Sacramento  - With California facing a cash crunch, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on Thursday urged legislators to set aside partisan differences and forgo their salaries until passing a long- overdue plan to address the state's looming 40 billion dollar deficit.

Washington  - The US Senate is expected to vote later Thursday on whether to release the second half of a 700-billion- dollar bail-out package passed last year to keep the finance industry afloat.

The vote in the 100-member upper house is seen as a key test for president-elect Barack Obama, who is to take office on Tuesday. Both Democrats and Republicans have expressed hesitancy about releasing the remaining 350 billion dollars of the controversial programme aimed at halting a further economic slide.

Prague  - If the European Union cannot find a way to make a new database for monitoring the fingerprints and photographs of people entering the bloc work by June, it should scrap the multi- million-euro project, EU interior ministers agreed Thursday.

The project for the second-generation Schengen Information System (SIS II) "is in a critical stage ... It may be that SIS II won't work," Czech Interior Minister Ivan Langer, who chaired the informal meeting in Prague, told journalists.

Washington  - US president-elect Barack Obama's pick for Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, will have to wait until next week for a confirmation hearing in the Senate amid questions about his failure to pay taxes earlier this decade.

The Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday postponed its confirmation hearing until January 21, one day after Obama's inauguration, after Republicans on the committee objected to an earlier date.

San Francisco  - Poet and playwright Elizabeth Alexander will be only the fourth poet to be featured at a presidential inauguration on Tuesday.

Alexander, an African-American professor at Yale University, said that she started writing the inaugural poem about a month ago and that Obama's decision to include a poet in the ceremony reflected his recognition of the power of words.

Washington  - President-elect Barack Obama should ensure that the US reclaims leadership of the global human rights agenda that has been subverted by countries such as China and Russia keen to avoid scrutiny of their own abuses, Human Rights Watch said in a report released Wednesday.