Cairo - Israel has deployed about 3,000 dogs on the Egyptian-Israeli border, witnesses said on Thursday.

The dogs were deployed in the centre of the Sinai peninsula to protect the advanced early warning radar system Israel recently received from the US.

The dogs are also intended to prevent Africans trying to migrate into Israel to find jobs.

Cairo  - Israel's new government will continue negotiations with the Palestinian government and believes that reaching a peace agreement before the end the year is possible, Israeli President Shimon Peres said on Thursday.

"We hope to see an independent Palestinian state to live side by side with Israel in peace and security," said Peres in a press conference during an Israeli-Egyptian summit in the Egyptian Red Sea city of Sharm el-Sheikh.

Peres said the chances of reaching a peace agreement with the Palestinian government were high, without giving specifics.

London - The Egyptian millionaire owner of the Harrods department store in London, Mohamed al-Fayed, has been questioned by police over allegations of sexual assault, British media reports said Wednesday.

They said the 75-year-old father of the late Princess Diana's friend, Dodi, had voluntarily subjected himself to questioning over reported claims that a 15-year-old girl was sexually assaulted at business premises in central London last May.

The reports said al-Fayed had not been detained. They quoted police as confirming that a man had been questioned in the case, but the police declined to identify him.

Cairo - The US will not review its policy of isolating Syria because Damascus has not moved far enough to allay US fears over its role in the Middle East, US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, David Welch, said in an interview Wednesday.

Syria's move to establish diplomatic relations with Lebanon is "a start" but is not enough to convince Washington to change its policy, Welch told the pan-Arab London-based Asharq al-Awsat newspaper.

In mid-October Syria initiated diplomatic ties with Lebanon for the first time since independence 60 years ago.

Cairo - Egyptian Human Rights activist and long-term democracy advocate Saad Eddin Ibrahim said he would meet the new US president on December 6, with a delegation that represents several continents.

The sociology professor told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa in a telephone interview that "it has been agreed with the teams of both Democratic presidential candidate Barak Obama and his Republican rival John McCain to hold a meeting with whoever wins the election."

Representatives from Europe, China, Africa, Latin America and the Arab world will meet the next president, with former US president Jimmy Carter and current incumbent George W Bush, to discuss US foreign policy and present the group's diversified points of view.

Cairo- Egyptian ministers emphasized terms including "healthy," "safe" and "sound" to describe the local economy during a two-day Euromoney business conference in Cairo, which concluded Tuesday.

The theme that they conveyed was: "We are not worried."

As panic spreads in markets worldwide amid the international economic slowdown, the local officials laboured to reassure investors about Egypt as a place with ample opportunities.