Morning Brief, Monday, April 30

Middle East

BEHROUZ MEHRI/AFP

Iran announced it will attend a regional conference on Iraq, to be held Thursday and Friday at an Egyptian resort. U.S. and Iranian foreign ministers could meet for the first time in three years. Each will have plenty of gripes to discuss.

Is the Mahdi Army, the militia of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, back in the business of fighting U.S. troops?

Anonymous “U.S. military officials in Baghdad” accuse the Iraqi prime minister of ousting military and police commanders who challenged Shiite militias too aggressively.

Europe

Turkey’s presidential election has become a full-blown constitutional crisis. The military stepped in Friday with a statement reminding the nation of its role as the guardian of secularism, and the constitutional court will likely rule tomorrow on whether to cancel the elections. Current Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, a moderate Islamist, will almost certainly win if they are allowed to proceed.

A British court convicted five men of plotting a massive bombing attack using 600kg of fertilizer. 

French presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy rallied his supporters in Paris, stealing the spotlight from an unusual televised debate Saturday between his rival Ségolène Royal and centrist François Bayrou, who lost the first-round runoff. 

Asia

U.S. food safety regulators are heading to China to talk about melamine, the chemical thought to be responsible for the deaths of at least 16 pets in the United States. 

NATO forces say they killed some 87 Taliban members in heavy fighting in the western province of Herat, Afghanistan. 

Japan’s prime minister saw his poll numbers rise for the first time since taking office in September, following last week’s visit to Washington.

Elsewhere

Desperate Somalis are returning to Mogadishu, the capital, following an announcement by the interim government that Islamist insurgents have been defeated. 

The United Nations has an accredited blogger, Matthew Lee of innercitypress.com. 

Colombia’s President Álvaro Uribe heads to Washington to shore up support for his government, which is suffering from persistent rumors about his military’s ties to death squad activity. 

Today’s Agenda

• Amid mounting calls for his resignation, World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz testifies today before a Bank committee investigating his direction of pay raises to his girlfriend.
• Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf pledged action against terrorism after their meeting in Ankara, Turkey.
• Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is not looking forward to tonight’s publication of the first part of a report into the conduct of the July 2006 war with Hezbollah.
• U.S. President George W. Bush hosts José Manuel Barroso, his EU counterpart, at an annual U.S.-EU summit in Washington, DC, to discuss security, airline travel, and trade.
• Members of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty begin a meeting today in Vienna to discuss ways to save the embattled NPT from falling apart.
• The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation holds hearings on “Halliburton and U.S. Business Ties to Iran.”