(Reuters) – Following are security developments in Iraq at 1515 GMT on Thursday. BAGHDAD – U.S. forces said they killed 18 fighters in clashes beginning on Wednesday afternoon and running through the night in the Shi’ite district of Sadr City in the capital. Police put the death toll at 18 …

DUBAI (Reuters) – Leaders of Pakistan’s month-old ruling alliance narrowed differences on Thursday over the reinstatement of judges ousted by President Pervez Musharraf to calm fears that the coalition was about to break up.

GAZA (Reuters) – Israeli forces on Thursday killed two Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, including a Hamas commander involved in the 2006 capture of an Israeli soldier, local medics and the army said.

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia said on Thursday an extra contingent of its troops had begun arriving in Georgia’s breakaway region of Abkhazia, a move Tbilisi said was an illegal act of military aggression.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel would likely agree to an informal truce with Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip if cross-border rocket attacks and arms smuggling into the territory ended, a senior Israeli official said on Thursday.

(Reuters) – Diplomatic novice Dmitry Medvedev will take over next week as Russian president with a thick stack of foreign policy challenges in his in-tray.

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Next week a lawyer with little foreign policy experience will become Russian president and lead a country with a nuclear arsenal, a UN veto and volatile relations with its neighbors and an energy-dependent West.

RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) – Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas underwent heart tests in a Jordanian hospital on Thursday, a spokesman said, describing his condition as good.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – An explosion near a U.S. patrol in Baghdad killed nine Iraqis and wounded 23 on Thursday, Iraqi police said.

TBILISI (Reuters) – Moscow’s sabre-rattling over two disputed regions of Georgia is driven by Kremlin hardliners who want to push Russia’s next president into an anti-Western stance, diplomats in both countries said.