Twitter has boosted its security measures following attacks on accounts run by media firms like The Associated Press, several of which were blamed on pro-Assad hackers. The micro blogging site, which transmits some 400 million messages a day, said on Wednesday that it had begun rolling out an option ... Read more

A car bomb targeting a police vehicle killed 11 policemen and one civilian Thursday in an area of southwest Pakistan wracked by a separatist insurgency and Islamic militancy, police said. The bombing on the outskirts of Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan province, also wounded 23 people, said senior ... Read more

 The World Bank has proposed a $150 million loan for Jordan to help it with the cost of thousands of Syrian refugees fleeing the civil war in Syria, Jordanian and World Bank board sources said on Wednesday. “The [World Bank] board should act on it in June,” one source told Reuters. ... Read more

Iran is making significant progress in expanding its nuclear program, including in opening up a potential second route to developing the bomb, a new U.N. atomic agency report showed Wednesday. The International Atomic Energy Agency’s latest quarterly update said Tehran had accelerated the inst ... Read more

A number of Facebook pages belonging to Syrian opposition groups have been disabled recently by the social media website’s administration, accuses former brigadier general of the Syrian Republican Guard, Firas Tlass.  Tlass defected from the Syrian government last July. His profile page h ... Read more

A man believed to be a British soldier was brutally murdered by suspected Islamists near a London barracks on Wednesday in an attack Prime Minister David Cameron said appeared to be terror-related. Cameron called the attack “appalling”, and said: “There are strong indications that ... Read more

A man who had contracted the coronavirus has died in Saudi Arabia, raising the death toll in the kingdom from the SARS-like virus to 17, the health ministry announced on its website on Wednesday. “A male non-Saudi died on Tuesday in a hospital in the Qassim region where he had been admitted s ... Read more

Nations gathering at the Friends of Syria meeting called for an immediate withdrawal of fighters belonging to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and Iran from Syria, the bloc said in a statement after a conference in Amman. The alliance described their armed presence in the country as a threat to ... Read more

A U.S. House of Representatives committee approved legislation on Wednesday seeking to impose tighter sanctions on Iran, the latest congressional effort to slow development of the Islamic Republic’s disputed nuclear program. The “Nuclear Iran Prevention Act of 2013” passed the Hous ... Read more

Turkish Airlines said on Wednesday it would raise employees’ wages by less than union demands and would no longer engage in contract talks, potentially prolonging a strike that it says has so far had little impact on its operations. The civil aviation union Hava-Is, which represents 14,000 of ... Read more

The Egyptian government said on Wednesday it would supply more gas and diesel to power stations to deal with electricity shortages that have worsened in recent months after the cash-strapped country failed to import enough fuel. The government has set aside $200 million to finance the additional pet ... Read more

Gold prices sank Wednesday as traders weighed the possibility that the Federal Reserve will start paring back its support for the economy in the coming months. Gold for June delivery fell $10.20 to settle at $1,367.40 an ounce, a drop of 0.7 percent. Prices for the precious metal wavered earlier in ... Read more

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), will launch two new initiatives to improve maternal health in some of the most-hard-to-reach areas around the world, according to a statement on Wednesday. The initiatives, set to be unveiled at next week’s 2013 Women Deliver Conference, which will b ... Read more

Scholars around the Muslim world were alarmed five years ago by news reports that Turkey planned a new, possibly heretical, compilation of the Prophet Mohammad’s sayings that might scrap those it thought were no longer applicable. Turkish religious leaders and theologians received anxious cal ... Read more

Muslim religious leaders from across the globe knelt in solemn prayer for Holocaust dead at Auschwitz on Wednesday, their foreheads touching the ground at the former Nazi German death camp in southern Poland. Imams from Bosnia, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the Unite ... Read more

Hundreds of sunbathers fled a popular Indonesian beach in panic when a four-meter (13-foot) crocodile laid down next to them to soak up some rays, an official said Wednesday. Crowds were thronging the beach at Balikpapan on Borneo island at the weekend when the 500 kilogram reptile crawled ashore. ... Read more

Youth football in the Kingdom received a boost Tuesday when General Sports Arabia announced that it is bringing the Royal Spanish Football Federation’s 2013 Summer Camp for Kids to Riyadh. At the camp, 7-16 years old kids, who have a passion for football and wish to develop their technical ski ... Read more

The first woman from Saudi Arabia to scale Mount Everest said she doesn’t intend to inspire a movement, but would be happy to change people’s opinions of Saudi women and Saudi women’s opinions of themselves. Raha Mobarak told reporters in Katmandu on Tuesday after returning from t ... Read more