Morning Brief: Obama prepares to referee Mideast meet

Asia

• The Philippine military says it has seized a major al-Qaeda-linked militant camp.
• Pakistan has put an important religious leader under house arrest over links to the Mumbai attacks.  
• The Indian government has obtained a report detailing the strategy of the country's Maoist rebels.

Middle East

• Around 150 Shiite rebels were reportedly killed in Yemen after they tried to attack a presidential palace. 
• Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei denounced nuclear weapons and denied that Iran has a covert program to build them. 
• Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says he is proud of his denial of the Holocaust, as he set out for U.N. week. 

Europe

• Human Rights Watch has accused Italy of returning migrants to Libya without processing their asylum requests. 
• Russian leaders are sending mixed signals on whether they still plan to go ahead with a plan to base missiles in Kaliningrad. 
• Former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin is on trial for slandering President Nicolas Sarkozy. 

Africa

• Fighting has broken out again between Sudanese government troops and rebels in Darfur. 
• A top Somali Islamist leader called for more attacks against African Union peacekeepers.  
• The Democratic Republic of Congo has deported a suspect in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. 

Americas

• The U.S. government is closing several democracy promotion programs in Bolivia at the request of the Bolivian government. 
• Alvaro Uribe's government is no longer demanding that Farc rebels release all their hostages at once. 
• U.S. officials worry that Puerto Rico's drug war is spiraling out of control.