Saudi court orders female journalist flogged

RIYADH :  A court on Saturday sentenced a female Saudi journalist to receive 60 lashes for her links with a Saudi-owned Lebanese TV network which broadcast a provocative racy show in July.

Rosanna al-Yami said a Jeddah judge dropped all charges that she had been directly involved with a program on Beirut-based network LBC in which a Saudi man boasted of his sex life, outraging Saudi conservatives and leading to the man's imprisonment.

However, Yami said the judge sentenced her to 60 lashes for having been a part-time employee for LBC's Saudi operations. The judge said that LBC had lacked the appropriate operating license.

"It's a punishment for all journalists through me," Yami told AFP by telephone.

"They just said the channel was illegal. But the Saudi minister of information himself appeared on LBC a couple week ago," she said.

Yami's sentencing comes after airline sales clerk Mazen Abdul Jawad was convicted of offensive behavior and sentenced to five years in jail and 1,000 lashes on Oct.7 for his July appearance on the LBC show "Bold Red Line" in which he talked about picking up girls and having sex with them.

Three friends who appeared on the show with him were given two-year terms and 300 lashes each, while a cameraman who helped film the episode was sentenced to two months in jail.

At least 14 people dead in Egypt train collision

CAIRO:  At least 14 people were killed and 24 others injured in a collision between two trains on Saturday in Giza district southwest of the Egyptian capital, with more bodies believed caught in the rubble, medical sources said.

A security services official said: "The two trains collided at al-Ayyat, in Giza. There are deaths and injuries."

"The trains were travelling on the same track. One ran into the other as they headed towards Upper Egypt," the security official said.

El-Ayatt and al-Wasta hospitals in Cairo received 40 wounded passengers, Said Abd el-Rahman Shaheen, spokesman for the ministry of health, adding that the death toll was yet to be determined and denying reports that more than 30 people have perished in the crash, Al Arabiya TV reported.

One medical source said people appeared to be trapped under an overturned train.

Fatal train crashes are not unusual in Egypt.

A train crash in northern Egypt killed 44 people in 2008, two years after a crash that killed 58 people. In 2002, at least 360 people were killed when fire ripped through seven carriages of a crowded passenger train.