IT just keeps getting worse for Julia Gillard. The latest Newspoll published in The Australian today shows the prime minister’s support has plunged to record lows while Opposition Leader Tony Abbott outstrips her as preferred prime minister. To add to Ms Gillard’s woes, the man she deposed as leader, Kevin […]
A Jordan-based group is threatening to file a lawsuit against Israel in the International Criminal Court over its opening of the baptismal site Qasr al-Yahud near the Jordan River. The group, which calls itself “The Arab Union to Resist the Expulsion of Arab Christians”, is headed by the speaker of […]
WikiLeaks’ Asian Field Day In Indonesia, the national police are discovered to be using a hard-line Islamic group as its hidden “attack dog.” In Indonesia, octogenarian Singaporean founder Lee Kuan Yew calls Islam a “venomous religion. In Malaysia, UMNO leaders are “willing to blacken Malaysia’s reputation to ensure the end […]
Authorities are placating extremists, writes Tom Allard in Indonesia. Ulil Abshar Abdalla is one of Indonesia’s most perceptive intellectuals, a Harvard-educated Islamic reformer and an adviser to the President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. When asked what has happened to Islam in Indonesia since the September 11 attacks, he says: ”I think […]
BBC: Settlers set fire to West Bank mosque after Israel demolishes illegal structures in Migron A mosque in a Palestinian village north of Jerusalem was attacked overnight, residents say. Two tyres were set on fire and thrown into the mosque in the village of Kasra, near the West Bank city […]
Source: Asiatimes on Line By Pepe Escobar Call it the Friends of Libya war; the R2P war (as in “responsibility to protect” Western plunder); the Air France war; the Total war; anyway, the “friends” had a blast spinning their win in Libya, which magically is not in Africa anymore. It has […]
by Bernard Léchot, swissinfo.ch Ten years on from the attacks in the United States which killed nearly 3,000 people, questions about the fateful day still remain unanswered. swissinfo.ch spoke to three Swiss specialists who have sifted through the official and unofficial versions. “When I saw the second plane – indicating […]
By MD HUMAIDAN | ARAB NEWS JEDDAH: A total of 400 young Saudi men and women will tie the knot next week during a mass wedding sponsored by Makkah Gov. Prince Khaled Al-Faisal. Saeed Al-Niaimi, chairman of the Welfare Society for Marriage Assistance and Family Care that is organizing the […]
SOURCE: ARABNEWS The WikiLeaks spotlight is once again trained on American war crimes in Iraq WikiLeaks finds itself in the spotlight all over again. The decision of the whistleblower website to put its full “unredacted” archive of more than 250,000 US government cables online has led to an uproar in […]
The minority has been under constant attack even though it keeps a low profile. DESIGN: SAMAD SIDDIQUI Source/Credit: The Express Tribune / By Shamsul Islam | September 5, 2011 [PAK] FAISALABAD: In a suspected incident of hate crime against minorities, unidentified attackers killed an Ahmadi man in Faisalabad late Saturday night. Naseem Ahmad Butt, 55, […]
Prime Minister Tony Blair makes several good points for religion and I thank him for doing so. What I liked the best about his opening statement was his appeal not to stereotype and not to lump all religious people in one pile for the wrongs committed by a minority. This […]
Source: Forbes A Norwegian boat crew recently had an unexpected wake-up call when a full-grown polar bear climbed aboard their anchored ship for a 30-minute-long sniff around the deck. Captain Einar Vallestad said Saturday that the bear had been following the Hydrograf vessel in northern Norway for days before finally […]
Source: Space.com A distant galaxy cluster was spawned by a huge cosmic smash-up of four different clusters, which lasted hundreds of millions of years, a new study suggests. A team of scientists pieced together the violent history of the galaxy cluster Abell 2744, also known as Pandora’s Cluster, using several different telescopes […]
Source: CNN International Suicide bombers are responsible for killing more than 12,000 Iraqi civilians and wounding more than 30,000 since the war began, according to study released by the British medical journal Lancet. The study found that 1,003 documented suicide bombings accounted for 12,284 of 108,624 Iraqi civilian deaths, 11% […]
Immediately after 9/11 I made it a point to ask my friends, colleagues and acquaintances to tell me their first and their second thought that came to mind immediately when learning of the 9/11 attack. I was quite shaken by the fact that a vast majority of Muslims spontaneously said […]
Source: Reuters (Reuters) – Turkish war planes bombed Kurdish guerrilla positions in Iraq Sunday, while in southeast Turkey insurgents killed two soldiers and two village militia members in separate weekend attacks. Fighters of the main Kurdish separatist militant group, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), operate from camps in the Qandil […]
Source: The Guardian Author: Jonathan Jones In the photograph Thomas Hoepker took on 11 September 2001, a group of New Yorkers sit chatting in the sun in a park in Brooklyn. Behind them, across brilliant blue water, in an azure sky, a terrible cloud of smoke and dust rises above […]
Source: The Guardian Author: Gary Younge In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks the then national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, called in her senior staff and asked them to think seriously about “how [to] capitalise on these opportunities”. The primary opportunity came from a public united in anger, […]
Source / Courtesy: Wikipedia Zheng He (1371–1433, 鄭和 / 郑和; pinyin: Zhèng Hé), also known as Ma Sanbao (馬三寶 / 马三宝) and Hajji Mahmud Shamsuddin (Persian: حاجی محمود شمس) was a Hui-Chinese mariner, explorer, diplomat and fleet admiral, who commanded voyages to Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and East Africa, collectively […]
Source: Spiegel International Germany Tension between systems of justice also represents a clash of values, according to Joachim Wagner. Using Sharia law to settle disputes can be innocent, but it can also undermine Western ideas of fairness. Journalist Joachim Wagner, author of a new book on parallel justice, discusses the […]