In brief

Two days after a series of errors allowed a convicted murderer to walk out of a Chicago jail, police recaptured the man at an Illinois home where he was watching TV.

Steven L. Robbins, 44, put up no resistance Friday as police burst into a home in Kankakee, 60 miles south of Chicago, said Cook County Sheriff's Office spokesman Frank Bilecki.

He was in the living room or kitchen area watching TV, taken by total surprise, Bilecki said, adding that it appears the homeowner might know an acquaintance of Robbins.

The prisoner, was serving a 60-year sentence in Indiana for murder.

As a police standoff with an Alabama man accused of holding a 5-year-old boy hostage in an underground bunker entered its fifth day, authorities were saying little except that their talks with the 65-year-old loner were continuing through a ventilation pipe.

Negotiators were still trying Saturday to persuade Jimmy Lee Dykes to surrender. Police have said they believe the Vietnam-era veteran fatally shot a school bus driver Tuesday, and then abducted the boy from the bus and disappeared into the bunker.

Egypt's Interior Minister vowed Saturday to investigate the beating of a naked man by riot police.

The beating was broadcast live on TV Friday as protests raged outside the presidential palace. Video showed police trying to bundle the man into a police van after beating him.

Interior Minister Mohammed Ibrahim said initial results from the public prosecutor's investigation show Hamada Saber, 48, was undressed by rioters during skirmishes between police and protesters. He was then hit in the foot by a bird shot, the interior minister said, but didn't say if it was from police firing into the crowds.

The central security forces then found him lying on the ground and tried to put him in an armored vehicle, though the way in which they did that was excessive, said Ibrahim.

In the footage from Friday, at least seven black-clad riot police beat Saber with sticks before dragging him along the muddy pavement and tossing him into a police van.

Syrian rebels captured a strategic neighborhood near Aleppo's international airport on Saturday, putting opposition fighters in control of a key road that the regime has used to ferry supplies and reinforcements to soldiers fighting in the city, activists said.

Troops loyal to President Bashar Assad and rebels have been locked in a deadly stalemate in Aleppo, Syria's largest urban center and main commercial hub, since last summer. Now the rebels hold large parts of the city and its outskirts, including several army bases, but have been unable to overcome the regime's superior firepower.

The capturing of the Sheik Said neighborhood, southeast of Aleppo, is a significant blow to regime forces.