Jerusalem  - Outgoing Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said Sunday that her centrist Kadima faction should be charged with forming the next government, even though it won only one mandate more in last Tuesday's elections than its hawkish rival, the Likud Party.

Final election results, released Thursday night, showed Kadima won 28 mandates in the 120-seat Knesset.

The Likud, under former premier Benjamin Netanyahu, won 27 seats, but the right-wing block, which the Likud leads, won an overall 65 seats, enough to prevent Livni from forming a coalition government.

Both Livni and Netanyahu have claimed victory in the elections.

Tripoli  - Libyan President Moamar Gaddafi, in another jab at a government he says is failing the people, called late Saturday for the country's oil revenues to be distributed directly to the population.

In a speech to the People's Congresses, a representative body of the country's villages, Gaddafi said 32 billion dollars - roughly Libya's annual oil revnues - should be distributed to Libya's five million people.

Gaddafi said the plan would help the country to overcome corruption in the government.

Washington  - Illinois Senator Roland Burris, who filled Barack Obama's vacated Senate seat last month, acknowledged in documents made public Saturday that the state's governor's brother sought donations from him.

Burris, 71, claimed that he didn't respond to the request, which came in the months before his appointment as senator. He said in an affidavit that he refused the request as it "could be viewed as an attempt to curry favour with him (governor) regarding his decision to appoint a successor" to Obama.

Harare/Johannesburg  - Zimbabwe's new finance minister, Tendai Biti, has vowed to save the virtually worthless Zimbabwe dollar and to sideline controversial central banker, Gideon Gono, South Africa's Sunday Times newspaper reported.

Biti, who was sworn in as one of the former opposition's ministers Friday by President Robert Mugabe, told the Times: "Our money can only be saved by floating the Zimbabwe dollar so that it finds its natural value," he said.

Harare  - Zimbabwean police have charged well-known white opposition politician Roy Bennett, whose arrest as a new government was being sworn in Friday provoked furore, with a lesser charge of insu

Washington  - US President Barack Obama on Saturday thanked Congress for passing a 787-billion-dollar economic stimulus bill, which he called "a major milestone on our road to recovery."

In his weekly address he also warned that "this historic step won't be the end of what we do to turn our economy around, but the beginning."