All Pakistani parliamentarians are bound to submit statements of their assets to the Election Commission.

The state-run National Accountability Bureau (NAB) had filed a case against the former ruling couple in a local court that Benazir Bhutto and her spouse had filed false statement in 1996, according to an official statement.

Judge Rafi-uz-Zaman of Islamabad District and Sessions Court issued arrest warrant for the former prime minister and her husband in their absence.

The court directed the Pakistani interior ministry to contact International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) for the arrest of Bhutto and her husband. The judge ordered that they must be produced in the court on September 7, 2006.

The statement from the NAB said, "it is alleged in the complaint filed by NAB against the accused that they have gathered immense wealth and property in foreign countries earned through illegal means and by commission of acts of corruption and corrupt practices."

"It is on account of this fact that they have suppressed the fact of ownership of these properties abroad in their declaration of assets before Election Commission of Pakistan," the statement said.

The statement added that the accused have admitted the ownership of these properties before the Swiss Court.

Bhutto had been living in exile in the United Arab Emirate, the United States and Britain.

She was elected prime minister of Pakistan in 1988, only to be deposed 20 months later by the country's military-supported president Ghulam Ishaq Khan. She was re-elected in 1993 but was dismissed three years later amid various corruption scandals by the then president Farooq Leghari.

In a statement issued on Sunday, the G8 leaders said they supported the decision to return the Iranian nuclear issue to the United Nations Security Council.

The leaders also urged Tehran to respond quickly and positively to incentives offered on June 6.

In June, the United States, China, Britain, France, Russia and Germany tabled to Iran an incentive package to resolve the Iranian nuclear issue.

The Iranian government had said Iran would respond to the incentives by Aug. 22.

Lopez Obrador lost the July 2 election to conservative Felipe Calderon by some 240,000 votes, out of over 41 million cast, and he claims widespread fraud.

Leftist leaders refused to say what kind of protests were planned by Lopez Obrador, who pulled a crowd of hundreds of thousands of supporters at a demonstration on Sunday.

Manuel Camacho Solis, a main political adviser to the leftist, said some of the actions would not be announced in advance to maintain an element of surprise.

"What I can say at the moment is that the protests are going to increase in the next two weeks all over the country," he told Reuters.

An electoral court is studying complaints by Lopez Obrador that there were huge irregularities in the original count, and a later recount of tally sheets. The court must declare a winner of the election by September 6.

European Union observers have said there was no major fraud at the election, which divided Mexico between left and right only six years after President Vicente Fox ended seven decades of single-party rule in the last presidential vote.

CALDERON CONCILIATORY

Sunday's march, along several miles of city streets, ended without any clashes or destruction of property, despite fears that the protests could get out of hand.

Calderon, a former energy minister, dubbed Lopez Obrador "a danger for Mexico" in TV ads during the campaign but he was conciliatory on Monday.

"I repeat my invitation to sustain and strengthen the dialogue that allows us to define and decide the Mexico we want for our children," he told a meeting of religious leaders.

But Calderon also refused to be bullied into accepting a recount if not ordered by the electoral court and insisted he won the election fairly.

"I will not accept blackmail or threats. I have fought all my life for Mexico to have free elections and for that reason I will continue defending the vote of Mexicans," he told a group of supporters.

Harvard-educated Calderon would foster Mexico's close relations with the United States. Lopez Obrador would be likely to create more friction with Washington, but he would not change Mexico's status as a close trade ally and partner on border security, analysts say.

Lopez Obrador, who wants a vote-for-vote recount from the election, has a long history of leading protests.

As a local politician in his native state of Tabasco in the 1990s he blocked oil wells and encouraged tens of thousands of people not to pay energy bills to protest alleged vote fraud and environmental damage by the Pemex oil company.

Camacho Solis said there would be no blocking oil wells this time around.

"We are not thinking of that," he said. "Everything we do will be peaceful and within Mexican law," he said.

Calderon has flatly opposed a vote-for-vote recount but a top aide suggested he would approve of it if the Trife electoral court ordered one.

"We would accept any mandate from the Trife," advisor Josefina Vazquez Mota told Reuters.

Sewage treatment facilities are to be built in 10 river valleys to dispose of waste water discharged by urban areas and part of the funds will also be used to reduce sulfur dioxide and dust in major cities.

China is home to 20 of the world's 30 most smog-choked cities.

The country has been struggling to curb its environmental degradation, the product of more than two decades of near-double-digit annual growth, as economic development trumps conservation.

Its pollution woes became a subject of international concern last November when a toxic spill poisoned the Songhua river, a source of drinking water for millions.

Under the commission's plan, the huge investment will also go toward building facilities to guarantee nuclear safety.

Douste-Blazy, who was to be accompanied by a parliamentary delegation and business representatives, was scheduled to visit Beijing on Thursday and Shanghai on Friday.

The statement did not say when the visit will be rescheduled.

It was to have been part of the preparations for French President Jacques Chirac's scheduled
visit in October, two years after his last one to China.

More than 200 people have been killed in the Israeli offensive on Lebanon which began last Wednesday.

France started evacuating its nationals from Lebanon on Monday. French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin Monday called for an "immediate humanitarian truce" between Israel and the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah.

The new coalition has proposed as its prime minister Viktor Yanukovich, the Moscow-backed politician who lost the 2004 presidential race to pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko in the aftermath of the revolution's weeks of mass street protests.

The grouping was put together after attempts to form an "orange" coalition collapsed. Yushchenko says he will dissolve parliament if no government is formed within the constitutional deadline of July 25.

The new three-party coalition, led by Yanukovich's Regions Party, formally proposed its creation a second time in the chamber. That sought to remove constitutional obstacles which the president said had disqualified the coalition from office.

"We have removed all barriers for the president so he can submit without delay Yanukovich's candidature as prime minister," said Evhen Kushnaryov, a top Regions Party official.

Though Yushchenko has ceded to parliament the right to choose the prime minister, he can dissolve the assembly if no cabinet is formed 60 days after its first sitting on May 25.

But parliamentary speaker Oleksander Moroz, whose defection this month toppled the "orange" team, says that with a coalition in place the president has no grounds to dissolve parliament.

The turmoil has left Ukraine with no full-fledged cabinet or working parliament, hobbling government activity with the harvest in full swing and ahead of preparations for winter. With talks proceeding, speculation focuses on whether some of the president's allies in his Our Ukraine party will abandon the notion of an "orange" government and join the new grouping.

Several politicians have long advocated a "broad coalition" to breach differences between Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine, Yanukovich's base, and the nationalist west, which dislikes him.

The remaining "orange" party, the bloc of ex-prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, says only a new election can end the deadlock. The new coalition, Tymoshenko told parliament, threatened "the very acquisition of Ukraine's independence in 1991."

"A coup has truly occurred in this parliament," Tymoshenko told deputies. "The president can stop this coup today by acting within the constitution and calling a new election."