ANKARA – Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan arrived in Jordan on Monday for a surprise private visit at the invitation of King Abdullah. The two men last met in March during an official visit by King Abdullah to Turkey.

BAGHDAD – Aisha Qadhafi, the daughter of Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi, has joined the legal team representing deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein – the latest high profile person to join the team, which has so far been denied access to Saddam or entry to Iraq.

AMMAN – Jordan’s parliament has rejected for a second time a bill banning parents from naming their children after Osama Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein. The proposed would have enabled civil registrars to reject babies’ names deemed “harmful to public order.”

JERUSALEM – Lawyers for an unnamed Israeli model have filed a request with tax authorities asking them to make the cost of plastic surgery tax deductible, following the precedent set by allowing deductions for the cost of suits for businessmen.

MANAMA– The United States said on July 3 that more than 500 American citizens in Bahrain would be evacuated, due to the threat of terrorism. The kingdom hosts about 5,000 Americans and the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet.

JERUSALEM – Israel has denied allegations that Israelis were involved in the interrogation of detainees at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. General Janis Karpinski, the US general formerly in charge of the prison, said on July 3 that she had evidence that Israelis were involved in interrogating Iraqi detainees.

ADDIS ABABA – United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan met Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi on Sunday for talks aimed at breathing new life into the country’s stalled peace process with Eritrea. The two countries ended a bitter war in 2000.

BEIRUT – Lebanese President Emile Lahoud on Monday left for an official visit to Poland, which deploys UN peacekeepers in Lebanon, ahead of a visit to Belarus to sign cooperation agreements, officials said.

DAMASCUS – Syria has signed up to the UN convention against torture but with reservations over the rights of an oversight committee that has the right, in agreement with the country concerned, to carry out a mission of inquiry on the ground.

DIYARBAKIR – Sixteen Iranian soldiers and four Turkish Kurd rebels have been killed in clashes in a mountainous region along the Turkish border, Turkish security sources said on Tuesday, saying the encounters were part of a “large-scale” operation by the Iranian army against rebels from the former Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

JERUSALEM – The Israeli supreme court ruled on Tuesday that the country’s next general elections should be held in November 2006 and not a year later, as previously scheduled. The wording of Israel’s Basic Law is ambiguous on when elections should be held.

TYRE – Hundreds of Palestinian refugees on Tuesday marched in support of Arab Israeli MP Azmi Beshara, who has begun a hunger strike to protest against Israel’s separation barrier in the West Bank. Beshara, who leads the Balad faction in the Israeli parliament, started an open-ended hunger strike on July 3.

TBILISI – Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili began a three-day visit to Tehran on Tuesday, for talks with Iran’s foreign minister and other senior officials. The former Soviet republic of Georgia is on the route of a US-backed oil pipeline to export crude from the landlocked Caspian Sea, the Baku- Tbilisi-Ceyhan or BTC pipeline, which will bypass both Iran and Russia.

TEHRAN – Iranian authorities announced on Tuesday that they were banning any public commemoration of the fifth anniversary of violent student protests this week, in a bid to prevent an outbreak of anti-regime demonstrations.

WASHINGTON – Nearly two metric tons of radio-active materials have been removed from Iraq to prevent them from falling into the hands of “terrorists or rogue nations,” according to the US energy department.

JERUSALEM – Riot squad officers regained control of the high security Gilboa prison in northern Israel on Tuesday, after clashes broke out between guards and Palestinian detainees. One guard was wounded when inmates threw boiling oil over him. Around 800 Palestinian inmates are detained at the prison.

MOSCOW – Chechnya’s interior minister, Alu Alkhanov, said on Tuesday that 92 people have been kidnapped in the republic so far this year. The human rights group Memorial says the figure is twice as high, with most of those abducted seized by Russian or pro-Moscow forces.

DOHA – Chechnya’s most powerful rebel warlord, Shamil Basayev, denied that his fighters are involved in operations outside Russia, during an interview aired on July 3 on Al Jazeera television – his first for several years. Basayev’s failed incursion into the neighboring republic of Dagestan led to Moscow’s second war against Chechen rebels, beginning in 1999.

MOSCOW – Chechen separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov this week vowed to kill any new ruler the Kremlin imposes on the republic, weeks after the assassination of the pro-Moscow president Akhmad Kadyrov. Kadyrov was killed during a parade on May 9.

TBILISI – Georgia has officially complained to Israel about damage to a fresco in an eleventh- century Georgian-built monastery in Jerusalem, that is under the control of the Greek Orthodox church. Georgia has accused the church of trying to erase references to the medieval Georgian poet and national hero, Shota Rustaveli.

KAMPALA – Uganda has announced plans to turn Entebbe airport, where a hostage rescue operation was mounted by Israeli commandos 28 years ago, into a national heritage site. Militants hijacked an Air France flight in Athens with 250 passengers on board, flying it to Entebbe where they had support from Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.

LONDON – British foreign secretary Jack Straw said on Sunday that he was unsure whether to believe Iran’s insistence that it had no intention of trying to build nuclear weapons. Britain, France, and Germany had negotiated a compromise with the United States in the international community’s handling of Iran’s nuclear program.

AMMAN – UN envoy for Iraq Lakhdar Brahimi held talks with Jordanian Prime Minister Faisal Al Fayez on Tuesday, after delivering a message to King Abdullah.

NEW YORK – The US based rights group Human Rights Watch has urged the UN Security Council to invoke sanctions against Sudanese officials and government-backed militias, to protect civilians in the country’s western Darfur region.

TEL AVIV – The UN atomic agency is discussing the return of inspectors to Iraq for the first time since the downfall of Saddam, an agency spokesman said on Wednesday. UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in March 2003, ahead of the US-led invasion.

ISTANBUL – Turkish police used truncheons and tear gas to break up a small demonstration in Istanbul on Sunday, by protestors demanding the release of jailed Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan.

LIBREVILLE – The rebel Movement for Democracy and Justice in Chad (MDJT) said on Monday that it had handed over two Islamic militants from Algeria’s Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat to Libya. The MDJT said it had captured the militants in Chad’s northern Tibesti region in mid-March.

TUNIS – Tunisian President Zine Al Abidine Ben Ali sent a message to his US counterpart, George W. Bush, on American independence day (July 4), saying he wanted to help restore peace in the Middle East. Tunis has recently shown signs of wanting to normalize relations with Israel.

LONDON – A 28-year-old Moroccan was arrested in east London on Tuesday, for questioning under Britain’s main anti-terrorist law, the Metropolitan Police said. The man, whose name was not released, was taken into custody during an early morning raid.

LONDON – The parliamentary wing of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the OSCE, has urged Libya not to execute six foreign medical workers convicted of deliberately infecting nearly 400 children with the virus that causes AIDS.