Africa, North Africa | featured news

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.

Doctors used a defibrillator twice on Hosni Mubarak Monday when they could not find a pulse, the latest health crisis for the ousted Egyptian president since he was sentenced to life and moved to a prison hospital nine days ago, security officials said.

Hosni Mubarak was sentenced to life in prison Saturday for failing to stop the killing of protesters during the uprising that forced him from power last year.