Roman Bezsmertny, leader of Our Ukraine's parliamentary faction, said that the Justice, Health, Culture, Youth and Interior Ministers had tendered their resignation to parliament.

"At this very moment all resignation letters from Our Ukraine ministers had been registered in parliament," he told a news conference broadcast live on television. All the ministers met Yushchenko earlier this week.

But the resignations are unlikely to provoke a government crisis in Ukraine. All key posts in the finance, economy and energy sectors are occupied by Yanukovich allies.

Yanukovich was reluctantly appointed by Yushchenko in August after a failure to form a coalition of liberals that led the 2004 Orange Revolution. The premier is backed by a coalition of his Regions party, Communists and Socialists.

Foreign Minister Borys Tarasyuk and Defense Minister Anatoly Hrytsenko have said they would remain in their posts. They were appointed by Yushchenko personally and symbolize his pro-Western drive.

Evhen Kushnaryov, a senior official from the Regions party, said parliament might offer Yushchenko the chance to name his candidates to vacant ministerial posts.

Yushchenko's powers were reduced at the start of the year after a constitutional reform. The Prime minister and other ministers are appointed by parliament. The president has no right to sack the premier.

Yushchenko defeated Yanukovich in the presidential election in 2004 but he made a comeback when his Regions party finished first in the parliamentary election in March.

The two clashed publicly last month over cooperation with
NATO after Yanukovich said Ukraine was not ready for fast-track membership because of low public support.

But passions have calmed since and Yushchenko and Yanukovich have united in a drive to persuade parliament to pass legislation vital for Ukrainian talks with the World Trade Organization.

A survey by the Datafolha polling firm showed Lula, Brazil's first working-class president who has huge support from the country's poor, would win 60 percent of the valid votes, compared with 56 percent in a poll released last Wednesday.

Alckmin, a former Sao Paulo state governor and a centrist favored by many business leaders, garnered 40 percent of valid votes in the opinion poll, down from 44 percent last week. The poll, carried out on Monday and Tuesday, surveyed 7,130 voters and had a margin of error of 2 percentage points.

In the first round of voting on October 1, Lula captured 48.6 percent of votes versus Alckmin's 41.6 percent.

"Lula's campaign calls on people not to swap something certain, which they have with this government, for dubious, and that seems to be working," said Carlos Lopes, a political analyst with the Santafe Ideias e Communicacao consultancy firm.

Social welfare for the poor and tame inflation are among the strengths of Lula's government, although the opposition says economic growth has been only modest.

Brazil's Central Bank last month cut its 2006 growth forecast to 3.5 percent from 4 percent, and Brazil lags other emerging countries, including its Latin American neighbors.

"As for Alckmin... it looks more and more like he needs a new scandal to be able to recover in polls," Lopes added.

Both candidates campaigned Rio de Janeiro on Tuesday, with Lula telling his supporters not to trust the opposition, which he says has plans to carry out "predatory" privatizations and layoffs and cut welfare programs.

"Their history is predatory, all they know is sell (state property)," Lula said during a rally in downtown Rio.

Alckmin denies such plans and says the government is using such claims to distract attention from the scandal.

"The only enterprise I want to put an end to is the enterprise of government lies," Alckmin said at a rally.

Earlier this month, the head of Lula's Workers' Party, Ricardo Berzoini, quit in the aftermath of the scandal in which senior aides were caught trying to buy documents to smear the opposition. It was the latest in a series of scandals that resulted in the removal of some of Lula's closest aides over two years.

Meir, one of the three flat mates, didn't want to miss the opportunity of documenting the unidentified object crossing the sky and quickly grabbed his camera capturing the picture you see here. "This thing fell downwards and before landing it made a right turn and disappeared from view," he told ynet.

So have aliens from outer space arrived in Tel Aviv? Experts are very skeptical. Chairman of the Israeli Astronomical Association and the director of the observatory in Givataim Yigal Pat-El said he was convinced it was an aircraft.

"If they saw it at five o'clock in the afternoon it is very likely that it was an aircraft emitting white smoke, in the picture it even looks like it has two engines, and you can see that it is flying towards the horizon and not downwards," said Pat-El.

Pat-El added that the reddish tint was created by the angle of the sun's rays, just as it paints clouds red at sunset. He explained that when the sun sets, its rays pass through and color the clouds red, and this is what he believes happened here.

Surprisingly, despite the scary feeling Lior tends to agree with the expert. "It was my assumption as well," she said. "I also thought the orange tint came from the sunset."

Police say they received no reports of irregular aerial activity in the area.

Friday's incident, in which a police patrol car was set upon by around 30 youths with stones and metal bars, was the third in as many weeks in the Paris area, prompting a chorus of alarm from police unions.

Serious clashes have also occurred at the Les Tartarets estate in Corbeil-Essonnes and at Les Mureaux, in the western Paris outskirts - sparking high profile police raids to root out the suspects.

The pre-dawn operation in Epinay, carried out by plain-clothes officers, was lower key than the previous operations, which critics accused of dangerously fuelling tensions with the local population.

Reporters, though they received notice of the operation, were held at bay as officers carried out the arrests at the suspects' homes.

Almost a year after France's suburban riots, sparked on October 27 last year, police have warned the latest attacks could herald a new upsurge of violence in the country's high-immigration, out-of-city estates.

Thousands of cars and hundreds of buildings were torched last year in three weeks of nightly confrontations.

With presidential elections due in April, the resurgence of tensions in the 'banlieues' has major political implications - raising questions over the tactics of Interior Minister and presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy.