The Gaza-based Islamist group Hamas and president Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) have agreed to a unity pact, both sides announced in a joint news conference yesterday.

A day before Egypt’s deposed Islamist president goes on trial, US secretary of state John Kerry expressed guarded optimism yesterday about a return to democracy in the country, as he began a tour partly aimed at easing tensions with Arab powers.

US Secretary of State John Kerry is in Cairo today pressing for reforms during the highest-level American visit to Egypt since the removal of the country’s first democratically elected president.

Syrian government forces bombed a strategic rebel town in the country’s north for the third straight day, pounding it with airstrikes that killed at least five people, activists said.

Egypt’s interim president is swearing in a new cabinet, the first since the removal of his predecessor by the military nearly two weeks ago.