Middle East

The police were polite but firm as they arrested Shahin Felakat, a lanky teen whose mussed-up strands of dirty brown hair reach in all directions, and charged him with singing lyrics that threatened Iran's Islamic order. After a few days in jail, the 18-year-old rapper ran back to the studio to rejoin his homeboys. "The authorities have a very negative view of rap," Felakat says. "They say rap has a corrupting influence.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned Wednesday that the United States may erect a "defense umbrella" over the Middle East if Tehran continues its nuclear program, a sign that the Obama administration is preparing for the reality of an Iranian bomb.

Standing outside his hookah station at a Middle Eastern restaurant in Glendale, Alfonso "Abou Salim" Ramirez grabbed a red apple and, using a sharp knife, sliced off the top. He flipped the apple over and made four quick incisions, creating a small square. "This is my secret," Ramirez said, jabbing a finger into the square to pop out the core. He then stuffed red, apple-flavored tobacco into the hole and covered it with a piece of tin foil.

It happened in Baku, transforming the capital of Azerbaijan into a battleground in a global shadow war. Police intercepted a fleeing car and captured two suspected Hezbollah militants from Lebanon. The car contained explosives, binoculars, cameras, pistols with silencers and reconnaissance photos. Raiding alleged safe houses, police foiled what authorities say was a plot to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic that borders Iran.

Qatar, a glittering peninsula of skyscrapers and sand, reminds one of a well-dressed, ambitious little guy playing all the angles in a rough neighborhood. Its pushy rise to prominence is creating suspicion and hardening the Middle East split between moderate U.S. allies and more militant nations.

When President Obama takes the podium in Cairo this week for his much-anticipated speech to the Muslim world, he'll stand before them as an American leader born of an African Muslim father and raised partly in Indonesia, as well as a politician who cut his political teeth in an Illinois political culture that has a sizable Muslim population. And he will talk, aides say, about those roots he shares with the Muslim world.

An American Al Qaeda militant urged fighters to meet President Bush with bombs when he visits the Middle East, according to a video posted Sunday on the Internet. Adam Gadahn, who was raised in Orange County, also tore up his U.S. passport in the nearly hourlong tape. The video came three days before Bush is scheduled to arrive for a weeklong trip in the region to push for an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. "Now we direct an urgent call to our militant brothers . . .

President Bush's accommodations are never shabby when he travels abroad. But consider life at his hotel in Abu Dhabi, where a run-of-the-mill suite can go for $1,595 a night. He was, a White House aide indicated, assigned one of the eight "Ruler's Suites" at the Emirates Palace Hotel on Sunday night. The suites are made available only to those who Sheik Khalifa ibn Zayed al Nuhayyan, the ruler of Abu Dhabi and president of the United Arab Emirates, says may stay there.

The U.S. primaries are an enticing, confusing political drama for a Middle East looking for an American president who can offer security and repair years of Bush administration policies widely seen as disastrous. The next U.S. president will inherit the Iraq war, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a rising Iran and competition from the growing economies of India and China for oil in Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf nations.