Analytics

Source : Al Arabiya | 09 Apr 2012

Ahead of an upcoming presidential election in France, policymakers are riding a wave of Islam-dominated issues that have unwittingly taken center stage in the country’s public domain.

Concerns over Islamic fundamentalism reached a peak in recent weeks when French police launched the latest of a series of raids on suspected Islamic militants, detaining 10 people across the country in predawn arrests.

By : Ian Cobain | The Guardian | 28 Mar 2012

The US government shut down a series of court cases arising from a multimillion pound business dispute in order to conceal evidence of a damning intelligence failure shortly before the 9/11 attacks, MPs were told.

Moreover, the UK government is now seeking similar powers that could be used to prevent evidence of illegal acts and embarrassing failures from emerging in court, David Davis, the former shadow home secretary, told the Commons.

By Ari Shavit | The New York Times | 21 Mar 2012

If Iran goes nuclear it will change our world.

An Iranian atom bomb will force Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt to acquire their own atom bombs. Thus a multipolar nuclear arena will be established in the most volatile region on earth. Sooner or later, this unprecedented development will produce a nuclear event. The world we know will cease to be the world we know after Tehran, Riyadh, Cairo or Tel Aviv become the 21st century’s Hiroshima.

By Levent Baştürk | 17 Mar 2012

Is there a relationship between the Greater Middle Eastern Partnership initiative and the Arab Spring?
Is the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ a product of the ‘democracy agenda’ initiated by the Bush Administration and followed during the Obama era?
These are the questions that are frequently being asked by some sectors nowadays.

Arab Spring: a manifestation of the public anger against status quo

By Osama Al Sharif | Arab News | Amman | 16 Mar 2012

More than a year has passed since Libyans revolted against their country's strongman and ruler for four decades Col. Muammar Qaddafi.

What started as a peaceful uprising quickly transformed into an armed struggle. But unlike other mass protests linked to the phenomenon of the Arab Spring, Libya presented itself as a unique case.

By : Iqbal Siddiqui | The Crescent | London | 12 Mar 2012

Thanks to the intense international news focus on current events in Syria, no one can be unaware of the increasingly bloody internal conflict in that country, which is arguably reaching the level of civil war. But the level of coverage can have, ironically, the effect of distorting and diminishing people’s understanding of issues rather than increasing it. I would like to focus on some little noted elements of the situation there.

By Damien McGuinness | BBC | Tbilisi | 20 Feb 2012

Tensions between Iran and the West have spread to the Caucasus, where a bomb was found attached to an Israeli diplomatic car last week.

Iran and Israel appear to be engaged in a covert war of threats, bomb attacks and assassination plots in the Caucasus, a region that was firmly inside Russia's sphere of influence in the Cold War.

Iran's secretive nuclear programme is a target for spies, as Western leaders remain convinced that Tehran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, despite its denials.

By Dmitri Trenin | Bloomberg | Moscow | 14 Feb 2012

When Russians look at Iran, they see a country that has been their neighbor and rival forever. As the Russian empire advanced, it wrestled the North and South Caucasus from the Shah. Peter the Great annexed, briefly, Iran’s entire Caspian Sea coastline and put his forces just north of Tehran.

By Pete Papaherakles | American Free Press | 13 Feb 2012

Could gaining control of the Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran (CBI) be one of the main reasons that Iran is being targeted by Western and Israeli powers? As tensions are building up for an unthinkable war with Iran, it is worth exploring Iran’s banking system compared to its U.S., British and Israeli counterparts.

By Justin Rowlatt : BBC World Service | 07 Feb 2012

For decades the West has lectured the East on how to manage its economies. Not any more.

Now the emerging economies of Asia look like models of steady, consistent policy and sustained growth while Europe, America and Japan are mired in debt and are growing achingly slowly, if at all.

So what can the West learn from the East?