Cairo  - Egyptian President Hosny Mubarak and Saudi king Abdullah Friday launched two ferries that Saudi Arabia donated to Egypt.

Donation of the vessels, "Cairo" and "Riyadh", came two years after the Egyptian-owned ferry "Salam 98" caught fire and sank in the Red Sea, killing around 1,000 people and stirring angry debate in Egypt over lax safety controls.

Both leaders attended a ceremony in the Red Sea port of Jeddah to pass the ownership of the ferries to the Egyptian government. The two ferries will run between Dhuba in Saudi Arabia and Safaga in Egypt.

Each ferry is 88 metres high and 24 metres wide and can carry up to 1,220 passengers, plus 200 small vehicles.

Ankara  - Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari on Friday refused to deny reports that the attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai were carried out by people operating from Pakistan.

"Pakistan has always discouraged, and our position that we are the victims of terrorism. Pakistan is currently doing its own internal investigation and it is waiting for concrete proof," Zardari said.

Asked whether Pakistan would change its own approach to combatting terrorism in the wake of the Mumbai attacks, Zardari said his government's focus would remain on fighting terrorists.

Washington  - President George W Bush said he was concerned about Friday's report of more than 500,000 US jobs lost in November and insisted his administration was making the right moves to address the credit crisis at the heart of the downturn.

The rise in unemployment to 6.7 per cent "reflects the fact that our economy is in a recession," Bush said. US economists this week officially declared the world's largest economy has been in a recession since December 2007.

Washington  - The Pentagon hopes to carry out a test of its long-range missile-defence system Friday over the Pacific Ocean, the first such test in more than a year of the system planned for deployment to Eastern Europe.

The Pentagon has a launch window of 3pm to 7pm (2000-0100 GMT) but is facing poor weather in Alaska that could force a postponement of the test, said Richard Lehner, a spokesman for the Missile Defence Agency.

If the weather clears up, a target missile will be launched from Kodiak Island, Alaska and radar systems will begin tracking. About 20 minutes later, an interceptor missile from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California will take off on a path to smash into the target missile.

Geneva  - The unique giant particle accelerator along the French-Swiss border, which scientists hope will give clues as to the nature of matter itself, will be functioning again by the summer of 2009, its operators said Friday.

The machine, known as the Large Hadron Collider, was turned off in September following a malfunction which caused damage to integral parts just about a week after the first experiment. It has since been turned off.

The LHC, operated by European Organization for Nuclear Research - known by its French acronym CERN- is run on a budget of some 10 billion Swiss francs (8.17 billion dollars), making it one of the most expensive science experiments.

Hanoi  - A Vietnamese official Friday cautiously welcomed Japan's decision to suspend new aid to the country owing to a major corruption scandal on a Japanese-funded infrastructure project.

On Thursday, Japanese Ambassador Mitsuo Sakaba told a meeting of international donors in Hanoi that his country would suspend new loans to Vietnam pending the investigation of the Pacific Consultants International case.

PCI, a Japanese consulting firm, allegedly paid millions of dollars in kickbacks to Vietnamese transportation officials while working on transit and water projects in Ho Chi Minh City in the early 2000s.