ANKARA – Turkish police clashed with a crowd of some 1,000 people in the eastern city of Tunceli on Sunday, during protests against prison conditions in the country. Dozens of protesters were injured.

KIRKUK – Three policemen were shot dead and four wounded on Sunday as they were eating on the terrace of a restaurant in Iraq’s main northern oil center of Kirkuk, police said.

TEHRAN – Police in the southern Iranian city of Kerman have uncovered a network manufacturing and distributing alcohol. Two people were arrested. 

MANILA – The Philippines stands to lose as much as $100 million in remittances due to a continued ban on the deployment of Filipino workers to Iraq following last month’s hostage crisis, labor officials said on Monday.

BAGHDAD – US forces arrested Muthana Hareth Al Dhari, the son of the president of Iraq’s influential Committee of Muslim Scholars, early on Monday morning.

ADDIS ABABA – Two explosions rocked the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, over the weekend. There were no casualties. Several park police were detained for questioning.

AUCKLAND – New Zealand’s immigration service has said that a Holocaust-denying British historian will be denied entry to the country. Prime Minister Helen Clark said Irving’s views should not bar him from the country.

KABUL – Voter registration in the Almar district of Afghanistan’s Faryab province has been suspended after a vehicle belonging to the electoral commission was attacked on Thursday. No one was hurt in the incident.

BAGHDAD – Iraqi health officials have said there are just 67 people in the entire nation suffering from AIDS. According to a statement issued on July 31, AIDS patients are treated at government expense and receive a monthly income of $1,000.

ALGIERS – Algeria’s army chief of staff, Gen. Muhammad Al Amari, has resigned, it was announced on Tuesday. He had submitted his resignation to President Abdel Aziz Bouteflika one month previously, but it was only accepted this week.

MOSCOW – Three civilians were shot dead in an incident involving a paratrooper with Russian federal forces in the southern Russian republic of Chechnya, ITAR-TASS news agency reported on July 31. No further details were available.

MOSCOW – Three suspected guerrillas and two policemen were killed in a clash in the southern Russian republic of Dagestan bordering Chechnya, police officials said on July 31.

JERUSALEM – Mecca Cola, the drink that prides itself on giving a share of its profits to “the children of Palestine,” has gone on sale in Arab-Israeli towns for the first time. The drink is not being stocked in Jewish areas of the country.

LONDON – Israel’s new ambassador to London has warned that Britain faces a serious problem in combating a rise in anti-Semitism. There has been a steady increase in attacks against Jews in Britain over the last decade, with 375 anti-Semitic incidents recorded last year.

AMMAN – Jordanian authorities seized a gang attempting to circulate counterfeit US dollars in the Jordanian market, judicial sources said on Monday.

RIYADH – Saudi authorities arrested a foreign resident in Riyadh, found in possession of a cache of weapons and ammunition in his house, security forces said on July 31.

ALGIERS – Algerian authorities are searching a mass grave discovered in Bouqra in southern Algiers for the remains of people abducted by suspected Islamic militants in the 1990s. An estimated 5,200 people have gone missing since 1992.

Man, ALGERIA – Morocco has removed visa restrictions on Algerians entering the country. The two countries are in dispute over Algeria’s backing for the Polisario movement, which is seeking independence for Morocco’s Western Sahara region.

TEHRAN – Iran’s foreign minister insisted this week that the Islamic republic had a “legitimate right” to enrich uranium, the most sensitive part of the nuclear fuel cycle, which the country is under pressure to abandon.

OTTAWA – Canadian officials are investigating whether a man thought to be a fugitive Israeli spy, Zev William Barkan, is using a stolen Canadian passport. Barkan is also sought by New Zealand police in connection with a case involving two other purported Israeli spies, found guilty of trying to fraudulently obtain New Zealand passports.

ANKARA – Unidentified assailants opened fire on a police vehicle in the eastern Turkish province of Agri on Wednesday, killing one officer and wounding another, local officials said. 

NICOSIA – The European Commission said on Wednesday that it had released

• 2.5 million for de-mining the UN-manned buffer zone that divides the island, in a bid to facilitate cross-border movement.

JERUSALEM – The Israeli army has said that soldiers suffering from combat stress after tours of duty in the Palestinian territories could soon be treated with cannabis to relieve their symptoms.

DUBAI – Three Saudi reformists – Ali Al Demaini, Matruk Al Faleh, and Abdullah Al Hamed – who have been in detention for nearly five months, will go on trial on August 9.

TALLINN – The Turkish government has asked Estonia to extradite a suspected member of a banned Kurdish militant group, Kawa, who is wanted in Turkey for manslaughter. 

TEHRAN – An Iranian man convicted of murdering a jeweler in 2003 was hanged in the western Iranian province of Lorestan at dawn on Tuesday.

KUWAIT – Iraqi defense minister Hazem Al Shaalan has demanded that Tehran return 130 planes entrusted to Iran ahead of the 1991 Gulf War. Iran says it has just 22 Iraqi planes, which it is ready to return if requested by the United Nations.

ALGIERS – The main defendant accused of the massacre of at least 240 people in the Bentalha suburb of Algeria’s capital in 1997, Fouad Boulemia, has been sentenced to death, state radio reported on Monday.

MOSCOW – The International Committee of the Red Cross staged a one-day strike across Russia on Monday, in protest at the authorities’ failure to find one of their colleagues, Osman Saidalayev, who disappeared in Chechnya one year ago.

MOSCOW – Chechen separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov has claimed responsibility for an attack in Ingushetia in June, in which 90 people were killed, according to a rebel Internet site, www.kavkazcenter. com.

JERUSALEM – Israeli attorney-general Menachem Mazuz announced on Monday that he would not prosecute businessman Elhanan Tannenbaum, whose kidnapping in Dubai in 2000 forced Israel into a costly prisoner swap with the Lebanese militant group, Hizbullah. Tannenbaum had been implicated in drug trafficking.

BEIRUT – Lebanese attorney-general Adnan Addum has ordered the reopening of an official inquiry into Libya’s role in the disappearance there nearly 26 years ago of the Shia Muslim spiritual leader, Moussa Sadr.

ISTANBUL – Turkish police killed three Kurdish rebels during a vast operation in the east of the country, the Anatolia news agency said on Monday, quoting local officials.

WASHINGTON – Israeli opposition is unlikely to scuttle US plans to sell an AAMRAM air-to-air missile system to Jordan, senior US officials said this week, after reports that Israel was trying to block the sale.

KUWAIT CITY – Kuwait and Iraq restored diplomatic relations on Monday, exactly 14 years after ties were severed when then-Iraqi president Saddam Hussein sent his forces to occupy the Gulf emirate.

AMMAN – Jordanian authorities have arrested a suspect in a foiled chemical bomb attack, raising to nine the number of people held in the case, which dates back to April.

TEHRAN – A senior member of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council has said Iran is not afraid of being referred to the UN Security Council over its suspect nuclear program and could easily withstand economic sanctions.

ALGIERS – Algerian security services said on Sunday that two armed Islamists had been killed by an army unit in the Relizane district, 200 kilometers (125 miles) west of Algiers. Two more armed Islamists were killed in the nearby Mascara region, 360 kilometers west of the capital.