President Bashar Assad on Saturday announced the creation of an ad hoc committee tasked with preparing a new constitution for Syria within four months, the official SANA news agency said.

It said Assad issued a decree establishing the national committee to draft a new constitution in a period "not exceeding four months from the date of its creation."

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, dismissed Saturday U.S. allegations of a Tehran-sponsored assassination plot as "absurd," in his first direct reaction to the claim.

"It's a meaningless and absurd accusation regarding a number of Iranians," he told a crowd in the western city of Gilangharb in a speech carried by state television.

Yemeni police shot dead 12 people and injured dozens of others on Saturday as they opened fire on demonstrators in Sanaa demanding President Ali Abdullah Saleh's resignation, medics said.

Security forces used live rounds as well as tear gas and water cannon to try to disperse hundreds of thousands of Saleh opponents trying to march on loyalist areas of the city center from their Change Square stronghold, witnesses said.

Syrian security forces on Saturday killed two people, one in the capital and the other in the flashpoint central city of Homs, activists said, as the protest movement against President Bashar Assad entered its eighth month with more gunfire and arrests.

"A young man was killed when security forces opened fire on a funeral procession for the child martyr Ibrahim al-Sheban," in Midan, a commercial neighborhood of Damascus, said the Local Coordination Committees (LCC).

A court in Tunisia Friday handed a 15-year jail term to Imed Trabelsi, a relative of the country's ousted president, a legal source told AFP, to add to two other sentences passed this summer.

Trabelsi -- nephew of the wife of Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, toppled in a popular uprising in January -- was convicted of having passed bad checks and was also fined 150,000 dinars (76,000 euros, 105,000 dollars).

A U.S. airstrike has killed the media chief for al-Qaida's Yemeni branch along with six other militants, the Defense Ministry and security officials said Saturday, in the second high-profile American missile attack in as many weeks to target the terror group in the country.

A ministry statement on Saturday said Egyptian-born Ibrahim al-Bana and six other militants were killed in the southeastern province of Shabwa on Friday night. Security officials said an American drone carried out the airstrike, which was one of five overnight strikes that targeted suspected al-Qaida positions in Shabwa and the neighboring province of Abyan in Yemen's largely lawless south.

U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon on Friday accused Israel of provoking the international community by approving new settlements in Palestinian territories while efforts were being made to jumpstart peace talks.

Ban added that no new settlement would get international recognition as he highlighted growing frustration.

Supporters and opponents of U.N. action against Syria crossed swords at the Security Council Friday after it was revealed the regime's crackdown has cost more than 3,000 lives, diplomats said.

Envoys for Germany, France, Britain and Portugal raised President Bashar Assad's deadly assault on protesters during closed-door consultations.

The United States is seeking international support for fresh sanctions against the Central Bank of Iran, a Treasury official said Friday following an alleged plot to kill the Saudi envoy in Washington.

"We are engaging in an effort to develop the multilateral support that would be critically important in having an action against the CBI really be effective," sanctions czar David Cohen told the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Police fired tear gas Friday at hundreds of people demonstrating against a private television station accused of blasphemy for airing a film with an image of God.

The demonstrators, mainly conservative Muslim Salafists, protested against Nessma television for the second time in a week after it broadcast "Persepolis", a globally-acclaimed animated film on Iran's 1979 revolution.