Two helicopters escorting U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates take off after a visit to Camp Black Horse where the Afghan National Army (ANA) receive training in Kabul March 10, 2010. The House of Representatives on Wednesday overwhelmingly rejected a measure calling for President Barack Obama to pull U.S. forces from Afghanistan, in an election-year test [...] [...more]
US international affairs journal Foreign Policy says Turkey’s Fethullah Gülen voted top of its list of world intellectuals. WASHINGTON - The bimonthly US international affairs journal Foreign Policy has just published a survey of the world’s top 20 public intellectuals and the first 10 are all Muslims. Fethullah Gülen, who heads a network of schools and [...] [...more]
PARIS: France is set to adjust its legal and fiscal framework to accommodate Islamic bonds this year, a leading Paris official said, as the French capital looks to attract business in this potentially fast-growing industry. “Work is well advanced on the matter of hosting sukuk (Islamic bond) emissions,” Paris Europlace managing director Arnaud de Bresson said [...] [...more]
Truth and Consequences in the Gaza Invasion Public outrage at the Gaza invasion did not come out of the blue but rather marked the nadir of a curve plotting a steady decline in support for Israel. As polling data of Americans and Europeans, both Gentiles and Jews, suggest, the public has become increasingly critical of [...] [...more]
Every detail of September 16, 2007, is burned in Mohammed Kinani’s memory. Shortly after 9 am he was preparing to leave his house for work at his family’s auto parts business in Baghdad when he got a call from his sister, Jenan, who asked him to pick her and her children up across town and bring [...] [...more]
KABUL - General Stanley McChrystal’s cautiously worded support for a negotiated settlement with the Taliban leadership is only the first public signal of a policy decision by the Barack Obama administration to support a political settlement between the Karzai regime and the Taliban, an official of the McChrystal’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) command has [...] [...more]
The Obama administration sent lawmakers this week a plan for $1.45 billion (Dh5.32bn) in aid for Pakistan this year, funding media campaigns to counter extremist views as well as water, energy and other projects. The 2010 spending plan, obtained by Reuters, was sent to lawmakers as part of the US administration’s obligation to consult Congress over [...] [...more]
A Dutch commission of inquiry has concluded that the US-led 2003 Iraq war was illegal under international law. The conclusion has far-reaching implications. Potentially, it could open up leading politicians and military figures in the US and Britain to prosecution for war crimes. Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende of the Netherlands set up the Davids Commission [...] [...more]
The chief author of the Bush administration’s “torture memo” told Justice Department investigators that the president’s war-making authority was so broad that he had the constitutional power to order a village to be “massacred,” according to a report released Friday night by the Office of Professional Responsibility. The views of former Justice lawyer John Yoo were [...] [...more]
A lingering technical question about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks still haunts some, and it has political implications: How did 200,000 tons of steel disintegrate and drop in 11 seconds? A thousand architects and engineers want to know, and are calling on Congress to order a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers [...] [...more]
