President George Bush was forced into making his fourth address to the nation in a week today as the US financial crisis stumbled on.

A LEADING Iranian newspaper is to hold a competition for cartoons on the Holocaust in what it calls a test of whether the West extends the principle of freedom of expression to the Nazi genocide as it did to the caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed.

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas today pledged to track down and punish militants responsible for a suicide bombing that killed four Israelis at a Tel Aviv nightclub, and Palestinian security officials pointed to the Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah as the apparent mastermind.

Palestinian officials said a Peres-Arafat meeting could take place today or tomorrow morning, before the start of the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur.