Washington  - US President Barack Obama laid out a new effort Monday to help small businesses struck hard by a Wall Street crisis that has cut off their access to loans.

The administration's new plan is designed to jump-start lending by directly investing in frozen credit markets, boosting loan guarantees and forcing the 21 banks that have accepted emergency government funds to report monthly on their loans to US companies.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper will print its last edition on Tuesday, ending a 146-year run and continuing operations as a web-only publication, the paper said Monday.

The newspaper is currently distributed to more than 117,000 subscribers every morning, making it the nation's largest daily newspaper to shift to an entirely digital news product.

The paper lost 14 million dollars last year and owner Hearst Corporation put the paper up for sale in January, saying that it would stop printing if a buyer couldn't be found.

Washington - The world's wealthiest nations should be responsible for China's pollution coming from exports, Chinese officials said Monday amid talks with the United States on how to combat global warming.

China - the world's largest polluter together with the United States - has a plan in place to reduce greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming even as its economy grows rapidly, said Li Gao, director of China's department of climate change.

Washington  - An Iranian drone that wandered deep into Iraqi airspace last month was shot down by American warplanes, a US military spokesman in Baghdad confirmed Monday.

The US jet fighters downed the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle on February 25 about 100 kilometres northeast of Baghdad, after tracking it for more than one hour and determining it was not a coalition aircraft, the spokesman said.

Washington  - US prosecutors intend to seize millions of dollars of homes, cars and other luxury items from disgraced financier Bernard Madoff, who pleaded guilty last week to operating a 50-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme.

A filing in US court shows prosecutors intend to go after four homes owned by Madoff and his wife, Ruth, including the property and contents of a 7-million-dollar Manhattan luxury apartment, a 3.4- million-dollar beachside home on Long Island, a 14-million-dollar waterfront mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, and a home in the south of France.

New York - US actor Ron Silver,