Lebanon’s parliament failed on Friday to grasp its last chance to elect a head of state before pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud leaves office at midnight, creating a vacuum that many fear could lead to violence.

Fear of violence looms over Lebanon after parliament failed to elect a new head of state on Friday, but analysts say blood will not flow just yet since rival political groups have too much to lose.

Prosecutors charged Russian Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Storchak on Friday with attempting to embezzle $43 million in budget funds, his lawyers said.

The portrait of Hussein Saleh al-Me’ari holding a slim iron key and the legend “We will return” hangs on a wall with peeling paint in a tiny room at the Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon.

Exiled former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, the man President Pervez Musharraf deposed, is set to return to Pakistan from Saudi Arabia within days, aides said on Friday.

A bomb hidden in a box of birds killed 13 people and wounded 57 at a popular pet market in central Baghdad on Friday, police and witnesses said, describing the deadliest attack in the Iraqi capital in two months.

Iraq is facing a health “catastrophe” in the capital Baghdad, with reports of cholera rising sharply over the past weeks to more than 80 new cases, the Health Ministry said on Thursday.

About 60 percent of the foreign militants fighting in Iraq have come from U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and Libya, unidentified U.S. military officials said in a newspaper report on Thursday.

Some Western aid groups driven from Iraq in recent years are cautiously coming back, weighing the danger to their staff against the lives they may save among increasingly desperate Iraqis.

An Australian commando was killed in a clash with Taliban militia in Afghanistan on Friday, a day before Australians go to the polls in national elections in which the war in Iraq and Afghanistan will feature.