A senior Iraqi security official on Wednesday hailed improving security ties with neighboring Saudi Arabia amid a tentative rapprochement between the two countries in recent weeks.

Deputy interior minister Adnan al-Assadi said Baghdad and Riyadh had already discussed working together on measures against terrorism, illegal narcotics, organized crime and cross-border smuggling, and would soon hold talks on prisoner exchanges.

Syria on Wednesday refused to let U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos enter the country to assess the growing crisis blamed on the government's deadly clampdown on protests, the U.N. official said.

The U.N. undersecretary general had been in the region waiting for a visa to go to Damascus. But President Bashar al-Assad's government did not respond to U.N. requests, diplomats said.

Egypt will vote on May 23 and 24 to elect its first president since a popular uprising overthrew Hosni Mubarak a year ago, the head of the elections committee said on Wednesday.

Farouq Sultan told journalists expatriates will be allowed to vote from May 11 to May 17 and that any run-off will be held on June 16 and 17.

A Syrian opposition leader voiced skepticism on Wednesday over plans for a new U.N. Security Council resolution demanding humanitarian access to protest cities where thousands have been killed.

"It is better to have a meeting between the interested countries and to have a political compromise," Haitham Manaa from the National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change (NCCDC) told Agence France Presse on the sidelines of a meeting in Rome.

Hundreds of students in Aleppo, Syria's second city largely spared anti-regime protests and the ensuing crackdown, called on Monday for the city to join the revolt, monitors and activists said.

"Hundreds of students protested Monday against the regime at the University of Aleppo," the country's economic hub, said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Egyptian police arrested a man on Wednesday who they thought had been a top lieutenant of Osama bin Laden, only to discover that the man they had nabbed had the right name but the wrong identity.

An Egyptian known as Seif al-Adel is on the FBI's Most Wanted List, indicted for involvement in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya and with a $5 million price tag on his head.

Kuwaiti MPs overwhelmingly approved a resolution on Wednesday calling on the government to recognize the opposition Syrian National Council as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people.

Forty-four members including all cabinet ministers present voted in favor of the non-binding resolution, while five MPs opposed it.

On Friday, Iran's 48 million voters are being called on to decide their next parliament in elections whose turnout will be weighed to give an idea of support for the Islamic republic's regime.

It will be the first nationwide poll since the 2009 disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which sparked months of opposition protests and a bloody crackdown by security forces.

Syrian forces on Wednesday killed 23 people across the country and launched a ground assault on a rebel-held district of Homs after shelling it for 26 straight days, as world pressure grew for humanitarian access to besieged protest cities.

A security source told Agence France Presse in Damascus that Baba Amr "is under control," after activists had earlier said that elite troops of the Fourth Armored Division had taken up position around the holdout neighborhood of Syria's third-largest city.

Israeli troops raided two Palestinian television stations in the West Bank city of Ramallah overnight, seizing computers and broadcasting equipment, employees told Agence France Presse on Wednesday.

The two stations affected were Watan Television, a local private station, and Quds Educational Television, affiliated with the Palestinian al-Quds University.