U.S. President Barack Obama on Saturday praised the "leadership" of the Arab League after the grouping suspended Syria in a move that deepened the Damascus government's isolation.

The League said the suspension will remain in place until President Bashar Assad implements an Arab deal to end violence against protesters, and called for sanctions and transition talks with the opposition.

President Barack Obama's key Middle East advisor Dennis Ross said Thursday he would resign after a period of turmoil in the Arab world and a difficult period in U.S. relations with Israel.

Ross, a veteran U.S. peace negotiator, said in a statement he had made a promise to his wife to return to private life after two years in the administration -- and had outstayed that promise by a year.

A Saudi man accused of masterminding the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen's port of Aden in 2000 was formally arraigned Wednesday by a Guantanamo military court.

Dressed in prison clothes, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, 46, appeared before the court for the first time since his arrest in 2002, smiling several times at the judge. It is the first such case to be held since U.S. President Barack Obama reversed course and ordered the controversial military trials to resume.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a "liar" in talks with U.S. President Barack Obama, who then complained of having to deal with him daily, a report said Tuesday.

The private conversation, held during the recent G20 summit in the French city of Cannes, was overheard by a number of journalists after it was inadvertently transmitted over a system used for translation, media website Arret sur Images reported.

A U.S. soldier has been killed in northern Iraq, the U.S. military said on Friday, the first American service member to die in an attack here since the U.S. announced its forces would depart by year's end.

"A U.S. service member was killed Thursday while conducting operations in northern Iraq," the military said in a brief statement, without providing further details.

Russia could take steps of "a technically military nature" if its objections to NATO's planned missile defense system are not heeded, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told a Serbian daily Tuesday.

"If our partners in the future continue to ignore out position we should protect our interests by other means... Concrete measures might be needed... a response of a technically military nature," Lavrov told Belgrade's Vecernje Novosti in an interview published Tuesday.

The United States is trying to secure the help of Pakistani intelligence service to organize reconciliation talks in Afghanistan aimed at ending the war there, The New York Times reported Monday.

The newspaper said overtures are taking place just a month after President Barack Obama's administration accused Pakistan’s spy agency of secretly supporting the Haqqani terrorist network, which has mounted attacks on Americans.

Leaders of the world's biggest economies meet in Cannes this week as Europe tries to convince markets and U.S. critics that its debt bail-out package is serious and urges China to fund it.

Much is at stake in the G20 summit on the French seafront. The world stands on the brink of a new global recession, and the leaders of the 20 most powerful developed and emerging economies need to agree measures to boost growth.

The Iraqi people's "unified resistance" forced the United States to pull its military out of their country, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said Sunday.

The national defiance "which finally resulted in America being forced to withdraw from Iraq is a golden page in the history of this nation," Khamenei told the visiting head of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region, Massoud Barzani, according to his office.

Iraq will not be fully able to defend its borders and airspace until at least 2020, a watchdog quoted Iraq's top general as saying in a report on Sunday, months before U.S. troops are to leave.

The Iraqi military's chief of staff, Lieutenant General Babaker Zebari, "estimated that it will take several more years before Iraq can provide for its external defiance without assistance from international partners," said the report from the U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR).