Egypt News اخبار مصر
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At least 10 Sudanese refugees were killed when several thousand Egyptian riot police using sticks and water cannon forcibly broke up a protest outside UN offices in Cairo.

Police armed with batons and shields stormed the small square where the Sudanese had been camping at around 5:00 am (0300 GMT) after failing to convince the refugees to end a three-month sit-in.

“There was a stampede that left 30 of the protesters injured, most of them the elderly and young and they were immediately taken to the hospital where 10 of them died,” the interior ministry said in a statement.

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Syrian President Bashar al-Assad threatened former Lebanese premier Rafiq Hariri just months before he was assassinated, Syria’s ex-vice president Abdel Halim Khaddam said

“I will destroy anyone who tries to hinder our decisions,” Assad told Hariri during a meeting in Damascus, Khaddam told Dubai-based television Al-Arabiya in an interview from Paris.

Khaddam said the meeting took place a few months before the February 14 assassination of Hariri in a Beirut bomb blast for which a UN probe has implicated Syrian intelligence.

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The U.S. army announced that it will impose restrictions on Iraqi special police forces, increasing the number of American troops assigned to work with them and requesting permission before the Iraqis conduct raids in their country, The Los Angeles Times reported.

The army claims that it decided to monitor Iraqi forces on a daily basis because the heavy-handed approach used by some Iraqi units fueled sectarian tensions, resulting in more violence in the war-torn country.

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The Foreign Office is investigating reports that three Britons kidnapped in Gaza on Wednesday have been released.
A spokesman said the reports were still as yet unconfirmed.

It is understood aid worker Kate Burton was showing her parents, Hugh and Helen, around Rafah, near the border with Egypt, when they were kidnapped.

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أعفي وزير النفط العراقي إبراهيم بحر العلوم من منصبه بشكل مؤقت وسط خلافات بشأن سياسة الحكومة لتسعير الوقود.

وتقرر استبدال بحر العلوم لمدة 30 يوما بنائب رئيس الوزراء أحمد الجلبي.

وكان بحر العلوم قد اعترض علنا على قرار الحكومة العراقية في وقت سابق هذا الشهر برفع أسعار الوقود ثلاثة أضعاف.

وجاء تعيين الجلبي بعد إغلاق كبرى مصافي النفط في العراق بعد تلقي سائقي شاحنات النفط تهديدات بالقتل

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The U.S. Justice Department is investigating who disclosed a secret domestic eavesdropping operation approved by President George W. Bush after the September 11 attacks, officials said on Friday.

“We are opening an investigation into the unauthorized disclosure of classified materials related to the NSA,” a Justice Department official said on condition of anonymity.

Earlier this month, Bush acknowledged the program and called its disclosure to The New York Times “a shameful act.” He said he presumed the Justice Department would investigate who leaked the National Security Agency eavesdropping operation to the newspaper.

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Guantanamo hunger strikers are being force-fed in a cruel manner, the UN special rapporteur on torture Manfred Nowak said.

Nowak told BBC that he received credible reports that some hunger strikers had had thick pipes inserted through the nose and forced down into the stomach.

This was done in a cruel way, sometimes by prison guards rather than doctors, he said. As a result, some detainees had reported bleeding and vomiting.

“If these allegations are true then this definitely amounts to an additional cruel treatment,” he said.

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The Rafah border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt has been re-opened on Friday, hours after a raid by Palestinian policemen forced it to close, Palestinian officials said, according to BBC.

More than 100 Palestinian policemen, angry over the killing of a colleague, stormed the border crossing in the morning, forcing European Union monitors manning it to leave.

According to Palestinian security officials, the angry policemen were friends and family of an officer who was killed Thursday in a clan feud in Gaza. They vowed not to allow Palestinian officials to leave Gaza until the gunman responsible for the killing was executed. There were no reports of casualties.

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قالت الشرطة المصرية إنه تم العثور على 10 أشخاص، من بينهم 3 أطفال ورضيع عمره 9 أشهر، مذبوحين وممثل بجثثهم داخل منازلهم الأربعاء في قرية جنوبي مصر.

وأضافت الشرطة قائلة إن الجيران استيقظوا على صرخات من منازل الأسر الثلاث ليجدوهم مذبوحين وقد بقرت بطون الضحايا وقطعت أطرافهم.

وقع الحادث في قرية شمس الدين بمحافظة المنيا التي تبعد 220 كيلومترا جنوبي القاهرة.

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China’s third confirmed bird flu death highlights the danger of small, undetected H5N1 outbreaks, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said, as authorities probed how the victim fell ill.

China’s health ministry announced on Thursday that a 41-year-old woman from the eastern province of Fujian had died on December 21 after contracting the H5N1 virus about two weeks earlier.

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