Middle East

Nine-month investigation by Al Jazeera discovers rare, radioactive polonium on ex-Palestinian leader's final belongings. It was a scene that riveted the world for weeks: The ailing Yasser Arafat, first besieged by Israeli tanks in his Ramallah compound, then shuttled to Paris, where he spent his final days undergoing a barrage of medical tests in a French military hospital. Eight years …

  More than 60 people died in a series of bomb blasts across Iraq on Wednesday. The endless violence indicates that Iraq’s problems are far from over though the United States withdrew its troops – at least on paper – six months ago.   That the victims of Wednesday’s bomb attacks were largely Shiite pilgrims indicates that the sectarianism created …

Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies may right now be boosting oil production, aiming to plunge the market price to as low as US$60 per barrel. The ultimate goal is to cripple the economies of Shiite Iran and Iraq, an insider view suggests. The insight comes from Barton Biggs, hedge fund manager running Traxis Partners, who spoke with a Saudi …

The US government is the second worst human rights abuser on the planet and the sole enabler of the worst–Israel. But this doesn’t hamper Washington from pointing the finger elsewhere. The US State Department’s “human rights report” focuses its ire on Iran and Syria, two countries whose real sin is their independence from Washington, and on the bogyman- in-the-making–China, the …

The United States has completed its planning for a military strike on Iran, the US Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro said in remarks at a closed conference in Tel Aviv that were broadcast on Israel TV on Wednesday night. “It would be preferable to resolve this diplomatically, and through the use of pressure, than to use military force,” Shapiro said …