Middle Orient

Behind concrete blast walls and battling a flickering power supply, Baghdad’s international film festival opened in a hotel on Wednesday in another sign of how improved security is bringing life back to the city.

A Turkish woman who was injured along with seven other people in a bomb blast in Istanbul on Tuesday has died from her wounds, state-run Anatolian news agency said on Wednesday.

Turkish warplanes bombed Kurdish guerrilla targets in northern Iraq on Wednesday, Turkey’s general staff said, in the fourth such cross-border raid in five days.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will meet on Thursday to try to salvage peace talks bogged down by a row over Jewish settlements, Israeli officials said.

Iraq’s interior minister ordered the dismissal of Baiji’s police chief, after a suicide bomber killed at least 20 people and wounded 80 in the northern Iraqi town on Tuesday, an Interior Ministry spokesman said.

A suicide truck bomb killed at least 20 people and wounded 80 in the northern Iraqi city of Baiji on Tuesday, the police and U.S. military said, in the deadliest attack in Iraq for two weeks.

Israel is considering easing criteria for freeing Palestinian prisoners, a move one Israeli official said on Monday could pave the way for the release of Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouthi.

TEHRAN (Fars News Agency)- Iranian diplomats have indicated they want to skip a postponed meeting with security, military and diplomatic experts from the US and instead hold another round of talks at the ambassadorial level, Iraqi officials said Monday.

Gunmen posing as Iraqi security forces kidnapped 14 members of one family in the volatile Diyala province north of Baghdad on Monday, police said.

A cargo train collided with a large family car and killed 12 people, including 10 children from the same extended family, a hospital morgue official said on Monday.