CAIRO

The Sudanese government and the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), an umbrella grouping of opposition groups, signed a political agreement in Cairo ahead of sealing a final deal, diplomats said on Monday. The talks leading up to the agreement with the country’s largest exiled political bloc were held under the auspices of Egypt.

Sudan officially ends its two-decade southern civil war next week with the signing of a peace deal. Amid the jubilation is hope that ending one war may spark a solution to the country’s second — in western Darfur, where a separate but equally brutal conflict has led to a massive humanitarian crisis.

A man identified as Osama bin Laden bitterly criticised the Saudi regime in an audiotape posted on an Islamic website on Thursday. The speaker says that while Saudi leaders blame ”holy warriors” for trouble in the kingdom, ”the truth is that the whole responsibility falls on the shoulders of the regime”.

Scores of Egyptians protested across the country on Tuesday against the signing of a strategic trade and industry accord between Egypt and Israel, slamming the agreement as a form of colonialism. In Cairo, an estimated 50 protesters gathered at the headquarters of the journalists’ union to denounce the agreement.

One of the two main rebel groups in Sudan’s war-torn Darfur region said on Wednesday that it considered truce agreements it signed with the Khartoum government effectively over and warned i t would resume fighting. ”All the agreements signed in Abuja and Ndjamena have broken down,” Mahjoub Hussein, spokesman for the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM), said.

The Egyptian capital, Cairo, was plagued on Wednesday by a huge swarm of locusts, but officials claimed the situation was under control. The locusts, numbering tens of thousands, moved across Cairo’s downtown area and continued heading south toward the agricultural areas of Helwan and Giza.

Fathi Arafat, one of ailing Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s brothers, is being treated in a Cairo hospital for terminal cancer, Palestinian sources said on Tuesday. The 67-year-old, whose cancer was diagnosed several years ago, is a trained doctor and was one of the founders of the Palestinian Red Crescent in 1968.

Muslims in the Arab world began marking Ramadan on Friday, a holy month of giving and prayer, clouded by relentless violence across Iraq and the deadliest Israeli raid against the Gaza Strip. Libya and Nigeria took the lead by kicking off the holiest month in the Muslim calendar on Thursday.

Saudi authorities do not know how to fine a Saudi restaurant owner who took advantage of an unclear employment law to employ two Saudi women, the London-based al-Hayat newspaper said on Monday. Restaurant owner Nabil Ramadan created a commotion last month in the quiet coastal city of Sihat in eastern Saudi Arabia when news spread that there were women working at his venue.

A top official from Sudan’s ruling party said on Thursday the government will not disarm ”Arab tribes” in the troubled Darfur region, saying they are not all members of the feared Janjaweed militia. ”The government and international community are not in agreement over the definition of the Janjaweed,” a National Congress spokesperson said.

Egyptian Mohammed Hussein Heikal has three feet — considering that each of his feet is a foot and a half (45,5cm) long — and is about to get his first pair of shoes at the age of 51. At a towering 7,5 feet (2,3m) in height, Mohammed is reputedly Egypt’s tallest man, and his gargantuan proportions have been a life-long source of grief.

Darfur burst into the news as a land of Arab-on-African violence, but a singer from the troubled region of Sudan says the two communities are as inextricably intertwined as the music they share, a distinctive blend of Arab tunes and African rhythms.

Egypt on Monday began airlifting relief aid to millions of Sudanese people in dire need for food, medicine and other basics due to a 17-month conflict in the western Darfur region. The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the supplies were donated by the Egyptian Red Crescent with the help of the Defence Ministry.

Egypt’s minister of foreign affairs does not believe France’s deployment of troops to Chad, where hundreds of thousands have sought refuge from violence in neighbouring Sudan, foreshadows military intervention in the region. Egypt and other Arabs have looked with suspicion on Western moves regarding Sudan.

Egypt’s increasing Budget deficit caused by its living above its means for years is now ringing alarm bells in the government, which is facing unpalatable measures to lower the national debt. A number of parliamentary deputies have begun pressing the authorities in public speeches to take radical steps.

The head of the main rebel force in Sudan’s Darfur region has threatened to extend a war affecting more than a million people to other areas if the government refuses to include it in all-round peace talks. ”The government continues to bomb civilian targets … and its militias are burning villages, killing civilians and raping women,” the leader said.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak strongly criticised Tunisia on Monday for cancelling the Arab summit it was due to hold this week, as he began talks with other leaders on saving the conference, probably by hosting it himself. Sources close to Mubarak’s staff said Bahrain, Jordan and Saudi Arabia backed the Egyptian move.

Egyptian authorities have entrapped, arrested and tortured hundreds of gay men suspected of engaging in consensual homosexual sex, a New York-based human rights group claimed in a report released on Monday that demands an end to such actions.

At least 14 people were killed, most of them policemen and firefighters, when a blazing 12-storey tower block collapsed on emergency services in a Cairo suburb, police said on Tuesday. Rescue teams had accounted for all the missing policemen and firefighters but could not rule out that civilians may still be under the rubble.

Governments that employ e-government will not eliminate jobs but will provide their citizens with a more efficient and transparent administration, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said on Sunday.

An Egyptian charter plane with 135 passengers and six crew members on board crashed into the Red Sea early on Saturday as it was headed for the coastal resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, Cairo airport officials said. Most of the passengers were French tourists.

Sudanese government warplanes killed 47 civilians and wounded 37 others during bombing raids on villages in western Sudan’s Darfur region, rebel leader Abdel Wahed Mohammed Ahmed al-Nur said on Tuesday. The attacks killed ”mostly women and children”, said Ahmed al-Nur.

The 100-year-old Egyptian Museum has taken a leap into the modern era with the launch of digital tour guides. But while museum officials laud them as a necessary step forward, many tourists still might prefer the human option.

Egypt’s antiquities chief will continue to press the British Museum to loan the 2 200-year-old Rosetta Stone to Cairo for a limited time, though British curators say they can’t let a piece central to their collection go.

Belgian archaeologists have for the first time used magnetic survey techniques to unearth the remains of an ancient Egyptian tomb complex at Deir el-Bersha in Minya, 300 kilometres south of Cairo.

Egypt will highlight the battle against the practice of female genital mutilation when it hosts campaigners from African and Arab countries later this month.

Egypt’s chief antiquarian is dismissing a new theory that Queen Nefertiti could have been buried in the Valley of the Kings, doubting that a political outcast like her could have enjoyed such an honour.