Middle Orient

Bulgarian nurse Snezhana Dimitrova has spent eight years in a Libyan jail and her family is convinced that a court there will on Wednesday confirm the death sentences passed on her and five other foreign medics.

Ali Ahmed is living “the garden life,” as a new bit of Iraqi slang puts it. Two years after earning his engineering degree, the 27-year-old is among Iraq’s teeming numbers of jobless with nothing to do but hang out in Baghdad’s parks.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, visiting former colonies in North Africa on Tuesday, said France should recognise its colonial history but not repent for it.

Whether it be mothers who lost their sons in combat or other Shiites whose homes were destroyed in Israel’s blitz of Beirut a year ago, Hizbollah is still riding high on its home turf.

Sunni gunmen seized control of a remote village northeast of Baghdad in a fierce battle with residents who pleaded for rescue by Iraqi army and police as they tried to defend their homes, the deputy provincial governor said Tuesday.

The foreign ministers of Jordan and Egypt postponed until July 25 their first visit to Israel on behalf of the Arab League to revive a long-stalled Arab peace initiative, officials said on Tuesday.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called on Tuesday for an international force in the Gaza Strip, which is now controlled by the rival Hamas movement.

Pakistani troops have cleared the Lal Masjid or Red Mosque compound in Islamabad of fighters after two days of fighting that left more than 60 people dead, the military said. Many questions were unanswered on Wednesday, including the final death toll and whether any women or children had been killed.

Occupation mass media reported that 3 kafirs from “Russian Interior Ministry troops” were killed and another five were wounded in the gun battle in the Vedeno district of CRI.

A suicide car bomb has killed at least eight people and wounded 30 near an Algerian military barracks southeast of the capital. The attack occurred on Wednesday in the town of Lakhdaria, about 120km southeast of Algiers in the region of Kabylie, local media and witnesses reported.