Middle Orient

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on a visit to Tehran on Monday that the “empire of the dollar is crashing,” one day after his country and anti-US ally

United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) Force commander Major General Claudio Graziano said on Monday that Southerners and peacekeepers

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner warned Lebanon’s deadlocked political factions that they must either agree on a consensus president before

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert sought wide Arab support on Monday for a U.S.-led peace conference by agreeing to release 441 Palestinian prisoners and reaffirming a pledge not to build new Jewish settlements.

France’s foreign minister blamed unnamed parties on Monday for blocking a deal between feuding Lebanese leaders to agree on a compromise candidate for president, two days before a key parliamentary vote.

Exiled Pakistani opposition leader Nawaz Sharif said on Tuesday he would not meet President Pervez Musharraf, the army general who deposed him eight years ago, when Musharraf visits Saudi Arabia this week.

Behind a poster of Jerusalem’s Muslim shrines, Islamist activist Omar Zaib tells a crowd of refugees at a Jordanian election rally that Israel is doomed — if not by this generation of jihadists then the next.

An Iraqi TV journalist who was kidnapped last week in a busy Baghdad neighborhood said he was released unharmed before dawn on Monday.

A propaganda video shot inside a radical Maldives mosque and posted on the Internet has raised fears that al Qaeda is gaining a foothold in the Indian Ocean tourist paradise.

At least a dozen people were killed in fighting between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslim tribesmen in a Pakistani region near the Afghan border on Monday, taking the death toll to more than 100 in four days of clashes.