Opposition leader LK Advani has written a letter to former president Dr APJ Abdul Kalam requesting him to build a national consensus on Terror and the need to effect strict anti-terror laws. 

San Francisco  - After an 80-day battle with legislators, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on Tuesday signed a 143- billion-dollar state budget that ended a spending impasse in the richest and most populous state in the US.

The budget makes up California's 15.2-billion-dollar deficit with a combination of cuts and increased revenues and includes special provisions for a rainy-day fund intended to smooth out fluctuations in state tax revenue.

New York  - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defended his nation's right to possess civilian nuclear technology and used the opportunity on Tuesday in the UN General Assembly to denounce nuclear powers that want to cancel that right.

"These are the same powers that produce new generations of lethal nuclear arms and possess stockpiles of nuclear weapons that no international organizations is monitoring," he told the 192-nation assembly.

Washington  - The US treasury secretary and central bank head Thursday outlined details of a historic finance rescue plan that would help healthy finance firms and banks in addition to propping up weak or troubled companies.

Speaking before the US Senate banking committee, Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke described a broad- based plan that would purchase bad mortgage debts and complex mortgage-related-securities-gone-sour from mostly successful banks and investment houses.

Budapest  - Financing for a proposed European gas pipeline that skirts Russia may be delayed by the global credit crunch, a Hungarian official was quoted Tuesday as saying.

But Mihaly Bayer, Hungary's special envoy for the Nabucco pipeline, insisted that governments could still be able to sign an agreement this year to launch the project, the MTI news agency reported.

The 3,300-kilometre line is slated to run Caspian gas via Georgia, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary to an Austrian distribution hub. Gas is to start flowing in 2013.

Washington  - Under pressure to rapidly adopt a rescue plan for the nation's finance system, US senators on Tuesday expressed anger at the prospect of bailing out Wall Street risk-takers but acknowledged the urgency of the issue.

US President George W Bush is asking Congress to pass an unprecedented 700-billion-dollar bailout of the financial sector, including buying up bad mortgage debts that have brought the banking system and the nation's economy to the brink of ruin.