JERUSALEM – Israeli police shot a Palestinian who had stabbed an Israeli border policeman near Jerusalem on Saturday, Israeli police and ambulance workers said.

BAGHDAD – Iraqi security forces have begun a “decisive” final offensive against al Qaeda in Iraq to push the Sunni Islamist militants out of their last major stronghold in the north, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Friday.

BEIRUT – A car bomb killed a police intelligence officer involved in the investigation of assassinations in Lebanon, in an attack in a Christian suburb of Beirut on Friday.

TEHRAN (FNA) – Iran’s permanent envoy to the United Nations Educational, Social and Cultural Organization condemned Israel’s crimes in Gaza, and urged the UN body to take urgent measures to rescue lives of innocent Palestinian citizens, specially teenage patients under treatment in Gaza hospitals.

TEHRAN (FNA) – Senegal’s Defense Minister Becaye Diop is scheduled to arrive here in Tehran on Sunday.

TEHRAN (FNA) – Iranian Parliament Speaker Gholam Ali Haddad Adel is due to pay a visit to Cairo to attend the fifth meeting of the Parliamentary Union of the Organization of the Islamic Conference Member states (PUOICM) in Egypt on Tuesday.

TEHRAN (FNA) – Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki underlined the need for the UN Security Council to return his country’s nuclear case to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

TEHRAN (FNA) – Iran’s foreign minister and Malaysian prime minister in a meeting on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland on Friday discussed arrangement of a ministerial meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC).

TEHRAN (FNA) – Iran joined 9 other iodine-producing countries of the world after starting extraction from its mines in the northern province of Golestan, a local official said here on Saturday.

TEHRAN (FNA) – Iran’s Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki met with Iraqi deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland on Friday.