After spending the night at Saudi King Abdullah's horse farm in the desert outside Riyadh, US President Barack Obama arrived in Egypt on Thursday to meet with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak at Qubba Palace before delivering a long-promised speech to an audience at Cairo University.
Aides said the address would blend hopeful words about mutual understanding with carefully chosen language on Iraq, Afghanistan and the Israeli-Palestinian standoff, plus blunt talk about the need for Muslims to embrace democracy, women's rights and economic opportunity.
The president's brief stay in Cairo also was to include a visit to the Sultan Hassan mosque, a 600-year-old center of Islamic worship and study, and a tour of the Great Pyramids of Giza on the capital's outskirts. Aides said the schedule also would afford Obama time to talk to Egyptian journalists and young people.
