WELLINGTON - NEW Zealand's opposition National Party is set to sweep Prime Minister Helen Clark from power after nine years in office, according to opinion polls a day ahead of Saturday's general election.

They showed the relatively inexperienced National leader John Key, who only joined parliament in 2002 after earning a fortune as an investment banker, on the brink of achieving his boyhood ambition of becoming prime minister.

SYDNEY - AN AUSTRALIAN couple who imprisoned a six-year-old boy in a baby's cot in their garage were on Friday jailed by a judge who described their behaviour as cruel and bizarre.

The pair kept the child in a portable cot covered with a homemade plywood lid that the boy was unable to remove.

CHICAGO - MR BARACK Obama will meet his economic team on Friday and hold his first news conference since becoming US president-elect as the country awaited signs of how he might tackle the economic crisis.

Mr Obama, who stands to inherit the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, faced pressure to announce his picks for key economic jobs, including Treasury secretary, though there were no indications of when he might do so.