Egypt's parliament and senate voted on Saturday for a panel tasked with drafting the country's new constitution to include 50 percent lawmakers from the Islamist-dominated parliament.

In a joint session, both houses of parliament were discussing the criteria for choosing the members of the 100-strong constituent assembly that will write a new charter.

Thousands of protesters gathered outside the White House Saturday to demand that the United States "stop the massacre in Syria," where an estimated 8,000 people have been killed in a regime crackdown.

Wearing T-shirts declaring "I have a dream of a free Syria" and "No longer afraid," the demonstrators -- who numbered 4,000, according to organizers -- were marking the first anniversary of a bloody revolt against President Bashar Assad's regime.

Bulgaria on Saturday urged all its nationals to "immediately" leave Syria due to the worsening security situation in the violence-wracked country after a year of unrest.

"The foreign ministry calls on all Bulgarian citizens in Syria to immediately leave the country," the foreign ministry said.

Al-Qaida's front group in Iraq has claimed a suicide car bombing at a Baghdad police academy a month ago that killed 15 people and wounded 21 others, a U.S. monitoring group said on Saturday.

The February 19 bombing was the deadliest attack in the Iraqi capital in weeks, and was claimed by the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) in a statement posted on a jihadist forum on Friday, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist websites.

Pope Shenuda III, who died on Saturday aged 88, was a fearless champion of Egypt's Coptic Christians ready to defy the country's Muslim government, but he also took a more conciliatory tone in his final years.

An increasingly frail Shenuda, who rarely appeared in public, was faced in recent years with a spike in attacks against the Coptic community which he led for more than four decades.

Iraq's deputy foreign minister voiced support on Saturday for the idea of peacekeeping forces manned exclusively by Arab League troops but stopped short of backing a Qatari proposal to deploy one in Syria.

Labid Abbawi's remarks come ahead of an Arab summit due in Baghdad on March 29, the first meeting of the 22-nation bloc in the Iraqi capital since the late dictator Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

Five Syrian opposition groups on Saturday announced the formation of a new coalition, a sign of how difficult opponents of the Damascus regime find it to cooperate, a year after the start of the protest movement.

The five groups, meeting here, said their yet unnamed coalition would act independently from the Syrian National Council (SNC), the main opposition coalition which was set up in August to fight President Bashar Assad's regime.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy Saturday hailed the arrest in Mauritania of Abdullah al-Senussi, the spymaster of Moammar Gadhafi, and will seek his extradition to France, his office said.

Senussi faced an international arrest warrant after a Paris court sentenced him in absentia to life for his alleged involvement in an attack on a French airliner in 1989 that killed 170 people, a statement from the Elysee said.

A U.N. team mandated by international envoy Kofi Annan will leave for Damascus on Monday, the former U.N. secretary general's spokesman said.

France "strongly condemned" twin bomb attacks in Damascus Saturday which Syrian authorities said killed 27 people and wounded 97, Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said.

"France condemns all acts of terrorism, which cannot be justified under any circumstances," Juppe said, expressing his condolences to the families of the victims.