North Africa

European Union leaders gathering for an extraordinary summit are facing calls from all sides to take emergency action to save lives in the Mediterranean, where hundreds of migrants are missing and feared drowned in recent days.

Foreign ministers of EU member states are set to discuss Sunday's incident in Mediterranean in which hundreds are feared dead.

A vessel carrying up to 700 migrants capsized late on Saturday off Libya. Only 28 have been rescued so far. A survivor is quoted by various news sources as saying there were as many as 950 people on board, about 50 of them children and nearly 200 women.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras urged the European Union on Sunday to urgently come up with a plan to tackle a mounting migrant humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean.

"The Mediterranean must stop being a graveyard sea and southern European countries a storage of human souls,» Tsipras said in a televised address.

When Arab League chief Nabil al-Arabi called March 9 for the creation of a "unified Arab force" to battle the spread of extremist groups, he actually used a rare figure of speech: A triple oxymoron.

Unified?

Each travelled more than 2,000 miles, Abou from impoverished Ivory Coast and Mahmud from Syria after Islamist militants besieged his hometown.
      
Each of them made it into Europe the only way he knew how: by land, past the fiercely guarded fence that closes off the Spanish city of Melilla from northern Morocco.
      

Arab countries of the Persian Gulf is planning to ramp up emegrency power network capacity by 2019 and looking to link the grid to Egypt and Turkey.

A bomb blast killed two Egyptian policemen near the foreign ministry in central Cairo on Sunday, a security official said.

'Poor: A Nubian Novel’ by Idris Ali, translated by Elliott Colla (The American University in Cairo Press, 220 pages, $19)

Police in Athens on Wednesday detained a 30-year-old Syrian man believed to be behind the abduction of a 41-year-old Sudanese national who was detained in an apartment near the city center for several days as his captors forced him to ask his relatives for money.

At least one person was killed in Egypt Thursday as police quashed attempts by supporters of ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi to commemorate the first anniversary of a brutal Cairo crackdown.