Eurasia Press & News

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian President Vladimir Putin will keep his official country residence when his term ends next year, exploiting a traditional perk for outgoing heads of state, the Kremlin’s chief property manager said.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Forty senior al Qaeda in Iraq members were either captured or killed in November, including a senior adviser to the Sunni Islamist group’s leader, the U.S. military said on Tuesday.

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The European Union was in disarray on Tuesday over Russia’s widely criticized parliamentary election after French President Nicolas Sarkozy telephoned President Vladimir Putin to congratulate him.

TULKARM, West Bank (Reuters) – Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s government stepped up a Western-backed crackdown on gunmen on Tuesday by deploying hundreds of security officers in the West Bank city of Tulkarm.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called on Tuesday for a U.S.-backed campaign to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions to continue despite a U.S. intelligence report that said Tehran had frozen its weapons program.

LAHORE (Reuters) – Former prime minister Benazir Bhutto is betraying Pakistan by not joining an election boycott that cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan said on Saturday was key to ousting President Pervez Musharraf.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Envoys of Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf dismissed criticism of his political crackdown and appealed on Monday to the United States to back their country as an ally against Islamic extremism.

GAZA (Reuters) – An Israeli air strike killed three Hamas militants and wounded another in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, Palestinian medical workers and Hamas said.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraq’s Interior Ministry will have the power to arrest foreign guards involved in shooting incidents if parliament approves a bill ending foreign security firms’ immunity from prosecution, the minister said on Monday.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – The Iraqi government announced on Monday it would put 12,000 neighborhood guards on its payroll, a move welcomed by U.S. forces promoting a program of raising mainly Sunni Arab “concerned local citizen” militia.