Amid tensions over Iran and Syria, the United States has brought forward the deployment of an aircraft carrier to the Middle East to shorten the time when a sole carrier is in the region.

Pentagon spokesman George Little told reporters on Monday that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta last week approved a request for the USS John-Stennis strike group to be deployed four months earlier than scheduled.

European Union foreign ministers plan to adopt fresh sanctions against President Bashar Assad's regime at talks next week, EU diplomats told Agence France Presse on Monday.

Several sources said on condition of anonymity that the EU's 27 foreign ministers would add to an existing EU blacklist of 129 people and 49 entities, or firms, when they meet in Brussels on Monday.

The 15 fighters who call themselves "Soldiers of the Prophet Mohammed" are not afraid of dying at the hands of the troops of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Their charismatic leader Abu Saeed says that for one month now, the army has laid siege to the rebels in the Wastani mountains overlooking the town of Jisr al-Shughour in the northwestern province of Idlib.

The Damascus regime is guilty of "tremendous political obstruction" that is preventing aid reaching an estimated 850,000 people in need in Syria, a top U.N. relief official said on Monday.

Launching an appeal to help Syrians both at home and abroad, U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) director of operations John Ging accused the regime of blocking visas for some aid workers.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague met Libyan officials on Monday to discuss bilateral cooperation and the progress of a probe into the 1984 murder of a British policewoman.

"I believe there is a very strong prospect for relations between the United Kingdom and Libya," Hague told reporters in Tripoli in what marked his fourth visit to the North African nation.

Tunisia's former president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, toppled by a popular revolt in 2011, is ready to hand over his Swiss-held financial "assets" to the Tunisian state, his Lebanese lawyer said on Monday.

"My client is ready to hand over all his alleged assets and economic resources held in Switzerland to the Tunisian state," lawyer Akram Azoury said in a draft statement to the Swiss ambassador in Lebanon, a copy of which was sent to Agence France Presse.

Israel has agreed not to renew its detention order for Palestinian parliament speaker Aziz Dweik and will free the Hamas member on Thursday, his lawyer told Agence France Presse on Monday.

Fadi Qawasmi said Israel had agreed to his request that Dweik's six-month administrative detention order not be renewed. "That means that Dweik will be released on Thursday," he said.

President Abdelaziz Bouteflika met Laurent Fabius on Monday on the French foreign minister's first official trip to an Arab country, focused on the political crisis in Algeria's neighbor Mali.

Before meeting Bouteflika, Fabius said they would discuss Franco-Algerian relations "as well as international questions."

Death threats were spray painted outside the Jerusalem home of a prominent Israeli anti-settlement activist working for Peace Now, police said on Monday, in the third attack on her home in 10 months.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the attack, believed to be the work of right-wing extremists, targeted the home of Peace Now's Hagit Ofran.

Egypt's prosecutor general on Monday ordered convicted former strongman Hosni Mubarak back to prison nearly a month after he was moved to a military hospital in Cairo after reportedly suffering a stroke.

Abdel Meguid Mahmoud "has issued an order to transfer former president Hosni Mubarak from the Maadi Armed Forces Hospital to Tora prison hospital after an improvement in his health," his office said in a statement.