NATO is sending a team to Libya to look at the possibility of training its military, alliance head Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Tuesday, some two years after NATO helped rebels oust Moammar Gadhafi.
The team will be sent as soon as possible and return by the end of June when the next step will be determined, Rasmussen said.

Crimes against humanity are happening daily in Syria, a team of U.N. investigators said Tuesday, adding the both sides have committed massacres, engaged in torture and may have used chemical weapons.
"War crimes and crimes against humanity have become a daily reality in Syria," the Commission of Inquiry on Syria said in a report delivered to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, adding it had "reasonable grounds to believe that chemical agents have been used as weapons."

Saudi Arabia beheaded by sword one of its citizens on Tuesday after a court convicted him of murder, the interior ministry said.
Shuwail al-Amri was found guilty of killing Mohammed al-Amri, an apparent relative, by deliberately running him over with a car after a dispute, the ministry said in a statement published by SPA state news agency.

Iran's former foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati would "cooperate" with France to resolve the conflict in Syria should he win the June 14 presidential election, he said in an exclusive interview with Agence France Presse.
"My offer, if I am victorious, is that Iran and France sit together to talk, and work together, to find a political solution to the Syrian crisis," Velayati said. "I am ready to do it."

The European Union and Russia launched a full day of talks on Tuesday dominated by a far-ranging dispute over the Syria crisis and Brussels' decision to lift its arms embargo on President Bashar Assad's foes.
EU dignitaries said Russia's human rights record would also come under the microscope at meetings in the industrial Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday issued a stark warning to Israel to resume long-stalled peace talks with the Palestinians, saying if efforts fail now they may never get another chance.
"We are running out of time. We're running out of possibilities... If we do not succeed now, we may not get another chance," Kerry told a forum in Washington organized by the American Jewish Community lobbying group.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will visit the Middle East on June 13-15 to discuss peace efforts with Israeli and Palestinian officials, Palestinian foreign minister Riyad al-Malki said on Monday.
But he said it was not clear whether Washington's top diplomat would visit Ramallah.

The United States will send a Patriot missile battery and F-16 fighters to Jordan for a military drill and may keep the weapons there to counter the threat posed by Syria's civil war, officials said Monday.
The Patriot missile launchers and F-16 warplanes "were approved for deployment to Jordan as part of Exercise Eager Lion," the spokesman for U.S. Central Command, Lieutenant Colonel T.G. Taylor, said.

Palestinian fire service officials on Monday accused Israeli settlers of setting fire to about 1,000 almond and olive trees at a known troublespot in the northern West Bank.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, they told Agence France Presse that settlers from Yitzhar torched the trees at the neighboring Palestinian villages of Burin and Madama.

Germany's Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said Monday that an international Syria peace conference may have to be delayed until July to give more time for preparations.
"It would be better that it takes place in July than never," Westerwelle said at the U.N. headquarters where he signed an international arms trade treaty. The United Nations had wanted to hold the conference this month, but mounting obstacles have appeared.
