Eurasia Press & News

Bulgaria rejected a formal Libyan protest Thursday (July 26th) against President Georgi Parvanov’s decision to pardon five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor released from life imprisonment in the North African country earlier this week.

The release of an old video showing Osama Ben Laden has revived speculation about the fate of the world’s most wanted man who has not offered foes or followers any proof he is alive for more than a year.

An Islamist radical on trial for a deadly raid last year on Turkey’s top administrative court said Thursday he also planned to assassinate the president and attack leading business groups, the Anatolia news agency reported.

Eritrea has secretly supplied “huge quantities of arms” to a Somali insurgent group with alleged ties to Al Qaeda in violation of an international arms embargo and despite the deployment of African peacekeepers, UN arms experts have concluded.

Russia on Thursday said it had delayed the start-up of Iran’s first nuclear power station to early 2008 because Tehran had fallen behind with payments for the plant, Itar-Tass news agency reported.

Egypt’s top religious adviser, Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, reaffirmed his belief Thursday that Muslims could choose their own religion after the local press carried apparently conflicting statements.

The deputy chairman of Somalia’s peace conference asked the country’s ousted Islamic movement to join the talks, but the group’s leader dismissed the meeting Thursday as “a disgrace and a humiliation”.

The second largest opposition party in Turkey’s new parliament will take part in the upcoming presidential election, its leader said Thursday, boosting the governing party’s chances of seeing one of its own members as head of state.

French green groups and opposition politicians Thursday attacked plans to build a French reactor in Libya for water desalination as a perilous masquerade that would encourage Muammar Qadhafi to get a nuclear bomb.

The Lebanese army on Thursday tightened the noose around Islamists at a refugee camp in a bid to end a near 10-week standoff that has cost the lives of 120 soldiers.