Egypt's opposition Muslim Brotherhood has said it will boycott municipal elections after being permitted to field only 20 candidates for thousands of seats. Mohammed Habib, the group's leader, said on Monday: "We call on the Egyptian people to boycott the municipal elections because of the executive's disregard for justice."

What began as a widespread call for a general strike ended Sunday as the police cracked down across the nation, dispatching thousands of riot troops, arresting more than 200 demonstrators and fighting with protesters in the north. While two schools were burned and more than 150 people were reported injured in the northern town of Mahalla al-Kobra, it was the eerie emptiness of the normally teeming streets of Cairo that signaled the depth of discontent with President Hosni Mubarak’s government.

Egyptian security forces detained 30 members of the opposition Muslim Brotherhood on Friday just days ahead of Egypt's local council elections, including a member of the group's governing Guidance Office, the group said. The detentions add to a growing crackdown that has seen more than 300 members of the country's most powerful opposition group picked up since Tuesday ahead of the April 8 vote, in which the Brotherhood is vying for seats against Egypt's ruling party.

A court in the Egyptian capital Cairo on Wednesday sent the country's most erudite and vocal editor to six months in prison for writing a story on the health of President Hosni Mubarak. Ibrahim Eissa - Chief Editor of 'Al-Dustur' daily - was found guilty of spreading false information on the state of Mr Mubarak, which according to prosecutors, could threaten national stability as well as damaged the country's economy.

Egyptian security men shot dead two African migrants on Thursday as they tried to slip across the frontier into Israel, bringing to 10 the number of migrants killed at the border this year, security sources said. The sources said security forces opened fire on the two men, both in their 30s and believed to be from Ivory Coast, after they refused orders to stop at the border.

The Iraqi Voices in Cairo is a website project under the auspices of the Forced Migration and Refugee Studies Program (FMRS). The Iraqi Voices in Cairo Project was formed by an association of reporters and researchers working together with the Iraqi community of Cairo. The goal of the project is to address a worldwide lack of humanitarian information about Iraqi refugees in Egypt. With an extensive international campaign, Iraqi Voices in Cairo aims to draw international attention to the Iraqi people who have been forced from their country into Egypt. The seminar will discuss the mandate of the project as well as the findings and goals for the future.

African migrants continue to attempt to cross the dangerous Sinai desert in an attempt to enter Israel as witnessed by the arrest of 13 Africans on Sunday by Egyptian police who said they were trying to sneak into Israel. Migrants, refugees and asylum seekers have repeatedly said they see Israel as a place for a better life. The 13 Africans arrested on Sunday "were from Eritrea, Sudan, Ghana and the Ivory Coast," an official told AHN Media Corporation. According to the official, they were arrested near the Rafah border crossing with Gaza.

The Egyptian government’s new indictments against several men arrested apparently on suspicion of having HIV violate their basic rights and deeply undermine Egypt’s fight against HIV/AIDS, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch has said. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International called on Egyptian officials to quash the indictments and overturn the convictions of four others who were sentenced in February 2008 to one-year prison terms.

HIV positive status is still being associated with homosexuality in Egypt, hence punishable. This came in the wake of arrest of twelve men after one of them disclosed to police that he was living with Aids, and was instantly condemned for homosexuality.

The Pan African Youth Leadership Forum II will be a one-week program to be held in Egypt in June 2008.The Pan African Youth Leadership Forum II is a follow up to the first Pan African Youth Leadership Forum (PAYLF), "Democracy in Africa: Renewing the Vision," which was held in Accra, Ghana, June 18 – 25, 2007. The PAYLF will be held annually to take stock of achievements, analyze the current political and economic situation in Africa, make recommendations and develop an agenda which will be presented to leaders present at the African Union Heads of State summit.

Africa and Middle East Refugee Assistance (AMERA) is seeking a qualified and dynamic legal officer for the deputy RSD team leader position. The job of the Deputy RSD team leader is full-time for 35 hours per week. S/he works under the day-to-day supervision of the RSD team leader. Application deadline: March 27 2008.

Eight Egyptian men who were arrested and forced to undergo HIV tests, and the subsequent torture of the two who tested HIV-positive, has unleashed a storm of controversy in a country where people still know very little about the virus. "You can find people who know what you are talking about when you talk about AIDS, but I could say that most people who live here don't know the difference between a person with HIV and a person with AIDS," said UNAIDS Country Officer Wessam El-Beih.

One year ago, Egyptian blogger Karim Amer was sentenced to four years' imprisonment for the "crime" of publishing on the internet material critical of Islam and President Mubarak. The then 23-year-old former al-Azhar University student was sentenced on 22 February 2007 and the Court of Appeal confirmed the sentence on 12 March of the same year.

Workers at the Ghazl el-Mahalla textile mill in Egypt staged a mass demonstration last Sunday, calling for the end of the US-backed regime of Hosni Mubarak. The textile mill is the biggest in the Middle East. Its 27,000-strong workforce has been instrumental in forcing the regime into making economic concessions.

Egyptian police detained dozens of members of the Muslim Brotherhood on Wednesday, expanding a crackdown on the country's strongest opposition group ahead of local elections in April. The Islamist group, which holds one fifth of the seats in Parliament, poses the most serious challenge to the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) in the April 8 elections for local councils, which the NDP has dominated for years.

Egyptian security forces shot dead a Sudanese man trying to cross into Israel on Tuesday. A total of five African migrants have now been killed crossing the border so far this year. Security officials said 50-year-old Ermeniry Khasheef was shot in the back after he ignored orders to stop as he attempted to cross barbed wire near the border town of Rafah.

The recent ruling by Egypt's Supreme Administrative Court allowing 12 Christian converts to Islam to "re-convert" back to Christianity is a welcomed rejection to the government's policy of religious discrimination, Human Rights Watch and the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) said today. The two organizations urged the government to take immediate steps to correct its systematic policy of forcing converts from Islam to accept a religious identity that was not their own in order to obtain essential identification documents.

A series of arrests in Cairo sparked by one man’s admission to police that he was HIV-positive endangers public health as well as human rights, Human Rights Watch has said. Human Rights Watch called on Egyptian authorities to overturn the convictions of four men for the “habitual practice of debauchery,” and to free four others who are held pending trial. The government should end arbitrary arrests based on HIV status and take steps to end prejudice and misinformation about HIV/AIDS.

The Egyptian government has made information and communications technologies (ICTs) a developmental priority and has modernised and upgraded the sector’s infrastructure, services, regulations and human resource capacity. Egypt had an antiquated ICT infrastructure until the early 1990s. People waited sometimes for years to have fixed phone lines installed, and the old copper infrastructure made connections unstable.

A lesbian sex scene in an Egyptian film has outraged religious scholars, who are telling people not to watch the 'sinful' movie. An Islamic Studies professor at Cairo University wants the Egyptian authorities to prosecute the director and both actresses involved in the scene, Ghada Abdel-Razeq and Sumaya Al-Khashab.