Middle Orient

RAMALLAH — Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has approved a rerouting of Israel’s separation barrier to take in two more illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the Israeli media reported yesterday.

WASHINGTON (AFP) — The United States took new steps to isolate Iran by freezing the sale of all F-14 fighter parts, as officials told US news media they suspect Iranians masquerading as Americans were involved in a deadly attack on a US compound in Iraq.

BAGHDAD (AP) — Car bombs struck mostly Shiite targets in Baghdad on Wednesday, and the bodies of three Sunni professors and a student were found days after they were seized while leaving their campus in a Shiite part of the city. At least 47 people were reported killed across the …

SOFIA (AFP) — A Bulgarian prosecutor launched a judicial enquiry Wednesday against 11 Libyan police officers who allegedly tortured five Bulgarian nurses sentenced to death in Libya in a high-profile AIDS epidemic case.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Training the police is as important to stabilising Iraq as building up an army there, but the United States has botched the job by assigning the wrong agencies to the task, two members of the Iraq Study Group say.

DAMASCUS — For a while in postwar Iraq, life looked up for Ahlam Jibouri, who found a well-paid job working with the US authorities after the 2003 invasion.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The US government wasted tens of millions of dollars in Iraq reconstruction aid, including scores of unaccounted-for weapons and a never-used camp for housing police trainers with an Olympic-size swimming pool, investigators say.

TEHRAN (Fars News Agency)- The White House reacted warily to Iran’s plans to expand ties with Iraq, saying that Tehran needed play a constructive role but leaving bilateral relations up to Baghdad

BAGHDAD (AP) — US attack helicopters chattered overhead Wednesday as American and Iraqi troops fought a ferocious daylong battle with fighters who fired heavy weapons from concrete high-rises in a stronghold just north of the heavily fortified Green Zone.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Democratic-controlled Senate Foreign Relations Committee dismissed President George W. Bush’s plans to increase troops strength in Iraq on Wednesday as “not in the national interest”, an unusual wartime repudiation of the commander in chief.