Ljubljana,- Slovenia's parliament on Friday endorsed youthful centre-left leader Borut Pahor as the nation's new prime minister.

Pahor, 45, has pledged to focus on the small European Union nation's economy.

He won 59 votes in the 90-seat parliament, becoming the sixth prime minister since Slovenia won independence from Yugoslavia after a brief 1991 war.

Pahor's Social Democrats won the most seats in September parliamentary elections and will lead a four-party coalition government.

Dhaka  - One of Bangladesh's past ruling parties on Friday voiced a seven-point charter of demands for joining the December 18 general election to return the South Asian nation to democracy, ending nearly two years of emergency rule.

"We will contest the election if the authorities ensure an atmosphere conducive for fair polls," former prime minister Khaleda Zia, the chief of Bangladesh Nationalist Party
(BNP), told a huge gathering of her supporters in the south-eastern Chittagong city.

She called upon the military-backed interim government of Fakhruddin Ahmed to meet her seven demands.

Moscow/Tbilisi - Nearly 10,000 Georgian opposition supporters demonstrated against President Mikheil Saakashvili on Friday, the first major rallies since Georgia's war with Russia in August.

The march marked the first anniversary of a police crackdown on anti-government protestors in 2007. Saakashvili then drew western condemnation when riot police used tear gas, rubber bullets and water guns to breakup the protests and was pushed to call snap elections.

A coalition of opposition parties renewed demands for early presidential and parliamentary elections, promising more rallies towards holding a vote in the spring of 2009.

Frankfurt  - Germany's IG Metall ended a week of token strikes for an 8 per cent pay rise on Friday as employers urged the engineering union to lower its demands.

"Job security has to take precedence over a distribution of (wealth) in pay negotiations for the year ahead," said Stefan Roell, head of the employers association in the south-west of Germany.

Ramallah - Faced with the failure of Israelis and Palestinians to meet an end of year deadline for a peace deal, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice nonetheless insisted Friday that a final settlement of the dispute between the sides was attainable.

President George W Bush's vision of a Palestinian state living alongside Israel "will not come in a single dramatic moment, but it will come," she told a news conference in Ramallah.

Stockholm - Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt held talks Friday with visiting Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian.

Bildt said he welcomed the joint declaration this week by the presidents of Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan to seek a peaceful solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, referring to the breakaway region claimed by both Armenia and Azerbaijan.