Madrid, Rabat - Morocco has called more than 100 imams based in Spain to a meeting in Marrakesh as part of its attempts to fight Islamist radicalism among Moroccan emigrants, the Spanish daily El Pais reported Friday.

Representatives of the Ministry of Islamic Affairs were to meet the imams over the week-end.

Moroccan government sources were not immediately available for comment.

Rabat, Morocco  - Morocco's King Mohammed VI on Wednesday congratulated US president-elect Barack Obama, praising his "high human qualities" and political capacity.

Rabat, Morocco  - A Moroccan appeals court Thursday let stand a ruling that would require the nation's largest newspaper and its publisher to pay record amounts of damages in a defamation case.

The ruling requires the al-Massae newspaper and its chief editor, Rashid Ninny, to pay damages of up to 6 million dirham (more than 700,000 dollars) to a group of four district attorneys. It is the largest damages ruling in Morocco's media history.

Rabat, Morocco - Eleven pe

Rabat, Morocco - Islamic law allows men to wed girls as young as nine years, because marriages to younger women often work out better - or so claims Moroccan theologist Mohammed Maghraoui.

The fatwa (opinion on religious law) issued by Maghraoui in Marrakesh in early September confirmed what King Mohammed VI already knew: that Islamist fundamentalism was on the rise in the traditionally relatively liberal north African country.

Rabat, Morocco/Washington - A day after the US clinched international approval for a nuclear trade deal with India, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended the George W Bush administration's record in halting nuclear proliferation.

Speaking to reporters in Rabat, Morocco, late Sunday, Rice cited the dismantling of the AQ Khan nuclear weapons' network, the proliferation security initiative that has stopped ships on the high seas carrying banned weapons cargo, Libya's renouncing weapons of mass destruction, the UN sanctions on Iran and progress in getting North Korea to dismantle its nuclear programme.