Hanevy Ould Dahah, who is now being held in Mauritania’s Dar Naim prison, is an unlikely dissident. Half-Arab and half-African, he was marked as a child to become a cleric, memorizing the Quran by age nine and studying at ultra-conservative academies. Some of his former classmates now lead Mauritania’s Salafist movement; Hanevy might have been [...]
Phil Jones, the beleaguered British climate scientist at the centre of the leaked emails controversy, is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based.
A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia’s climatic research [...]
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia – Saudi Arabia will not get involved in peacemaking in Afghanistan unless the Taliban stops providing shelter and severs all ties with Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida movement, officials said Tuesday.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai is visiting Saudi Arabia hoping for an active Saudi role in his plan to persuade Taliban militants [...]
The Obama administration’s decision to read the Christmas Day bomber his Miranda rights has rightly come under withering criticism. Instead of a lengthy interrogation by officials with al Qaeda expertise, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was questioned for 50 minutes by local FBI agents and then later advised of his “right to remain silent.”It’s well understood that [...]
Two monuments in Paris are so prominent that they’re hard to miss. One is the Eiffel Tower, of course, the all-iron tour de force of engineering, standing by the Seine amid the city’s spacious and supremely elegant West End. Then to the north, atop Montmartre, there is the Sacré-Cœur: a tall, immaculately white Catholic basilica [...]
The global warming movement as we have known it is dead. Its health had been in steady decline during the last year as the once robust hopes for a strong and legally binding treaty to be agreed upon at the Copenhagen Summit faded away. By the time that summit opened, campaigners were reduced [...]
The world turns. In Indonesia, the principal of a Muslim boarding school in Tangerang who is accused of impregnating a 15-year-old student says the DNA test will prove that a malevolent genie is the real father.
In New Zealand, a German tourist, Hans Kurt Kubus, has been jailed for attempting to board a plane at Christchurch [...]
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama sent Congress a $3.83 trillion budget on Monday that would pour more money into the fight against high unemployment, boost taxes on the wealthy and freeze spending for a wide swath of government programs.
The deficit for this year would surge to a record-breaking $1.56 trillion, topping last year’s then unprecedented [...]
It is welcome news that the Obama administration has reversed its irrational decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 plotters in Manhattan’s federal court. So far, however, the administration has merely — and grudgingly — begun to climb out of this hole of its own making.The president seems more poised to move [...]
Climate science is under assault, progress towards a treaty to end global warming is shuddering to a halt, and Barack Obama is struggling to press on with his clean energy agenda.This was the last conversion to the environmental cause that anybody would have wanted.In a new audiotape that surfaced today on the al-Jazeera network, Osama [...]
