Middle Orient

Republicans in the US Senate on Wednesday blocked a Democratic measure which would have required President George W. Bush to pull most combat troops out of Iraq by the end of April 2008.

A year after his Fateh movement was trounced at the polls, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Wednesday he will call new legislative elections, a move designed to freeze the Islamist Hamas from power.

Al-Qaeda has regenerated and is plotting attacks against the United States, according to a US intelligence report.

At least 16 Pakistani soldiers are reported to have been killed in an ambush against a military convoy near the Afghan border.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, has called for early elections in the Palestinian territories, denouncing Hamas and declaring “even the devil cannot match their lies”.

The U.S. military on Wednesday announced the arrest of a senior leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, an insurgent who, the military said, is casting himself as a “conduit” between the top leaders of al Qaeda and al Qaeda in Iraq.

In his little office at Stony Brook University east of New York City, the former director of the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad has hung a maxim of Martin Luther King: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that.”

The White House said Tuesday the international meeting on the Middle East proposed by President George W. Bush should not be viewed as “a big peace conference” and it is too early to say where or when it will be.

About 100 Palestinians smashed doors and windows inside an airport building in this Egypt-Gaza Strip border town early Tuesday after being trapped there for more than a month since the border’s closure, police and one of the rioters said.

Army troops are making “significant” gains in their long-running battle against Al Qaeda-inspired fighters barricaded inside a Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon, security officials said Tuesday.