British Prime Minister David Cameron is expected Friday in the Saudi capital for talks with King Abdullah, SPA state news agency reported.

Cameron and the Saudi monarch will discuss "bilateral relations, and ways to strengthen them," said SPA, adding without elaborating that the two leaders will also discuss "regional and international issues of common interest."

Israel troops on Thursday demolished an unauthorized settler outpost made up of 10 wooden huts in the southern West Bank, police and the military said.

COGAT spokesman Guy Inbar said forces operating in the early morning had removed "10 illegal structures in Mitzpe Avichai near Kiryat Arba," a settlement just north of the city of Hebron.

Israel's Supreme Court has rejected constitutional challenges to a law that makes it more difficult for Palestinians to get permission to live with their Israeli spouses inside Israel.

The ruling indicates that six judges ruled in favor of maintaining the law late Wednesday. Five were against.

The head of the political arm of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood on Wednesday hailed U.S.-Egyptian ties during talks with the U.S. State Department's number two, but also said they must be "balanced."

The meeting with U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns at the Cairo headquarters of the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) came as marathon elections that propelled Islamists to Egypt's center stage wrapped up.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Wednesday that President Bashar al-Assad gave a "chillingly, cynical speech" in which he tried to shift the blame for the violence in Syria.

"Instead of taking responsibility, what we hear from President Assad in his chillingly cynical speech yesterday was only making excuses blaming foreign countries," Clinton said.

The United States on Wednesday denied that it was to blame for the killing of an Iranian nuclear scientist by a car bomb, after Tehran said Washington and Israel were responsible for the attack.

"The United States had absolutely nothing to do with this. We strongly condemn all acts of violence, including acts of violence like this," said National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor.

Syrian security forces killed 21 civilians and were clashing with army deserters in a town near the central city of Hama on Wednesday, activists and a human rights group said.

Twenty-one civilians and three army deserters were killed at the hands of security forces, five of them under torture, the Local Coordination Committees, the main activist group spurring protests on the ground, said.

The Arab League is putting on hold a decision to send new observers to Syria after three monitors were slightly wounded in an attack this week, an official at the Cairo-based bloc said on Wednesday.

The official also dismissed remarks by an Algerian monitor who said he quit the Syria mission, accusing the regime of war crimes, saying all his claims were unfounded because he was bedridden and was never in the field.

A French journalist was killed on Wednesday in the flashpoint central Syrian city of Homs, the first Western journalist to be killed since protests erupted in March.

The public France 2 channel identified the slain journalist as Gilles Jacquier, one of its reporters. The 43-year-old joined public television in 1991 and was an award-winning veteran who had covered conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo and Israel.

Clashes between Egyptian troops and Bedouin in the Suez district east of Cairo killed three people on Wednesday as military police tried to evict the Bedouin from state-owned land, security sources said.

An officer, a conscript and a Bedouin died in a gunfight which erupted at dawn in the town of Janifah near the southern edge of the Suez Canal, the sources said.