JERUSALEM (AP) ― Israel and the Palestinians said Sunday that their chief peace negotiators would attend a gathering of international diplomats in neighboring Jordan this week, bringing the sides together for the first time in more than a year.Officials stressed that the meeting would not be a formal negotiating session. Nonetheless, it could mark an important step toward restarting peace talks, which broke down in September 2010.“The upcoming meeting is part of serious and continuous efforts to

CAIRO (AP) ― A pan-Arab body called Sunday for the immediate withdrawal of the Arab League monitors in Syria because President Bashar Assad’s regime has kept up killings of government opponents even in the presence of the observers.The 88-member Arab Parliament said that Arabs are angered by the Syrian regime’s ongoing killings while the nearly 100 monitors are in the country. The monitors are supposed to be ensuring Syria complies with terms of the League’s plan to end the 9-month-old crackdown

SEATTLE (AP) -- Here’s another reason for holdouts to join the social media site Facebook: It’s a great place to find a kidney.Between the children’s photos and reminiscences about high school, more and more pleas for help from people with failing kidneys are popping up. Facebook and other social media sites are quickly becoming a go-to place to find a generous person with a kidney to spare, according to the people asking for help and some national organizations that facilitate matches.Damon Bro

LONDON (AFP) ― Britain’s biggest cosmetic surgery chain has revealed that rupture rates on allegedly faulty French-made breast implants are seven times higher than previously thought, a report said Sunday.The new data from Transform, reported in the Sunday Telegraph newspaper, has prompted Health Secretary Andrew Lansley to order an urgent review into the data used to assess the risks to 42,000 British women given the implants. The firm’s figures suggest one in 14 implants made by French manufac

KABUL (AFP) ― An Afghan child bride Saturday spoke of how she was tortured by her mother-in-law who locked her in a toilet for six months, beat her, pulled out her fingernails and burned her with cigarettes.Sahar Gul, 15, is recovering in hospital in Kabul, her face bruised and swollen, her skin still bearing the marks of her ordeal, barely able to speak.Police have said she was locked up when she defied her in-laws who tried to force her into prostitution. Her brother had sold her to her husban

BEIRUT (AP) ― Syria’s two largest opposition groups signed an agreement on setting up a democracy if President Bashar Assad’s autocratic regime falls, opposition figures said Saturday.The move is so far the most serious by the fractured opposition to unite against the regime and shows that Assad’s opponents will accept nothing less than his departure from power.Burhan Ghalioun, leader of the Syrian National Council, and Haytham Manna of the National Coordination Body for Democratic Change in Syr

UNITED NATIONS (AFP) -- Five new countries on Sunday join a U.N. Security Council driven by one of the biggest international splits in years on how to handle the Arab Spring uprisings.Azerbaijan, Guatemala, Morocco, Pakistan and Togo start two year terms on the council which has been wounded by air strikes in Libya and is battling over President Bashar Assad’s deadly crackdown in Syria. Growing tensions around Iran add to the nerves on the 15-member body.“It is like the Cold War,” said one Weste

TEHRAN (AP) ― Talk of blocking the strategic oil route through the Strait of Hormuz is a discussion of the past, a commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said Saturday in comments that seemed to back away from an earlier threat. But he said Iran had other, unspecified strategies for reacting to any Western aggression.“Discourse about closing the Strait of Hormuz belongs to five years ago. Today’s debate in the Islamic Republic of Iran contains new layers and the time has not come to raise it,”

BEIJING (AFP) ― A bus driver in southern China who contracted the bird flu virus died Saturday, health authorities said, in the nation’s first reported human case of the deadly disease in 18 months.The man, surnamed Chen, died in Shenzhen ― a boomtown that borders Hong Kong where thousands of chickens have already been culled after three birds tested positive for the H5N1 avian influenza virus in mid-December.He developed a fever on Dec. 21 and was taken to hospital four days later, and diagnose