Muslim Issues

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 …

  Soldiers on Monday violated the status quo on the esplanade of the mosques in east Jerusalem by raising Israel's flag, the head of theIslamic Waqf organisation that oversees the compound charged. "More than 180 soldiers from a special Israeli army unit today raised a large Israeli flag opposite the mosque of the Rock, which is a grave provocation," Sheikh Azzam al-Khatib told AFP. The sprawling esplanade containing …

  The scale of the ongoing tragedy visited on Libya by NATO and its allies is becoming horribly clearer with each passing day. Estimates of those killed so far vary, but 50,000 seems like a low estimate; indeed the British Ministry of Defence was boasting that the onslaught had killed 35,000 as early as last May. But this number is constantly growing. …

  Defence secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa has said it is not appropriate to view the north of the country, over which a separatist war was fought, as a predominantly Tamil area. Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, who many credit with defeating Tamil rebels, also told the BBC there were few civilian casualties in the war's closing phase. Human rights groups say tens of thousands …

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 …

  Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon speaks at the General Assembly's debate, "The Road to Rio+20 and beyond", on May 22.  Credit:UN Photo/JC McIlwaine UNITED NATIONS, May 23, 2012 (IPS) – Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who has invested heavily in the success of the upcoming U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD), is publicly expressing his frustration at the lack of substantial progress on …