Amman  - Jordan's King Abdullah II on Wednesday received an invitation to visit Honduras from President Manuel Zelaya, a royal court statement said.

The invitation was relayed to the head of the Royal Court Bassem Awadallah by the visiting Honduras Foreign Minister Edmundo Mercado.

Honduras and Jordan are members of the Eleven Group (G-11), which is currently chaired by King Abdullah.

The gathering is a forum comprising mainly developing countries with the aim of easing their debt burden and narrowing the income gap with the world's rich nations.

Amman - Arab stock markets fell this week despite positive results for the first six months of the year, as investors appeared hesitant due to political developments and retreating oil prices, financial experts said Friday.

"We believe that markets have been affected before anything else by geopolitics and receding oil prices," Wajdi Makhamreh, Chief Operating Officer of the Amman-based Sanabel International Holding, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

"However, we believe that regional markets will benefit in the long term from lower oil prices because they give boost to the world economy, particularly in the United States," he said.

Amman - Jordan's income from tourism rose by 8.5 per cent while the number of visitors coming to the country on package tours increased by 55 per cent in the first six months of the year, according to official statistics published Thursday.

The kingdom's tourism industry generated revenues of 835 million dinars (1.18 billion dollars) between January and June, compared with 769 million dinars in the same period of 2007, a report by the Central Bank of Jordan (CBJ) said.

The number of visitors on package tours increased to 242,795 in the first half of the year from 156,358 in the same period of 2007.

Amman  - The Arab Bank Group, one of the Arab world's largest banking establishments, raised its net profits in the first six months of the year by 25.8 per cent compared with the same period of 2007 to 465.9 million dollars, the group's chairman Abdul Hamid Shoman said Saturday.

He attributed the jump in the group's semi annual profits mainly to the financing of projects in the oil-rich Gulf area and to the "effective administration" of assets.

Amman  - Jordan's lower house of parliament on Thursday rejected as of "political nature" the genocide charges issued recently by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Luis Moreno-Ocampo, against Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir.

"The house rejects these charges because we are convinced that they are of political nature and seek to fulfil objectives and interests of certain states," said the chamber's Speaker, Abdul Hadi Majali.

Amman - US Democratic Party presumtpive presidential candidate Barack Obama pledged Tuesday to work relentlessly for peace between Israel and the Palestinians based on the "two-state" vision if elected president.

Addressing a press conference in Amman, Obama supported a "phased withdrawal" from Iraq, fielding more US troops in Afghanistan and putting pressure on Pakistan to play a more active role against terrorism.