The head of Egypt's press syndicate and two colleagues were in custody Monday after being charged with harboring journalists and publishing false news, a lawyer and one of them said.

The arrests, which Amnesty International denounced as a "draconian clampdown" on media freedom in Egypt, comes weeks after the arrest of two reporters on allegations of incitement to protest.

An Egyptian court Monday sentenced the Muslim Brotherhood's leader and 35 other people to life in prison over violent clashes after the army overthrew Islamist president Mohamed Morsi, a judicial official said.

Mohamed Badie, the Brotherhood's supreme guide, has already been sentenced to death and prison terms in other trials.

France expressed its "deepest regret" Wednesday at a decision by the Egyptian authorities to expel a journalist working for the French Catholic daily La Croix.

Correspondent Remy Pigaglio was put on a plane out of the country "for no reason", the newspaper's publication director Guillaume Goubert told AFP.

An Egyptian appeals court has overturned five-year prison sentences for 47 people for participating in unauthorized protests, but upheld fines of more than $11,000 each, judicial officials said Wednesday.

The defendants were among more than 150 people jailed in mid-May in connection with demonstrations on April 25 against Egypt's decision to hand over two Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia.

Amnesty International has accused nearly half of the European Union's members of fueling killings and torture among other abuses in Egypt through arms exports, in a report issued on Wednesday.

International organizations have accused Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi of running an ultra-authoritarian and repressive regime since he deposed his democratically elected Islamist predecessor Mohamed Morsi in 2013.

Al-Azhar's Grand Imam Ahmed al-Tayeb, who had a historic meeting with Pope Francis on Monday, has been on a mission to update Islamic thought while championing classical scholarship against jihadist ideologues.

The 70-year old Tayeb was appointed by ousted president Hosni Mubarak in 2010, and as a senior member of the strongman's National Democratic Party, was widely viewed as possibly another compliant cleric of the state.

Smoke was detected inside an EgyptAir plane shortly before it plunged into the Mediterranean with 66 people on board, investigators said Saturday, offering clues but no answers about why it crashed.

The Airbus A320 had been flying from Paris to Cairo early Thursday when it plummeted and turned full circle before vanishing from radar screens, without its crew sending a distress signal.

Egyptian prosecutors on Wednesday referred nine policemen to trial for allegedly using violence against two doctors at a public hospital when they refused to falsify a medical report, officials said.

January's incident in Cairo's northern district of Matareya caused a major backlash, with thousands of doctors later demonstrating outside their union headquarters in the city.

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said Tuesday there is now a "real opportunity" for an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement that would also lead to warmer ties between Egypt and the Jewish state.

In a live televised speech also addressed to the Palestinians and Israelis, Sisi urged them to draw hope from the "real and stable peace" between Israel and Egypt.

Egyptian courts have handed out jail sentences on the weekend to 152 people for taking part in unlicensed anti-government protests, judicial officials and lawyers said on Sunday.

The rulings were issued on Saturday by separate courts, with a first group of 51 people sentenced to two years in jail and later in the evening 151 others given five-year sentences for the same reasons.