Mr. Abbas was scheduled to meet with Mr. Trump in Washington on Wednesday as the sole representative of the Palestinian people. He has sought in recent weeks to rein in Hamas, cutting salaries and refusing to pay for electricity, in a bid to undermine the group’s authority. Gazans now have only a few hours of power a day. Continue reading the main story “Whether it’s a coincidence […]
Theresa May’s critics have attacked the British prime minister for having “no plan” over Brexit in the wake of a leaked account of a private dinner that heightened tensions between Brussels and London. A report published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung portrayed last Wednesday’s dinner between Mrs May and European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker as a disaster. According to the FAZ, commission officials were astonished at Mrs […]
GENEVA The United Nations is continuing to receive signals that the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen could attack the key port of Hodeidah, causing humanitarian suffering and loss of life, U.N. human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein said on Monday. A Saudi-led military coalition backing the internationally-recognised government in its war against the Houthi rebels has been preparing an assault on Hodeidah. “The U.N. is concerned about […]
When North Korea deployed hundreds of artillery units, submarines and soldiers to take part in its largest live-fire drill, it was intended as a chilling display of the reclusive regime’s military might. The country boasts the world’s fourth-largest standing army, with more than 1m troops as well as 7m reserves, and last week’s military exercise came as US President Donald Trump ramped up the pressure on Pyongyang […]
President Donald Trump was a distracting entertainment from the moment he launched his campaign in June of 2015 — until he wasn’t. His opening speech, in which he called Mexican immigrants “rapists” and told the world he would be the best jobs president “God ever created,” was looked at as the ravings of a man whose outsized ego was too big to be anything but hilarious. News […]
Before comedian Hasan Minhaj got up to poke fun at the assembled White House press corps last night, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein got up to celebrate it. The legendary Watergate duo gave a speech evoking their investigative reporting of the Nixon administration and calling on the current generation of journalists to practice careful, thorough and relentless reporting on the current White House. Below are their remarks, […]
ABU DHABI // The Sawab Centre, a joint UAE-US initiative combating online propaganda by ISIL and other extremist groups and promoting positive alternatives, has announced the launch of a new anti-youth recruitment campaign on social media. Using the hashtag #DeludedFollowers, the four-day campaign will run until May 3 in Arabic and English on Sawab’s Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube sites. Even as its territory in Iraq and […]
Ibn Arabi, undoubtedly one of the world’s great spiritual teachers, provokes mixed reactions. There are those that consider the 12th century mystic, philosopher, Islamic scholar, poet and sage to be the foremost spiritual leader and Sufi master in Muslim history. Others regard him as a heretic or even an apostate. There is rarely much middle ground. Ibn Arabi – known as Muhyiddin (the Revivifier of Religion) and […]
A Doha court on Sunday upheld the death penalty in the retrial of a Qatari man convicted of murdering a 24-year-old British female teacher. Badr Hashim Khamis Abdallah al-Jabr was found guilty of stabbing Lauren Patterson and then burning her body in the Qatari desert in October 2013. “The defendant was fully aware of the consequences of his actions,” Doha’s court of cassation ruled. It said that […]
Editor’s note: This post was originally published on Scott Helme’s blog, and was reprinted to ZDNet with permission. I was recently invited to take part in some research by BBC Click, alongside Professor Alan Woodward, to analyse a device that had quite a lot of people all excited. With slick marketing, catchy tag lines and some pretty bold claims about their security, nomx claim to have cracked […]
By Matthias Blamont | PARIS PARIS A week before a decisive second round in France’s presidential election, many voters are sceptical that either of the two candidates can solve chronic unemployment or tackle security concerns, a poll published on Sunday found. The Ifop survey for the Journal du Dimanche highlights two key battlegrounds as centrist presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron and far-right leader Marine Le Pen enter a […]
DUBAI Saudi Arabia said on Sunday it had arrested 46 members of a militant cell responsible for a deadly suicide bombing attack on the Prophet’s Mosque in the holy city of Medina last summer widely blamed on Islamic State. The suspects, which included foreign and Saudi citizens, were detained in the Western port city of Jeddah, state news agency SPA quoted the interior ministry as saying. (Reporting […]
Heart attack and stroke were the most common reasons for life and critical illness cover claims by men in the Middle East, while cancer was the leading cause for claims by women, according to new research. Zurich International Life’s latest claim statistics revealed that the majority of claims made by men are from those aged 40 and above, whereas for women, the majority of claims were paid […]
DUBAI // A Bangladeshi driver who chased his countryman around a construction site before stabbing him to death was sentenced to five years in jail by Dubai Criminal Court on Sunday. The 38-year-old attacked his colleague on November 22 at a site in Al Rashidiya at about 7am and the man later died of his injuries. By the time police arrived, the attacker had fled but he […]
By Ahmed Rasheed | BAGHDAD BAGHDAD A top Iraqi commander expects to dislodge Islamic State from Mosul in May despite resistance from militants in the densely populated Old City district. The battle should be completed “in a maximum of three weeks”, the Iraqi army’s chief of staff, Lieutenant General Othman al-Ghanmi, was quoted as saying by state-run newspaper al-Sabah on Sunday. A U.S.-led international coalition is providing […]
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts, Not everyone likes to hear about the threat of nuclear war. Some find refuge in denial and say that nuclear war is impossible because it makes no sense. Unfortunately, humankind has a long record of doing things that make no sense. In previous posts in recent years I have pointed out both written documents and changes in US war doctrine that indicate […]
DUBAI // A jobless Russian and his two Uzbek friends are accused of attacking an Emirati trader and stealing his Dh400,000 watch. Prosecutors told Dubai Criminal Court that the trader bought the Swiss-made watch – one of only 88 in the world – but later decided to post it on Dubizzle for sale. “Two days after I made the post, I received a WhatsApp message from a […]
By Patrick Rucker | HARRISBURG, Pa. HARRISBURG, Pa. U.S. President Donald Trump hit the road on Saturday to celebrate his first 100 days in the White House with cheering supporters at a campaign-style rally, touting his initial achievements and lashing out at critics. Trump told a Pennsylvania crowd he was just getting started on meeting his campaign promises. He repeatedly attacked an “incompetent, dishonest” media, saying they […]
The pope said he did not know enough about French politics to respond, but, he said, “Europe is in danger of breaking apart, this is true.” He noted that the migrant crisis fueled fears that destabilized the Continent, “but we mustn’t forget that Europe is made by immigrants.” Continue reading the main story “Centuries and centuries of immigrants,” he said. “It’s us.” That inclusive message has proved […]
Epilepsy is a neurological disorder that affects millions of people, regardless of age, but has yet to discover why it happens and how to effectively stop it. So far, most epilepsy patients manage their seizures with prescription drugs or by using cannabis. While scientists continue to study minibrains in order to understand the origins of epilepsy and other neurological disorders, however, a team of engineering students from Rice University […]
April 29, 2017 by: Rochelle Toplensky in Brussels Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban left Brussels on a defiant note on Saturday, in spite of promising European colleagues he would “behave” and settle a stand-off with the European Commission. Mr Orban came under heavy pressure from leaders of his centre-right EU group amid growing impatience and concern across the bloc over Budapest undermining independent universities and mounting a […]
By Drazen Jorgic | ISLAMABAD ISLAMABAD Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Saturday sacked one of his special advisers and sanctioned another bureaucrat after an inquiry into a newspaper leak, but the country’s powerful army rejected Sharif’s directive as “incomplete”. The report’s findings and recommendations threaten to reopen a rift between the army and the civilian government at a time when relations between the two have been […]
By Matthias Blamont and Simon Carraud | PARIS PARIS French far-right presidential hopeful Marine Le Pen on Saturday chose defeated first-round candidate Nicolas Dupont-Aignan as her prime minister, a bid to attract his voters and help her to victory over centrist favourite Emmanuel Macron. Dupont-Aignan is a nationalist whose protectionist economic policies are close to those of the National Front’s Le Pen and who, like her, wants […]
BEIRUT Fighting between rebel groups in the biggest insurgent stronghold near the Syrian capital Damascus entered a second day on Saturday, while government forces pressed an offensive against the besieged enclave, a war monitor said. The clashes broke out in part of the densely-populated rural area east of Damascus known as the Eastern Ghouta which has been besieged by Syrian government forces since 2013. The Syrian Observatory […]
