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.

A nonymous militants killed a 55 year-old civilian, Saleh Hamed, inside the North Sinai city of Al-Arish on Saturday evening as he attempted to stop the kidnapping of his son, who was taken by the militants following the shooting, state-run newspaper Akhbar Al-Youm reported.

Two rockets landed in Baghdad's highly fortified Green Zone on Saturday night following clashes at anti-government protests that left five dead, according to Iraqi security and hospital officials.

An "Islamic State" (IS)-affiliated terrorist group claimed responsibility for firing rockets on Thursday towards Israel's Red Sea resort of Eilat from Egypt's Sinai peninsula, an attack that Israel said caused no damage or casualties.

Experts in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) warned US President Donald Trump that declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organisation "may fuel extremism", a POLITICO report revealed on Thursday.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and US President Donald Trump agreed in a phone call overnight to act jointly against Islamic State in the Syrian towns of al-Bab and Raqqa, both controlled by the militants, Turkish presidency sources said on Wednesday.

Suspected Islamic State gunmen killed at least six Afghan employees of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on Wednesday as they carried supplies in the north of the country to areas hit by deadly snow storms, government officials said.

Air strikes on Al-Qaeda's former affiliate in Syria on Tuesday killed 26 people in the country's northwest, most of them civilians, a monitoring group said.

At least 20 people were killed on Tuesday in a bomb blast outside the Supreme Court in the center of Afghanistan's capital, Kabul, government officials said, in what appeared to be the latest in a series of attacks on the judiciary.

Egyptian MP Tarek El-Khouly, a member of the Presidential Pardon Committee, said that he has received a “declaration of repentance” from a number of imprisoned members of the Muslim Brotherhood, which he will forward to the presidency. Speaking to Al-Ahram Arabic website, MP El-Khouly said that these messages from the Brotherhood prisoners were sent to him personally, since the pardon committee has already set criteria excluding those affiliated with the banned group from consideration for pardon.

The Council of Senior Scholars, the top body of Al-Azhar Institution, made a decision about the verbal divorce case on Sunday, confirming its validity if it meets the set conditions. In a statement, the council said this is what Muslims settled upon since the time of Prophet Mohamed.

Egyptian Christians can now take paid vacations from work to perform a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Naguib Gabriel – the lawyer who successfully challenged the constitutionality of an article in a 1978 law for civil servants that grants Muslims paid vacation to perform the Hajj – told Ahram Online on Sunday.

The Council of Senior Scholars, the top body of al-Azhar institution, convened in an emergency meeting on Sunday to discuss the case of verbal divorce potentially being eliminated. The meeting was headed by Grand Imam Ahmed al-Tayyeb.

Syrians fleeing the Islamic State (IS) militant group in the eastern city of Deir Ezzor are taking dangerous smuggling routes through mined territory to reach safety, but harsh conditions await near the Iraqi border.

Al-Qaeda is gaining ground in Yemen and could benefit from military actions like the deadly raid by elite US forces ordered by President Donald Trump, the International Crisis Group warned Thursday. "The Yemeni branch of Al-Qaeda is stronger than it has ever been," ICG said in a report documenting the spread of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).