German police have raided properties linked to an ultra-conservative Islamic organisation after the interior minister banned the group.

France’s prime minister has rejected suggestions that anti-terrorism authorities fell down on the job in monitoring a radical Islamist who gunned down seven people in a wave of killings that revolted the country.

EVEN when the Arab Spring was in its faltering infancy, concerns were raised about who or what would replace the regimes toppled by popular, relatively peaceful revolution.

WOMEN in Cairo’s Coptic hospital wailed for their dead and Christians accused Egypt’s generals of failing to protect them from strict Islamists after 25 people, most of them Coptic demonstrators, were killed in clashes with troops.

More than two dozen Islamic extremists involved in a deadly fire fight with police this month had blueprints of foreign embassies and documents naming foreign envoys, Tunisia’s official news agency quoted the interior minister as saying today.

The Algerian army is hunting a group of armed Islamic rebels hiding in the eastern scrubland that is believed to count two al-Qaida members among its ranks.