Syria's President Bashar Assad on Wednesday received a delegation of Belgian lawmakers led by far-right Flemish nationalist Filip Dewinter, state media reported.

State news agency SANA said Assad met the delegation to discuss the conflict in Syria, in which more than 215,000 people have been killed since March 2011.

Ousted Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi and 24 others, including prominent Islamists and secular figures, will go on trial May 23 for insulting the judiciary, a court official said Wednesday.

The trial will be the fifth for Morsi, who faces the death sentence if convicted in the other cases for espionage and violence.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry left Washington on Wednesday for a date with history, hoping to seal a deal reining in Iran's nuclear ambitions for years to come.

After months of closed-door negotiations, Kerry and his team was headed once again for talks in Switzerland with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.

A Moscow-friendly Greece could paralyze NATO's ability to react to Russian aggression, former U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski warned Wednesday.

Athens could use its veto to slow the alliance's response if Russia set its sights on its Baltic member states, he told Poland's Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.

Iraq pledged Wednesday to probe all rights abuses committed in the conflict-torn country, including by its own security forces and pro-government militias, and bring the perpetrators to justice.

"Any person involved in any violation will be brought to trial," Iraqi Human Rights Minister Mohammed Al-Bayati told the United Nations Human Rights Council.

Activists speaking up against abuses in war-torn Libya face reprisals from all sides in the chaotic conflict, and are increasingly being threatened, attacked, abducted and killed, the U.N. warned in a report Wednesday.

The report, drafted by the U.N. rights office and the U.N. mission in Libya (UNSMIL) revealed a plethora of violent attacks against activists across the conflict-ravaged country, and even in some cases after they have fled abroad.

Kuwaiti Commerce and Industry Minister Abdulmohsen al-Mudej resigned Wednesday, two days after an MP called for him to be questioned in parliament, the second such case in as many weeks.

The official KUNA news agency said the emir accepted the resignation of Mudej, a liberal, Western-educated minister appointed in January 2014.

David Cameron went on the offensive against the opposition in a rowdy House of Commons on Wednesday at his last Prime Minister's Questions session before May's knife-edge election in Britain.

Conservative leader Cameron dealt a blow to the main opposition Labor party by ruling out a tax rise and peppering his answers with cutting put-downs of its leader, Ed Miliband.

As tension mounts with Washington, Israel's outgoing government has suspended a controversial plan to build hundreds of new settler homes in annexed east Jerusalem, a news website reported Wednesday.

The plan involves the construction of 1,500 homes in the settlement neighborhood of Har Homa where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a controversial speech on the eve of March 17 elections, pledging to build thousands of new homes if returned to office.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will visit France, Germany and Canada next month, the foreign ministry said Wednesday, on a tour expected to focus on attracting investment to the country.

Modi won a landslide election victory last May on a pledge to revive India's economic fortunes, and has embarked on an ambitious drive to attract more foreign investment to the country of 1.2 billion people.