Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi named a liberal Christian, a hardline Islamist and a woman as assistants Monday as he sought to reach out beyond his power base in the Muslim Brotherhood to rival groups.

Morsi's appointments, announced just before he left for China on a key trip abroad, were seen as a balancing act between Egypt's Coptic minority, which has felt threatened by Morsi's Islamist roots, and the Brotherhood's ultra-conservative Salafist rivals.

Syrian opposition activists have drafted a political roadmap after a possible ouster of President Bashar Assad, drawing on examples from other states that moved to democracy such as South Africa.

The working group, which brought together a broad spectrum of political organizations and religious faiths, produced a report called "The Day After Project: Supporting a Democratic Transition in Syria".

Turkish media on Monday relayed the video of a Turkish journalist missing in neighboring Syria for a week and reportedly being held by troops loyal to President Bashar Assad.

The video was broadcast by Syria's al-Ikhbariya news channel and relayed by Turkey's private NTV television where Cuneyt Unal, who speaks in Turkish with Arabic subtitles, says he crossed into Aleppo together with armed groups from Chechnya, Libya, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

The Congress for the Republic, the party of the Tunisian president, has re-elected as secretary general an ex-minister who quit the government in June, amid simmering tensions with the ruling Islamist party.

The CPR announced early on Monday, at the end of its annual conference, that Mohammed Abbou, who resigned as administrative reform minister in June over obstacles in the fight against corruption, would remain head of the party.

Egyptian authorities have denied entry to the daughter of the jailed symbol of the Bahraini opposition movement, Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, Cairo airport sources said on Monday.

Maryam al-Khawaja flew straight back to Copenhagen after arriving in Cairo on Sunday, having been denied entry "for security reasons," the sources said.

Saudi King Abdullah arrived in Casablanca on Monday for a private visit to Morocco, official sources said.

The 88-year-old monarch was received at the airport by senior Moroccan dignitaries, the official MAP news agency reported.

When the Syrian uprising started, Fatima Zahra sent her five sons off to join the rebel forces and battle the regime, but she wanted to find a way to do more.

So over the course of several months, she transformed her house into a rear base of support for the Free Syrian Army, cooking up massive meals for distribution to the rebels, offering basic medical treatment and care, sheltering army defectors, and even storing weapons in the rooms of her home.

The European Union condemned on Monday a "massacre" in the town of Daraya near Damascus, Syria, where rebels reported the discovery of hundreds of bodies.

"We regret and strongly condemn this sort of violence, it's totally unacceptable," Michael Mann, spokesman for EU foreign affairs High Representative Catherine Ashton, told a news briefing.

An explosion hit the Turkish-Iraqi pipeline overnight Sunday, causing a fire and stopping oil flow to Turkey, local security sources told Agence France Presse on Monday.

The cause of the fire was not immediately clear but suspicions are running high that Kurdish rebels, who have in the past targeted the pipeline or oil smugglers, may have sabotaged it.

Iraqi Communications Minister Mohammed Tawfiq Allawi told Agence France Presse on Monday he quit his post, accusing Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of doing nothing to stop "political interference" in his ministry.

"I resigned because Maliki refused to... (Stop) political interference in my ministry," Allawi said by telephone from London, referring to demands he made in late July for an end to meddling in his ministry.