JERUSALEM (AP) — An official Israeli committee on Thursday handed the government its proposal for ending a contentious system that grants Jewish ultra-Orthodox seminary students automatic exemptions from military service, setting the stage for what could become the first major conflict in the new Israeli coalition government.
BEIRUT (AP) — Lebanese supporters and opponents of Syrian President Bashar Assad fired heavy machine guns and lobbed mortar shells at each other Thursday in some of the worst fighting in the port city of Tripoli in years.
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel’s prime minister says a new report by the U.N. atomic agency shows that international pressure is having no effect on halting Iran’s suspect nuclear program.
CAIRO (AP) — Cairo, the Arab world’s most populated city, is often referred to as an open-air museum of Islamic antiquities and the city of 1,000 minarets.
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Banned from upcoming elections, Iran’s former president has leveled harsh criticism at the Islamic Republic’s clerical rulers, saying they are doing a poor job running the country, an Iranian pro-reform website reported late on Wednesday.
JERUSALEM (AP) — The United States and Israel raised hopes Thursday for a restart of the Middle East peace process, despite little tangible progress so far from U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s two-month-old effort to get Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table.
BAGHDAD (AP) — Gunmen killed at least seven soldiers in central Iraq on Thursday, officials said, in the latest episode of violence to hit the country in a particularly bloody month.
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DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — Syria’s fighting has uprooted more than half of the country’s 530,000 Palestinians — descendants of refugees from a Mideast conflict half a century ago — and their situation is becoming increasingly desperate, the head of a U.N. aid agency said Thursday.