Egypt | featured news

President Obama fired back at Mitt Romney's criticism of the administration's handling of protests in Libya and Egypt today. "Gov. Romney seems to have a tendency to shoot first and aim later," Obama told CBS News.

The film at the centre of the protests in Libya and Egypt is called Innocence of Muslims and was apparently shot in the US. The full version is said to run for two hours, but so far all most people have seen is a collection of extracts found on Facebook and Youtube - with one trailer running to 14 minutes.

More foreign fighters claiming allegiance to al-Qaida have reportedly joined rebels in war-torn Aleppo, deepening the regional implications of the conflict in Syria. According to Zeina Khodr, a journalist with news channel Al Jazeera, "Arab fighters from Saudi Arabia and Egypt who didn't want to be filmed" were operating in the city. Some reportedly claimed allegiance to al-Qaida.

A U.S.-military dominated peacekeeping force of 1,650 troops in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula is finding itself caught between restive Bedouin tribesmen and an escalating Egyptian army offensive against insurgents.

Two possible pyramid complexes might have been found in Egypt, according to a Google Earth satellite imagery survey. Located about 90 miles apart, the sites contain unusual grouping of mounds with intriguing features and orientations, said satellite archaeology researcher Angela Micol of Maiden, N.C. One site in Upper Egypt, just 12 miles from the city of Abu Sidhum along the Nile, features four mounds each with a larger, triangular-shaped plateau.

They came in Toyota pick-up trucks, dozens of heavily armed masked men, firing machineguns and waving the black flag of al Qaeda as terrified residents and police huddled indoors, and then disappeared again, melting away into the mountains and remote villages of Egypt's Sinai desert.

Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi on Sunday purged the nation's military leadership in a provocative move to expand his power and push aside generals who epitomized the inner circle of deposed leader Hosni Mubarak.

Egyptian security officials and residents say Egyptian military attack helicopters have fired missiles on suspected Islamic militants in Sinai after an attack on security checkpoints.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, making what is likely to be her last trip to Jerusalem as America’s top diplomat Monday, hailed a “moment of great change” in the Middle East — after her motorcade was pelted with fruit and shoes in Egypt.

Having pressed the new Egyptian president, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Sunday sought to mobilize what influence the United States still has with the army chief whose key role in post-Hosni Mubarak Egypt is splitting the country between those who see the military as a threat to democracy and those clinging to it as a guarantor of stability.