TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso plans to call a general election on August 30, a top ruling party official said on Monday, despite the prospect that his long-ruling conservative party is headed for a historic defeat.

A Democratic Party victory in the national election would end half a century of nearly unbroken rule by the business-friendly Liberal Democratic Party and raise the chance of resolving political deadlocks as Japan tries to recover from its worst recession since World War Two.

BERLIN (Reuters) - German prosecutors have charged suspected Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk with helping to kill about 28,000 Jews in World War Two, in what is expected to be one of Germany's last major Nazi-era war crimes cases.

The 89-year old Demjanjuk, who has been held in a jail in southern Germany since May 12 after he was deported from the United States, will be tried at a court in Munich.

ISLAMABAD, July 13 (Xinhua) -- Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari on Monday ordered an enquiry and sought an immediate report into the explosion in a village, in east Pakistan's Punjab province, that killed 16 people, including seven children, and injured 70 others.

The president expressed his shock over the loss of innocent lives in the incident, in which apparently explosives hidden in a house of a school teacher went off, causing widespread damage to people and property.

The Nabucco line has no guaranteed supply of gas

Four European Union countries and Turkey have signed an agreement to construct the long-planned 3,300km Nabucco natural gas pipeline.

Once completed, the line will bring up to 31 billion cubic metres of gas a year from the Caspian and the Middle East across Turkey and into Europe.

It will give an important alternative energy supply to Russia, which already meets 30% of Europe's gas needs.

(Adds details of Honda's sports and Fit hybrid cars, plus comments from company's new president)

TOKYO (Dow Jones)--Honda Motor Co. (7267.TO) said Monday it will launch the world's first sports and compact hybrid cars next year, hoping to turn around its earnings picture by catering to drivers who are at the same time environmentally aware, cost conscious and into speed.

Honda, the biggest rival to the globe's largest hybrid maker Toyota Motor Corp., will in February launch ...

Staten Island, New York - In a graphic and pungent demonstration of natural selection in action, a New York teen fell into an open sewer because texting was more important than looking where she was walking.

In what has been described - rather aptly - as a freak accident, the freak in question, 15-year-old Alexa Longueira, obviously from the shallow end of the gene pool, was so busy texting that she failed to notice an open manhole in front of her and plummeted five feet into a pool of a rather more noisome nature, scraping her back and arms and losing a shoe in the process.

(Adds analyst, detail, updates share price.)

Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES

LONDON (Dow Jones)--Shares in U.K. independent Venture Production PLC (VPC.LN) Monday rose 6.4% after U.K. utility Centrica PLC (CNA.LN) announced late Friday an offer of 845 pence a share, valuing the company at GBP1.3 billion.

However, Venture shareholders representing over 10% of shares said Monday they backed the company's rejection of the hostile bid.

With multiple Academy Awards, Grammys, Emmys and a Special Tony Award to her credit, Barbra Streisand is inarguably among the world’s most successful and renowned entertainers. Yet Streisand is also a noted environmental activist, having donated $1 million in 2006 to the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation in support of former President Bill Clinton’s Climate Change Initiative. She answered questions from POLITICO Senior Editor David Mark about her environmental work.

Police officers are on the lookout for three prisoners who prison officials said escaped this morning from the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City.

The three men, two serving time for murder and the third for rape, were discovered missing at 10 a.m. from their housing units.

A press release from the prison said the prison was placed on lockdown and a search of the prison was conducted.

The missing offenders are:

* HK shares fall most in three-weeks to seven-week low

* China shares drop on news of year's largest IPO

* China Eastern, Shanghai Airlines gain on merger news (Updates to close)

HONG KONG, July 13 (Reuters) - Hong Kong shares fell the mostin three weeks, dropping 2.6 percent to a seven-week low onMonday as worries about likely austerity measures from Beijing,following a strong surge in bank lending in the first half,persisted.

THERE ARE people who can forgive Ted Kennedy anything. There are people who can forgive him nothing.

Many of the rest, perhaps, regard the senior senator from Massachusetts as a marvelously flawed human being who's somehow survived scandal and tragedy and more than three-quarters of a century in the public eye to arrive at a point where colleagues from both sides of the aisle appear to regard him with affection and respect.

With British support for the war in Afghanistan flagging and Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government under fire following the deaths of 15 British soldiers in the past two weeks, President Barack Obama told a British television interviewer that there would be a re-evaluation of how to prosecute the war after Afghan elections in September.

“I think that all of us are going to have to do an evaluation after the Afghan election to see what more we can do,” Obama said in an interview broadcast Sunday on Sky News.

A teen in Staten Island, NY had a real crappy texting experience.

CBS' Channel 2 in New York reports:

And she also happens to admit that she was texting as she walked and didn't notice the open manhole. Overall, the city was negligent but texting also played a role.

Longueira is fine-aside from cuts and bruises-but the tale is a reminder (a smelly one) that you should look up when texting as you walk, drive and conduct other activities.

President Barack Obama’s plan for climate change legislation faces an extraordinarily tough climb in the Senate. For proof, look no further than to some of Obama’s closest allies.

“We’ve got to be very careful with what we do with this legislation,” Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), a near—constant cable surrogate during Obama’s presidential campaign, told Missouri talk radio show host Mike Ferguson last week. “We need to be a leader in the world, but we don’t want to be a sucker.”

As he gears up for his 2010 reelection, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s startlingly low poll ratings back home in Nevada are a matter of considerable concern among Democrats. But few have as much reason to worry as Reid’s own son Rory, who might have to share the ballot with him.

Rory Reid, a two-term Clark County commissioner and former state Democratic Party chairman, is expected to formally announce his campaign for governor in the weeks ahead.

Sonia Sotomayor still speaks with her elderly mom, who’s retired in Florida, “every day.”

She’s a “doting” aunt to three of her brother’s children and an “attentive godmother to five more.”

And did you know she was a “fearless and effective prosecutor” and anti-child-pornography crusader widely credited “with saving baseball”?

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Dutch conglomerate Philips Electronics (PHG.AS)(PHG.N) signaled brighter business prospects for the second half of 2009, helped by cost cuts, as it surprised the market with a return to profit in the second quarter.

Though still cautious about the overall picture, Philips said on Monday it expected an improved performance in the rest of this year as some of its markets, notably in emerging economies, may be bottoming out.

MUNICH (AP) - German prosecutors formally charged John Demjanjuk on Monday with 27,900 counts of being an accessory to murder at a Nazi death camp during World War II.

The charges against the 89-year-old retired auto worker, who was deported from the U.S. in May, were filed at a Munich state court, prosecutors in the city said in a brief statement. There was no immediate word on when a trial might start.

Democrats pushing second stimulus have few supporters

Who needs a whip operation on the Senate floor when you can just read senators’ tweets?

Some Democrats are pushing another stimulus — several have indicated that they believe the economy could use another infusion of government spending — but they would first have to build more support within their own party.

Claire McCaskill minced no words in her Twitter feed over the weekend. “I do not support a second stimulus,” she tweeted.

HONG KONG (Dow Jones)--Declines in regional markets and concerns about weak corporate earnings led Hong Kong shares to close Monday at a seven-week low, led by the financial and energy sectors.

The blue-chip Hang Seng Index fell 453.79 points, or 2.6%, to 17,254.63, the index's lowest close since it hit 16,991 May 26. All but four of the 42 blue chips closed lower Monday.

Analysts said they expect further declines in the near term given continued weakness on Wall Street and cautiousness among investors ahead of earnings reports. ...