Australia is poised to expand its military role in Iraq, with Federal Cabinet approving a plan to send another 300 soldiers to help train forces fighting Islamic State militants. Some 200 Australian special forces are already in Iraq helping train Iraqi government forces. Now Federal Cabinet has agreed to send up to 300 more troops as part of a joint ...

A deal on Iran’s nuclear program could be concluded this week if the United States and other Western countries have sufficient political will and agree to remove sanctions on Tehran, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said on Monday. “Our negotiating partners, particularly the Western countries and particularly the United States, must once and for all come to the understanding ...

Two people were killed and nine wounded, including seven policemen, in a bomb explosion Monday outside the Egyptian supreme court in Cairo, the health ministry said. Ministry spokesman Hossam Abdel Ghaffar told that a 22-year-old man “died of injuries sustained in his backbone” in the attack. Another man, aged 24, who had suffered head injuries and internal bleeding, also died ...

SANAA: Arab Gulf countries threw their support behind Yemen’s embattled president Wednesday as the group’s chief visited Abed Rabbou Mansour Hadi amid the Houthis’ power grab in the capital, Sanaa. Hadi’s top aides said the Gulf Cooperation Council’s secretary-general, Abdel-Latif al-Zayani, visited the president in Aden, days after he escaped to the city. Hadi recently retracted the resignation he submitted ...

Middle East Airlines has maintained its profits and good results in 2014 despite the difficult conditions in the country and the regional tension, the chairman of the national carrier said Thursday. “Our unaudited profits for 2014 were close to $69 million compared to around $63 million in 2013. We suffered some losses in the first three months of last year, ...

Egyptian foreign ministry asks European ambassadors to monitor “extremist websites”, and not to deal with Brotherhood-affiliated groups. Egypt’s foreign ministry called on European countries on Tuesday to “monitor extremist websites that incite violence and terrorism, and to halt broadcasting channels linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.” In a meeting with the European ambassadors, the minister’s aide for European affairs Hatem Seif ...

Fourteen candidates have registered to run against Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir in a presidential vote in April, the country’s electoral commission said on Tuesday. “The electoral commission has received a total of 15 candidacies for the post of the president of the republic,” commission head Mokhtar al-Assam told reporters. The presidential vote is scheduled for April 13 and parliamentary elections will ...

The army of Libya’s internationally recognised government announced on Sunday that it would cease fire, two days after an Islamist-backed militia alliance announced a truce. “We declare a ceasefire from midnight (2200 GMT) Sunday,” said the army said, stressing however that it would continue to pursue “terrorists”, as UN-brokered peace talks resume in Geneva next week. The army also said ...

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir submitted his candidacy Sunday for reelection in an April 13 vote widely expected to hand him another five-year term, poll organisers said. The election will be only the second since Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for suspected war crimes in Darfur, seized power in a 1989 coup. The opposition boycotted the first ...