TEHRAN (Fars News Agency) Iran and Malaysia have signed an agreement worth USD16 billion to develop two Iranian gas fields.

Serbia said on Wednesday it would shun any offer of membership of the European Union or NATO if they recognized the breakaway province of Kosovo as an independent state.

Veteran liberal politician Boris Nemtsov withdrew from Russia’s presidential race on Wednesday, saying the opposition needed to put forward a single candidate in the March election to withstand the Kremlin’s “foul play”.

Hamas will not release a captured Israeli soldier unless Israel meets its demand to free nearly 1,400 Palestinian prisoners, including 350 with life sentences, a leader of the Islamist group in Gaza said on Wednesday.

Behind concrete blast walls and battling a flickering power supply, Baghdad’s international film festival opened in a hotel on Wednesday in another sign of how improved security is bringing life back to the city.

Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto vowed to fight for workers’ rights on Wednesday as she took her campaign for January general elections to an industrial belt near the capital.

A Turkish woman who was injured along with seven other people in a bomb blast in Istanbul on Tuesday has died from her wounds, state-run Anatolian news agency said on Wednesday.

Turkish warplanes bombed Kurdish guerrilla targets in northern Iraq on Wednesday, Turkey’s general staff said, in the fourth such cross-border raid in five days.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will meet on Thursday to try to salvage peace talks bogged down by a row over Jewish settlements, Israeli officials said.

TEHRAN (Fars News Agency) Iran signed a contract with Russia Tuesday night on the purchase of an advanced missile system called S-300, Iranian Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar said here on Wednesday.