Israel and the United States are determined to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and do not rule out any option to that end, Israel's defense minister said on Sunday.

"Our two countries clearly believe that a nuclear Iran is neither conceivable nor acceptable and we are determined to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons," Defense Minister Ehud Barak told public radio, two days after meeting U.S. President Barack Obama.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Thursday the United States hopes it can work with Russia on the draft resolution it proposed to the U.N. Security Council on the Syria crisis.

Though Clinton said Washington had differences with Moscow on the draft, Clinton said it was the "first time" that Russia has recognized the violence in Syria needs to be taken up by the Security Council.

The Central Intelligence Agency has been operating form the U.S. embassy compound in Awkar to recruit agents to spy on Hizbullah, the party’s al-Manar TV station reported on Friday.

It said the CIA’s current chief in Lebanon is Daniel Patrick Mcfeely, 45, who replaced Louis Kahi after quitting in 2009.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced Monday that the United States was ending a freeze on hundreds of millions of dollars in development funds for Afghanistan amid financial reforms.

"The United States is pleased to announce we will be joining other partners in resuming financial disbursements to the Afghan Reconstruction Trust Fund," Clinton told a conference on Afghanistan in Bonn.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman has said Washington has evidence that Tehran and its Lebanese ally Hizbullah are bolstering Syria’s Assad regime.

Speaking in Amman, Feltman told reporters that Syrian President Bashar Assad is pegging his ruling Alawite minority against other sects and implementing his "own prophesy, which is moving Syria into more chaos and a civil war."

U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugee, and Migration Affairs Kelly Clements has underscored the important responsibility of Lebanon to ensure the safety of Syrian refugees, the U.S. embassy said in a statement.

Clements held talks with Social Affairs Minister Wael Abou Faour, Higher Relief Council Secretary General Ibrahim Bashir, and senior officials from the U.N. High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) on Thursday, the statement said.

Microsoft's Bill Gates was set to testify Monday in a $1 billion antitrust lawsuit accusing the software maker of duping a competitor prior to its rollout of Windows 95.

The case against Microsoft has been ongoing in federal court in Salt Lake City for about a month.

Lebanon’s ambassador to the U.N. Nawwaf Salam has stressed that he voted in favor of a General Assembly draft resolution demanding that Iran cooperate with an investigation into an alleged plot to assassinate the Saudi envoy to Washington.

The Saudi resolution on the plot was passed with 106 votes in favor, nine against and 40 abstentions on Friday. The United States accuses Iran of masterminding the plot.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton declared Monday that the Obama administration would work with ascendant Islamist parties of the Muslim world, answering one of the central U.S. policy questions resulting from the Arab Spring.

Delivering an address at the National Democratic Institute, Clinton offered a forthright embrace of the democratic changes enveloping North Africa and the Middle East at a time when the euphoria of the successful revolutions from Egypt to Libya is giving way to the hard and unprecedented work of creating stable democracies.

Freezing conditions hit the U.S. East Coast Sunday after a rare October snowstorm and icy rain reportedly killed at least three people, sparked long airport delays and caused massive power outages.

The "historic early season" snowstorm wrought havoc on air, rail and road traffic from Washington to Boston, with the National Weather Service warning that travel at night would be "extremely hazardous."