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Former Illinois Gov Rod Blagojevich on Tuesday lashed out at lawmakers who booted him from office, calling his removal a “hijacking.”

The Illinois Senate unanimously convicted Blagojevich on Thursday of abuse of power, making him the first US governor in more than 20 years to be removed by impeachment.

“I view what happened on Thursday as a hijacking by a legislature that removed a governor and prevented that governor from proving his innocence by denying me the right to bring witnesses in,” Blagojevich said on NBC’s “Today” show.

Neither the prosecution nor the defense was allowed to summon any witnesses whose testimony might interfere with an ongoing federal criminal case. But Blagojevich did not ask to call any witnesses, and did not participate in the trial other than delivering his own closing statement.

“It was an unlawful and improper impeachment. So I don’t view myself at all as being shamed or disgraced,” he said. “They did a disservice to the people of Illinois.”

Blagojevich still faces federal corruption charges including allegations he tried to profit from selling President Barack Obama’s vacant U.S. Senate seat.

Blagojevich has repeatedly maintained his innocence. When asked Tuesday if he ever tried to profit from the appointment, he replied: “flat-out, unequivocally no way. No.”

The former governor also said he was eager to have his day in court.

“This is America, and I still believe this is a place where, as it’s written in the Bible the truth will set you free. I’m clinging to the truth and embracing the truth, I’ll ride the truth, and I’ll clear my name.”

Blagojevich also was to appear Tuesday on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” Fox’s “On the Record with Greta Van Susteren” and CBS’ “Late Show with David Letterman.”

Remember when it was hard to find a Wii? You know, like just yesterday? Did you hit the tarmac early last week but come away empty-handed? Walmart feels your pain, and they’ve got just the palliative: “Tens of thousands” of Nintendo Wii consoles on sale through the retailer’s official website, starting today.

Walmart’s selling the base system for $249.24, as well as four bundles: The “value” bundle ($329) includes an extra remote and nunchuk plus your choice of one “value” game (like Ben 10: Protector of Earth or Freddi Fish) and an accessory starter kit. The “customer choice” bundle ($359) also includes an extra remote and nunchuk plus the accessory starter kit, but lets you choose from more recent and expensive games like Madden NFL 09 and LEGO Batman.

The “family fun” bundle ($399) includes the extra remote and nunchuk plus the accessory starter kit but bumps your game selection from one to two. And the “Wii Fit” bundle ($458) comes with an extra remote and nunchuk, the Wii Fit Balance Board, a Wii Fit accessory kit, and your choice of one game.

Other online offers include select Wii games “two for $30″ and select accessories for under $10.

As of this writing, the “Wii Fit” bundle is out of stock, but the other three bundles plus the base system are fully available.

It’s not a pretty sight: Sagging skeletons of two- and three-story buildings under a threatening gray sky. Abandoned shops with corrugated iron fronts riddled by bullet holes. And amid the garbage heaps and pools of fetid rainwater, a roadside bomb set to explode.

Five years after the U.S.-led invasion and following a significant drop in violence nationwide over the past year, the battle for Mosul, Iraq’s third largest city, still waxes and wanes.

“This is our hottest area,” says Sgt. 1st Class Ron Corella, a decorated combat veteran in this war-scarred quarter of the ancient city where moments before his troops spotted — and disarmed — that roadside bomb.

“The enemy knows that if we gain a foothold and they can’t push us out, it’s another safe haven they have lost. So they have to fight,” Corella added.

Lt. Col. Robert Molinari, executive officer of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, says Mosul “looks like Baghdad about 18 months ago” at the height of violence in the Iraqi capital.

It was the generally successful pacification of Baghdad — the fruit of the so-called troop surge — that drew al-Qaida and other insurgents to this hub of northern Iraq to open a new battleground and safeguard their infiltration and supply routes.

But on-off security clampdowns, a lack of aid money and a power struggle between Kurds and Sunni Arabs are also blamed for Mosul’s woes.

In the city’s version of the Baghdad surge, 22,000 U.S. forces and Iraqi troops and police have spread out in an operation called “Mother of Two Springs” — taken from an Arab nickname for Mosul — that began in May and went into a new phase Oct. 15.

Armored vehicles snake through mile-long lines of traffic, backed up behind checkpoints. Soldiers man sandbagged positions atop houses and mosques. Iraqi and U.S. troops stage patrols around the clock from some 40 makeshift bases in the city of 1.8 million people.

U.S. and Iraqi commanders cite some progress after months of struggling to root out insurgents in street-by-street battles.

Attacks, they say, are down to fewer than 70 a week, compared to about 130 before May. Insurgents have had to switch from well-coordinated attacks to hit-and-run strikes and hurried planting of roadside bombs. Some city quarters are relatively safe, with commerce reviving and shops staying open after dark.

“The people feel more secure, so some dare to come forward with tips about the bad guys,” says police Lt. Col. Adel Kader, hunkered down in the Hadba district, one of the city’s most violence-ridden.

But nobody is yet declaring victory, and Molinari says the current military push “just treats the symptoms, not the problems” of ethnic politics and a wrecked economy.

On the security front alone, Mosul is a complex nut to crack. Not just al-Qaida, but more than a dozen Sunni Muslim and other insurgent groups are on the loose, together with criminal syndicates and rival tribes.

“Al-Qaida looks to Mosul as a gateway to Iraq. It’s a place that it doesn’t want to lose,” says Molinari, from Fort Hood, Texas. “It is not as such the last stand of al-Qaida. It’s a last stand to maintain their lines of communication, thus their viability to conduct operations in Iraq.”

Roughly equidistant from the borders of Syria, Iran and Turkey, Mosul has been an important junction on trade and smuggling routes for centuries. The route from Syria across the desert and along the Tigris River is the prime conduit for fresh insurgents.

The core of the insurgency is in the Ottoman Empire-era old town and nearby western Mosul — densely populated areas, interlaced by narrow alleys stacked with cheek-by-jowl houses and burrowed under with tunnels and caverns.

This is where Corella charged an insurgent machine-gunner to earn a Bronze Star for valor, and where six soldiers were wounded in a recent roadside blast.

“It’s key terrain for the insurgents. They continue to fight there because they badly need to control it,” says Capt. Justin Davis Harper of Sherman, Texas, commander of the regiment’s Killer Troop.

After an attack, he says, the insurgents slip into alleys too narrow for military vehicles. Within this enclave of eight square miles (20 square kilometers) are Mosul’s wholesale and retail markets, magnets for extortion, smuggling and business serving as cover for insurgents.

Heavy trucks, ideal for hiding weapons, can move in and out to every point in Iraq and beyond.

“You can buy a bus ticket to just about anywhere, including Mecca,” says Harper, referring to Islam’s holiest city in Saudi Arabia.

“This is not a final, apocalyptic battle with someone walking off the field as the victor,” he says. “It is an achievable goal but it will be months of hard effort and enough Iraqi forces doing the job. It will be messy. It will require time and patience.”

And that has been Mosul’s problem — failure to sustain the effort.

Since the 2003 invasion, the pendulum here has swung several times between stark violence and fragile security, and this year is no different.

Last November, when the American regiment arrived, the city’s western half was “entirely enemy territory,” with other areas not much better, says Maj. John Oliver, operations officer of the regiment’s 3rd Squadron.

U.S. and Iraqi forces then froze all commerce, secured the main arteries and fought their way into insurgent strongholds. A dramatic drop in attacks followed. But after midsummer, the violence began to pick up.

“Security was good, but reconstruction and political reconciliation did not happen, the money didn’t come from Baghdad,” says Oliver, of Fontana, Calif. “After two and a half months of people holding their breath and waiting, they said, `I’ve got to feed my family, so I’m going to take the money and start planting IEDs (roadside bombs) again.’”

How long the military surge will last here has not been announced.

“If the forces move out, the bad people will return. We need them to protect us, our children,” says Ibrahim Hassan Yasim, a guard at a high school.

Reflecting the Iraqi lack of faith in the authorities, Yasim tells a U.S. patrol: “If I knew of any insurgents in our neighborhood, I wouldn’t tell you. We need to stay safe.”

Iraqi commanders differ about how long it will take to pacify Mosul. Some say months, others years — depending on several variables.

U.S. troops could be pulled out of Iraq’s cities by June 30 under a Status of Forces Agreement being negotiated by Washington and Baghdad.

Much depends on President-elect Barack Obama, who campaigned pledging to withdraw U.S. combat forces within 16 months. Also critical is an election early next year for the Nineveh provincial council, which oversees Mosul. The council is now dominated by Kurds who are just a third of the population, leading to paralyzed decision-making and anger by the Arab majority.

Still, U.S. commanders express some optimism.

“This is the last frontier and we have been neglecting Mosul for far too long,” says Maj. Gen. Mark P. Hertling, commander of U.S. forces in northern Iraq. “The city has had its ups and downs so let’s hope this will be the last push.”

‘Dream Girl’ Hema Malini was the most searched topic in web pages on Thursday by netizens, as she turned 60, beating the already battered Sensex that turned up second in search engine Google’s hot trends.Like she ruled the tinsel world years ago, She conquered the virtual world in terms of volume of internet search conducted through Google.

Search for news related to Air India, whose CMD on Thursday said that about 15,000 employees could be considered for leave-without-pay for up to five years if the staff wishes so was also in the top-ten, according to the Google Hot Trends data for the day.

Another airline, Spicejet, also made it to the top ten list after announcing cut in its airfares. Besides Sensex at the second, another related term, “BSE

Sensex” figured at the fourth place. Netizens’ quest for the upcoming Karva Chauth festival, where women keep fast for their husbands, was at the third place.While, The Mobile Store bagged the fifth place followed by Spicejet, Diwali Greetings, Mehandi design, Air India News and RPL in the top ten.

According to the Google data, maximum number of search queries for Sensex has come from Gujarat this month, followed by Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Delhi.

When Indonesia’s health minister stopped sending bird flu viruses to a research laboratory in the U.S. for fear Washington could use them to make biological weapons, Defense Secretary Robert Gates laughed and called it “the nuttiest thing” he’d ever heard.

Yet deep inside an 86-page supplement to United States export regulations is a single sentence that bars U.S. exports of vaccines for avian bird flu and dozens of other viruses to five countries designated “state sponsors of terrorism.”

The reason: Fear that they will be used for biological warfare.

Under this little-known policy, North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Syria and Sudan may not get the vaccines unless they apply for special export licenses, which would be given or refused according to the discretion and timing of the U.S. Three of those nations — Iran, Cuba and Sudan — also are subject to a ban on all human pandemic influenza vaccines as part of a general U.S. embargo.

The regulations, which cover vaccines for everything from Dengue fever to the Ebola virus, have raised concern within the medical and scientific communities. Although they were quietly put in place more than a decade ago, they could now be more relevant because of recent concerns about bird flu. Officials from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said they were not even aware of the policies until contacted by The Associated Press last month and privately expressed alarm.

They make “no scientific sense,” said Peter Palese, chairman of the microbiology department at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. He said the bird flu vaccine, for example, can be used to contain outbreaks in poultry before they mutate to a form spread more easily between people.

“The more vaccines out there, the better,” he said. “It’s a matter of protecting ourselves, really, so the bird flu virus doesn’t take hold in these countries and spread.”

U.S. Commerce Assistant Secretary Christopher Wall declined to elaborate on the precise threat posed by vaccines for chickens infected with avian influenza, except to say there are “valid security concerns” that they “do not fall into the wrong hands.”

“Legitimate public health and scientific research is not adversely affected by these controls,” he said.

But some experts say the idea of using vaccines for bioweapons is far-fetched, and that in a health emergency, it is unclear how quickly authorities could cut through the current red tape to get the vaccines distributed.

Under normal circumstances it would take at least six weeks to approve export licenses for any vaccine on the list, said Thomas Monath, who formerly headed a CIA advisory group on ways to counter biological attacks. All such decisions would follow negotiations at a “very high level” of government.

That could makes it harder to contain an outbreak of bird flu among chickens in, say, North Korea, which is in the region hardest hit by the virus. Sudan and Iran already have recorded cases of the virus in poultry and Syria is surrounded by affected countries. Cuba, like all nations, is vulnerable because the disease is delivered by migratory birds.

Kumanan Wilson, whose research at the University of Toronto focuses on policymaking in areas of health protection, said it would be ironic if the bird flu virus morphed into a more dangerous form in one of those countries.

“That would pose a much graver threat to the public than the theoretical risk that the vaccine could be used for biological warfare,” he said.

The danger of biological warfare use depends on the specific virus or bacteria. But most experts agree that bird flu vaccines cannot be genetically altered to create weapons because they contain an inactivated virus that cannot be resuscitated.

It’s also unlikely they would be used to create a resistant strain of the virus as part of efforts to wreak havoc within global poultry stocks. If enemy states wanted to do that, they could make their own vaccines or turn to a less hostile country like China, said Ian Ramshaw, an expert on vaccine immunology and biosecurity at The Australian National University in Canberra.

“I can think of no scientific reason how a terrorist organization could use such a vaccine for malicious intent,” he said. “I personally think it’s a rather silly attitude and the U.S. is probably going overboard as it has in the past with many of its bioterrorism initiatives.”

Meanwhile, bioethicists say limiting vaccines could also raise moral questions of whether some countries should be denied because of decisions based on foreign policy. They said the export controls appear inconsistent, as Libya, Iraq and two dozen other countries suspected by the U.S. of having biological weapons programs do not face restrictions on the export of poultry vaccines.

“If there really is a serious threat, to be consistent we’d have to more heavily regulate who has access to the vaccine,” said Michael Selgelid, who co-authored the book “Ethical and Philosophical Consideration of the Dual Use Dilemma in the Biological Sciences.”

“There are malevolent actors in the U.S. just like there might be in all these other countries,” he said.

The policies were initially put in place amid biosecurity fears in the mid-1990s and then bolstered after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and subsequent anthrax letter mailings. The vaccines are among a long list of other items barred to rogue states over fears they could be used to make weapons of mass destruction, from technology and chemicals to dangerous pathogens.

Bird flu has killed more than 240 people across the world since 2003, nearly half of them in Indonesia.

Indonesia’s health minister Siti Fadilah Supari first drew widespread attention when she boycotted the World Health Organization’s 50-year-old virus sharing system last year, saying pharmaceutical companies were using viruses from developing nations without their knowledge to make expensive vaccines. She has since called for the creation of a global stockpile of drugs or other forms of benefit-sharing.

Germany has re-introduced a military medal for bravery, more than 60 years after the last Iron Cross was awarded for valour in battle, according to a defence ministry spokesman Friday.

The Cross of Honour for Bravery will be in the iron-cross shape, but will not have the old name.

The iron cross was introduced in 1813 by the kingdom of Prussia and was a common award in Nazi Germany till its 1945 defeat.

The only existing medals for German soldiers, sailors and flyers are given for exemplary conduct over fixed periods of service. Personnel do not have to go into danger to earn the four existing grades.

The fifth, higher award will be for ‘especial valour at risk of physical danger or death’ during peacekeeping and other dangerous assignments, a defence spokesman said in Berlin.

Germany’s President Horst Koehler has given his consent for the new bravery award.

Heating U.S. homes with oil this winter will cost a painful $450 more than a year ago, another slap to families already reeling from high gasoline and food costs and fearful of losing their heat because of unpaid bills.

Gas, propane and electricity for home heating will go up as well, but not as much, the government says.

Even as oil prices are plummeting and plenty of natural gas is going into storage, people should brace for higher heating bills “across the board” no matter what fuel is used or region of the country, said Howard Gruenspecht, acting chief of the federal Energy Information Administration.

But fuel oil users — about a third of households in the Northeast — will experience the biggest hit with an expected heating bill of $2,388 on average for the October-March heating season, or 23 percent higher than what it cost last winter.

The price of natural gas, the most widely used heating fuel used in half of the nation’s households, will increase an average of 18 percent, or $1,010 over the heating season — about $155 more than last winter. People who heat with propane or electricity will see a 10 percent to 11 percent increase in costs, the agency said.

Natural gas supplies will be plentiful this winter, with storage in November expected to be well above the five-year average, and prices have dropped below what they were a year ago. But many utilities purchased gas for storage this past summer when prices were at their peak and will pass those costs onto customers this winter.

Gruenspecht acknowledged the winter fuel cost estimates are based on assumptions made before the latest Wall Street credit crunch and the possibility of a more severe global economic decline. That could push down oil prices and, in turn, ease prices somewhat for fuel oil and propane.

“The economic picture is perhaps the biggest uncertainty today,” Gruenspecht acknowledged.

But he said he doubts the EIA’s winter-long price projections are likely to change dramatically. “People are already buying fuel oil … it’s not like people are going to delay their first purchase until February to take advantage of what might be lower prices.”

“We expect it to be more expensive this winter across the board,” he said.

Gruenspecht emphasized that the cost figures should be viewed as “a broad guide” comparing this year’s expected heating costs to last winter and said actual expenses can vary depending on region, local weather and the energy efficiency of individual homes.

But this year’s forecast marks the second winter in a row of sharply higher heating prices compared with the previous year. And it follows a summer of record $4-a-gallon gasoline, a booming credit crisis, a struggling economy and growing unemployment.

Some people have not yet paid last winter’s heating bills, much less this past summer’s electricity tab from having to cool their homes. A recent Associated Press survey found that utility shutoffs because of unpaid bills have been running 17 percent to 22 percent higher than last year in some parts of the country.

“We’ve seen rising shutoffs around the country. More and more people are struggling to pay their energy bills,” says Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association whose members administer government programs to help people pay heating and cooling costs.

Wolfe said that while Congress recently doubled the program to help poor people pay energy costs to $5.1 billion, that may not be enough. “It’s not only the poor, but the middle class family that will be struggling. That’s really a new situation,” Wolfe said in an interview.

Jamie Py of the Maine Oil Dealers Association in Brunswick, Maine, said the credit crunch is likely to add to the problem. “It’s difficult for some dealers to offer as much credit as they used to. The credit markets have tightened up,” said Py.

In many states utilities are prohibited from shutting off gas or electricity service during winter months. Fuel oil dealers have no such requirements although Py said that in Maine — and possibly other states — they are obligated to make emergency deliveries if a customer pays cash for the new delivery, no matter what is owed.

He said a survey in Maine showed the average fuel oil price has dropped about $1 a gallon since July to an average of $3.60 a gallon with hopes that it will fall more if the price of crude oil drops.

While the cost of crude oil has declined from a high of $147 a barrel in July to just under $88 a barrel for delivery in November, the EIA said this winter, “Oil markets are expected to remain relatively tight because of sluggish production growth.” Crude prices likely will still be higher this winter than last, the EIA said, although cautioning that could change depending on the weakness or the global economy.

Egyptian and Sudanese troops, backed by European commandos, swooped down in helicopters Monday to rescue a tour group that had been kidnapped in Egypt and taken on a 10-day dash across the Sahara to the frontier of Chad.

Freedom for the 11 European tourists and eight Egyptian guides came hours after Sudanese troops killed six of the abductors and captured two who revealed where the remaining gunmen were holding their captives.

The brother of one of the freed Egyptians said he was told that the kidnappers abandoned the captives in the desert and fled soon before the rescuers arrived.

Egyptian officials released no details of the rescue except to say troops used helicopters to bring out the prisoners.

“They took everything from us and left us with nothing,” one freed Egyptian, Sherif Abdel-Monem, said of the kidnappers. Speaking in an Egyptian military video taken on a airplane flight to Cairo, he added: “But they treated us well. It was not harsh treatment.”

The video, obtained by Associated Press Television News, showed the hostages inside the military plane, laughing and joking, drinking bottled water and being tended to by army doctors.

The five Germans, five Italians and a Romanian, along with eight Egyptian drivers and guides, arrived in Cairo on the military plane, smiling as they walked across the tarmac to be greeted with bouquets of flowers.

They were taken to a military hospital for checkups, but doctors said none had been hurt.

The ordeal began Sept. 19 during a safari on the Gilf al-Kebir, a desert plateau renowned for prehistoric cave art in a remote corner of southwestern Egypt, near the Libyan and Sudanese borders. While the group was camping, heavily armed gunmen in SUVs seized them and took them across the unguarded border into Sudan.

The abduction — the first of its kind involving tourists in Egypt — was an embarrassment to the Egyptian government, which depends on tourism as the country’s biggest foreign currency earner. Tour companies feared it was a sign that chaos in violence-torn eastern Chad and Sudan’s Darfur region was spilling over into the isolated corner of Egypt.

The kidnappers, who officials said were Sudanese and Chadian tribesmen, reportedly demanded up to $15 million in ransom and were negotiating with German officials by satellite phone. At the same time, Egyptian and Sudanese troops working with German and Italian intelligence experts combed the desert looking for them.

At one point, Sudanese soldiers spotted the group near Oweinat Mountain, in northwestern Sudan, then reported they had crossed into Libya. But Libya denied the kidnappers and their prisoners had entered its territory, and for several days their whereabouts were unknown.

Then on Sunday night, Sudanese troops encountered eight of the kidnappers, apparently sent to get fuel and food. In a running gunbattle, six of the kidnappers were killed and two captured, Egyptian and Sudanese officials said.

“Our search efforts were combing the Sudanese-Libyan border and were surprised to see a Land Rover with the tourist company’s logo on it,” Ibrahim Ezz Eldin Ibrahim, deputy head of Sudanese intelligence, told al-Jazeera Television. “There was then a chase and an exchange of fire, where we killed six of the kidnappers and caught two of them.”

The two kidnappers told authorities the remainder of the gunmen and their captives were holed up in Tabat Shajara in Chad, just across the border with Sudan, some 250 miles southwest of the Gilf al-Kebir, an Egyptian security official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

Sudanese troops and an Egyptian commando team, using two helicopters, launched a rescue mission early Monday, two Egyptian security officials said, also demanding anonymity to discuss the operation. The officials said there was a gunfight in which up to six kidnappers died.

A German special police unit and military commandos were also involved, German Interior and Defense Ministry officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Italy’s foreign minister, Franco Frattini, suggested Italian special operations troops also participated. The Egyptian officials said the Germans and Italians were present but did not participate in the fighting.

Egyptian Defense Minister Hussein Tantawi said “half the kidnappers” were killed in the rescue operation, according to the state news agency MENA, but the report did not give a precise number or give details on the rescue. An Egyptian security official said there were 18 kidnappers in all.

But one of the freed Egyptian drivers, Abdel-Rahim Ragab, told his brother that the gunmen abandoned their prisoners and stole their belongings shortly before the rescue, the brother told The Associated Press.

Ragab said the kidnappers “treated them OK” until the Sunday gunbattle, Mustafa Ragab said after visiting his brother at the Cairo hospital. “Then they took their (the tour group’s) vehicles and their equipment and left them in the desert.”

At the Cairo military hospital, the tourists were seen joking with diplomats, visibly relieved. Reporters were barred from approaching them.

The five Italians, two of whom were in their 70s, left later Monday night on a military flight to Rome, and the remainder were expected to leave soon.

“What happened isn’t the fault of Egyptians. Egyptians are nice people,” the Romanian tourist, Irina Oana Kalis, said in the Egyptian military video.

Tour guide Ahmed Abdel Monem said the kidnappers spoke some Arabic to the group, but spoke in a language among themselves that the Egyptian captives couldn’t understand.

His colleague, Mohammad Hassan, said: “They were changing our locations every day and would tell us that we were going to be let go soon. One day there were many planes circling above us, and they seemed afraid, so they kept moving us and we were sleeping in dust and dirt with no food at times.”

Sudanese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ali Youssef said the kidnappers were Sudanese and Chadians and accused them of having ties to ethnic African rebels in Darfur that the Sudanese government has been battling since early 2003. Darfur rebel groups have denied any involvement in the abduction.

Darfur and eastern Chad have become hotbeds of armed groups notorious for banditry and attacks on vehicles. International aid groups have had to limit their movements because of repeated carjackings and kidnappings of drivers.

Eastern Chad and Darfur lie about 200 to 250 miles from the Gilf al-Kebir, but the desolate terrain is largely unguarded. Egyptian tour guides have reported several armed robberies of tourists near the Gilf over the past year, raising fears that such bandits have been drawn to the vulnerable and relatively well-off Westerners visiting the site.

Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi ceded the key Finance Ministry post to his powerful deputy on Wednesday and hinted he may leave office before an agreed date of 2010.

Abdullah faces a resurgent opposition led by Anwar Ibrahim, which says it has won over sufficient government MPs to take power. The Prime Minister again dismissed that claim and said he had no plans to meet Anwar, who he accused of sabotaging foreign investment in Malaysia.

“I see he (Anwar) is a threat to the economy and probably security,” Abdullah told a press conference to announce Najib Razak’s new portfolio.

Najib’s appointment to the Finance Ministry post, which has been held by the Prime Minister since ex-Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed sacked Anwar in the late 1990s, was seen as indicating that Abdullah may accelerate his departure from office.

He had already agreed to hand over to Najib in 2010, two years ahead of the next elections in 2013, but has come under pressure from some top officials in his party, the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) to step aside earlier.

“I would not be staying longer than 2010. It will be more flexible, if I want to go earlier I will tell Najib,” Abdullah said.

Peaceful Transmission

UMNO leads the 14-party coalition that has ruled Malaysia for over fifty years, but in March under Abdullah’s leadership it slumped to its worst ever election result and lost its two-thirds majority in Parliament.

“He’s under pressure within the coalition to speed up his own departure,” said Gerald Ambrose, of Aberdeen Asset Management, which has 6 billion Malaysian ringgit ($1.74 billion) invested in Malaysian shares. “The appointment of Najib sort of indicates he is going some way towards speeding up that transition. I don’t think that’s the end of it.”

The return of Anwar to Malaysia’s political scene after he was released from prison on sodomy and corruption charges has galvanized the three-party alliance which he now heads.

Anwar said on Tuesday he had won over sufficient government MPs to take power and wanted talks with Abdullah on a peaceful transition.

The Opposition needs the support of at least 30 government legislators to add to its 82 MPs so as to have a majority in the 222-member Parliament.

He also said he would go to the country’s king within two days to seek a confidence vote in the Prime Minister.

Abdullah confirmed that he had received a letter from Anwar requesting a meeting, but there was no indication in it that the Opposition leader wanted to discuss a handover.

Six bombs exploded in a Sunni Muslim neighbourhood of Beirut Monday, threatening to derail a dialogue called by Lebanese leaders to bring stability to the country.No casualties were caused, but the bombs damaged shops and cars in heavily populated Corniche al-Mazraa, an area which saw fierce clashes between pro and anti-government groups in May.

The explosions, which took place a day before the start of a national dialogue at the Baabda presidential palace, ‘are aimed at terrifying people,’ said a police officer at the scene.

Leaders of the anti-Syrian ruling majority accused the pro-Syrian opposition led by the fundamentalist Hezbollah of seeking to delay the dialogue.

Fares Soeid said Hezbollah wanted to avoid discussions on placing its weapons under state control.

President Michel Suleiman set September 16 as the starting date for the dialogue to try to mend fences between the rival Lebanese leaders and discuss the fate of Hezbollah.

UN resolution 1701, which ended 33 days of war between Israel and Hezbollah in August 2006, called on the Lebanese government to disarm all militias in Lebanon, including Hezbollah, and expand its control on all Lebanese territories.

The anti-Syrian camp has argued that Hezbollah’s arsenal undermines the state. Hezbollah says its guerrilla army, known as ‘the resistance’, is vital to defend Lebanon from Israel.

Hezbollah used some of its military power in May to briefly take control of the Muslim half of Beirut, which mainly backs the anti-Syrian ruling majority.

The national dialogue was agreed upon as part of a Qatari-mediated deal that ended an 18-month political conflict in May.