News updates

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 22, 2010 (IPS) – Defying a challenge by the government of Sri Lanka, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon Tuesday named a three-member panel of experts to advise him on how he should proceed with investigating violations of human rights and humanitarian law during the concluding stages of that country's long-drawn-out separatist war last May. "The secretary-general has all …

AMERICA is still embarrassed by the infamous McCarthy Hearings which ruined the lives of thousands of innocents during the Fifties. Anyone then, suspected of being linked to communism was arrested, interrogated and either imprisoned or forced to give names of others suspected of communist tendencies. And so the fear and intimidation spread like a great plague across the USA. Names were …

A study conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has cast doubt over Israel's survival beyond the next 20 years.  The CIA report predicts "an inexorable movement away from a two-state to a one-state solution, as the most viable model based on democratic principles of full equality that sheds the looming specter of colonial Apartheid while allowing for the return …

Russia apparently believes that the longer the US presence in Afghanistan the greater the harm Russia will suffer. It even wonders whether the US is on a mission to destabilize it. Its worries may have increased last Sunday when the New York Times reported that minerals worth one trillion dollars had been discovered in Afghanistan. The report said: "The previously …

  The Muslim Council of Britain deplores Home Secretary Theresa May’s uncharacteristicall y intemperate move to ban the renowned Indian mainstream Islamic scholar Dr. Zakir Abdul-Karim Naik, from a speakers’ tour in the UK, reported in the media (Daily Telegraph, 18th June 2010), apparently because of his “unacceptable behaviour” and that his visit “would not be conducive to the public good”. …

  Prince Charles yesterday urged the world to follow Islamic 'spiritual principles' in order to protect the environment.   In an hour-long speech, the heir to the throne argued that man's destruction of the world was contrary to the scriptures of all religions – but particularly those of Islam.    He said the current 'division' between man and nature had …