The first phase of the 2015 parliamentary elections has seen a significant improvement for women and Coptic candidates for the first time since 1952, according to the Maat Foundation for Peace, Development, and Human Rights.

The Sinai Peninsula, where a Russian passenger jet crashed Saturday killing all 224 people on board, is home to jihadists and local tribes hostile to the central government.

A lower court in Kuwait on Monday sentenced five men to 10 years in jail each for raising funds for the Islamic State jihadist group.

Muslim Brotherhood, 6th of April, and Revolutionary Socialists banned from student union elections The Egyptian Ministry of Higher Education will start accepting candidacy applications on Monday for student union elections after announcing the exclusion of students belonging to the banned Muslim Brotherhood, the 6th of April Youth Movement, and the Revolutionary Socialists.

A court in Egypt today ordered a retrial for 77 Muslim Brotherhood supporters, who were earlier sentenced between five to ten years in prison for taking part in violent acts in the coastal city of Alexandrian in 2013.

The Vatican's own police force has arrested a monsignor and a laywoman in its latest probe into the leak of confidential documents. The Vatican said both people were members of the commission established on Pope Francis' order to investigate the Church's finances. They were being held on suspicion of leaking confidential documents to the media.

Eleven civilians were killed in a Boko Haram suicide bomb attack Sunday on a Chadian army post at Bougouma in the Lake Chad region, the government said.

On top of the biggest winners of the first stage of Egypt's parliamentary elections, held between 17 and 28 October in 14 governorates, are Copts and women.

Egypt has increasingly used unlawful means to prevent citizens from traveling outside the country over the past year, a report from Human Rights Watch said on Sunday, another sign of the government's tightening grip on political opposition.

The administration of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has announced a three-month extension to a state of emergency it imposed on parts of the northern Sinai Peninsula as the country’s military launches counterterrorism operations against jihadists in the region.

The Isis-linked group that claimed to have downed a Russian plane over the Sinai peninsula has surface-to-air missiles smuggled from Libya, but nothing powerful enough to hit a plane at cruising altitude, experts say. The jihadi group, which calls itself Sinai Province, proved it posed a serious threat to low-flying aircraft when it brought down a military helicopter flying low over the area last year, and they could pose a serious threat to civilian airliners taking off and landing at the region’s airports.

The Salafi-led Nour Party claimed success in taking over ten seats out of the 23 it was competing for in runoffs for the first round of parliamentary elections that ended Wednesday.

Syria’s main political opposition body and representatives of the armed opposition have not been invited to international talks on the country’s war, an opposition politician and a rebel leader said.

An Al-Azhar University professor was suspended for inviting Iranians to a conference he was planning to organize at his department, Youm7 reported Thursday.

Suppression of the Gezi Park protests, press censorship, erosion of the constitution. But Erdogan and ‘his’ AKP party are still popular in Turkey ahead of Sunday’s elections. Daniel Heinrich reports from Kayseri.

A Saudi blogger sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for insulting Muslim clerics has won the European Union’s prestigious Sakharov Prize for human rights.

A Nour Party parliamentary candidate was hospitalised on Tuesday after two men forced him out of his car and attacked him.

The Islamic State group advanced on Tuesday to the outskirts of a major government military stronghold in northern Syria, a monitoring group said.

A woman wearing the niqab was caught trying to vote using another citizen’s national ID in a polling station in Kerdasa, Giza on Tuesday. The incident was reported and confirmed by several obvservers, including the state-affiliated National Council for Human Rights (NCHR).

The world's oldest bible is among 200 objects tracing Egypt's religious evolution in an exhibition at London's British Museum, which opens Friday and spans the 1,200 years since Cleopatra's death.

Suspected Boko Haram militants killed at least 14 people in an overnight attack on a village in southeastern Niger, security sources said on Wednesday.