San Francisco  - California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger issued 20,000 layoff notices and halted work on the state's remaining 276 public projects as intransigent Republican lawmakers continued to stonewall efforts to pass a budget.

The budget impasse prompted legislative leader to hold parliamentarians in their chambers Tuesday until they reached an agreement.

Caracas - The newspaper column that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has been writing three times a week will now appear just once a week, the government said Tuesday.

On Sunday, a Chavez-sponsored proposal to remove term limits on the mandates of the president and other elected officials was passed in a referendum.

Tokyo  - The Japanese public has over the years got used to the occasionally embarrassing escapades of its politicians.

But the performance of Finance Minister Shoichi Nakagawa at a weekend press conference left even staunch government supporters speechless.

The 55-year-old appeared utterly drunk as he met the international press during the final day of the G7 meeting in Rome and started to mumble into the microphone.

He later attempted to excuse his excruciating performance, saying it was a combination of exhaustion, possibly aggravated by having taken too much cold medicine.

Warsaw  - Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Tuesday the government would intervene if the country's currency drops to 5 zloty against the euro, and would then sell euros on the market.

The announcement came after the zloty dropped to historic lows on Monday, when it traded at 4.77 against the euro. It dipped further on Tuesday, when at times it traded at
4.94 against the euro.

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Beirut  - The leader of the Hezbollah Shiite movement, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, said late Monday that his group had the right to possess an air defence system to confront what he called the daily Israeli violations of Lebanese airspace.

"What I want to confirm today is that we have every right to obtain any weapon, including air defence weapons, and we have every right to use them," Nasrallah said at a rally in Beirut's southern suburbs to commemorate the first anniversary of the group's military leader Imad Mughaniyeh.