Middle Orient

BEIRUT — The bitter smell of burned plastic is carried on the wind with the choking dust churned up by a noisy backhoe that rattles and scrapes at a small mountain of rubble.

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BEIRUT (AP) — Syria hotly opposed deployment of an international force along its border to prevent arms shipments to Hizbollah, and Israel on Wednesday called the situation in Lebanon “explosive”, as the ceasefire was shaken by artillery shells and explosions that killed three Lebanese soldiers and an Israeli.

BAGHDAD (AP) — Kurds on Wednesday told of entire families killed in chemical weapons attacks against their villages in the 1980s, saying survivors plunged their faces into milk to end the pain from the blinding gas or fled into the hills on mules as military helicopters fired on them.

Two Western journalists kidnapped in Gaza earlier this month were shown in footage released yesterday by a previously unknown group calling themselves the Holy Jihad Brigades.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — The United States said on Wednesday that Iran’s request for talks fell short of the UN Security Council’s demand for it to halt its nuclear programme.

BEIRUT (AP) — Syria’s President Bashar Assad was quoted in a TV interview Wednesday as saying that he would consider the deployment of international troops along the Lebanon-Syria border a hostile move towards his country.

BYBLOS — The Lebanese port of Byblos has survived the Romans, the Crusades and the armies of Alexander the Great but now it faces a 21st century menace, brought to its shores on a tide of war — oil pollution.

MOGADISHU (AP) — The seaport in the Somali capital reopened Wednesday for the first time in 11 years, the latest sign that the city’s rulers are trying to restore confidence after more than a decade of anarchy.

Israel’s attorney general has presented Ehud Olmert with a list of options for investigating the conduct of the recent war in Lebanon, as the prime minister faced mounting calls for a sweeping probe into the conduct of the conflict.