A longtime political activist and member of a semi-official rights body has backed calls to suspend death sentences in Egypt for three years as courts continue to hand down mass death sentences to Islamists accused of murder and terrorism.

Egyptian universities’ students will participate in the “Egypt Without Slums” workshop which will last for three years to carry out studies on ending the slums phenomenon in Egypt, said urban development minister Laila Iskander.

President Abdel-Fatah al-Sisi will meet with a number of chairpersons of political parties Tuesday to discuss the amendments made to the law regulating Egypt’s long-awaited parliament election, Youm7 reported.

The April 6 Youth Movement has on Wednesday called for demonstrations on June 10 to protest at policies undertaken by the regime in the last two years that led to the deterioration of economic conditions and the suffering of the poor.

The New York Times May 19th editorial “In Egypt, Deplorable death Sentences” starts with yet another outright fabrication.It claims that an Egyptian court has sentenced Mohamed Morsi and others to death. Had the editorial board chosen to apply basic standards of journalism, they would have disclosed that the judge actually set a date in early June to pronounce his sentence. Until that time, any reports as to what that sentence may be amount to nothing more than conjecture. Faithful to what has become its established policy, the Times again goes out of its way to absolve the Moslem Brotherhood of their crimes. At a time when the Brotherhood’s official media outlets are openly instigating their followers to violence and terrorism, this newspaper makes the claim that the Moslem Brotherhood “renounced violence in the 1970s” without providing a shred of evidence to that effect, and brushing aside the ample evidence to the opposite that has surfaced in recent years. In January of this year, the Moslim Brotherhood’s official website posted a statement in Arabic calling for a “long, uncompromising Jihad” against Egypt, while the Brotherhood-controlled TV called for the assassination of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El Sisi. Soon thereafter, terrorist attacks in North Sinai killed more than 30 and injured nearly 100. The Times editorial makes a clumsy attempt at reinterpreting these calls as an “invitation to continue to demonstrate peacefully”. I wonder how they would defend similar Moslem Brotherhood calls to target Westerners.

Hamdeen Sabahy, prominent Nasserite political figure, called Tuesday on boycotting Mobinil, an Egyptian company for mobile services, because it is owned by Orange, which Sabbahi said it deals with the Israeli army.

Egyptian authorities opened the Rafah crossing on Tuesday, for the first time in nearly 80 days, to allow stranded Palestinians to return to the Gaza Strip, witnesses and officials said.

Egypt has picked five banks to arrange fixed income investor meetings from Thursday ahead of a potential dollar-denominated bond issue, a document from lead arrangers showed on Tuesday.

The Electricity Ministry has raised an alert at all its production, transmission and distribution companies ahead of Ramadan, school and university final exams and high temperatures.

Egypt’s Attorney-General Hisham Barakat appealed the acquittal of 17 people of organizing a January illegal protest where activist Shaimaa al-Sabbagh was killed, Youm7 reported Tuesday.

Egypt’s Wafd Party has said that an internal rift between some of its members and party head El-Sayed El-Badawi is over, but these members have set certain conditions for reconciliation.

Egypt has taken legal actions to restore dozens of artifacts smuggled to Israel amid the rising illicit digging activities carried out in several Egyptian archaeological sites following the 2011 uprising, sources told Youm7.

Several farmers have decried the seizure of their lands by the state and businessmen, urging Egypt’s presidency to intervene.

The postponement of the Labour Syndicate elections will lead to more “tensions in labour circles, as well as increase the rate of strikes”, said Egyptian Democratic Social Party spokesperson Mohamed Arafat.

Egypt's top prosecutor referred on Monday the chairman of a newspaper to criminal court for "publishing false news" and illegally practicing journalism, alongside the newspaper's chief editor and one of its journalists.

Egyptian authorities will open the Rafah border crossing for two days on Tuesday and Wednesday allowing passengers to travel from Egypt into Gaza, although not the other way around, Egyptian security sources told Ma'an.

One hundred and forty eight Egyptians have recently returned to Egypt from Libya, according to Major General Al-Anany Hammouda, Marsa Matrouh's security chief. There were 106 people who arrived legally, while the remaining 43 crossed the borders surreptitiously.

An Egyptian Housing Ministry official source revealed that negotiations with the UAE's Arabtec to create one million housing units in Egypt has been permanently dismissed because no serious steps were taken by the company to implement the project, according to economic daily newspaper Al-Mal.

Social media users circulated a video Saturday showing two youths bullying an old man and torching his beard with a lighter; allegedly in Helwan, south of Cairo.

Two people burned to death in a huge fire that broke out Sunday in a residential building on Mohy el-Din Abu el-Ezz St. in Cairo’s Dokki district, Youm7 reported.

Egypt has given the private sector a green light to import natural gas or liquefied natural gas (LNG), a government official said, a step that could encourage private investment in the energy sector while easing energy shortages.