Middle Orient News

WASHINGTON — President George W. Bush keeps revising his explanation for why the US is in Iraq, moving from narrow military objectives at first to history-of-civilisation stakes now. Initially, the rationale was specific: To stop Saddam Hussein from using what Bush claimed were the Iraqi leader’s weapons of mass destruction …

ISRAELI TROOPS KILLED eight Palestinian fighters in clashes in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, including seven from the Hamas group, amid a surge in violence in the coastal territory. In the past three days, 21 Palestinians have been killed in fighting in Gaza, the majority of them fighters, and two …

BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraq’s Shiite-dominated interior ministry, whose police forces have been accused of complicity in the sectarian attacks wracking the country, will change top commanders and has already fired 3,000 employees accused of corruption or rights abuses, a spokesman said Saturday. Thousands have died this year in the cycle …

BAGHDAD (AP) — Suspected Shiite gunmen, some dressed as police, broke into a television station and gunned down 11 executives, producers and other staffers Thursday — the deadliest attack against the media in Iraq, where at least 81 journalists have been killed in the past three years.

GAZA CITY   (AFP) — 8 Palestinians, including a teenage boy and three Hamas fighters, were killed by Israeli fire in the Gaza Strip on Thursday as troops mounted a fresh incursion as part of a four-month offensive. The violence — at a time of increased tensions between rival Palestinian factions …

RAMALLAH — A Palestinian festival showcasing women filmmakers has battled against Israeli closures, rampant insecurity, recession and funding shortages to promote cinema in Gaza and the West Bank. “It’s hard to work in films here,” said Alia Arasoughly, who runs Shashat, a non-profit organisation focusing on women’s cinema which is …

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) — The US military may soon be able to communicate better with Iraqis in their own language, thanks to technology developed by IBM that quickly translates spoken English into Iraqi Arabic. The technology could help the military overcome a major hurdle in Iraq, which is the inability …

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM (AP) — With his political fortunes plummeting after the summer’s war in Lebanon, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is scrambling to shore up his rickety coalition by courting a hardline party that favours redrawing Israel’s borders to exclude Arab citizens.

BAGHDAD (AP) — A witness in Saddam Hussein’s genocide trial testified that the ousted leader’s agents ran a human trafficking ring that sold his sister and other Kurdish women in the 1980s. Defence lawyers and one of Saddam’s co-defendants on Wednesday immediately challenged the charge as hearsay based on a …

Addressing an open session of the parliament here on Wednesday, Haddad Adel also praised solidarity of the different political groups and movements in the face of the nuclear issue, and said that the nuclear approvals of the Islamic Consultative Assembly speak the nation’s word.