The statement was read and broadcast live on state television.

Sixteen Egyptians were killed and hundreds more injured after a day of mass protests nationwide Sunday gave way to violent clashes outside the ruling Muslim Brotherhood headquarters in Cairo overnight.

Millions took to the streets in Cairo and other cities — in demonstrations that dwarfed the protests of the uprising two years ago — to call for President Mohamed Morsi, a former Brotherhood leader, to step down after a turbulent year in power.

As night fell, demonstrators besieged the Islamist movement’s headquarters — throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails, to which Brotherhood members holed up inside responded with gunfire, witnesses said. Eight peopled were killed in ensuing clashes, and protesters eventually ransacked and looted the office, according to the health ministry.

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The United States spied on European Union offices and broke into private computer networks of EU officials in the US and Europe, according to a new report.

German magazine Der Spiegel claims that top secret documents from 2010 leaked by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden show that the US bugged offices in Washington, New York and Brussels.

The NSA also tapped European Union private computer networks to read e-mails and listen to phone calls and meetings by government officials.

The NSA document refers to the European Union as "a target."

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"McDonald's decision not to be a part of the Ariel mall is a miserable decision discriminating against the city's residents," Ariel Mayor Eliyahu Shaviro said.

Former interior minister Eli Yishai said on his Facebook page that he would eat the first burger grilled by McDonald's local competitor Burger Ranch, and that is rumored to take the American chain's spot in Ariel.

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SEOUL, South Korea — If there’s one key art form where North Korea beats the South, it’s beer-making.

Pyongyang is home to Taedonggang, a government-made, full-bodied lager that The New York Times called one of the finest beers on the Korean peninsula. The beverage is named after Pyongyang’s Taedong River.

In 2000, North Korea’s former ambassador to Switzerland backed a plan to take apart and ship home an entire 180-year-old British brewery. The edifice was reassembled in the isolated state, despite the seller’s fears that the machinery could be used to make chemical weapons.

South Korea lacks similar tales of a globe-trotting beer quest. For decades, a maze of regulations has protected big South Korean brewers and their dull beer, smothering the entrepreneurial creativity that North Korea showed with Taedonggang.

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May saw an uptick of 0.3 percent in consumer spending in the United States, the Commerce Department said Thursday. That figure follows a revised 0.3 percent drop in April, which was previously reported to have declined 0.2 percent.

Consumer spending amounts to 70 percent of economic activity in the US. Reuters noted that while the pace has slowed since the first part of 2013, it is still likely to drive growth.

Commerce Dept. figures also showed that income grew by 0.5 percent in May.

Applications for unemployment benefits from workers fell by 9,000 to a seasonally adjusted 346,000 in the week ending on June 22.

Meanwhile, the four-week average of unemployment figures fell by 2,750 to 345,750, according to Labor Department figures — near the five-year-low of 338,000 that was reached in May.

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JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Welcome back to Africa, Barack Obama.

The colorful banners are up and the local people are excited — but, um, maybe not so much as the last time.

When the US president lands in Senegal late Wednesday on his first visit to the continent in four years, he will come laden with the weight of surveillance scandals at home and disillusionment abroad.

Obama’s visit to Ghana in 2009, a brief stopover of less than 24 hours, was during the halcyon days at the start of his first term. Africans were still joyously celebrating that the son of a black Kenyan man had been elected president of the United States.

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He’s just taken a big step to fulfilling that ambition at a trainee bullfight in this small town 30 miles north of Madrid.

Mejias stands at a little over five feet tall and his voice hasn’t broken, but his skills with the cape against a quarter-ton bullock wowed the local crowd. At the end of the faena, he drove his sword into the animal’s heart, killing it with the cool precision of a veteran.

“I want to be a great bullfighter,” he said afterward. “That’s why I’m here. Otherwise I’d be at home studying.”

Mejias and the other teenagers who took part in the event are part of the next generation of Spanish matadors. But they’re embarking on their careers at a time that bullfighting’s future is more in doubt than perhaps any other time in its three-century history — as Moralzarzal’s three-quarters-empty bullring attests.

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But Brazil’s raised major concerns that it may not be ready to handle its host duties. There’s only about a year to go until the massive international soccer tournament, the World Cup, kicks off.

The Confederations Cup — a smaller tourney considered a dry run for the World Cup — began in the country’s capital, Brasilia, on Saturday.

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Hundreds of protesters bypass shield-wielding police to scramble up a ramp and storm the roof of Brasilia's congress. Now they whoop, sing and dance, casting giant shadows over Oscar Niemeyer's iconic bowl architecture.

That was the stunning scene, Monday night, in Brazil's capital, as protesters simultaneously marched through the streets of 10 other cities, including Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, braving a sometimes violent backlash from police.

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Demonstrations began about two weeks ago in opposition to a public transit fare hike. They've since snowballed into a movement drawing hundreds of thousands across Brazil airing complaints about the government.

A record 65,000 people met in the western area of the city known as Largo da Batata on Monday to protest a 10-cent rise in metro and bus fare. The movement started with a group called Passe Livre (Free Pass), largely made up of students, which argues that students should be able to ride public transit for free. Last night, united by outrage, they were joined by members of other social movements — and others who didn't belong to any formal group at all.

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MOSCOW, Russia — When crowds of protesters first flooded the streets of Moscow in December 2011 chanting “Putin is a thief!” they probably had in mind rigged elections, budgetary funds and natural resources, to name a few concerns.

Certainly not a Super Bowl ring.

But billionaire and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft is no ordinary, disenfranchised middle-class protester. So when he reportedly claimed last Thursday that Russian President Vladimir Putin swiped one of his Super Bowl rings during a meeting in St. Petersburg in 2005, the world — and the Kremlin — quickly took notice.

“I put my hand out and he put [the ring] in his pocket, and three KGB guys got around him and walked out,” the New York Post reported Kraft as telling an audience at a New York City gala.

Although it was unclear from Kraft’s comments whether he intended to accuse Putin of outright theft, he did seem to expect the ring back.

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New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft told an audience Thursday night that Russian President Vladimir Putin stole his Super Bowl ring.

It was the good one, too, from Super Bowl XXXIX in 2005 when the Pats beat the Philadelphia Eagles 24-21.

It happened while Kraft and other American executives toured Russia after the team’s NFL championship season.

Putin greeted the execs during a stop in St. Petersburg, the New York Post reported:

“I took out the ring and showed it to [Putin], and he put it on and he goes, ‘I can kill someone with this ring,’” Kraft said at the Carnegie Hall’s Medal of Excellence gala at the Waldorf-Astoria. “I put my hand out and he put it in his pocket, and three KGB guys got around him and walked out.”

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It has no coastline but plenty of fetid canals. Its inhabitants don’t speak much English, the planet’s default lingua franca. The streets are choked with gridlock, stray dogs own the back alleys and, for much of the year, the city is deluged with monsoon rains.

And yet Bangkok, with its projected 15.9 million international overnight visitors in 2013, has taken the top spot, according to an annual index by MasterCard. The lead was snatched from mainstay London. Bangkok is forecast to best England’s capital by 200,000 visitors this year. Paris ranks third, and the affluent city-state of Singapore comes in fourth. New York ranks a distant fifth.

On the surface, this statistic offers an obvious lesson: Bangkok’s allure — a swirl of intoxicating cuisine, cheap shopping, glittering temples and raucous nightlife —is potent enough to overpower its drawbacks.

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The campaign pits three major conservatives against a candidate supported by reformers and moderates, with six total contenders handpicked by the country’s premier religious and political authority.

"I voted for Hassan Rouhani," said Ali Shokrzadeh, a blue-collar worker at a polling station in south Tehran. Despite having largely voted for conservative candidates in the past, a number of people in this poor and working class section of the capital also expressed support for Rouhani.

A moderate, Rouhani made a last minute jump in the polls as reformists threw their weight behind him, and because some conservatives say he appeals to them, too.

"I expect him to create more jobs," said Shokrzadeh, who decided to vote for Rohani since the election campaign began several weeks ago.

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Under the “One Country, Two Systems” policy implemented after the British handed over sovereignty of the city-state to China, Hong Kong retains a separate legal and political system, but has its foreign policy and defense dictated by Beijing.

As a result, if Communist Party officials in China decide they want to get involved with Snowden's case, they can. The question, however, is whether they will want to do so.

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Hong Kong has an extradition treaty with the US; its government is weak; its foreign policy is dictated by Beijing — no friend of free speech or internet freedom.

But there is at least one reason it could be incredibly shrewd: Hong Kong's asylum system is currently stuck in a state of limbo that could allow Snowden to exploit a loophole and buy some valuable time.

Simon Young, director of the Centre for Comparative and Public Law at the University of Hong Kong, told GlobalPost that a decision delivered by Hong Kong's High Court in March of this year required the government to create a new procedure for reviewing asylum applications.

Until the government does this, he said, asylum seekers are allowed to stay in Hong Kong indefinitely.

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BUZZARDS BAY, Mass. — The sensational disclosure that the US government’s National Security Agency has been scooping up phone and internet records of millions of Americans might have surprised ordinary citizens in Topeka or Milwaukee, but it did little to excite politicians in Washington, DC.

“As far as I know, this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif, said of the news about Verizon telephone and mobile log monitoring.

In an uncommon show of bipartisanship, Georgia Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss supported Feinstein, his colleague on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

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HONG KONG — While college-bound American high-school students complain have to sweat through their fair share of tests, nothing in the US compares to the intensity and all-or-nothing stakes of China's dreaded gaokao.

Over the next two days, more than 9 million graduating Chinese students will take the gaokao, or "high test," the results of which will determine what university they can attend, or if they can attend college at all.

The test is so grueling that students have been known to hook themselves up to IV bags full of amino acids to fuel marathon study sessions, and exam sites have banned everything from bras to mobile phones.  Consisting of sections of math, science, English and Chinese, the gaokao lasts nine hours over two days. Perhaps the most dreaded section is an 800-character essay that is supposed to test a student’s writing and thinking ability.

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Their victory, however, was short-lived as Israeli security sources said Syrian troops took back the crossing after heavy fighting.

Earlier, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and a spokesman for the Austrian Defense Ministry reported that rebels had taken the crossing, according to Reuters.

Israeli citizens have been ordered to stay away from the border fence area by authorities as fighting continues in the UN-patrolled demilitarized zone. The crossing is normally operated by the UN Disengagement Observer Force.

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The ruling means a halt to all imports and sales on AT&T-sold models of the iPhone 4, iPhone 3, iPhone 3GS, iPad 3G and iPad 2 3G.

Many of those products are not on sale in the US anymore.

"Today's decision has no impact on the availability of Apple products in the United States," Apple spokeswoman Kristin Huguet said in a statement.

Apple said it planned to appeal the decision.

Samsung said it was satisfied with the decision which overturned an earlier decision that ruled in favor of Apple.

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