Six foreign medics convicted of deliberately infecting hundreds of Libyan children with HIV were freed on Tuesday after a partnership deal between Tripoli and the European Union ended their eight-year ordeal.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, making his first public comments as the international community’s Mideast peace envoy, urged Israeli and Palestinian leaders Tuesday to take advantage of a new “sense of possibility” in the region.

Iraqi police say a suicide car bomber has killed at least 26 people and wounded about 70 others in the southern town of Hillah.

Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, last week (16 July) authorised the creation of a higher council for science and technology and a science and technology development fund.

Egyptian postal workers occupied the Egyptian Postal Service building in the capital Cairo last week.

Hidden away in a concrete loading bay around the side of a major Cairo postal office, about 100 workers in their 20s and 30s gather among a forest of placards.

The body headed by Egypt’s official religious advisor on Tuesday denied he had said that Muslims were free to change their faith, as had been reported by a US Washington Post-Newsweek forum on Islam.

Egypt’s announcement that it is to sell off 80 percent of its third largest public sector bank, Banque du Caire, has revived old fears that privatisation is heralding the return of colonialism.

A 25-year-old Egyptian woman has tested positive for the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus, bringing the number of human cases in the most populous Arab country to 38, a World Health Organisation official said on Sunday.

Darfur refugee Adam Abdel Karim, 31, became the latest casualty from the rising tide of those seeking to enter Israel illegally after being shot by increasingly vigilant Egyptian border guards.