North Africa | featured news

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.

An Egyptian couple has been charged with putting their child at risk and attempted smuggling after security officers at an airport in the United Arab Emirates found their 5-month-old boy hidden in a small handbag.

Egypt’s dissolved parliament defied a court order and reconvened Tuesday, escalating the power struggle between the newly elected Islamist president and the military over the political future of a nation still tangled in the legacy of toppled leader Hosni Mubarak.

Mohamed Morsi was formally sworn in on Saturday as Egypt’s first democratically elected president, marking a new stage in an ever murkier struggle to define the future of the nation.

The chairman of the election commission announced that Mohamed Morsi had won 51 percent of the runoff vote completed last weekend, an ambiguous marker in Egypt’s promised transition to democracy.

Egypt entered its final day of voting on Sunday with very few people going to the polls to choose Hosni Mubarak’s successor under a cloud of apprehension and anticipation. Turnout appeared dismal in a sign of just how polarizing and demoralizing the choice between a military strongman and conservative Islamist is for the Arab World’s most populous nation.