dent the positive momentum.

Pyongyang has ramped up its weapons programme, conducting its sixth nuclear test and firing two missiles over Japan, and leader Kim Jong-Un has been engaged in a heated war of words with US President Donald Trump.

The tensions “have the potential to affect trade as well as the availability and access to external finance,” Shetty said, speaking to reporters via videolink from Bangkok.

“Since one of the channels for their impact is through trade, they will have significant impact on Asia which is reliant on trade and supply chains.”

He added that “an intensification of tensions in the region could make capital flows and exchange rates more volatile and raise global interest rates”.

Rising protectionism in the US under Trump and uncertainty caused by Britain’s looming exit from the European Union were also threats, the bank warned.

China, the world’s second-biggest economy, is expected to expand 6.7 per cent this year, easing to growth of 6.4 per cent next year and 6.3 per cent in 2019 as the economy rebalances away from external demand toward domestic consumption, the report said.

Southeast Asia’s five biggest economies should see growth of 5.1 per cent this year and 5.2 per cent in 2018 and 2019, slightly higher than April’s forecasts.

BANGLADESH – Rohingya refugees arriving in Bangladesh amid a fresh exodus from strife-torn Myanmar have described whole villages being emptied and thousands marching to the border as security forces redouble efforts to drive the remaining Muslims from their homes.

More than 500,000 Muslim Rohingya have fled ethnic bloodshed in Myanmar in the past month and numbers are again swelling, with Bangladesh reporting 4-5,000 civilians now crossing the border each day after a brief lull in arrivals.

An estimated 10,000 more have reportedly massed in Myanmar near a crossing point into Bangladesh, and are poised to join the hundreds of thousands of mainly Rohingya refugees eking out survival in wretched camps over the border.

The spike in new arrivals – prompted by what Rohingya say is a fresh drive to purge Muslims still in westernmost Rakhine state – casts doubt on a Myanmar proposal aired this week to start repatriating the persecuted minority.

Rakhine has been emptied of half of its Rohingya population in weeks, and more are on the move as insecurity presses them to leave villages which have so far been spared the worst of the communal violence ripping through the state.

Rashida Begum, who arrived in Bangladesh late Monday, said local officials assured the Rohingya community for weeks they would be safe if they remained in their village.

“(But then) the army came and went door to door, ordering us to leave,” she told AFP of the military sweep in Maungdaw on Friday.

“They said they wouldn’t harm us, but eventually they drove us out and burned our houses.” Begum, 30, fled with her daughter to the coast where hundreds of Rohingya waited to cross the Naf River dividing Myanmar and Bangladesh.

Myanmar state media said the fleeing Rohingya had left “of their own accord” despite assurances they would be safe.

“I wanted to stay in my village,” Hasina Khatum, 25, told AFP in the coastal border town of Shah Porir Dwip.

“They (local officials) said ‘don’t go to Bangladesh. Everything will be fine’. We believed them, but nothing improved. Eventually we had to leave.” Sumaya Bibi, a softly spoken Rohingya teenager, described more than a thousand civilians hiding along the riverbank late Monday.

She said they boarded about 10 wooden fishing boats, many overloaded and carrying mainly women and children, and drifted under the cover of darkness across the Naf where they washed up on a remote beach.

Fazlul Haq, a local councillor in the area, said the flow of boats had almost stopped by late September but has resumed in recent days, bringing scores of Rohingya families reporting threats and intimidation by the army.

The UN said Tuesday that 509,000 refugees had crossed into Bangladesh as of September 30.

BURNED TO THE GROUND

The influx began after August 25, when attacks by Rohingya militants spurred a ferocious Myanmar army crackdown that the UN says amounted to “ethnic cleansing”.

Myanmar’s government refuses to recognise the Rohingya as a distinct ethnic group and considers them illegal migrants from Bangladesh.

Violence appears to have ebbed in northern Rakhine, although independent reporting is still blocked by an army lockdown, but fear has unsettled many of the Rohingya who remain.

Nurul Amin, who arrived Sunday after the military ordered his village be evacuated, described a long column of Rohingya civilians growing in size as it snaked toward the coast.

“As we left, people from villages all around us started joining. They (the Myanmar army) weren’t killing anyone, just burning houses,” he told AFP.

Thick plumes of smoke could be seen from Bangladesh rising beyond the border on Tuesday. An EU delegation in Rakhine earlier this week urged an end to the violence after seeing “villages burned to the ground and emptied of inhabitants”.

Amin said there were just “two, maybe three families in hiding, but no houses” in the villages surrounding his razed home in Maungdaw.

“They too will come in time,” he said.

YANGON – A Myanmar beauty pageant on Wednesday denied that the reason it dethroned a teen contestant was because of a graphic video she posted accusing Muslim Rohingya militants of driving communal violence in the west – an issue that has stirred a fierce nationalistic reflex inside the Buddhist-majority country.

Shwe Eain Si was stripped of her Miss Grand Myanmar title earlier this week. While pageant organisers said she had breached her contract, she alleged the move was linked to her comments on a crisis that has curdled religious tensions across Myanmar.

In the video, which was interspersed with gruesome photos of mutilated bodies, Shwe Eain Si expressed a view widely held among the Myanmar public that the Rohingya militants have led a “media campaign” to trick the world into thinking “they are the oppressed”.

She was referring to the humanitarian crisis in Rakhine state, where an army crackdown on the militants has sent more than half a million Rohingya civilians fleeing for Bangladesh since August 25.

While the globe has looked on with horror as Rohingya refugees pour into Bangladesh, sharing stories of atrocities at the hands of soldiers and Buddhist mobs, there is little sympathy for the group inside Myanmar.

The intense global pressure has sparked a siege mentality inside Myanmar, which has oppressed the Muslim minority for years and where Islamophobic sentiment has recently surged.

On Wednesday, Miss Universe Myanmar denied that the reason it punished the beauty queen was for her video and even offered some praise for the clip, which made no mention of the Rohingya exodus.

“The decision of Miss Universe Myanmar organisation regarding Shwe Eain Si was not related at all with the Rakhine video,” the company said in a Facebook post.

It added: “Although the video file posted now is good, it would be better if it was filmed more completely.” The firm’s original statement said Shwe Eain Si had been stripped of her title for breaking a number of rules.

In a lengthy Facebook post on Tuesday, the model denied breach of contract and defended her video as an effort by “a citizen of this country to use her fame to speak out the truth for her nation”.

The UN has accused Myanmar’s army of using its crackdown on the militants to systematically purge the Rohingya from its borders – a charge Myanmar authorities have staunchly denied.

Many, including the government, refuse to recognise the Rohingya as a distinct ethnic group, instead calling them “Muslims” or “Bengalis” – shorthand for illegal migrants from Bangladesh.

Ethnic tensions have been kindled over the years by the army and radical Buddhist monks, who have spread fears of an Islamic takeover despite Muslims making up less than five per cent of the population.

It is not the first time Myanmar’s nascent beauty queen scene has been rocked by drama.

Earlier this year a prominent transgender pageant winner was detained after a famous actress sued her for defamation over insults posted on a popular celebrity gossip page.