BERLIN: Egypt’s long-standing President Hosni Mubarak said Thursday former UN atomic watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei could run in the 2011 presidential election as long as he respected the constitution.

ElBaradei, emerging as Egypt’s most high-profile dissident, has called for an amendment of the constitution which includes rules that would make it difficult for him to challenge Mubarak at the ballot box.

“If he wants to join a party, he could choose whichever one he wants,” Mubarak told reporters during a visit to Germany, according to a translation of his comments in Arabic.

“If he wants to be a candidate for that party (at the presidential elections), he could do that. If he wants to stand as an independent candidate, he could do that,” he said.

“The only thing is that he must respect the constitution,” he said, adding the country “does not need a new hero”.

Under Egyptian law, a presidential candidate is required to have been a leading member of a party for at least one year and for the party to have existed for at least five years.

As an independent, ElBaradei would need the backing of at least 250 elected officials from parliament’s upper and lower houses and from municipal councils — all bodies dominated by Mubarak’s National Democratic Party.

ElBaradei last month he flew to Cairo to a rapturous welcome from supporters and formed the National Association for Change, before leaving Egypt again. He is due to return.

He has said he would run for president on condition that the constitution is amended.

The 67-year-old former chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency has also called for democratic reforms of the Egyptian regime which Mubarak, 81, has headed for nearly three decades.

Mubarak met journalists after talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

He is due to have medical tests in the city of Heidelberg Friday after suffering gall bladder pain, Egypt public television announced Thursday in a rare statement on the leader’s health, which is almost taboo.

The American Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen has accused Iran of being responsible for causing instability in the Middle East.

During his meeting with the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and other senior Egyptian officials, Mullen said that the nuclear program and polices of Iran are dangerous for the

An al-Qaeda website has denied the killing of its six leaders in air raids in Yemen.
The website has claimed that no al-Qaeda leader was killed in the air strafe; however, added that some of them got injured. The Yemen government claimed on Friday that as many as six al-Qaeda leaders including its chief in Yemen Qassem al-Rimi, Ayed al-Shabwani, Ammar al-Waili, Saleh al-Tais, Egyptian Ibrahim Mohammed Saleh al-Banna and an unidentified sixth person were killed in an air raid.

WASHINTON: Operation of Lockheed Martin’s F-16 production line in Fort Worth could be extended “perhaps another year” as a result of an agreement, announced Tuesday, under which Egypt would buy up to 24 of the jet fighters, company spokesman Joe Stout said.

“Right now, production in Fort Worth extends through the first quarter of 2012,” he said. “It extends it perhaps another year. … It’s very good news.”

Lockheed has about 2,100 employees in Fort Worth building the venerable F-16 — the world’s most widely flown jet fighter — at a rate of about two planes per month.

The U.S. government signed an agreement with Egypt on Dec. 24 to sell the planes to the African nation, and the Pentagon had notified Congress of the possible sale in October, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday.

Stout said Lockheed is expected to enter into a contract with the U.S. government, probably in the first quarter of next year, to produce the planes for Egypt. With contract negotiations ahead, the specific value of the contract isn’t yet known, Stout said.

Production of the planes for Egypt is expected to take about three years from the signing of the contract, Stout said. That could extend the Fort Worth plant’s F-16 production line through the first quarter of 2013, he said.

This is the second piece of good news for Fort Worth’s F-16 operations in a week.

On Dec. 22, Lockheed was awarded an $841.9 million contract to complete production of 24 F-16 fighters for Morocco, as well as for electronic warfare gear and support equipment.

Lockheed Martin said Tuesday that it is “pleased that the U.S. and Egyptian governments have reached agreement” on a program to deliver F-16s to the Egyptian air force. “Egypt has acquired more than 200 F-16s in the past, in six previous orders, and is a valued customer,” the Bethesda, Md.-based company said.

CAIRO: Al-Zawahri Blasts Obama, US Arab Allies, Al-Qaida’s deputy leader has accused President Barack Obama of cheating the Arab world by failing to advance Middle East peace talks.

In a new Internet posting, Ayman Al-Zawahri also scoffs at key American allies in the region — the Egyptian president and the Jordanian king — for making peace with Israel.

The 25-minute audio message focuses on Obama.

Al-Zawahri says the U.S. president’s Mideast policy is “another cycle in the Crusader and Zionist campaign to enslave and humiliate us.”

Al-Zawahri also urged Muslims and Palestinians to wage holy war outside Israel and the Palestinian territories, and praised Muslim militants fighting in Pakistan.

The authenticity of Monday’s message could not be independently confirmed.

GAZA: Israeli planes carried out air strikes against targets in the Gaza Strip on Sunday, injuring seven Palestinians, Palestinian medical workers said.

An army spokesman said the strikes, which occurred after a rocket fired from the Hamas-run enclave landed in Israel, had targeted two factories in the central and northern Gaza used to make weapons and a smuggling tunnel under the border with Egypt.

Palestinian witnesses and medical workers said the targets included a metal foundry in the central Gaza Strip, a caravan in the north and smuggling tunnels in the south.

The attacks occurred one day after Hamas said it had reached an agreement with smaller armed groups in the territory to halt sporadic rocket fire towards Israel, which often responds with air strikes.

The army spokesman said the air strikes were in response to a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip on Saturday. It landed near the city of Sderot, causing no injuries or damage, he said.

Calm along the Israel-Gaza frontier has been largely maintained since Israel ended a 22-day war against Hamas in the territory in January with the aim of halting daily rocket fire.

The Israeli military usually responds to sporadic rocket attacks by launching air strikes against tunnels under the Egyptian border used to smuggle goods and weapons into Gaza.

Egypt has been trying to mediate a prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas that would include the release of a captured Israeli soldier held in Gaza since 2006 in return for hundreds of Palestinians jailed in Israel.

Khloe Kardashian Wedding pictures, Lamar Odom, Khloe Kardashian’s engagement was far from ordinary.

“Khloe keeps saying she does not want a traditional wedding,” Jenner, who raised Khloe from the age of five, told reporters at the opening of Palazzo Las Vegas’s Lagasse Stadium Friday. “She does not want the first dance thing. There is no maid of honor as of right now.”

Khloe Kardashian was just married to NBA player Lamar Odom, reportedly that Kris Jenner who is Khloe’s mom and manager brokered a deal with OK! magazine to sell Khloe’s wedding pictures for $300, 000.

Lamar Odom, Khloe’s husband will not get any money from the deal. So, Khloe Kardashian just landed a $300,000 payday for getting married.

The hastily planned wedding is coming just one months after the couple started dating. The wedding will reportedly be televised on her hit show Keeping Up With the Kardashian’s for the new season.

They report that paparazzi and other bootleg photographers most likely tried to get shots,so we could see some surface online,anyways.Khloe Kardashian Wedding Pictures

Karine Bakhoum, According to Wikipedia, Karine Bakhoum is an Egyptian American chef and currently one of the regular judges on Iron Chef America, a television program on the Food Network.

WASHINGTON: Mohamed ElBaradei, the outgoing head of the UN atomic watchdog, called the threat from Iran “hyped” and said there was no evidence that the Islamic republic will soon have nuclear weapons. In an interview released Tuesday, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) hit back at critics who accuse the Egyptian of covering up Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

“In many ways, I think the threat has been hyped,” ElBaradei told the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a Chicago-based magazine critical of nuclear weapons. “Yes, there’s concern about Iran’s future intentions and Iran needs to be more transparent with the IAEA and international community,” he said. “But the idea that we’ll wake up tomorrow and Iran will have a nuclear weapon is an idea that isn’t supported by the facts as we have seen them so far,” he said.

In a report last week, the IAEA said that Iran had slowed production of enriched uranium, which can be used to make a nuclear bomb, and agreed to tighter monitoring of its enrichment plant. The United States downplayed the report, saying that Iran was still not co-operating fully with the UN inspectors.

Israel’s Haaretz newspaper said that the IAEA report did not include a classified annex incriminating Iran. Israel has long been critical of ElBaradei and asked in 2007 that he be fired. ElBaradei, who along with the IAEA as an institution won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005, rejected the criticism.”About Iran, I’ve been told, ‘Mind your own business; you’re a technician.’ And yet, at other times, on other matters, I have been told that I’m the custodian of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty – sometimes by the very people who tell me to mind my own business when it comes to Iran,” he said. “I don’t put much stock in either designation. I’m neither a custodian nor a technician; I’m merely someone who is trying to do his job,” he said. ElBaradei steps down at the end of November, handing over to Yukiya Amano, a veteran Japanese diplomat.

JERUSALEM: The Israeli army says its soldiers mistakenly shot and wounded an Egyptian policeman along the border between the two countries.

The army says a routine patrol on Monday morning identified a suspicious, armed figure at the border.

It says that when the Israeli troops challenged the man, he cocked his weapon — prompting the soldiers to open fire.

The army says the soldiers only realized it was an Egyptian policeman after the shooting. A joint Israeli-Egyptian team is investigating the shooting.

There was no immediate comment from Egyptian officials.

The incident occurred south of the volatile Gaza Strip in a border region that has been largely peaceful since Israel and Egypt signed a peace deal in 1979.