ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — President Gen. Pervez Musharraf faces a potent challenge with the return from exile of the religiously conservative elected leader he overthrew eight years ago.

Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is expected to arrive in the eastern city of Lahore with the country still reeling from a set of brazen suicide attacks. Police detained some 1,800 of his supporters ahead of his planned return, his party said Sunday.

There was no official confirmation of the arrests reported by party spokesman Ahsan Iqbal, but the claim came as the country remained under a state of emergency.

From Rawalpindi in Pakistan today, an army spokesman said Musharraf will step down as head of Pakistan's military and be sworn in as a civilian president on Thursday. "He is going to take oath as has been announced by government on the 29th, most probably, so he is going to take off his uniform a day before that," said Maj. Gen. Waheed Arshad.

Meanwhile Sharif registered today as a candidate in the parliamentary elections.

SYDNEY, Australia — Conservative Prime Minister John Howard, one of the Bush administration's staunchest allies, suffered an election defeat Saturday at the hands of an opposition leader.Labor leader Kevin Rudd, a Chinese-speaking former diplomat, has vowed to pull troops out of Iraq and sign the Kyoto Protocol on capping greenhouse gas emissions, leaving the U.S. as the only industrialized country not to have joined it.Rudd's Labor Party had more than 53 percent of the vote with over 75 percent of ballots counted, compared to 46.8 percent for Howard's coalition, according to the Australian Electoral Commission.

BEIJING — Airbus signed contracts today to sell 160 commercial passenger jets to China in a deal worth around $14.8 billion, the company said.The orders include 110 A320 planes and 50 of the slightly larger A330 planes, Airbus officials said in Beijing, where they were accompanying French President Nicolas Sarkozy on his first state visit to the Asian trading giant.Airbus and Chinese partners this summer signed an agreement to open a final assembly line in the Chinese city of Tianjian to produce A320s.