Politics

The Myanmar junta has suspended nine weekly news journals which accorded prominent front-page coverage to the release of democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi. The Press Scrutiny and Registration Division under the Ministry of Information suspended publication of the top sports journal First Eleven and the Hot News journal for two weeks while other journals 7 Days News, The Voice, Venus News, Pyithu Khit, Myanmar Post, The Snap Shot, and Myanmar Newsweek were suspended for one week, according to...

The Al-Qaeda threat to Egypt's Coptic Christians has run into all-round opposition ― from the country's powerful Muslim Brotherhood political group to the press. The threat had been issued by the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), an Al-Qaeda outfit in Iraq. The Opposition Muslim Brotherhood, according to an Agence France-Presse (AFP) report, said Muslims must protect Christian houses of worship. "The Muslim Brotherhood is stressing to all, and primarily Muslims, that the protection of holy places of...

As the US establishment tries hard to project itself as a religiously diverse country, the conviction that America is a Christian nation is gaining currency and becoming more intensified, a study has found. "Though initially paradoxical, these trends are less mysterious if the idea of a Christian America is understood, not as a description of religious demography, but as a discursive practice that seeks to align the symbolic boundaries of national belonging with the boundaries of the dominant...

An unprecedented number of women will be in positions of power, Muslim immigration to the West will rise, and office workers will be unchained from their cubicles ― all in the next 40 years, says a consultancy set up by the author of Future Shock. Toffler Associates has released its predictions for the next 40 years to mark the 40th anniversary of Future Shock, in which author Alvin Toffler studied the 1970s to see what would happen in the future. Some of the predictions that the consultancy...

This should come as a farce – Egypt has become chair of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) governing body, while back home it shoots unarmed migrants and blocks UNHCR's access to detainees seeking the agency's protection. Egypt is notorious for shooting foreign nationals trying to cross into Israel. It also impedes the UN refugee agency's access to foreign nationals detained in Egypt who want to claim asylum. Since July 2007, Egypt has shot down 85 unarmed migrants as they...

The son of a Baloch nationalist leader who was killed during Pakistani military ruler Pervez Musharraf’s rule has offered a bounty of Rs 1 billion and 100 acres of land to any person who beheads the former dictator. The offer was made by Talal Akbar Bugti, the son of late leader Nawab Akbar Bugti and chief of the Jamhoori Watan Party, in the North West Frontier Province town of Quetta on Saturday. Nawab Bugti was killed in a cave, about 150 miles east of Quetta in August 2006. Musharraf, on the...

China's best-known dissident Liu Xiaobo, who is into his first year of an 11-year prison term for subversion, has been awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for Peace "for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China." The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that it was awarding the prize to Liu Xiaobo for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China. "The Norwegian Nobel Committee has long believed that there is a close connection between human...

The story now in Moscow is about two groups of journalism students making calendars for Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin aimed at his 58th birthday. The first posed in saucy lingerie, the second has hit back with a hardhitting realistic one. The first calendar, called "Vladimir Vladimirovich, We love you. Happy Birthday Mr Putin," featured 12 journalism students of Moscow State University (MGU). The 259-ruble ($8.73) calendar, which hit the markets on Tuesday, came with captions like “You...

Al-Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden, has voiced his concern about climate change and the recent floods in Pakistan, in an audiotape posted on the Internet on Friday. Osama's new tack is being seen as an effort to bolster his flagging image. The speech titled "Reflections on the Method of Relief Work" came in an 11 minute video that had been posted on Islamist websites, and was released by American watchdog SITE Intelligence Group on Friday. SITE said that it had been able to identify the voice, but...

Directly challenging extremist ideology through exposing the fallacies, contradictions and harmful effects of jihadist concepts and actions is a better way of tackling them than closing down extremist websites, a think-tank has concurred. Quilliam, a London-based think-tank whose founders are former ideologues of UK-based extremist Islamist organisations, has based its conclusions on an 18-month study of Arabic-language websites that eventually focused on 20 discussion forums. Unlike earlier...