CAIRO — Muslims attacked a community center and burned several homes belonging to Coptic Christians in northwestern Egypt over the weekend, injuring 23 people, in a rampage that a local bishop said was incited by a radical Muslim preacher.

The rioting began Friday when a group of young men hurled rocks at the church community center in Marsa-Matruh, a city along Egypt's Mediterranean coast. The attacks then spread to nearby homes and left behind destroyed cars and other property.

Copts, who make up most of the 8 million Christians in a country of 80 million people, generally live in peace with Muslims but violence occasionally occurs. Human rights groups say attacks on Copts are on the rise, underscoring the government's failure to address chronic sectarian strains in a society where religious radicalism is gaining ground.

Hussein Fekry, the local security chief, told Egyptian TV on Saturday that the clashes were limited and were provoked by a new fence built around the community center.

The church's local bishop, Father Bejemy, said, however, that the rioters were responding to a Friday prayer sermon at a nearby mosque calling for jihad against infidels, a reference to non-Muslims among extremists.

The bishop said the attackers broke the community center's gate, several windows and destroyed trees. Later, they lobbed firebombs at Christian homes and destroyed cars, he said. A group of Copts took refuge in the community center and were holed up there for 10 hours while security forces brought the situation under control.

Of the 23 Copts wounded, three remained hospitalized in critical condition Saturday, Bejemy said.

"If the fence is the real problem, I agreed to remove it. I just hope it is the real problem," Bejemy said in a telephone interview from Marsa-Matruh. "I am not sure if this violence is only because of one fanatic who didn't act wisely or if the situation is bigger than this. Only days will tell."

Twenty Muslims and Christians were arrested on suspicion of taking part in the disturbance, a police officer said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

Nader Shokry, a researcher with the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, which tracks religious violence, said residents of the area also said the Muslim cleric's sermon was inflammatory and probably in response to prayers held in the community center.

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran says it has dismantled several U.S.-backed cyber warfare networks that were gathering information on nuclear scientists and provoking unrest in the country.

A judiciary statement says the networks were set up by Iranian opposition groups, including the armed People's Mujahedeen, and that 30 of their members were arrested.

Iran has repeatedly accused the U.S. and Britain of provoking the unrest that followed June's disputed presidential election -- charges both countries have denied.

The judiciary said Saturday that the cyber campaign also involved a group seeking to restore Iran's monarchy. The statement said the networks sought to destabilize the Islamic ruling system in Iran, according to the official IRNA news agency.

DUBLIN — It often starts as a voice in the wilderness, but can swell into an entire nation's demand for truth. From Ireland to Germany, Europe's many victims of child abuse in the Roman Catholic church are finally breaking social taboos and confronting the clergy to face its demons.

Ireland was the first in Europe to confront the church's worldwide custom of shielding pedophile priests from the law and public scandal. Now that legacy of suppressed childhood horror is being confronted in other parts of the Continent -- nowhere more poignantly than in Germany, the homeland of Pope Benedict XVI.

The recent spread of claims into the Netherlands, Austria and Italy has analysts and churchmen wondering how deep the scandal runs, which nation will be touched next, and whether a tide of lawsuits will force European dioceses to declare bankruptcy like their American cousins.

"You have to presume that the cover-up of abuse exists everywhere, to one extent or another. A new case could appear in a new country tomorrow," said David Quinn, director of a Christian think tank, the Iona Institute, that seeks to promote family values in an Ireland increasingly cool to Catholicism.

Quinn noted that stories of systemic physical, sexual and emotional abuse circulated privately in Irish society for decades, but only moved aboveground in the mid-1990s when former altar boy Andrew Madden and orphanage survivor Christine Buckley went public with lawsuits and exposes of how priests and nuns tormented them with impunity.

Floodgates opened for Irish complaints that have topped 15,000 in this country of 4 million. Three government-ordered investigations have shocked and disgusted the nation, which has footed most of the bill to settle legal claims topping euro1 billion (nearly $1.5 billion).

"A lot comes down to: When does that first victim gather the courage to come forward into the spotlight?" Quinn said. "It seems to take that trigger event, the lone voice who says what so many kept silent so long. That's basically happening now in Germany. It could happen next in Spain, Poland, anywhere."

In January, an elite Jesuit school in Berlin declared it was aware of seven child-abuse cases in its past and appointed an outside investigator, Ursula Raue, to seek testimony. Within weeks, she had gathered stories of long-suppressed woe from more than 100 ex-students abused by their Jesuit masters, and from 60 molested by parish priests.

"I always thought that at some point the wave would reach us," said Petra Dorsch-Jungsberger, a commentator on Catholic affairs and retired University of Munich communications professor.

She credited heavy German media coverage of the latest Irish abuse scandal -- a November report into decades of cover-up in the Dublin Archdiocese involving approximately 170 priests -- with inspiring similar soul-searching in Germany.

"Once the door had been opened, then many others felt they were able to step up and say: That happened to us too," she said.

In recent weeks, new German abuse claims have surfaced on a near-daily basis and spread to Pope Benedict's Bavarian heartland and the Regensberg boys' choir long directed by the pope's brother. Benedict was Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger of Munich from 1977 to 1982, and questions now focus on what role, if any, the pontiff, played in handing pedophile priests to new parishes rather than to the law.

A Swiss abbot said in an interview published Saturday that 60 people have reported being victims of abuse by Catholic priests in Switzerland.

Abbot Martin Werlen of the Benedictine Abbey of Einsiedeln told Swiss daily Aargauer Zeitung that the allegations were reported to the Swiss Bishops Conference, which is investigating them.

The Vatican on Saturday denounced what it called aggressive attempts to drag Pope Benedict XVI into the spreading scandals of pedophile priests in his German homeland, and contended he has long confronted abuse cases with courage.

In separate interviews, both the Holy See's spokesman and its prosecutor for sex abuse of minors by clergy sought to defend the pope.

"It's rather clear that in the last days, there have been those who have tried, with a certain aggressive persistence, in Regensburg and Munich, to look for elements to personally involve the Holy Father in the matter of abuses," Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi told Vatican Radio.

It's inevitable that all bishops of the day, including Ratzinger, handled abuse complaints against priests in-house, said the Rev. Fergus O'Donoghue, editor of the Irish Jesuit journal Studies.

"The pope was no different to any other bishop at time. The church policy was to keep it all quiet -- to help people, but to avoid scandal. Avoiding scandal was a huge issue for the church," he said. "Of course there was cover-up," he added. But worse was "the systematic lack of concern for the victims."

In the Netherlands, a former Catholic boarding-school abuse victim is leading a campaign for accountability. Bert Smeets, 58, has formed Mea Culpa, a victims group that has collected testimony from hundreds of abuse victims and is mulling a class-action lawsuit against the Dutch church.

The church has apologized to the victims and set up an inquiry headed by a former government minister, a Protestant. Smeets dismisses that effort as "a typical Vatican cover-up." He said the pressure on the church came from aggressive investigations into abuse in Ireland and the U.S.

In other predominantly Catholic areas of Europe, child-abuse scandals have tarnished individual priests and even a Polish archbishop, but have not mushroomed into a mass movement. In Spain, more than a dozen priests have been convicted of child abuse in recent decades and two potentially larger-scale cases are attracting attention.

Ireland was until relatively recently the most enthusiastically Catholic country in Europe. Its half-dozen seminaries exported priests worldwide. All but one of those seminaries is closed now, illustrating the rapid falloff in Mass attendance as the economy has advanced and secularism has spread.

Quinn, the Dublin think-tank director, noted that a few Irish dioceses are openly warning that they're struggling to pay bills stemming from abuse claims. In the southeast diocese of Kells, the archbishop's house has had to be remortgaged.

"The church is asset-rich but cash-poor," Quinn said, noting that it's the biggest property owner in Ireland but has comparatively little cash in the bank. He said the Vatican, too, has less money on tap than resides in the endowment fund of a typical top-tier U.S. university.

GENEVA — Around 60 people have reported being victims of abuse by Catholic priests in Switzerland, a Swiss abbot said in an interview published by a newspaper Saturday.

Abbot Martin Werlen of the Benedictine Abbey of Einsiedeln said some of the allegations were reported to the Swiss Bishops Conference's commission on abuses, according to Swiss daily Neue Zuercher Zeitung. Werlen indicated that others were reported to different dioceses.

Werlen, who is a member of the commission on abuses at the Bishops Conference, did not specify where the alleged cases occurred or when they might have happened.

Neue Zuercher Zeitung said on its Web site the 60 alleged cases happened over the last 15 years.

Werlen acknowledged in the interview that some of the alleged abuses may have happened at the school of the Einsiedeln abbey.

"I've tried to address the cases I knew of and tried to process them," he was quoted as saying.

Werlen could not be reached for comment, but Father Urban of the Abbey of Einsiedeln confirmed the authenticity of the interview.

The Bishops Conference's commission on abuses was set up in 2002 and has been looking into alleged abuses since, Werlen said, according to the interview.

Switzerland needs a central contact point coordinating different bodies dealing with such allegations, he was quoted as saying.

Werlen's statement was the latest report of abuse by Catholic clergy or church employees in Europe, which has recently seen new allegations of s

PARIS — The U.S. ambassador to Morocco has expressed dismay over the expulsion of Americans accused of trying to convert Moroccans to Christianity in the North African kingdom.

The episode, involving several other foreign nationals, threatened to overshadow U.S. praise on Friday for Morocco's recent steps to improve human rights, women's rights and democracy.

A charitable group called the Village of Hope, a home for orphaned and unwanted children in northern Morocco, said Thursday that 16 of its workers were ordered on Monday to leave the country.

Islam is Morocco's official religion -- one of King Mohammed VI's titles is Commander of the Faithful -- and Christian evangelism is banned. Periodic expulsions for it have taken place in the past.

U.S. Ambassador Samuel Kaplan, in a message Thursday to Americans registered with the embassy, said the U.S. doesn't take issue with Moroccan law.

Kaplan expressed "our distress" about the way they were sent away. He said the Moroccan government refused a hearing for those expelled -- and that "violates fundamental rules of due process." He said "a number" of Americans were involved, without specifying.

Separately, timed with the release Friday of a U.S. State Department report on human rights, Kaplan trumpeted progress in Morocco on women's rights and democracy, and "one of the strongest records in the Arab world" toward reforms that have improved human rights.

For leaders of the children's home, the expulsions were a step in the wrong direction.

The group, on its Web site, called the expulsions "part of a nationwide crackdown against Christians living in Morocco" and said the "parents" were given hours to pack up and leave -- without being shown any evidence of wrongdoing.

"The eviction process was the most painful situation imaginable," the statement said.

The group said it "always sought to abide" by the law, and had required volunteers and visitors at the center near the town of Ain Leuh in northern Morocco to sign a declaration promising to abide by the ban.

The group said it had appealed to the king "to act with mercy and help us reach a point of compromise and reunite the 33 children with the only parents they know."

Michael Paita, of French affiliate group La Gerbe who was listed as a contact on the group statement, said couples from the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa and the United States were among those expelled.

Speaking by phone, Paita said all the workers there were Christian, "but they were there only for social reasons" -- not to spread Christianity.

According to the group's site, the home near Ain Leuh was created by two American women -- Emmagene Coates and Ellen Doran -- over a half-century ago. Coates died in 1995 and Doran in 2007.

___

Toyota Motor Corp. President Akio Toyoda, center, answers a reporter\'s question after his meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama at Hatoyama\'s official residence in Tokyo on Monday, March 8, 2010. Toyoda\'s meeting with the Japanese leader on Monday came after his recent visits to Washington and Beijing, where he appeared before U.S. lawmakers and Chinese media, respectively, to talk about his company\'s recall of vehicles. (AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi) View more photos

LOS ANGELES -- Toyota Motor Corp. on Friday contested allegations that it withheld evidence in lawsuits, telling Congress that it has maintained "the highest professional and ethical standards in its legal and regulatory practices."

In a letter to Rep. Edolphus Towns, D-N.Y., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Toyota countered claims by a former company lawyer that it had refused to provide key information to plaintiffs' attorneys over a period of years.

Last month, the committee subpoenaed some 6,000 documents from the former Toyota attorney, Dimitrios Biller, as part of its investigation into the automaker's handling of safety recalls and sudden acceleration problems.

Although the documents largely deal with issues unrelated to unintended acceleration, they have taken on new relevance as Congress and federal regulators investigate whether Toyota moved to downplay the significance of the safety issue and to delay or mitigate recalls.

On Feb. 26, Towns sent Toyota a letter addressing the contents of some of that material, raising concerns that Toyota "deliberately withheld" information from lawyers and regulators, including hiding the existence of so-called Books of Knowledge, or troves of technical information about its vehicles.

In an eight-page response prepared by outside attorney Theodore Hester of firm King & Spalding, the automaker rebutted those allegations, saying it has gone to great lengths to share information. The letter also attacked Biller, who handled product liability cases for Toyota between 2003 and 2007, calling him "a disgruntled former employee" and noting that he is currently in litigation with Toyota and several other parties.

The automaker, however, acknowledged the existence of the Books of Knowledge, calling them "highly proprietary and commercially sensitive." It said it never disclosed them to attorneys or regulators in the past because it was never specifically asked to do so.

Jenny Rosenberg, a spokeswoman for the congressional panel, said Towns' staff was reviewing the letter and would respond to Toyota soon.

Last month, the committee held a hearing in which Akio Toyoda, president of Toyota, apologized for the way the company had dealt with the recalls. At the same hearing, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said Toyota had been "safety-deaf."

Biller said he did not believe that Toyota's letter fully addressed his concerns, saying it was "filled with misleading statements." A lawsuit he filed against Toyota last year in California is currently in arbitration.

Meanwhile, the fate of the 6,000 documents remains uncertain. Toyota has succeeded in keeping them sealed by court order, but Congress briefly released four of the documents last month.