Karachi - Allama Raja Nasir Jafari, secretary general, Majlis Wahdat-e-Muslimeen, has said that the US and its allies in Arab countries are hijacking Pakistani elections. He appealed to all the political parties to join hands against these US stooges and turn down them. He said that MWM was a ...

RIYADH - Arab leaders pledged to remove obstacles to finalising a free trade zone this year and agreed to facilitate capital flows, as they wrapped up an economic summit in Riyadh on Tuesday.“We stress our determination to complete all the prerequisites of (forming) the free trade area before ...

CAIRO - Arab foreign ministers meeting in Cairo on Sunday agreed to form a delegation to visit Arab capitals and ask for help in easing the Palestinian financial crisis, the pan-Arab body said.The delegation will comprise Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad, Arab League Secretary General Nabil ...

RAMALLAH (Reuters/AFP) - Top Arab officials paid a rare visit to the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Saturday to discuss a Palestinian financial crisis that President Mahmoud Abbas hopes will be eased by Arab donations.Arab League chief Nabil al-Arabi on Saturday called on US President Barack Obama ...

What’s happening in Egypt is not unexpected; going beyond the mandate that has been set, always results in such turmoil and polarization of society. Someone has very rightly commented on this crisis that Muslim Brotherhood came to power due to Arab Spring not Islamic Spring, therefore, they ...

DUBAI  - Taking their cue from the Arab Spring, cyber activists have embarked on a daring campaign urging women fight for equality. “The uprising of women in the Arab World” is the title of the Facebook page where the campaign was launched on October 1 to highlight ...

ABDULATEEF AL-MULHIMThirty-nine years ago, on Oct 6, 1973, the third major war between the Arabs and Israel broke out. The war lasted only 20 days. The two sides were engaged in two other major wars, in 1948 and 1967.The 1967 War lasted only six days. But, these three wars were not the only ...

VENICE  - Arab cinema is witnessing a new wave of creativity in the wake of the Arab Spring revolts, said directors at the Venice film festival where some of the emerging talent from the region was on show.Social themes that were previously kept bottled up are now making their way on film and ...

The Arab awakening sweeping across the Middle East is one of the epic happenings of the 21st Century. It is essentially a fight for dignity and equality. Driven by power politics, double standards are on display: the Arab Establishment, passive about the protests in Egypt, is aggressive about the ...

HARARE  - A Zimbabwean court fined six activists $500 (380 euros) each Wednesday for having discussed the Arab Spring uprisings at a gathering, and ordered them to perform community service. “Each accused is sentenced to pay a fine of $500 and if they default they will spend 10 months in ...

MARWAN KABALANOn Sunday, the attention of the world’s media will be focused on Moscow, where millions of Russians will cast their votes in one of the most important presidential elections since the collapse of the former Soviet Union.It is almost a certainty that current Prime Minister and ...

For the first time since the end of the cold war two decades ago, Russia and China used the veto twice in the UN Security Council to block a resolution regarded particularly in Moscow as another western attempt to ignore its interests in the international arena. Russia’s firm position in ...

“Emboldened by the fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, other pro-American regimes in the region are quickly coming to realise that their countries are not immune to the revolutionary fervour that has swept through the Middle East. In Bahrain, “protests to topple the monarchy ...

SARAH MOUSAThis week marks the 54th anniversary of the foundation of the United Arab Republic (UAR), a unity between Egypt and Syria that was the height of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s power and the pinnacle of the pan-Arab philosophy that he epitomised.At that moment in 1958, the ...

The Arab League has worked out a new plan to settle the situation in Syria, based on the crisis resolution experience in Yemen, Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani said.Al-Thani said the plan, presented at an Arab League meeting in Cairo on Sunday, urges embattled Syrian ...

Arab League officials say the 22-member organization's observers mission in Syria has been extended for an extra month. Sunday's decision has been made by Arab foreign ministers meeting in Cairo. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to speak to the ...

TEHRAN  - Iran is refusing to refuel some European and Arab airlines at its main international airport in a tit-for-tat move over major oil companies denying fuel to Iranian planes abroad, the airport’s chief said Saturday.“Government directives” ordered the ban, Morteza ...

This year, the certitudes of the old Middle East dissolved with unseemly haste. A regional order frozen in place since the death of Egypt’s Colonel Nasser 40 years ago finally thawed. It produced a torrent of uprisings, coups, standoffs, civil wars, and an orgy of state-sponsored ...

JERUSALEM (AFP) - European Union ambassadors in Israel have voiced concern about the Jewish state's treatment of its Arab minority, in an unprecedented report on the issue obtained by AFP."While the international community is focused predominantly on restarting the Israeli-Palestinian peace ...

RAWALPINDI - The Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) on Wednesday strongly and categorically denied contents of an article, published in a British newspaper in which it made assertions regarding Director General ISI Ahmad Shuja Pasha’s visit to Arab leaders in a bid to oust the Zardari ...

DAMASCUS (AFP) - At least 100 Syrian army deserters were killed or wounded in clashes on Tuesday as Damascus faced new demands to halt its bloody nine-month crackdown on dissent.The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which provided the casualty figures, also said 36 civilians were killed around ...

Minsk is as close to Berlin as London is. Yet, an iron curtain separates the two capitals. In 2011, over a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the nation of Belarus holds out as the last dictatorship in Europe. A former Index on Censorship award winner, journalist Natalia Radzina was smuggled ...

In his 1938 work The Anatomy of Revolution, American historian Crane Brinton used the analogy of a fever and its movement through the corpus of a nation to describe the multiple stages of a political uprising. Analysing the various phases of the American, British, French and Russian revolutions, ...

Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, Chairman of Kingdom Holding Company (KHC), has been ranked number one for 3 consecutive years in Middle East's Magazine's 2011 list of the "World's 50 Most Influential Arabs." In these troubled times, the magazine said, "it is clear Prince Alwaleed retains huge ...

UNITED NATIONS Employment and economic conditions in the occupied Arab territories continue to be stifled by restrictions imposed under Israels occupation and the policy of separation, according to a report by the UN International Labour Organisation (ILO). The annual report of ILO on the ...

Leaders of the Group of Eight rich nations said Friday that international development banks could give more than $20 billion to Egypt and Tunisia to support countries that overthrew dictators this year and are trying to establish free democracies. President Barack Obama and other G-8 leaders ...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Al-Qaeda has released a message from slain leader Osama bin Laden praising the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia and urging Muslims to take advantage of a rare historic opportunity to rise up, a US monitor said. The message posted on militants forums on Wednesday by al-Qaedas ...

CAIRO (AFP) - Egyptian Foreign Minister Nabil al-Arabi was unanimously elected Arab League chief on Sunday to succeed Amr Mussa, embarking on a challenging task as political upheaval sweeps the region. The surprise announcement of his candidacy came after Egypt withdrew diplomat Mustafa al-Fikki ...

In Tunisia, protesters escalated calls for the restoration of the countrys suspended constitution. Meanwhile, Egyptians rose in revolt as strikes across the country brought daily life to a halt and toppled the government. In Libya, provincial leaders worked feverishly to strengthen their newly ...

A century before young men and women took to the streets of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and other parts of the Arab world, demanding a new way of life and a new kind of politics, there was young Khalid, calling for a revolution of the spirit, a fusing of Islam and liberalism. He was the creation of Ameen ...