CAIRO/LONDON (Reuters) - Military police idly guard the gates of Egypt's presidential palace in Heliopolis, built as a 400-room luxury hotel in 1910 and vacant since a popular uprising deposed Hosni Mubarak 15 months ago. Egyptians, who never stormed in to gawk and plunder their fallen leader's home as Tunisians and Libyans did last year, vote on May 23 and 24 for a new president, the latest stage of an uncertain transition guided bumpily by the military. ...

Posting views on Facebook and other social media sites delivers a powerful reward to the brain similar to the pleasure from food and sex, a Harvard study concludes.

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Tunisia's prime minister said on Thursday the economy grew 2 percent in the first quarter of 2012, climbing back from a contraction a year ago. "Despite the difficult conditions the country has gone through, it has achieved positive numbers in a short period of time. The growth average has risen from minus 1.8 percent (in 2011) to 2 percent," Hamadi Jebali told an economic conference in Beirut. An uprising in January 2011 forced former leader Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali to leave Tunisia after almost 23 years in power, sparking the "Arab Spring" revolts that have swept the ...

A Jewish pilgrimage to the oldest synagogue in Africa on Tunisia's Djerba island began Wednesday under tight security after it was cancelled last year following the revolution.

RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas warned on Tuesday that the death of any one of the hundreds of Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike in Israel would be a "disaster" and could trigger a backlash that might slip out of control. "It is very dangerous," Abbas told Reuters on a day when the Red Cross urged Israel to transfer to hospital six detainees who it said were close to death after not eating for two months. ...