Crackpot anti-Islam activists, “Serial Fabricators” and the tale of Iran and 9/11
Behind a mysterious December 22 Associated Press story about "finding of fact" by a District judge in Manhattan Friday that Iran assisted al-Qaeda in the planning of the 9/11 attacks is a tapestry of recycled fabrications and distortions of fact from a bizarre cast of characters.The AP story offers no indication of the nature of the...Obama resists Israeli pressure on Iran
President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are engaged in intense maneuvering over Netanyahu’s aim of entangling the United States in an Israeli war against Iran.Netanyahu is exploiting the extraordinary influence his right-wing Likud Party exercises over the Republican Party and the U.S. Congress on matters...
War of words calculated to avoid actual conflict
January 7th, 20120 WASHINGTON (IPS) — The recent escalation in Iranian threats to blockade oil shipments and attack U.S. Navy vessels are meant to push up the price of oil and divert domestic opinion from an economic crisis but are not likely to lead to a war in the Persian Gulf, in the view of Iran experts. Iranian navy speed boats take part in an...Quest for survival: Thousands flee war, famine, chaos in Somalia
DOLO ADO, Ethiopia — When famine ravaged southern Somalia earlier this year, camel herder Ibrahim Mohamed refused to join the thousands fleeing for help, vowing to stay on in his homeland to save his dying animals.But after Islamist Shebab gunmen stole his last two camels to have survived the drought and then ordered him to join their...Security Council remains gridlocked by political manipulation
UNITED NATIONS (IPS) — When Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin briefed reporters recently, he offered some biting criticisms of the growing political manipulation of the most powerful body at the United Nations: the 15-member Security Council.Implicitly targeting some of the Western nations — specifically the United States, UK and...Netanyahu backs law to ban loudspeakers at mosques across Israel
A highly contentious bill which threatens to inflame Arab religious and ethnic sensitivities in Israel by clamping down on mosques using loudspeakers for the call to prayer has split the Cabinet of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.Netanyahu expressed sympathy this week for the principle behind the Bill, promoted by Anastasia Michaeli, a...U.S. edging closer towards war with Iran?
Suddenly the struggle to stop Iran is not about saving Israel from nuclear annihilation. After a decade of scare-mongering about the second coming of Nazi Germany, the Iran hawks are admitting that they have other reasons for wanting to take out Iran, and saving Israeli lives may not be one of them. Suddenly the neo-conservatives have...
Analysis: “Cold War” with Iran heats up across Mideast
December 5th, 20110 Worries of Israel striking Iran might or might not be overblown but across the region the largely hidden "cold war" between Tehran and its enemies is escalating fast, bringing with it wider risk of conflict. An Iranian couple rests as they sit in front of an Iranian-made Zelzal missile at a war exhibition held by Iran's...
Assange: iPhone, Blackberry and more have become spying devices
December 4th, 20110 LONDON - Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, says that governments have been using electronic devices such as smart phones and computers to monitor what they're saying, where they are going and what they're writing. He spoke at a panel of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism at he City University in London on Monday.The panel...
Congress using Iran to handcuff Obama on foreign affairs
November 11th, 20110 The "Iran Threat Reduction Act" HR1905, passed on November 2 by the House Foreign Relations Committee, neither reduces an Iranian threat, nor puts significant pressure on Iran's leaders to change policies with which the United States disagrees. A corresponding bill has been introduced in the Senate (S1048). Iran's Supreme Leader...
U.S. hawks behind Iraq war rally for strikes against Iran
October 21st, 20110 WASHINGTON (IPS) - Key neo-conservatives and other right-wing hawks who championed the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq are calling for military strikes against Iran in retaliation for its purported murder-for-hire plot against the Saudi ambassador here.Leading the charge is the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), the ideological successor to the...Turkey masses 10,000 troops on Iraq border
Turkish troops are backed up by F-16 warplanes, helicopter gunships and dronesISTANBUL - The Turkish military dispatched about 10,000 troops to the border with northern Iraq yesterday as part of its largest offensive against Kurdish militants for three years.Turkish television reported last night that most of the troops, part of 22...U.S. arms Bahrain while decrying Russian weapons in Syria
UNITED NATIONS — Peeved at Russia's Security Council veto derailing a Western- sponsored resolution against Syria last week, U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice implicitly accused the Russians of protecting the beleaguered government of President Bashar al-Assad primarily to safeguard their lucrative arms market in the Middle Eastern...
Alleged Iranian assassination plot suspicious, experts say
October 16th, 20110 WASHINGTON — The U.S. Justice Department charges that elements of Iran's government were behind a foiled plot on the life of Saudi Arabia's U.S. ambassador have boggled the minds of many Americans knowledgeable about both Iran and terrorism. Manssor Arbabsiar is shown in this courtroom sketch during an appearance in a Manhattan...
The Apple that changed the world has Arab roots
October 8th, 20110 SAN FRANCISCO -- Abdul Fattah Jandali, a young Syrian Muslim immigrant in Wisconsin, never met his son Steve Jobs. When a baby was born to the 23-year-old Jandali -- now known as John -- and his 23-year-old German-American girlfriend, Joanne Schieble, in 1955, there was no chance he'd be able to grow up with his biological......
Apple’s visionary Steve Jobs dead at 56
October 7th, 20110 SAN FRANCISCO (Thomson Reuters) — Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who changed the daily habits of millions by reinventing computing, music and mobile phones, died Wednesday at the age of 56.Apple loses a visionary leader who inspired personal computing and iconic products such as the iPod, iPhone and iPad, which made Jobs one of the...
UN statehood bid deals a death blow to the old diplomacy
September 30th, 20110 Amid the applause in New York and the celebrations in Ramallah, few seem to have paused to consider where the Palestinian bid for statehood is ultimately leading.The Palestinian application, handed to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon last week, will now disappear from view — possibly for some time — while the United......
Palestine in criminal court triggers Western, Israeli fears
September 30th, 20110 UNITED NATIONS — If Palestine fails to achieve full statehood recognition at the United Nations, the only other viable option is to get "enhanced" observer status with the 193-member General Assembly, the U.N.'s highest policy making body. A Palestinian boy has the national flag painted on his face at a gathering to watch President...
Politics throws Palestine under the bus
September 30th, 20110 WASHINGTON (IPS) — The right-wing government of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu could not be more pleased.Not only did the allegedly most "anti-Israel" president ever repeat, for the nth time, that "America's commitment to Israel's security is unshakeable," but also made crystal clear that Washington will veto any Palestinian...
Deep flaws in the UN’s Mavi Marmara report
September 17th, 20110 When the UN Secretary General announced on August 2, 2010 that a panel of inquiry had been established to investigate the May 31, 2010 Israeli attacks on the Mavi Marmara and five other ships carrying humanitarian aid to the beleaguered people of Gaza, there was widespread hope that international law would be vindicated and the Israelis...Tehran triumphant at nuclear milestone
Tehran — Iran's first nuclear power plant has finally begun to provide electricity to the county's national grid, official media reported yesterday, a long-delayed milestone in the nuclear ambitions of a country the West fears is covertly trying to develop atomic weapons.The start-up will come as a relief to Tehran after many years of......
FBI leak shows U.S. spying on Israel over Iran
WASHINGTON — An FBI translator was sentenced to 20 months in prison last year for leaking secret U.S. wiretaps of the Israeli embassy to a blogger, the New York Times reported Tuesday.Prosecutors and even the judge were tight-lipped about the case, the first of a record five prosecutions of individuals who leaked information to the...
Evidence of British, Pakistani complicity on 9/11
September 11th, 20110 In the hours immediately after the 9/11 attacks, before so many theories muddied the airwaves, there was the clear sense that the scale of the operation would have had to involve at least one foreign sovereign state. By mid-afternoon, then-CIA chief George Tenet laid the blame squarely on Al Qaeda. Mohamed Atta and 18 other......
Norway killings: U.S. Islamophobes fuel murderous rage
July 29th, 20110 WASHINGTON — As Norway mourns the loss of at least 76 of its citizens in Friday's bombing of government buildings in Oslo and mass shootings at a Labour Party youth camp, attention here has focused on the U.S. bloggers and groups whose Islamophobic message appears to have fueled the alleged perpetrator's murderous rage. Used rounds are...
Germany arms Saudis against Iran
July 29th, 20110 BERLIN (IPS) — Germany's delivery of armored tanks to Saudi Arabia is not aimed at repressing local or regional popular uprisings, but to improve Saudi military capabilities in a likely war against Iran, diplomatic and military experts say.The German government's decision to deliver 200 state-of-the-art Leopard 2 armored tanks to the......
