CAIRO

At least three Egyptians died Monday when two buildings collapsed in separate incidents, police said, adding that several people were still trapped under the rubble. A three-storey building in the province of Qaliubiya, north of Cairo, collapsed overnight, killing three people and injuring three, a police official said.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has suggested that his detractors have lost their nerve, and asked God to calm them, in the latest verbal jab at Damascus over the the conflict in Lebanon. ”I hold my nerve and I am unflappable in the face of provocation. May God calm those who have lost their nerve,” Mubarak said in an interview to be published by the top-selling al-Ahram weekly.

The head of Egypt’s national railway authority has been sacked following a train crash in northern Egypt that left 58 people dead, security sources said on Tuesday. Transport Minister Mohamed Mansur announced late on Monday that Hanafy Abdel Qawi had been fired and his deputy Eid Mahran suspended pending an investigation into Monday’s crash.

At least 40 people were killed on Monday when two trains travelling on the same track collided in Egypt, a security source said. One train was heading for Cairo from Mansura 130km north of the capital while the other, on the same line, was coming from Benha, 50km to the north, the source said.

Arabs on Thursday wrote off the Rome meeting on Lebanon as a disappointment and accused Washington of subverting the will of the world for an immediate ceasefire between Israel and the guerrilla group Hezbollah. But some saw hope in signs that Washington was isolated and might have to change its position if its Israeli allies fail to make progress in their military campaign in south Lebanon.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak rejected calls for tougher action in response to Israel’s offensive in Lebanon, in comments carried by state-owned press on Wednesday. ”Those who urge Egypt to go to war to defend Lebanon or Hezbollah are not aware that the time of exterior adventures is over,” he told reporters on the flight back from talks with Saudi King Abdullah.

Osama bin Laden has defended attacks by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi against civilians, saying in a taped web message on Friday that the Jordanian militant was acting under al-Qaeda orders to kill anyone who backs the Americans in Iraq. Bin Laden paid tribute to the slain leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq in the 19-minute videotape.

Israel’s offensive in the Palestinian territories is drawing fierce accusations in neighbouring Egypt that the Jewish state is seeking to destabilise the region. While Egypt’s diplomacy has remained mum since the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier in the Gaza Strip triggered a military operation, Cairo newspapers are lashing out at Israel.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) urged Libya on Wednesday to investigate the suppression of a prison revolt 10 years ago during which hundreds of inmates are believed to have been killed. ”Hundreds of prisoners were apparently killed at Abu Salim prison” on June 28 and 29 1996, HRW’s Middle East and North Africa director Sarah Leah Whitson said in a statement.

Egypt’s Parliament has approved a controversial law on judicial reform that falls short of opposition demands but temporarily quiets a fierce campaign against the regime by the country’s judges. ”The law has curbed the powers of the Ministry of Justice, but as a jurist, I am pleased with that,” Justice Minister Mahmoud Abu Leil told Parliament on Monday.

The Egyptian government’s policy on low-income housing districts received mixed reactions from experts, with some praising it for providing basic utilities and others panning it for not addressing the root cause of slum growth. A new United Nations habitat report praises the government for investing in electricity, water and sanitation infrastructure in the country’s vast slum areas.

Egypt’s opposition Muslim Brotherhood movement on Thursday criticised Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas for his decision to hold a referendum on a proposal which calls for recognition of Israel. ”The effort to circumvent legitimate routes by imposing a document presented by certain detainees will only serve the Zionist enemy,” the group’s supreme guide Mohammed Mehdi Akef said.

The inquiry into the February 3 sinking of the ferry al-Salam 98, which went down with the loss of more than 1 000 lives, opened on Monday in the Red Sea port of Safaga, a legal source said. The hearing began in the absence of the main accused, Mamduh Ismail.

Sinai Bedouins have pledged their assistance to Egyptian security forces in their search for people suspected of involvement in deadly attacks on Red Sea tourist resorts in the last two years, the official news agency Mena reported. ”There is an agreement between all the tribe leaders of central Sinai to help the security forces,” said Abdallah Juhama, one of the elders of Sinai’s Tarabin tribe.

An internet audio tape attributed to Osama bin Laden said on Tuesday that Zacarias Moussaoui — the only person convicted in the United States for the September 11 attacks — had nothing to do with the operation. ”He had no connection at all with September 11,” Bin Laden said.

Egypt’s interior ministry said on Tuesday the Egyptian group which carried out three simultaneous suicide bombings in the Sinai last month received support from Palestinian militants in Gaza and Egypt. Several members of the Tawhid wal Jihad group blamed for the bombings went to the Gaza Strip for training, it said in a statement.

A leader of an Islamist group blamed for a spate of deadly attacks in tourist resorts in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula over the past two years was killed in an explosion on Friday, a security source said. Arafat Ouda Ali died as a device he tried to hurl at security forces closing in on his hideout on a Rafah farm exploded in his face.

Police cracked down on demonstrators in central Cairo, arresting 100 members of the Muslim Brotherhood, including one of its leaders, as they were protesting on Thursday near a Cairo court where two hearings for pro-reform figures were scheduled.

An elderly woman died of the H5N1 strain of bird flu in Egypt on Thursday, marking the country’s sixth fatal case of the virus in humans, a World Health Organisation official (WHO) said. ”We have some basic information that she was a 75-year-old woman from al-Minya” in southern Egypt, WHO regional health regulation officer John Jabbour told Agence France-Presse.

Somali officials on Tuesday blamed the latest violence in their lawless capital, Mogadishu, on the United States, which they accused of meddling in domestic affairs by funding an alliance of warlords. ”The US is behind [the latest violence] through its financial and military support of warlords,” said Somali Health Minister Abdel Aziz Sheikh Yussef.

Demonstrations in solidarity with two Egyptian judges facing disciplinary hearings on Thursday morning were forcefully put down and dispersed in downtown Cairo. At least ten thousand security force members prevented 2 000 activists from the Muslim Brotherhood and the left-leaning opposition umbrella movement, Kifaya/Enough, from demonstrating, said security sources.

The United Nations threatened on Friday to suspend relief operations in parts of Sudan’s war-ravaged Darfur region because of continued attacks against aid workers by rebel fighters. The UN blames the Sudan Liberation Army, the armed wing of the Sudan Liberation Movement, for a spate of attacks in north Darfur.

A third person has died from bird flu in Egypt, the hardest-hit non-Asian country in the world, as health officials struggled on Thursday to enforce preventive measures. Iman Mohammed Abdel Gawad, a 16-year-old girl from the northern governorate of Menufiya, died after being rushed to hospital on Wednesday suffering from high fever and shortness of breath.