Egyptian security officials and a tribal leader say that Islamic State militants in the volatile northern Sinai region have abducted four civilians accused of cooperating with the military and killed at least two of them.

Egypt has rehoused 118 Coptic families who fled North Sinai after a spate of killings of Christians by militants there, the parliamentary affairs minister told parliament on Sunday.

For the third consecutive day, the outflow of Coptic families deciding to flee their residences located in the North Sinai city of Al-Arish to the governorate of Ismailia is on the rise. This exodus followed an escalation of murders targeting Copts by militants believed to be members of the IS-affiliated group “Sinai Province”.

The holy month of Ramadan for the hijri year 1438 will come on May 27, according to Hatem Ouda, the head of the National Research Institute for Astronomy and Geophysics. Speaking to the official MENA news agency on Thursday, Ouda said that the new moon, which marks the beginning of Ramadan, will not be sighted on Friday May 26, which will be the last day of the lunar month of Shaaban, the month before Ramadan.

Turkey's military has changed its regulations to allow female officers to wear headscarves while on duty, defense officials said Wednesday, removing a ban on Islamic-style head coverings at an establishment that once was considered a bastion of secularism.

Egyptian security officials say suspected militants have killed two Christians in the restive north of the Sinai Peninsula, days after an Islamic State affiliate vowed to step up a wave of attacks on the embattled minority. The officials said Saad Hana, 65, was shot dead and his son Medhat, 45, was abducted and burned alive before their bodies were dumped on a roadside in al-Arish on Wednesday.

Egypt's Al-Azhar and the Vatican have resumed dialogue sessions in Cairo — focused in particular on combining efforts to combat religious extremism and terrorism — for the first time since the sessions were halted in 2010. A special seminar held at Al-Azhar University Wednesday was attended by a range of Al-Azhar scholars and Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, head of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue.

CIA-coordinated military aid for rebels in northwest Syria has been frozen since they came under major Islamist attack last month, rebel sources said, raising doubts about foreign support key to their war against President Bashar al-Assad.

After years of strained relations, Egypt is moving closer to Hamas in Gaza, offering concessions on trade and free movement in return for moves to secure the border against Islamic State fighters who have killed hundreds of policemen and soldiers in northern Sinai.

Eleven members of an Afghan family, including women and children, were killed in a grenade attack on their home in the country's volatile east, officials said Monday.

Demonstrations were held in cities around the US this weekend to support Muslim Americans and to protest President Donald Trump's immigration policies.

Veteran Islamist preacher and theorist of Al-Jamaa Al-Islamiya group, Omar Abdel Rahman, died on Saturday, after 24 years of imprisonment in a US prison.

The Egyptian army said on Sunday it had arrested eight terrorists in central Sinai’s Halal Mountain. "The raids on caves in Halal Mountain resulted in the destruction of 33 workshops for manufacturing Improvised Explosives Devices," an army spokesman said on Facebook.

A Swedish court has sentenced a Syrian man to life imprisonment for participation in the 2012 mass execution of seven government troops in Syria.

Suspected Islamic militants gunned down a Coptic Christian teacher on his way to school in northern Sinai on Thursday, the second killing of a Christian in less than a week in the turbulent region, officials said, amid fears of escalating attacks on Christians.

A suicide bomber detonated a pick-up truck on Wednesday in Sadr City, a heavily populated poor Shia suburb of Baghdad, killing at least 15 and wounding 50, security sources said. The explosion, the deadliest in Baghdad so far this year, targeted a crowded street full of garages and used car dealers.

A suicide bombing targeted the administrative headquarters of a tribal region in northwestern Pakistan on Wednesday, killing three policemen and two passers-by, officials said. The explosion went off at the main gate of the tribal headquarters in Ghalanai in the Mohmand tribal region, just as the workday was about to start, said Hameedullah Khan, a local government official. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

The Grand Imam of Egypt's Al-Azhar Ahmed El-Tayyeb and Pope Tawadros II, the head of Egypt's Orthodox Church, stressed the importance of reviving values and ethics as an imminent necessity to maintain national unity and preserve the community's social fabric.

Egypt is a model of religious moderation and coexistence, Lebanon’s President Michel Aoun told Egypt's Coptic Pope Tawadros II Monday during a meeting in Cairo. In an official statement, a spokesperson from the Coptic Orthodox Church's said Aoun gave a short speech during his visit with an official delegation to the papal seat at Cairo's Saint Mark's Cathedral, expressing his happiness to visit Egypt.

One of the most famous Catholic churches in the Holy Land has reopened with a special mass two years after an arson attack blamed on Jewish extremists.

Jakarta's Christian governor will fight to cling on to his job at polls this week despite standing trial for blasphemy, in a saga that has fuelled concerns about religious intolerance in the Muslim-majority nation. Basuki Tjahaja Purnama will Wednesday face two prominent Muslim candidates in the race to lead the Indonesian capital, a megacity of 10 million, as local elections take place across the country.