Articles

Arab governments and their media claimed last month to have helped Iraq on the road to international rehabilitation by allowing it to chair the Arab League foreign ministers’ conference held in Cairo on September 11 - 12.

Dr Yusuf Abu-Safiat, the Palestinian Authority’s ‘minister for the environment’, has accused Israel of turning the Palestinian Authority-ruled area of the West Bank into a vast dumping-ground for its domestic industrial, chemical and nuclear waste, thereby creating a potentially catastrophic environmental nightmare.

After 30 years as a false revolutionary, Colonel Mu’ammar Qaddafi is now marketing himself as an African hero and a hater of ‘everything Arab’, opening a racial can of worms with the potential of dividing the Muslims of the continent and setting ‘Arab’ against ‘African’ on a larger stage.

In the age of the Internet and cyberspace, radio programming may appear small potatoes. But it is not, especially in North America ,as the protests since last March against Pacifica Network policy, which owns KPFK Radio Stations, show.

Prince Faisal bin Fahad, the son of king Fahad of Saudi Arabia, who has died at the age of 54, had been general manager for the Ministry of Youth and Sports since the late 1970s. The cause of his death was surrounded with vagueness and conflicting accounts.

Moscow has been desperately trying to involve the west in its futile war in the Caucasus by invoking the name of Osama bin Laden, the US’s current villain of the month, but with little success so far.

The Kosova Liberation Army (KLA), the military force which grew from nothing to become the main representative and protector of the Kosovars against the Serbs during the years of persecution and oppression before NATO intervention in the region earlier this year, was formally disbanded on September 20, when talks with NATO and KFOR commanders were finally concluded nearly 24 hours behind schedule.

Political instability is so much a part of life in Pakistan that it hardly evokes any concern. It is when the escalation of political instability begins to threaten economic life that the powers-that-be get restless and send their current ‘leader’ packing. That point may be approaching fast for prime minister Nawaz Sharif.

The South African Human Rights Commission (HRC) ruled last month that a Muslim schoolgirl, Layla Cassim, who was suspended for writing an essay about Palestine had had her rights violated by her school, Crawford College.

Nigerian troops cancelled their planned withdrawal from Sierra Leone last month, after the rebel Revolutionary United Front failed to disarm as agreed in the July peace deal. Fears remain of a resumption of the brutal fighting that has killed thousands and left many more deliberately maimed.