Middle Orient

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM (AP) — Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has ordered quicker work to finish Israel’s contentious West Bank separation barrier, especially the section enclosing Jerusalem, a senior official said Wednesday — and Palestinians responded that Israel is trying to dictate borders while taking over their part of the disputed city.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) — Iraq’s prime minister announced a new phase in anti-insurgency operations on Monday, as troops seized more than 100 suspects around Baghdad airport and hunted the kidnappers of Egypt’s envoy in the capital. Political efforts to undermine revolt among Sunni Arabs moved forward with parliament’s formal acceptance of …

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM (Reuters) — Israeli President Moshe Katsav said on Monday the vocal opposition of pro-settler rabbis to Israel’s Gaza pullout could incite ultranationalists to try to assassinate Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. “In the struggle over the disengagement someone is likely to distort the rabbis’ messages,” Katsav told army Radio. …

HAMYYA, Iraq — Tawfiq Jamil hasn’t worked since Saddam Hussein’s government fell more than two years ago. A former taxi driver, the 28-year-old was forced to sell his car after the war to try to provide for his wife and seven children, and hasn’t been able to find a new …

RAMALLAH (AP) — The embattled Greek Orthodox patriarch in Jerusalem was not involved in the long-term lease of prime Jerusalem properties to Jewish settlement groups in the city, the Palestinian Authority concluded Monday, after an investigation of several weeks. The findings could signal a turning point in the murky saga …

DAMASCUS (AFP) — Syrian forces captured two “terrorists” and a security officer was killed Monday in a dawn clash with extremists who included former bodyguards of Saddam Hussein, official media said. The gunbattle on Mount Qassioun overlooking the Syrian capital was the second such firefight with extremists in recent days …

BEIRUT (Reuters) — Lebanon’s pro-Syrian president bowed to the will of the majority on Thursday and appointed an anti-Syria former minister to head the first government to take office without Syrian troops in the country for 30 years. Highlighting the challenges facing the next government, Israeli troops shot at Hizbollah …

KHARTOUM (AFP) — Sudanese Islamist opposition leader Hassan Turabi was freed from jail Thursday, 15 months after his arrest over an alleged coup plot, and immediately lashed out at the lack of freedom in his country.

MANAMA (AP) — Bahrain’s first independent rights body called on Thursday for the government to scrap a royal decree granting immunity to those involved in the unrest of the 1990s, and to reform the tiny Gulf kingdom’s constitution to give more political power to the people.

BOSTON — Iraq’s archaeological sites, despite protection efforts, are so ravaged by looters that the pillaging has landed the entire embattled nation on a list of the world’s 100 most endangered cultural sites. Two years after the US-led invasion of Iraq and a widely publicised break-in at the Baghdad Museum, …