Cairo - The headquarters of Egypt's opposition al-Ghad party were set on fire on Thursday amid clashes between rival factions in the party, security sources told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur, dpa.
Twelve fire trucks were called in to extinguish the flames in the party's offices in downtown Cairo.
The clashes involved supporters of the party's chief Ayman Nour and his deputy Moussa Moustafa Moussa, in their ongoing dispute over who should lead the party. The dispute has been going on since September 2005.
Monte Carlo - The IAAF, the governing body of world athletics, has imposed two-year doping bans on eight Russian athletes for testing positive a varied of substances, including the banned blood-booster EPO.
It emerged Thursday that the athletes are mostly from the sport of walking and include Vladimir Kanaykin, the 20-kilometre walk world record holder, and Alexsey Voyevodin, 50km bronze medalist at the Athens Olympics in 2004, who both tested positive for EPO in an out- of-competition test in Saransk in April.
Tokyo - Asian stocks took a big dive Thursday, reacting to a sharp fall overnight on Wall Street and wiping away gains from earlier in the week.
The largest falls in Asia were seen in Hong Kong and Seoul. Hong Kong shares plunged 7.08 per cent as the blue-chip Hang Seng Index lost 1,050.12 points to close at
13,790.04.
The losses came 24 hours after the index surged by more than 3 per cent on news of Barack Obama's win in Tuesday's US presidential election.
Harare - Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's government promised it would repay an international donor organisation 6.5 million US dollars that was meant for the country's anti-malaria campaign but disappeared, a local newspaper reported Thursday.
The money was part of a 103-million-dollar grant from the Geneva-based Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, 28.5 million dollars of which was destined for the health ministry for prevention and treatment of malaria.
Beirut - Lebabon's Shiite House speaker Nabih Berri, who is also close to the radical Shiite Hezbollah, hailed Thursday the election of Barack Obama as the next US president, urging him to push forward Middle East peace process.
"The new president should start by resolving the Middle East crisis," Berri was quoted as saying in a statement.
Cairo - The headquarters of Egypt's opposition al-Ghad party were set on fire on Thursday amid clashes between rival factions in the party, security sources told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur, dpa.
Monte Carlo - The IAAF, the governing body of world athletics, has imposed two-year doping bans on eight Russian athletes for testing positive a varied of substances, including the banned blood-booster EPO.
Tokyo - Asian stocks took a big dive Thursday, reacting to a sharp fall overnight on Wall Street and wiping away gains from earlier in the week.
Harare - Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's government promised it would repay an international donor organisation 6.5 million US dollars that was meant for the country's anti-malaria campaign but disappeared, a local newspaper reported Thursday.
Beirut - Lebabon's Shiite House speaker Nabih Berri, who is also close to the radical Shiite Hezbollah, hailed Thursday the election of Barack Obama as the next US president, urging him to push forward Middle East peace process.
