Middle Orient

Opposition leader MP Michel Aoun held a series of meetings on Tuesday with other Christian political figures that focused on the political

Palestinian police killed one man in the West Bank on Tuesday as it broke up rallies against a US peace meeting, while Hamas supporters in Gaza rallied in force against the conference.

Under the gaze of an Israeli tank, Syrian bulldozers slice through rocky terrain to build roads just inside a ceasefire line separating the occupied Golan Heights from the rest of Syria.

Falluja, once the heart of Iraq’s bloody insurgency, is hoping to trade mortar bombs for bricks and mortar as it seeks to heal its wounds and return to normality.

NATO air-strikes killed 12 civilian road workers in eastern Afghanistan, a provincial governor said on Wednesday, an incident bound to fuel Afghan resentment against the presence of international forces.

General Pervez Musharraf finally quit as army chief on Wednesday, trading the post for a second five-year term as president and fulfilling a promise many Pakistanis doubted he would keep.

Official negligence contributed to the death toll in Afghanistan’s biggest suicide bombing, which killed 72 people, most of them schoolboys, this month, the interior minister said on Tuesday.

Nine people were killed when a suicide bomber posing as a shepherd attacked police north of Baghdad on Tuesday and at least six civilians died in a spate of shootings by U.S. soldiers, security officials said.

Six people were killed when a suicide bomber attacked provincial police headquarters in Baquba north of Baghdad on Tuesday, police said.

U.S. troops killed five Iraqi civilians, including a child, in two separate shootings in the past two days, the U.S. military said on Tuesday.On Monday, U.S. troops targeting al Qaeda fighters in Baiji, 180 km (110 miles)