Senior Egyptian officials visited Iran on Saturday to further a proposal by Cairo for an Islamic quartet that would help to resolve the Syrian conflict, the presidency said.

President Mohamed Morsi's foreign relations adviser Essam El Haddad led the delegation which included the president's chief of staff Refaa al-Tahtawi, the presidency said in a statement.

Egyptian police arrested 12 members of the "Black Bloc" -- a violent group opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood -- after clashes outside Cairo's presidential palace, the official MENA news agency said on Saturday.

Protesters hurled rocks and fire bombs at the walls of the presidential palace in Heliopolis, and torched a police vehicle, a security source told MENA.

President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt will visit Brazil on May 7 for a two-day visit focused on the economy, his spokesman Ehab Fahmy said on Wednesday.

Morsi, who won elections last June promising to address the battered economy, has already visited the four other member states of the BRICS group -- Russia, India, China and South Africa -- which he hopes Egypt can join.

An Israeli Bedouin who has been jailed in Egypt for more than 12 years on charges of spying has begun an open-ended hunger strike, he said in a handwritten letter in Arabic seen by Agence France Presse.

Ouda Tarabin's letter, passed on to the Israeli embassy in Cairo, was addressed to Ambassador Yaakov Amitai.

U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel landed in Egypt on Wednesday as part of a Middle East tour designed to bolster America's alliances amid growing concern over the fallout from Syria's roiling civil war.

In his first trip to the Middle East as Pentagon chief, Hagel is promoting longstanding U.S. military ties with traditional allies -- including Israel and Saudi Arabia -- as a way of countering Iran and deterring Islamist militants.

An adviser to President Mohamed Morsi has submitted his resignation in protest at the running of the state and the "failure" of the government, Egyptian media announced on Tuesday.

"Mohamed Fuad Gadallah, presidential adviser on judicial affairs, is resigning," the public television channel Nile News said.

A Cairo court on Tuesday sentenced Egypt's former finance minister Youssef Boutros-Ghali to life in prison in absentia on corruption charges, judicial sources said.

Boutros-Ghali, who served as finance minister under ousted president Hosni Mubarak, is accused of squandering public funds to the value of 20 million Egyptian pounds (almost $3 million), the court said.

Egyptian authorities on Monday suspended and started interrogating a provincial prosecutor who ordered a man flogged 80 times for public drunkenness.

Spokesman Mahmoud el-Hefnawi of the prosecutor general's office said the country's top attorney ordered Hussein Anani's decision canceled and referred him to a judicial investigation.

The International Monetary Fund and Egypt hope to conclude talks for a loan deal "in the coming weeks", they said in a joint statement Sunday.

The statement came after IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde met an Egyptian delegation in Washington this weekend that included Central Bank of Egypt Governor Hisham Ramez and Finance Minister Al-Mursi Hegazy.

Egypt will try a cousin and top aide of slain Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi on charges of attempted murder, although Libyan authorities are pressing for his extradition, Egyptian state media reported on Sunday.

Ahmed Qaddaf al-Dam, arrested in Cairo in March after a gunfight with police in his apartment, has been detained in Egypt since, despite Libyan demands for his extradition so he could be put on trial on forgery charges.