A court in Tunisia Friday handed a 15-year jail term to Imed Trabelsi, a relative of the country's ousted president, a legal source told AFP, to add to two other sentences passed this summer.

Trabelsi -- nephew of the wife of Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, toppled in a popular uprising in January -- was convicted of having passed bad checks and was also fined 150,000 dinars (76,000 euros, 105,000 dollars).

A U.S. airstrike has killed the media chief for al-Qaida's Yemeni branch along with six other militants, the Defense Ministry and security officials said Saturday, in the second high-profile American missile attack in as many weeks to target the terror group in the country.

A ministry statement on Saturday said Egyptian-born Ibrahim al-Bana and six other militants were killed in the southeastern province of Shabwa on Friday night. Security officials said an American drone carried out the airstrike, which was one of five overnight strikes that targeted suspected al-Qaida positions in Shabwa and the neighboring province of Abyan in Yemen's largely lawless south.

U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon on Friday accused Israel of provoking the international community by approving new settlements in Palestinian territories while efforts were being made to jumpstart peace talks.

Ban added that no new settlement would get international recognition as he highlighted growing frustration.

Supporters and opponents of U.N. action against Syria crossed swords at the Security Council Friday after it was revealed the regime's crackdown has cost more than 3,000 lives, diplomats said.

Envoys for Germany, France, Britain and Portugal raised President Bashar Assad's deadly assault on protesters during closed-door consultations.

The United States is seeking international support for fresh sanctions against the Central Bank of Iran, a Treasury official said Friday following an alleged plot to kill the Saudi envoy in Washington.

"We are engaging in an effort to develop the multilateral support that would be critically important in having an action against the CBI really be effective," sanctions czar David Cohen told the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Police fired tear gas Friday at hundreds of people demonstrating against a private television station accused of blasphemy for airing a film with an image of God.

The demonstrators, mainly conservative Muslim Salafists, protested against Nessma television for the second time in a week after it broadcast "Persepolis", a globally-acclaimed animated film on Iran's 1979 revolution.

Demonstrators on Friday called for the United Nations to intervene to put Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh on trial in the wake of a crackdown on anti-regime protests that has cost hundreds of lives.

"We want the world to pass a resolution which defends the blood of the revolutionaries," protesters chanted at a huge gathering near "Change Square" in central Sanaa that has become the epicenter of a campaign to oust Saleh.

Israel has formally submitted plans for a new settlement neighborhood in annexed east Jerusalem in what will be the first sector's first new district in 14 years, Peace Now said on Friday.

The new district, Givat HaMatos, will be located on the southern flank of east Jerusalem which lies close to the West Bank town of Bethlehem, in what the settlement watchdog described as the first neighborhood to be planned since the establishment of Har Homa in 1997.

Syrian security forces killed 10 people on Friday when they opened fire on protesters in several cities, Rami Abdul Rahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told AFP by telephone.

"Ten demonstrators were killed today," said Rahman.

New regime forces in Libya were regrouping on Friday for a new bid to take full control of Moammar Gadhafi's hometown Sirte after a reverse at the hands of the fugitive strongman's remaining loyalists.

National Transitional Council (NTC) troops remained in the central police headquarters to which they retreated two kilometers on Thursday under heavy fire from Gadhafi forces, an Agence France Presse correspondent reported.