A Jordanian hotel owner preparing a lunch for the pope spent five weeks coming up with a choice of five menus for the upcoming visit and is still agonizing over what could go wrong _ just as he did when John Paul II visited nine years ago.

Jordan’s powerful Muslim Brotherhood is urging Pope Benedict XVI to apologize ahead of his Mideast tour for his previous remarks about the Prophet Muhammad that many Muslims interpreted as insulting their faith.

Ali Mizhir was on his way to a market in Baghdad to buy slippers three years ago when a car bomb exploded nearby, blowing away much of his lower left leg.

Pope Benedict XVI will visit Jordan’s largest mosque during his first papal tour of the Holy Land in May, a local Roman Catholic priest said Tuesday.

Forty narrow mattresses line the carpeted floor of the basement at the Philippines Embassy, a damp and dimly lighted room where 20 women have sought refuge from abusive employers.

The Jordanian Central Bank’s 0.5 percentage point cut in key lending rates went into effect Tuesday, as indications mounted that the cash-strapped Arab kingdom was being hard hit by the global financial crisis.

Jordan’s Queen Rania has received YouTube’s first Visionary Award for a daily video Web cast and blog in which she sought to challenge stereotypes of the Arab and Muslim world and encourage dialogue across cultures.

Jordan’s Queen Rania has warned that rising unemployment among Arab youth is a “ticking time bomb” that has to be defused before it causes unrest.

Jordanian police arrested a local writer Tuesday for incorporating verses of the Quran, the Muslim holy book, into his love poetry, a judicial official said.

Two American journalists who went missing during a vacation in Lebanon were quoted Friday as saying they were “kidnapped” by their taxi driver and taken into Syria, where they were held in custody for a week before being released.