Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas plans to hold legislative and presidential elections within six months, PA officials in Ramallah said Sunday.

  The Baghdad government plans to send 6,000 Kurdish soldiers — known as peshmerga — to help secure oil and electricity installations in the multiethnic region of Kirkuk.

Turkey and Iraq agreed to try to end the presence of a Kurdish rebel group in Iraq, Turkey’s prime minister told a news conference Tuesday, while four more US soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq as US troop levels reached an all-time high of about 162,000. “We …

CAMP DAVID — Afghan President Hamid Karzai and U.S. President George W Bush agreed that Pakistan must help quell deadly violence inside Afghanistan, but broke sharply on Iran’s influence there.

The Kuwaiti parliament recently passed a law banning women from working between eight PM and seven AM except in the medical sector. The law further bans women from engaging in work in which they would use their femininity in a way that is “counter to general moral values,” or from …

President Mahmoud Abbas promised Palestinians on Tuesday their lives would improve as a result of his talks this week with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. “Many issues which affect the Palestinians in their day-to- day lives will be resolved,” Abbas told Voice of Palestine radio in his first public comments …

Ehud Olmert on Monday became the first Israeli prime minister to visit a Palestinian town since the outbreak of fighting seven years ago, meeting under heavy guard with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to talk about the creation of a Palestinian state.

A Christian opposition candidate narrowly won a by-election to Lebanon’s parliament in a result that seemed set to further complicate a 9-month-old political crisis.  In the latest showdown between Prime Minister Fouad Siniora’s Western-backed government and its opponents, tens of thousands of Lebanese voted in by-elections on Sunday triggered by …

Sources close to the Turkish military say the military did not look warmly to the idea of a joint covert operation with the Americans to capture PKK leaders in northern Iraq because they felt even the gossip of such a plan would be leaked and would drive the terrorist leadership …

(CBS/AP) Iran and the United States will meet in Baghdad today to discuss ways to ease Iraq’s security problems, Tehran’s ambassador to Baghdad said.