JERUSALEM -- A Palestinian attacker turned a construction vehicle into a fearsome weapon in downtown Jerusalem just hours before Barack Obama's visit Tuesday, ramming a bus, overturning a car and injuring five people before he was shot dead.

Both men were from east Jerusalem, where Palestinian residents hold Israeli ID cards and can move freely about Israel.

Early Tuesday afternoon, the Palestinian rammed his yellow vehicle into a bus several times before the bus driver moved the vehicle to safety, then crushed a small car with his heavy scoop, overturned a sedan and repeatedly hit cars waiting at a stoplight before he was shot dead.

"After I passed him, he turned round, made a U-turn and rammed the windows twice with the shovel. The third time he aimed for my head, he came up to my window and I swerved to the right. Otherwise I would have gone to meet my maker," said the bus driver, Avi Levi.

"Suddenly I heard smashing and crashing and heard people shouting and lots of people came running down the street," said Eran Sternberg, 33, who was on the sidewalk talking on his phone at the time. "Then the bulldozer came down the street and overturned the car next to me, almost hitting me."

Sternberg then began to take a video with his cellular phone. The clip shows the vehicle -- called a backhoe loader -- stopped a few feet from him, as the civilian ran up and began shooting at the driver through the glass door. The large shovel then jerked and fell to the ground, where it rested as a border policeman ran up to shoot at the driver again.

Police identified the driver as Ghassan Abu Teir, a 22-year-old east Jerusalem resident related to a militantly anti-Israel politician from the Islamic Hamas, Mohammed Abu Teir. The driver's family said he was not affiliated with any militant group.

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba -- A former driver for Osama bin Laden knew the target of the fourth hijacked plane on Sept. 11, a prosecutor said Tuesday as he sought to undercut defense arguments that the Guantanamo prisoner was a low-level employee of the terrorist leader.

Salim Hamdan, the first prisoner to face a U.S. war-crimes trial since World War II, heard bin Laden say the plane was heading for "the dome," an apparent reference to the U.S. Capitol, said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Timothy Stone.

The plane crashed in a Pennsylvania field as passengers overcame the hijackers.

"Virtually no one knew the intended target, but the accused knew," Stone told the jury of six U.S. military officers in his opening statement.

Hamdan is charged with conspiracy and aiding terrorism. The defense says the prisoner, a Yemeni with a fourth-grade education, was merely a driver for bin Laden and had no significant role in al-Qaida's terrorist attacks.

"The evidence is that he worked for wages, he didn't wage attacks on America," Harry Schneider, one of Hamdan's civilian defense attorneys, told the jury. "He had a job because he had to earn a living, not because he had a jihad against America."

But prosecutors say that as bin Laden's personal driver, he helped the al-Qaida leader evade U.S. retribution after the Sept. 11 attacks and transport weapons for the Taliban in Afghanistan.

SINGAPORE -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice hopes to judge North Korea's seriousness about abandoning nuclear weapons when she holds the Bush administration's highest-level talks in four years with the Stalinist state this week.

The North has been given a four-page draft document laying out what the United States wants from it to prove it has told the truth about its past atomic programs. Rice expects Pyongyang's foreign minister to provide at least an initial response to the proposal at today's meeting.

"It will give some indication of the amount of effort the North Koreans have put into the completing this verification protocol," chief U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill said Tuesday.

The draft calls for intrusive inspections of North Korean nuclear facilities, soil sampling and interviews with key scientists. It was presented to the North Koreans earlier this month by Hill and representatives of the other four nations pushing the denuclearization effort.

Hill said the goal is to reach a formal agreement on the document by mid-August after negotiations on the fine points, some of which the North Koreans have already objected to.

Five South Koreans were abducted in a Mexico border city, officials said Tuesday.

Gunmen who seized the four men and one woman demanded a $30,000 ransom in return for their freedom, according to an official from the National Intelligence Service. The official did not give further details and asked not to be named, citing an internal policy.

South Korean President Lee Myung-bak instructed his top security adviser to "make utmost efforts for quick and safe return" of the kidnapped victims.

South Korea's Foreign Ministry said in a statement that the five were kidnapped in the Mexico border city of Reynosa last Monday when they were traveling there to seek job information. The ministry said the five were confirmed to be alive.

Mexico has a large South Korean population, many of whom are active in the import industry and own assembly-for-export factories.

KATMANDU, Nepal -- Nepal's former rebels withdrew plans to form the country's new government, saying Tuesday they refused to lead after the defeat of their presidential candidate.

The decision pushed the Himalayan nation, which has been without a government since April elections, into fresh political turmoil.

"After our candidate was defeated in the president election we have lost the moral grounds to lead the new government," Maoist leader Prachanda told reporters.

He said the party, formally known as Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), will act as the opposition even though it emerged as the largest political party in the April election. Since then, the political parties have not been able to agree on a new coalition government.

Ramraja Singh lost the vote for president on Monday to Ram Baran Yadav, who was backed by the Nepali Congress, Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist) and Madhesi People's Rights Forum -- the second-, third- and fourth-largest parties.

An alliance of the three parties formed just before the election managed to defeat the Maoists' candidate.

ROME -- Italy's Parliament gave final approval Tuesday to a contentious law that grants immunity from prosecution to Premier Silvio Berlusconi and other top Italian officials.

The Senate passed the legislation by a wide margin after it previously sailed through the lower house of Parliament. Berlusconi's conservatives have a comfortable majority in both chambers.

The legislation protects the president, the premier and the two speakers of parliament from court prosecutions while in office. It will enter into effect once President Giorgio Napolitano signs it.

Critics have charged that the law is aimed at protecting Berlusconi from a current corruption case in Milan. Berlusconi is accused of ordering payment in 1997 of at least $600,000 to his co-defendant, British lawyer David Mills, in exchange for false testimony at two Berlusconi trials in the 1990s.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- Europe turned up pressure on Zimbabwe's president to share power with the opposition, toughening sanctions Tuesday against Robert Mugabe just as his ruling party was to begin talks with its chief rival mediated by South Africa.

Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai met face-to-face Monday for the first time in 10 years and agreed to formal talks about power sharing after three months of state-sponsored electoral violence. The negotiations were expected to start either late Tuesday or Wednesday at an undisclosed location around the South African capital Johannesburg.

Analysts said growing international pressure coupled with Zimbabwe's economic meltdown left Mugabe little choice but to sign the agreement with the opposition. The central bank issued a 100 billion-dollar note this week in the face of the world's worst inflation -- which officials estimate at 2.2 million percent annually but independent finance houses say is closer to 12.5 million percent.

"When you start to hit these kinds of figures, you know the wheels have come off in a big way," said Richard Cornwell, researcher at the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies in South Africa.