With the government unwilling to amend its budget, all three opposition leaders said they are prepared to defeat Prime Minister Stephen Harper's minority government on a motion of non-confidence Friday.

Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff said Wednesday his party was giving notice it would introduce the motion. NDP Leader Jack Layton and Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe both said they would support it.

Ignatieff said Harper has shown a "flagrant disregard" for democracy and failed on its economic agenda, and as a result, "the moment has come" for Canadians to make a choice between the Liberals and Conservatives.

Following a busy morning of the Prime Minister Stephen Harper and all three opposition leaders speaking to the media about their intentions over the coming days, the Conservatives and opposition parties squared off over the budget and other matters during a lively question period.

Israeli fighter jets have struck four targets in the Gaza Strip, injuring several Palestinians, security sources and witnesses said.

The four strikes were launched on Gaza on Thursday evening and injured three Palestinians, AFP reported.

It follows three airstrikes carried out on Gaza early Thursday morning, targeting the city as well as a tunnel near the Egyptian border at Rafah.

On Tuesday, at least 10 Palestinians, including four children, were killed and dozens injured after an Israeli tank fired shots at a home in the Gaza Strip.

Adham Abu Selmiya an emergency services spokesman said the deaths occurred when Israel "opened fire on young people who were playing football in Shejaiya on the eastern outskirts of Gaza City.

NATO appeared on Thursday to move closer to assuming command of the military operation in Libya when Turkey's foreign minister was quoted as saying an agreement has been reached.

The alliance needs the approval of all 28 of its members in order to co-ordinate the operation, and Turkey had set conditions on that role for NATO.

"The coalition that was formed following the Paris meeting will abandon the mission and hand it over entirely to a single command system under NATO," Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu was quoted as saying by Turkey's state-run Anatolia news agency.

"All of Turkey's concerns, demands on the issue have been met," he said, and NATO has promised to complete the work needed to take over the Libya mission "within one or two days."

The package bomb that exploded at a busy Jerusalem bus stop Wednesday, killing a 60-year-old British woman and wounding 39, was exceptional in more ways than one. The holy city hasn't had a terrorist attacks since 2008, so the homemade explosive sent a charge through a sprawling metropolis that, in a matter of minutes, became clogged with impromptu checkpoints and rush hour traffic funneling into single lanes to pass them.

But the nature of the strike was exceptional, too. Police say only about four pounds of explosives were tucked into a bag leaning against a telephone pole - suspiciously enough that the owner of a nearby kiosk phoned it in moments before it exploded. David Amoyal named his stand, "A Blast of a Kiosk" after it was all but destroyed in 1994 by a Palestinian wearing a suicide vest. It's the kind of detonation Israelis learned to expect during the first years of the 21st Century, when suicide attacks became almost routine.

The Egyptian government on Wednesday passed a law criminalizing protests and strikes. Under the new law, anyone organizing or calling for a protest will be sentenced to jail and/or a fine of LE500,000.

The new law will be enforced as long as the current Emergency Law is in place, said the Council of Ministers in a statement on Wednesday. The Emergency Law has been in force since 1981 following the assassination of former President Anwar Sadat.

The new law will apply to anyone inciting, urging, promoting or participating in a protest or strike that hampers or delays work at any private or public establishments.

Col Muammar Gaddafi's Tripoli compound was targeted by coalition air strikes on Wednesday night as a senior British commander said the Libyan air force had been destroyed.

Five loud blasts were reported at Gaddafi's Bab al-Aziziya compound, where he had made an address on Tuesday night and which had been first attacked on Sunday night.

There were eight further large explosions heard in the east of the capital and at a military base in Tajura, 20 miles to the east of the city.

State television reported "a large number of civilians" had been killed.

In the eastern city of Misurata, rebels have been besieged by Gaddafi's forces for weeks, but said allied air strikes had offered much-needed respite.

What balls! What hubris! What hypocrisy! What happened to America?

Once again, America has preemptively attacked a sovereign nation that posed no threat to her without a declaration of war from the people's representatives. Apparently the U.S. president now gets permission from the U.N. to spend U.S. taxpayer dollars on unprovoked wars and outright murder. Isn't it still called murder when killing is not done in self-defense? Okay, just checking to make sure I haven't lost my mind.

Nobel Peace prince Obama launched his liberation of the good people of Libya with his own shock-and-awe bombing campaign appropriately on the eighth anniversary of Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq. This tyrannical intervention is so naked, so brazen in its hubris that whatever shred of goodwill America had left is completely gone. America is officially the most murderous, anti-democratic, terrorist nation the world has ever known.

• Plans for Nato takeover of mission 'are in chaos'
• Farce as Arab jets almost run out of fuel
• Pro-war MPs out of step with public mood

Ministers admitted yesterday that they have no idea how long the military operation against Colonel Gaddafi could take.

Asked for an estimate, Armed Forces Minister Nick Harvey said: 'How long is a piece of string? We don't know how long this is going to go on.

'We don't know if this is going to result in a stalemate. We don't know if his capabilities are going to be degraded quickly. Ask me again in a week.'



The comments come as a defiant Muammar Gaddafi made a speech on Libyan state television last night in which he claimed said he was ready for entrenched conflict, saying; 'In the short term, we'll beat them, in the long term, we'll beat them.'

The Libyan leader was said to have delivered the message to supporters at his residential compound near the capital Tripoli which was hit by an allied cruise missile on Sunday.

He denounced the 'unjust' action against his country and called those taking action against Libya as 'crazed fascists'.

President Barack Obama Wednesday categorically ruled out a land invasion to oust Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi as coalition forces launched a fifth day of air strikes against government military targets in the North African nation.

And Obama said the U.S. this week will be pulling back from its dominant role in the international campaign aimed at preventing Gadhafi from attacking civilians.

In international attacks early Wednesday, missiles from F-15 fighter jets destroyed Gadhafi missile sites around Tripoli. In two cities where pro-Gadhafi troops have besieged civilians, the international force struck a government ammunition depot outside Misrata and other planes hit ground forces outside Ajdabiya, officials said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.

Residents in Misrata said coalition attacks forced government troops to withdraw tanks there.

Obama was asked in an interview with the Spanish-language network Univision if a land invasion would be out of the question in the event air strikes fail to dislodge Gadhafi from power. Obama replied that it was "absolutely" out of the question.

Asked what the exit strategy is, he didn't lay out a vision for ending the international action, but rather said: "The exit strategy will be executed this week in the sense that we will be pulling back from our much more active efforts to shape the environment."

"We'll still be in a support role, we'll still be providing jamming, and intelligence and other assets that are unique to us, but this is an international effort that's designed to accomplish the goals that were set out in the Security Council resolution," Obama said.

Obama had said last week that he had no intention of sending ground combat troops into Libya, and his statements in the interview served to reinforce that point.

As the air war in Libya achieves some of its early objectives, such as grounding Gadhafi's air force, the administration is looking for a quick way out of the front-line role it has assumed in an international operation that has yet to gain the robust participation of Arab nations that Washington wanted.

MI5 has warned that Libyan expats are plotting terrorist attacks in Britain in revenge for bombing raids on Colonel Gaddafi's regime.

The threat was exposed after intelligence officers monitored hundreds of conversations between Libyans in the UK who have 'maintained connections with Tripoli'.

It raises the spectre of a new atrocity such as the 1988 Lockerbie bombing which was ordered by Gaddafi after U.S. air raids on his palace, launched from air bases in Britain in 1986.


MI5 sent a dossier to its allies on Friday just hours before the first bombs were dropped on Libya. It warns that Islamic extremists could be bankrolled as terrorists by wealthy and respected Libyan businessmen living in the UK.

One suspected plotter was overheard saying: 'Wherever we are, we'll do it. We have to fight. We must be dedicated to give support.'

Another talked of launching 'actions against neo-colonialism'.

The threats emerged as the commander of RAF raids over Libya declared that Gaddafi's airforce has been wiped out by four nights of allied air strikes.