Forces of Libya's new regime on Sunday tightened their stranglehold on Moammar Gadhafi's hometown Sirte, seizing its university and edging closer to his diehards holed up in a conference center.

Fighting has been raging around Sirte's university and the nearby Ouagadougou conference center since the National Transitional Council forces launched on Friday what they are calling their final assault on the coastal city.

Turkey has condemned the "loathsome assassination" of top Kurdish activist Meshaal Tamo as well as attacks against leading opposition figures in Syria, the foreign ministry said.

"We... strongly condemn the attempts aiming to suppress the Syrian opposition and the increase in attacks targeting main representatives of the opposition," the Turkish foreign ministry said in a statement posted on its web site late on Saturday.

A group of about 30 demonstrators stormed the Syrian embassy in Berlin overnight Sunday and confronted the ambassador to Germany, police said, following similar protests in other European capitals.

No one was injured, a police spokesman told Agence France Presse.

Syria closed one of its border gates with Turkey and barred Turkish citizens from entering Syria following bloody clashes in the city of Qamishli, Anatolia news agency reported on Saturday.

Turks were not allowed to cross into Syria from the border gate in Nusaybin city in southeast Turkey, which is only a few kilometers (miles) away from Qamishli, the local governor Murat Girgin told Anatolia.

Vandals defaced graves in two cemeteries, one Muslim and the other Christian, with anti-Arab graffiti in Jaffa south of Tel Aviv, Israeli police said on Saturday.

The vandals wrote "Death to Arabs" and "Price Tag" on 22 graves in the Muslim cemetery and on four in the Christian burial ground, media reports said.

The foreign ministers of Venezuela and Cuba are leading a delegation of leftist Latin American countries to Syria to meet Sunday with Syria's President Bashar Assad in a show of support.

The eight-member ALBA bloc's talks aim to "reject invasion and political destabilization attempts of the country by the United States and its allies," Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro said in state news agency AVN.

Jerusalem municipality has given the green light for the construction of 11 new apartments in the Jewish settlement of Pisgat Zeev in the annexed east of the city, a councilor told Agence France Presse on Saturday.

"The municipality approved at the beginning of the week the construction of 11 apartments, as part of a project of 300 housing units supposed to be approved section by section," Pepe Alalou of the leftist Meretz party said.

Egypt's military amended a controversial election law on Saturday to allow parties to contest a third of the seats in parliament reserved for independents after a boycott threat, state media reported.

The military decree is a concession to the parties, which also insist on a law banning corrupt politicians from running for office for a decade.

Tunisia has arrested a colonel in the former Libyan intelligence service, hiding out in a rented house in a remote town after Moammar Gadhafi's fall, the official TAP news agency said Saturday.

The officer had crossed the border using false identity papers more than a month ago, according to a security source cited by the agency, who did not name the colonel.

British police said Saturday they had arrested seven protesters outside the Syrian embassy in London, including three men who climbed onto the roof of the building and waved the Kurdish flag.

The trio were arrested on suspicion of criminal damage after mounting the roof of the entrance of the embassy, where they waved the red, white and green Kurdish flag with a sun emblem on it, according to television pictures.