Qatar’s foreign minister has spoken of “some progress” in talks with Saudi Arabia on ending a bitter two-year-old rift between Doha and the kingdom and its allies.

Iraq’s anti-regime protesters gathered in the capital and south yesterday, grieving but defiant after 23 were killed in an attack demonstrators described as “slaughter”.

Regime air strikes yesterday killed 15 civilians in Syria’s last major opposition bastion, where deadly clashes between regime forces and armed groups have escalated in the past two days, a monitor said.

Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories has cost the economy of the Palestinians more than $2.5 billion a year for the past two decades, a UN report said yesterday.

Saudi Arabian authorities have released 11 citizens who were detained for several days last month for questioning over suspected links to foreign entities, a Saudi official told Reuters.

The recruiting agencies of Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia will shoulder all responsibilities of female workers as long as they remain in the kingdom.

Iraq’s embattled premier yesterday announced he would resign in keeping with the wishes of the country’s top cleric, as renewed violence added to a soaring death toll in two months of anti-government protests.

Iraq's protest-hit cities see one of their bloodiest days yet as a government crackdown killed nearly 40 demonstrators following the dramatic torching of an Iranian consulate.

Iraq’s southern hotspot of Nasiriyah was in bloody upheaval yesterday after a government crackdown killed 25 protesters and thousands defied a curfew to march in their funerals, following the dramatic torching of an Iranian consulate.

Six protesters were killed in Iraq’s south yesterday, where resurging anti-government demonstrations turned up the heat on paralysed politicians facing the country’s largest grassroots movement in decades.

A car bomb killed nine people including four civilians in a Turkish-held border town in northern Syria yesterday, a Britain-based war monitor said.

A fractured spine, paralysed leg, hole in the back: Hamza took to the streets of Iraq’s capital to demand a better life but now he has even less than ever.

The Israeli army carried out a “wide-scale” attack against Iranian forces and Syrian army targets in Syria yesterday, killing at least 11 fighters, the Israeli army and a monitoring group said.

Despite decades of sanctions, Iran has succeeded in developing its missile arsenal, which is larger than that of any other Middle Eastern country including Israel, a Pentagon study said Tuesday.

Five people including a Bangladeshi national are killed in an airstrike at a biscuit factory in Libya’s capital Tripoli.

A suicide bomber blew himself up at a police station in Indonesia yesterday, killing himself and wounding six others including for officers, according to authorities who described the 24-year-old attacker as a “lone wolf”.

At least seven people were killed and ten wounded, including four foreigners, when a suicide bomber in a minivan packed with explosives detonated during Kabul’s morning rush hour yesterday, an interior ministry spokesman said.

A man was shot dead south of Beirut after the army opened fire to disperse protesters blocking roads, Lebanese state media said yesterday.

A Yemeni man stabbed three actors at a performance in the Saudi capital, police said yesterday, in the first such attack since the ultra-conservative kingdom began easing decades-old restrictions on entertainment.

A Palestinian man was shot and killed yesterday during clashes with Israeli forces in the south of the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian health ministry and medics said.