Middle Orient News

BEIRUT (AP) — Syria’s President Bashar Assad was quoted in a TV interview Wednesday as saying that he would consider the deployment of international troops along the Lebanon-Syria border a hostile move towards his country.

BYBLOS — The Lebanese port of Byblos has survived the Romans, the Crusades and the armies of Alexander the Great but now it faces a 21st century menace, brought to its shores on a tide of war — oil pollution.

MOGADISHU (AP) — The seaport in the Somali capital reopened Wednesday for the first time in 11 years, the latest sign that the city’s rulers are trying to restore confidence after more than a decade of anarchy.

Israel’s attorney general has presented Ehud Olmert with a list of options for investigating the conduct of the recent war in Lebanon, as the prime minister faced mounting calls for a sweeping probe into the conduct of the conflict.

UN warns of Lebanese ‘security vacuum’ as Israel kills 3 Islamic Jihad fighters, charges Dweik with ‘belonging to terrorist organisation’ Agencies Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Tuesday said Israel has no plans to lift its air and sea blockade of Lebanon until an international peacekeeping force takes up positions along …

BAGHDAD (Reuters) — Violence in Baghdad has declined in the past two weeks and all but ended in some formerly deadly neighbourhoods, the US military said in a cautiously upbeat report on Tuesday on a major security clampdown in the city.

BAGHDAD (AP) — Breaking down in tears, a Kurdish woman testified Tuesday in the genocide trial of Saddam Hussein, describing how foul smoke billowed across her village, blinding residents, in a 1987 poison gas attack and how her male relatives disappeared at a prison camp.

TEHRAN (Reuters) — Iran handed over its formal response on Tuesday to a nuclear incentives offer from major powers and said it contained ideas that would allow serious talks about its standoff with the West to start immediately.

BEIRUT (AFP) — Food, bedding and other emergency supplies are pouring into war-battered Lebanon since a ceasefire took effect more than a week ago, United Nations relief officials say.

SRIFA — When not fighting under the Hizbollah banner, Abu Hadi is a farmer whose faith in the movement appears unshaken by the destruction of his village and the deaths of his relatives.