Israel's attorney general has decided not to appeal against last month's acquittal of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman on corruption charges, the justice ministry said on Wednesday.

"Following the verdict, the attorney general (Yehuda Weinstein) was required to address the question of whether to file an appeal on behalf of the state, and, to that end, he heard opinions and held a number of discussions," the ministry said.

Regime warplanes pounded Syria's second city Aleppo for a fourth straight day Wednesday in air raids that have killed at least 135 people, many of them children, a monitor said.

The attacks focused on rebel-held areas of eastern and northern Aleppo, once the country's commercial hub, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The U.S. ambassador to Damascus has said a newly formed Islamist alliance in war-torn Syria has refused to meet with American officials, in an interview aired Wednesday on Al-Arabiya television.

"The Islamic Front has refused to sit with us without giving any reason," Robert Ford said, a day after U.S. State Secretary John Kerry described as "possible" a meeting with Syria's biggest rebel alliance.

Russian armored trucks will help take Syria's chemical weapons out of the country, tracked by U.S. satellite equipment and Chinese surveillance cameras, in an unprecedented international operation, the world's chemical watchdog said.

The details are part of an ambitious plan unveiled by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) at a meeting of its Executive Council published Wednesday despite delays to the overall operation which aims to be completed by mid-2014.

Ethiopia has brought home close to 140,000 citizens from Saudi Arabia, the International Organization for Migration said Wednesday, a month after the oil-rich kingdom started deporting undocumented migrants.

Thousands are continuing to arrive daily from Saudi Arabia, where a seven-month amnesty period for migrants expired in November and where Ethiopia says three of its nationals were killed in police clashes as the migrants prepared to leave.

An Iraqi policeman sacrificed himself on Wednesday as he tried to protect Shiite pilgrims, embracing a suicide bomber just moments before the man exploded, officials said.

The bomber struck in the Khales area northeast of Baghdad, killing five people and wounding 10, a police colonel and a doctor said.

The West's policies on Iran and Syria are a "dangerous gamble" and Saudi Arabia is prepared to act on its own to safeguard security in the region, a top Saudi diplomat said Tuesday.

"We believe that many of the West's policies on both Iran and Syria risk the stability and security of the Middle East," the Saudi ambassador to Britain, Prince Mohammed bin Nawaf bin Abdulaziz, wrote in a commentary in the New York Times.

Migrants who have worked for nearly a year without pay on a Qatar skyscraper are facing "severe foot shortages" and cannot leave or seek other employment, Amnesty International said Wednesday.

Qatar has come under mounting criticism from rights groups, particularly after being chosen to host the 2022 World Cup, which has spotlighted the conditions of migrant workers in the gas-rich monarchy's booming construction industry.

Britain accused Syria on Tuesday of effectively murdering a surgeon who was detained after volunteering to work at a hospital in the war-torn country and then died in jail.

Abbas Khan, a 32-year-old orthopedic surgeon from south London, traveled to the northern city of Aleppo last year to help civilians but was captured by the Syrian regime.

Ailing President Abdelaziz Bouteflika is "well-informed" of developments in Algeria, despite having been largely unseen for months because of health woes, French premier Jean-Marc Ayrault said Tuesday after meeting him.

The 76-year-old president, in power since 1999, returned home in July after nearly three months in France recovering from a mini-stroke.