Egypt's military ruler decreed on Sunday that multi-phase elections for parliament's consultative upper house, the Shoura, will be held over a shorter period, effectively speeding up steps towards drafting a new constitution.

The elections, which had been due to take place in three phases between January 29 and March 11, will now be done in two steps, wrapping up on February 22, according to the decree by Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi quoted by state news agency MENA.

Thousands of Egyptians packed Cairo's Tahrir Square under a blaze of fireworks to ring in the New Year, capping a roller coaster year of political upheaval and deadly clashes but also the first steps towards democratic rule.

"We're here to welcome the New Year together, Christians and Muslims," said one woman holding an Egyptian flag.

Sectarian clashes broke out in the southern Egyptian province of Assiut after a Christian student posted a drawing of the Muslim prophet on the Internet, officials said on Saturday.

The clashes, which spread to three villages, saw several Christian homes burned and left five police officers injured, a security official told Agence France Presse.

The German government summoned the Egyptian ambassador to Berlin Friday over the "unacceptable" raid by Cairo police of a German political foundation, a foreign ministry spokesman said.

The spokesman, Andreas Peschke, said Berlin was troubled by the searches Thursday targeting the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, which has close ties to Angela Merkel's conservative party, and other local and foreign rights groups.

A criminal court in Cairo on Thursday acquitted five police officers who had been charged in connection with the deaths of protesters during the popular uprising that ousted Hosni Mubarak.

The officers had been accused of killing six demonstrators near a police station in the Sayeda Zeinab neighborhood of central Cairo, a judicial source said.

Egyptian police raided more than a dozen offices belonging to local and foreign rights groups on Thursday, as part of an investigation into alleged illicit foreign funding, an official statement said, drawing sharp criticism from Washington.

At least two U.S. rights groups -- the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI) -- are being targeted by the operation, judicial sources said.

Palestinian militants fired a rocket at southern Israel on Thursday morning, hours after Israeli warplanes attacked "terror sites" inside the Gaza Strip, the army said.

"A rocket fired from Gaza exploded in an open field in the Eshkol region," a military spokesman told Agence France Presse.

The murder trial of Egypt's former president Hosni Mubarak resumed Wednesday after a three-month hiatus that saw the ousted strongman's fate eclipsed by deadly clashes and an Islamist election victory.

Mubarak risks the death sentence if he is found to have been complicit in the killings of some 850 people who died during protests that overthrew him in February.

An Egyptian court ordered the Egyptian army on Tuesday to stop forced virginity tests on female detainees, months after the practice sparked a national outcry and stained the ruling military's reputation.

The Cairo Administrative Court ruled in favor of Samira Ibrahim, who sued the army over the practice, slammed by rights groups as torture and sexual violence.

Canada is concerned that forces worse than deposed strongman Hosni Mubarak could rise to power in a newly democratic Egypt, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in an interview.

"There are obviously forces who want democracy and progressive change (in Egypt), but there are clearly some forces that would want something that's probably worse than what we had before," he said in a taped interview with CTV News to be aired Monday.