Middle East News

As of Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2008, at least 4,148 members of the U.S. military have died in the Iraq war since it began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

BEIT AWWA, West Bank - A Palestinian couple locked their disabled son and daughter away for decades out of fear they would ruin the marriage prospects of a healthy child if discovered, police said Wednesday.

UNITED NATIONS - The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Wednesday to keep a peacekeeping force in Lebanon for another year, calling for stepped-up efforts to achieve a permanent cease-fire and long-term resolution of the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war.

TRIPOLI, Libya - Two Sudanese men, armed with handguns and the threat of explosives, stormed the cockpit of the Boeing 737, taking control just minutes into the flight. Passengers said the hijackers remained calm but they still spent a night in fear.

JERUSALEM - Abie Nathan, the peace activist who made a dramatic solo flight to Egypt in a rattletrap single-engine plane and later founded the groundbreaking "Voice of Peace" radio station, died Wednesday. He was 81.

AMMAN, Jordan - In an about-face, Jordan is reaching out to the Hamas militant group amid fears that a collapse of Mideast peacemaking would bring an influx of refugees. But the U.S. ally must walk a delicate line to avoid angering its American and Israeli friends.

BAGHDAD - The U.S. military says it has captured a suspected senior Shiite militant believed to be behind a June bombing in Baghdad that killed four Americans and six Iraqis.

NAJAF, Iraq - The city's first airport is weeks away from opening, but already a bigger one is talked about. Land prices are soaring. Merchants say they don't remember business ever being so good.

BAGHDAD - Iraq is calling on companies to submit designs to build a giant Ferris wheel in Baghdad — the latest in a string of lavish proposals painting the capital as a leisure friendly city.

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - The ruling Hamas movement replaced hundreds of striking teachers with its own supporters Wednesday, purging Gaza's schools of political rivals and deepening its control of this coastal territory.

JERUSALEM - An upcoming concert by Paul McCartney has revived memories of the 1960s, when an Israeli official supposedly called off a Beatles concert for fear it would corrupt the nation's youth.

BEIRUT, Lebanon - A Lebanese prosecutor has charged Libya's Moammar Gadhafi and six other Libyan officials in the disappearance of a top Lebanese Shiite cleric 30 years ago, judicial officials in Beirut said Wednesday.

JERUSALEM - Scientists using American space technology have started a huge project to digitally photograph the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest known version of the Hebrew Bible, and post it on the Internet for all to see, Israeli authorities said Wednesday.

BAGHDAD - A university president and a top local official in a restive province north of Baghdad are suspected of giving weapons and government cars to al-Qaida in Iraq insurgents, according to arrest reports obtained Wednesday.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - A Dubai police official says that a fire in a building packed with foreign laborers has killed 11 people. India's consul in Dubai, Venu Rajamony, says 10 of the victims were Indian.

BAGHDAD - The U.S. military says an American soldier has died of wounds suffered in a roadside bombing in northeast Baghdad.

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Egyptian officials are trying to ease tension between Lebanon and Israel that has risen over an exchange of threats.

BAGHDAD - A former security adviser to Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said in comments published Tuesday that he had quit his job so he can freely speak about what he called the danger Iran poses in the Middle East.

JERUSALEM - Israeli police said Tuesday they have arrested the grandfather and mother in the disappearance of a 4-year-old French girl, saying they fear the girl is dead.

ALEXANDRIA, Egypt - The 27-year-old woman and her husband already had three children — all girls. They badly wanted a boy, and she had not conceived in five years, so doctors gave her hormones.

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Syria's President Bashar Assad has publicly stepped up his outreach to old ally Russia in recent days, seeking aid to build up Syrian military forces and offering Moscow help in return — in an apparent effort to exploit a new Russian-American rift.

KABUL, Afghanistan - Drought and anti-drug campaigns helped slash Afghanistan's opium poppy cultivation by 19 percent this year compared to 2007, but the country is still far and away the world's leading source of the heroin-producing crop, the U.N. said Tuesday.

CAIRO, Egypt - Cairo's luxury Grand Hyatt hotel is serving alcohol again after a compromise was reached between the international chain and the hotel's Saudi owner who abruptly declared it a dry venue earlier this year.

RAMALLAH, West Bank - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday that "God willing" there could still be a Mideast peace agreement before the end of President Bush's term in office.

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Relatives of imprisoned Sunni Islamic militants in Lebanon have staged a protest in the capital Beirut demanding the release of their kin.