Middle Orient

The U.N. nuclear watchdog on Wednesday put finishing touches on a report expected to confirm that Iran continues uranium enrichment activities, a finding that could trigger harsher U.N. Security Council sanctions against Tehran.

A suicide car bomber struck a police checkpoint Wednesday in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, killing at 11 people in the spiritual heartland of the militia factions led by radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Britain will withdraw nearly half its troops from Iraq by the end of the year if local forces can secure the southern part of the country, Prime Minister Tony Blair planned to announce Wednesday.

Iran wants talks on its nuclear programme but rejects preconditions demanding it freeze the work, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Tuesday, just ahead of a United Nations deadline for Tehran to back down.

The Lebanese army said on Tuesday its sappers had defused a bomb hidden in a wheel near Beirut’s airport road. An army statement said the bomb, which was discovered after a scrap metal dealer brought the wheel to a shop near

At least seven people were killed when a suicide bomber targeted mourners at a funeral in Iraq. Around 15 people were injured in the blast in a funeral tent in northeastern Baghdad.

The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq starkly delineates the gulf that separates President Bush’s illusions from the realities of the war. Victory, as the president sees it, requires a stable liberal democracy in Iraq that is pro-American. The NIE describes a war that has no chance of producing that …

Hamas said on Tuesday it still hoped Washington would soften its position toward a Palestinian unity government despite Israeli statements that the United States and Israel would shun it until it met several conditions.

Six former officials in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq regime today denied crimes against humanity for a crackdown on Kurds in the 1980s.

The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, today rejected international demands for his country to suspend its uranium enrichment programme as a UN deadline to do so approached.