Protests destroy party’s offices

Thousands of demonstrators destroyed the regional headquarters of Egypt’s ruling party in the northern Sinai peninsula Sunday, burning furniture and blocking roads in a show of anger over the central government’s treatment of residents.

Dozens were injured in clashes when plainclothes police attacked the demonstrators with batons, tear gas and metal chains, police and witnesses said. Two police officers were also injured, and at least 40 people arrested.

It was the second day of protests in the town of El Arish sparked by a shootout between Bedouin tribesmen and locals.

On Sunday, demonstrators reiterated long-standing complaints against the central government, including economic neglect despite a tourism boom in southern Sinai.

ISTANBUL, Turkey

Kurdish rebels kill 13 soldiers

Kurdish rebels killed 13 Turkish soldiers Sunday in a clash in the country’s southeast, and troops responded by shelling an area near Iraq to try to stop the rebels from escaping across the border, the military said.

The soldiers were killed in the southeastern province of Sirnak, not far from where troops and rebels clashed two days earlier, said a statement on the military’s Web site.

Abdul-Rahman al-Chadarchi, a spokesman for the Kurdish rebel group, confirmed the attack and said the rebel fighters sustained no casualties.

PARIS

Vandals damage Monet painting

Intruders, apparently drunk, broke into the Orsay Museum through a back door early Sunday and punched a hole in a renowned work by Impressionist painter Claude Monet, the French culture minister said.

A surveillance camera caught a group of four to five people entering the museum, which houses a major collection of Impressionist art on the Left Bank of the French capital along the Seine River.

An alarm sounded and the group left, but not before damaging an invaluable painting, “Le Pont d’Argenteuil,” Culture Minister Christine Albanel said.

Albanel said the painting could be restored, but she deplored the damage.

“It’s always a heartbreak when an art object that is our memory, our heritage, that we love and that we are proud of is victim of a purely criminal act,” she said.

The painting, shown to reporters, bore a horizontal tear about 4 inches in length that exposed threads of canvas. It looked to have been punched in with a fist.

From wire reports