SANAA — Lunchtime in Sanaa. Offices begin to close, the crowds disappear from the ancient souqs, restaurants hurry their last customers out: The qat is here.

TEL AVIV (AFP) — Israel’s Labour was voting for a new leader Monday in a poll expected to affect Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s coalition, with ex-premier Ehud Barak in a tight race with a former security chief.

ANKARA (AFP) — Lawmakers from Turkey’s main ruling and opposition parties traded blows Monday during a stormy national debate on constitutional changes that would see the president elected by popular vote.

BAGHDAD (AP) — A suicide car bomber struck a busy Baghdad commercial district Monday, killing at least 21 people, setting cars on fire and damaging a nearby Sunni shrine, police and hospital officials said.

BAGHDAD (AFP) — The United States and Iran traded accusations over the bloodshed in Iraq on Monday during the first high-level direct official talks between the archfoes in 27 years.

GAZA (Reuters) — Hamas kept up rocket fire into Israel on Monday in defiance of a ceasefire call by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli threats to escalate military strikes in the Gaza Strip.

BEIRUT (Reuters) — Palestinian leaders tried on Monday to negotiate an end to a bloody standoff between the Lebanese army and Islamists who have been holed up in a refugee camp for more than a week.

Bush regimes’ puppet Ryan Crocker and Iranian diplomat Hassan Kazemi talked in the first and formal meeting after 27 years on Monday with a four-hour meeting about Iraqi security.

To paraphrase the famous quip during the 1992 US Presidential debates, when an unknown William Jefferson Clinton told then-President George Herbert Walker Bush, “It’s the economy, stupid,” the present concern of the current Washington Administration over Darfur in southern Sudan is not, if we were to look closely, genuine concern …

A Pentagon report on China’s military strength deliberately exaggerates figures and is intended to spread the theory of a “China threat”, Beijing’s foreign ministry has said.