Middle Orient

Islamist militants fired Katyusha rockets at Lebanese villages on Friday, escalating their 8-week-old battle with the army at a Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon.

London-based HSBC Holdings Plc, which owns a 70 percent stake in Dar Es Salaam bank, said on Wednesday that less than $1 million in cash was stolen in a raid on a Dar Es Salaam branch in Baghdad.

The White House is expected to present to Congress an interim report on the situation in Iraq, assessing the results of the major US troop “surge”.

In the first instalment of what I intended would be a short series of articles, I wrote that Oded Yinon’s 1982 study entitled “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s” is the most detailed account so far of the Zionist mindset; how it works and how it aspires to manage …

Egypt’s Coptic Church on Wednesday rejected the Roman Catholic Church’s claim to be “the one true Church of Christ,” saying such provocative declarations unnecessarily stirred up tensions.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan says authorisation of a military incursion into northern Iraq is not on the immediate agenda, but he did not rule it out after the July 22nd general elections.

The Libyan Supreme Court on Wednesday (July 11th) upheld the death sentences of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who has been given Bulgarian citizenship.

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.