Middle Orient

There is an air of relief blowing in with the hot sea breeze over the Gaza Strip these days, but it’s one salted with worry that factional warfare which ended in victory for Hamas two weeks ago could swiftly return.

Following this week’s foiled car bombs in central London, the British media raised the spectre of “Iraq-style attacks”, but what exactly would be the hallmarks of such a campaign?

Kuwait’s emir on Saturday accepted the resignation of his oil and transportation ministers who stepped down over a parliament inquiry into corruption allegations, the state-run news agency reported.

Maher Talaat and his two friends sat on the grassy mountainside, toasting bottles of beer and gazing at the pastoral scene — and at the girls.

Relief workers on Saturday accused the Lebanese army of using “excessive force” to disperse a protest in which dozens of displaced refugees in northern Lebanon were killed or wounded.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki condemned a US raid Saturday in Baghdad’s Shiite Sadr City slum — a politically sensitive district for him — in which American troops searching for Iranian-linked gunmen sparked a firefight that left 26 Iraqis dead.

The trucks are there, piled high with foreign foodstuffs. There’s a grinding of gears, dust, hand signals and a man with a clipboard, waving load after load through the heavy frontier gate.

Israel launched two air strikes in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, killing six Palestinians, including three senior Islamic Jihad fighters it long sought for firing rockets and orchestrating other attacks.

According to the source of AlKavkaz news website, on June 28 during a combat operation near the village of Gezinchu, southern Chechnya, a unit of Mujahideen under the command of Amir Osama blew up an APC of the invaders.

Part 1 JOHN STOCKWELL, 10 October 1987 John Stockwell is the highest-ranking CIA official ever to leave the agency and go public.