Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on Wednesday dismissed a Libyan claim that an April 30 NATO air strike killed one of strongman Moammar Gadhafi's sons, the ANSA news agency reported.

Berlusconi said the international coalition had no information that 29-year-old Seif al-Arab, Gadhafi's youngest son, was dead, dismissing the report by a Libyan government spokesman as "propaganda".

Turkey is ready to help any initiative to end Libya's turmoil but has had no contact so far with South Africa's leader on an exit strategy for Moammar Gadhafi, a government official said Wednesday.

"We have had no particular dialogue (with South Africa) so far but it does not mean that we will not have any in the future," the foreign ministry official told Agence France Presse on condition of anonymity.

Libya's rebels have accepted an invitation to open a representative office in Washington, top United States official Jeffrey Feltman said on Tuesday.

"I delivered a formal invitation to the council for the opening of a representation in Washington," Feltman told a news conference, referring to the rebels' National Transitional Council.

Powerful explosions rocked Tripoli Tuesday as NATO launched its heaviest bombardment yet of the capital, while France and Britain piled pressure on Moammar Gadhafi by bringing attack helicopters into the Libya fray.

Government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim told reporters that at least three people died and 150 were wounded in the air strikes, which he said targeted a deserted military barracks but which instead hit civilians living nearby.

The United States on Monday called on Moammar Gadhafi to leave Libya as Washington's most senior envoy to date held talks in the rebel capital in another boost to forces fighting to oust the strongman.

Washington's call came a day after the European Union opened an office in the rebel bastion of Benghazi to show its "long term" support to the rebels who took their diplomatic offensive to NATO's sole Muslim member Turkey.

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton on Sunday vowed to offer the European Union's long term support to Libyan rebels, hours after NATO bombed the port of Tripoli and Moammar Gadhafi's compound near the capital.

Ashton, on a visit to the rebel-held eastern Libyan city of Benghazi, is to open a European Union mission office in a city hotel later Sunday and she will also address a news conference.

NATO said on Friday its warplanes hit eight vessels of Moammer Gadhafi's navy, after U.S. President Barack Obama predicted the Libyan strongman would "inevitably" leave or be forced from power.

The authorities in Tripoli slammed Obama's comments as "delusional," while strongly denying reports that Gadhafi's wife and daughter had fled to Tunisia and that Oil Minister Shukri Ghanem had defected.

It’s official! Lebanon is still a priority for the U.S. although President Barack Obama did not address the situation in the country in his “historic” speech on Thursday.

“The democratic changes in the region started in Lebanon in 2005,” U.S. embassy spokesman Ryan Gliha said about the Cedar Revolution that drove Syrian troops out of Lebanon in the aftermath of the assassination of former Premier Rafik Hariri.

U.S. President Barack Obama declared Thursday that the borders of Israel and a Palestinian state must be based on 1967 lines, likely setting up a new clash with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In a long-awaited survey of the "Arab spring" of revolts, Obama compared "shouts of human dignity" across the region to America's birth pangs and civil rights struggles, and said the uprisings showed repression would not work.

Authorities in Tunis on Thursday denied reports that members of embattled Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's family, including his wife and daughter, had fled and arrived in Tunisia.

"These reports are totally false," said a government source, stressing that "no member of the Gadhafi family has crossed the Tunisian border" with Libya, where Gadhafi loyalists are fighting to put down a rebellion.