Middle Orient News

TEHRAN (FNA)- The Turkish energy minister’s trip to Iran to firm up energy deals between the two countries is expected to be delayed by two weeks until mid-September, an energy ministry source said on Thursday.

China’s state-owned oil firm CNPC has agreed a $3bn (£1.63bn) oil services contract with the government of Iraq.

Police in Israel have arrested an Israeli citizen who entered Gaza with a group of pro-Palestinian activists.

At least one immigrant domestic worker dies each week in Lebanon, by suicide or by accident during a bid to escape, a human rights group reports.

Israeli settlement construction in the occupied West Bank has nearly doubled since last year, the Israeli campaign group Peace Now has said.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – U.S. forces arrested the deputy head of a committee that purged Iraq’s government of members of Saddam Hussein’s party, an ally said, but the U.S. military said he was a wanted militia leader behind a deadly Baghdad bombing.

TEHRAN (FNA)- A Lebanese court has issued an arrest warrant for the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi over the abduction of a senior Shiite leader 30 years ago.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – U.S. troops will on Sept. 1 hand over control of Iraq’s Anbar province, once the heart of a bloody Sunni Arab insurgency, reflecting a dramatic drop in violence across the country, an Iraqi official said on Thursday.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has reshuffled and replaced the head of a negotiating team seeking to finalize an agreement on the future presence of U.S. troops here, a senior Iraqi politician said on Thursday.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr extended indefinitely a ceasefire for his Mehdi militia on Thursday and ordered his followers to protest peacefully against the U.S. occupation.