Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak on Saturday extended until Tuesday a lockdown on the West Bank that had been due to end Saturday at midnight, an armed forces spokesman said. Israel sealed off the West Bank on Friday, citing security risks, amid tension with key ally the United States over plans to build new homes for Jewish settlers in predominantly Arab east Jerusalem.

The Central African Republic's government said Saturday it had foiled a plan to launch a coup d'etat on March 15, according to a recorded radio statement obtained by AFP.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered an inquiry Saturday into why a contested settlement plan was announced during a landmark visit by US Vice President Joe Biden, a spokesman said.

Lebanon's Druze leader Walid Jumblatt on Saturday called on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to turn the page on the past, admitting that he had in a moment of anger said inappropriate things. The former virulent critic of the Damascus regime admitted to Al-Jazeera satellite television channel in an interview that he had made "inappropriate and unreasonable remarks about President Assad at a time of internal tensions and extreme division within Lebanon.

US President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev believe Moscow and Washington are close to reaching agreement on a new nuclear disarmament treaty, the Kremlin said Saturday. US and Russian negotiators have been meeting in Geneva to discuss a successor to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), a landmark Cold War-era nuclear arms pact which expired in December.

Hundreds of Israelis staged a protest on Saturday against gender discrimination on some bus routes in ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighbourhoods, where women are made to sit at the back. Around 1,000 men and women gathered outside the Jerusalem home of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, holding up placards reading "Israel is not Tehran" and "Democracy, not theocracy," an AFP correspondent said.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told German and Italian leaders Saturday that Israel does not plan to speed up the controversial construction of settlements, a government source said. A day after a rare, sharp rebuke from Washington over plans to build 1,600 new settler homes in east Jerusalem, Netanyahu contacted German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Tens of thousands took to the streets of Rome on Saturday to demonstrate against Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi ahead of regional elections. Protesters with banners and balloons in the colours of opposition parties filled the Piazza del Popolo square. Many chanted support for Manchester United football team, who beat Berlusconi's AC Milan on Wednesday.

Non-governmental organisations in uranium-rich Niger on Saturday called on the military junta to renegotiate dubious mining and oil contracts. "In light of the murky allocation of mining and oil contracts since 2008, we strongly recommend an investigative body to be set up as quickly as possible . . . and contracts to be renegotiated," a network of NGOs said in a statement.

The Iraqiya bloc led by secular former prime minister Iyad Allawi was leading in the northern Iraqi province of Nineveh, early election results showed on Saturday. The initial result based on a count of 15 percent of votes cast in Sunday's poll makes the predominantly Sunni Arab Nineveh, which also has a sizable Kurdish and Christian population, the third province in which Allawi's alliance was ahead.