Middle Orient

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.

BEIRUT (AP) — Opposition protesters burned tyres and cars in the streets and clashed with government supporters, paralysing Beirut and areas across Lebanon on Tuesday in the worst violence yet in the pro-Iranian Hizbollah’s campaign to topple US-backed Prime Minister Fuad Siniora.

RAMALLAH — Fateh and Hamas met again in Gaza last night to discuss forming a unity government while a number of incidents across the occupied Palestinian territory provided ample evidence of the state of lawlessness Palestinians are struggling with.

US President George W. Bush prepared to urge opponents in Congress on Tuesday to back sending thousands more troops to Iraq, as the UN envoy in the country said it was “sliding into the abyss of sectarianism”. A day after bombers killed 88 people in Baghdad’s bloodiest attack this year, …