Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Saturday he believed Western powers had no desire to intervene in the Syrian conflict.
"I have a feeling that no one has any appetite for external intervention," Lavrov told journalists traveling with him on a flight to Moscow from an EU-Russia summit in Brussels, quoted by the ITAR-TASS news agency.

Syria's Greek Orthodox leader called on Christians on Saturday to remain in the country despite its spiraling conflict, which the U.N. recently described as "overtly sectarian."
Patriarch of Antioch and All the East Youhanna X al-Yaziji also appealed to warring parties to renounce violence and to start a process of dialogue.

Islamist rebels warned two Christian towns on Saturday they will be attacked if they do not evict regime forces, as the new Greek Orthodox patriarch said Syria's often-fearful Christians will stay put and urged a peaceful end to the conflict.
Yet a key opposition group said Syria's conflict is not sectarian, contradicting warnings this week by a U.N. team that increasing sectarianism is threatening whole communities.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki called on Saturday for the people to stand together against sectarian strife, warning of a return to the days of bloody sectarian war when heads were left in the streets.
Maliki called in a speech in Baghdad for Iraqis to "stand together in one rank in facing this strife."

Veteran Algerian dissident Hocine Ait Ahmed is to step down as leader of the Socialist Forces Front which he has led since founding it in 1963, he said in a letter obtained by Agence France Presse on Saturday.
Ait Ahmed, 86, is the sole surviving member of the nationalist leadership that launched the war for independence from French colonial rule on November 1, 1954.

Omanis went to the polls on Saturday for the Gulf sultanate's first ever local elections but the 192 elected councilors will have only advisory powers.
By midday, turnout among the 546,000 voters was "good", the official ONA news agency reported.

A cameraman for Syrian state television has been gunned down outside his home in Damascus, the broadcaster reported on Saturday, blaming the attack on "terrorists.”
"Our colleague Haidar al-Sumudi, cameraman for Syrian Arab Television, was shot dead by an armed terrorist group outside his home in Kfar Sousa in Damascus," the television said, without specifying when the attack took place.

Gunmen suspected of links to Al-Qaeda kidnapped two Finns and one Austrian in the Yemeni capital Sanaa on Friday, security officials told Agence France Presse.
One official said the three included an Austrian man and a Finnish man, both students of Arabic, and a Finnish woman who arrived recently in Yemen.

Egyptians voted on Saturday in the final round of a referendum on a new constitution championed by President Mohamed Morsi and his Islamist allies, but with little prospect of the result quelling fierce protests.
On the eve of polling, clashes in Egypt's second city Alexandria injured 62 people as stone-throwing mobs torched vehicles, underlining the turmoil gripping the Arab world's most populous nation.

The Libyan army is deploying units to help bolster security in the eastern city of Benghazi, a military spokesman said on Friday, a day after clashes there killed four people.
"Army units will secure the entrances and exits of the city as well as strategic sites until security is restored," army spokesman Ali al-Sheikhi told AFP, adding that the decision was in coordination with the interior ministry.
