A Yemeni military cargo plane crashed Tuesday while landing at a base in the southern province of Lahej killing at least four of 15 people on board, a military pilot said.
"Three Syrian technicians and one Yemeni were killed," the source at al-Anad base told Agence France Presse, adding that eight Syrian engineers and seven Yemenis were on board the Russian-made plane.

The Syrian government has detained more than 30,000 people since launching a deadly crackdown on opposition protests in March, a leading Syrian rights activist said Monday.
President Bashar Assad's government has turned all the country's main football stadiums into prisons, Radwan Ziadeh, co-founder of the Damascus Center for Human Rights and scholar at George Washington University in Washington, told a press conference at the U.N. headquarters.

Amnesty International has condemned what it calls the "climate of fear" in state hospitals of unrest-strewn Syria where both patients and medics were being targeted.
"The Syrian government has turned hospitals into instruments of repression in its efforts to crush opposition," it said in a 39-page report released late Monday.

A new Jordanian cabinet led by judge Awn Khasawneh took the oath of office before King Abdullah II on Monday, as analysts warned his government could be a last ditch effort for reform.
The king swore in the new 30-strong cabinet of Khasawneh, an International Court of Justice judge, who pledged to push ahead with political reform "at this critical stage of Jordan's history," the state-run Petra news agency reported.

The leader of Tunisia's center-left Progressive Democratic Party, tipped in second place ahead of the country's first free elections, conceded defeat Monday as votes were being counted.
"The trend is clear. The PDP is badly placed. It is the decision of the Tunisian people. I bow before their choice," PDP leader Maya Jribi told Agence France Presse at party headquarters as the Islamist Ennahda party claimed to be in the lead.

Interim leader Mustafa Abdul Jalil on Monday set a two-week target for Libya to have a new government and said a commission of inquiry is being formed to probe Moammar Gadhafi’s killing.
"We have begun talks (on forming a government), and this matter will not take a month but will be finished within two weeks," the National Transitional Council (NTC) chairman told a media conference in the eastern city of Benghazi.

Syrian forces shot and killed four civilians Monday in the flashpoint central city of Homs, where troops were raking several neighborhoods with heavy artillery fire, a rights watchdog said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said one person was killed in the army's operations while the three others were shot dead by security forces and pro-regime militiamen.

The U.S. on Monday pulled its ambassador out of Syria what it said were security concerns, prompting a swift response from Damascus which recalled its ambassador to Washington a few hours later for "consultations."
State Department spokesman Mark Toner said that Ambassador Robert Ford returned to Washington this weekend after "credible threats against his personal safety."

Yemeni tribes backing a nine-month protest movement against President Ali Abdullah Saleh clashed with his loyalists on Monday in Sanaa, witnesses said, after weekend gun fights left more than 20 dead.
The firefight in north Sanaa began after midnight and continued into the morning in al-Hassaba neighborhood, the base of tribesmen led by Sheikh Sadeq al-Ahmar, a fierce foe of Saleh, residents said.

The Israeli military said on Monday it had dismissed from command an officer implicated in the death of a Palestinian in the West Bank last month.
The officer, who was not named, was reportedly in command of the unit that opened fire on Palestinians in the West Bank village of Qusra, killing one, as they clashed with settlers who had attacked the area on September 23.
