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BAGHDAD/BEIRUT - Neighbouring Iraq warned that Syria's civil war is tearing the Middle East apart and Lebanon's president urged his country's Hezbollah movement on Thursday to pull its fighters out of the conflict.
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DOHA - A fresh effort to end Afghanistan's 12-year-old war looked in trouble on Thursday after a diplomatic spat about the Taliban's new Qatar office delayed preliminary discussions between the United States and the Islamist insurgents.
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ISTANBUL/BRUSSELS - Turkey warned German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday not to play politics with its European Union ambitions, and said failure to open a new chapter in accession talks next week would be a major setback in Ankara's relations with the bloc.
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LONDON - More than a third of all women worldwide are victims of physical or sexual violence, posing a global health problem of epidemic proportions, a World Health Organization report said on Thursday.
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WASHINGTON - The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a George W. Bush-era law requiring non-profit organizations to adopt an anti-prostitution policy in order to obtain federal funding for HIV/AIDS programs abroad.
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WASHINGTON - A army of new federal agents and high-tech surveillance devices would be dispatched to the U.S.-Mexican border under a deal reached on Thursday that is aimed at winning increased Republican support for an immigration bill in the U.S. Senate.
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GENEVA - A United Nations human rights body accused Israeli forces on Thursday of mistreating Palestinian children, including by torturing those in custody and using others as human shields.
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RAMALLAH - Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah has offered his resignation to President Mahmoud Abbas just two weeks after taking office, an official in his press office told Reuters on Thursday.
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CAIRO - An Egyptian court ordered the release of former Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif on Thursday because of a limit on pre-trial detention in a corruption case for which he had been held since the revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak.
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NEW DELHI - India has launched a wide-ranging surveillance programme that will give its security agencies and even income tax officials the ability to tap directly into e-mails and phone calls without oversight by courts or parliament, several sources said.
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