Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s resolve to brutally crush mass protests demanding an end to his authoritarian regime is forcing the United States and Europe to back verbal condemnations with deeds.
Syria’s brutal crackdown on anti-government protests is putting Iran between a rock and a hard place.
In a square in Nazareth, right below the Basilica of the Annunciation, a Koranic verse warns that "whoever seeks a religion other than Islam, it will never be accepted of him, and in the Hereafter he will be one of the losers". Yet it is the spectre of losing in the here-and-now that most haunts the dwindling number of adherents to Christianity in the land of its birthplace.
President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen has agreed to a proposal by Gulf Arab mediators to step down within 30 days, and hand power to his deputy in exchange for immunity from prosecution, Yemen’s state TV said on Saturday evening.
Egypt’s former energy minister Sameh Fahmy and six other officials will stand trial on charges related to a natural gas deal with Israel, Reuters reported the country’s public prosecutor as saying.
The firebrand Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has threatened to unleash militia forces if US forces stay on in Iraq, Reuters reported on Saturday.
Against the backdrop of American drone attacks on Muammar Qaddafi’s forces, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France announced plans to travel to Benghazi to meet the country’s opposition, reported Agence-France Presse.
Snipers shot dead at least three mourners Saturday in Douma, a suburb of the Syrian capital where funerals were underway for several protesters killed the previous day, witnesses said.
More than 3,000 protesters took to the streets after Friday prayers in Oman’s southern port of Salalah, making it one of the largest demonstrations since sporadic unrest began in the sultanate two months ago, reported Reuters.
The pastor of a small Florida church and his associate who planned to burn the Quran on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks in 2010 were briefly jailed in a heavily Islamic suburb after he refused to pay a “peace bond†before staging a protest outside a mosque in Michigan, one of America’s largest industrial states and the home of the automobile industry in the United States.