WASHINGTON — US President George W.  Bush on Friday strongly condemned Iran’s detention of American citizens and called for them to be freed “immediately and unconditionally.” Tehran has accused dual US-Iranian citizens Haleh Esfandiari, an academic, Kian Tajbakhsh, a social scientist, and Parnaz Azima, a journalist, of spying. The State …

CAIRO (AP) — A Muslim Brotherhood blogger was released Saturday after a 45-day detention, but the crackdown against the group continued, with 51 Brotherhood members arrested in recent days, police said.

MOGADISHU (AFP) — A US warship shelled suspected Al Qaeda targets in northeastern Somalia after Islamist fighters clashed with troops from the country’s semi-autonomous region of Puntland, witnesses and officials said Saturday.

CIZRE, Turkey (AP) — The top commander of the Kurdish rebel group PKK said his forces would resist any Turkish military incursion aimed at destroying rebel bases in northern Iraq, a news agency reported Saturday.

NABLUS (Reuters) — Israeli undercover forces killed a Palestinian shopkeeper and wounded his brother on Saturday during an apparent attempt to shoot two gunmen in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian security officials said.

BAGHDAD (AFP) — Unidentified gunmen shot dead a local Al Qaeda leader in the western Iraqi city of Fallujah on Saturday, police said, as fighting between rival Sunni factions undermined the insurgency.

BEIRUT (AFP) — Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora repeated a warning on Saturday to Islamist gunmen holed up in a northern refugee camp that they must surrender or be crushed, as intense fighting continued to rage.

The Lebanese army has continued to shell the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon as Fatah al-Islam fighters hiding inside vow to fight to the last man.  

In Israel, there is “no effective barrier – not legal and certainly not ethical – that stands in the way of using torture,” concluded a recent report by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI).

Ukraine’s presidential representative in the Constitutional Court has been elected chairman of the Central Election Commission (CEC), the body’s press service head said Saturday.