*News and analysis

The twin suicide bombings yesterday in Bir Hassan, south of Beirut, were rightfully described as “an attack on the Islamic orphanage.” In fact, the two blasts shook the neighborhood surrounding al-Majad Center, part of the Social Welfare Institutions, where about 100 children were playing outside and 150 others were attending …

Boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) are big news in 2014. If Scarlett Johansson’s Sodastream fiasco didn’t grab your attention, perhaps the American Studies Association’s boycott of Israeli universities did, or Netanyahu’s increasing talk of million-dollar PR campaigns, legal offensives and diplomacy efforts to counter the BDS threat. Opinion pages are filled with debate, John Kerry has warned …

Updated at 3:40 pm: The Abdullah Azzam Brigades claimed responsibility for a twin suicide car bomb attack near an Iranian cultural center in a southern suburb of the Lebanese capital Beirut on Wednesday morning. The Lebanese National News Agency reported that the 9:20 am explosion appeared to have been caused by …

The ninth meeting of the Islamic Inter-Parliamentary Union (IIPU) has opened in the Iranian capital, Tehran, with representatives from nearly 50 countries in attendance. The IIPU meeting kicked off in Tehran on Tuesday with a speech by Sudanese National Assembly Speaker Al-Fateh Ezzedin, whose country holds the rotating presidency of …

The leader of Hungary’s Jobbik movement has said that “Islam is the last hope for humanity in the darkness of globalism and liberalism.” During the recent Hungarian parliamentary elections, the Jobbik movement earned 16.67% of the overall vote, securing 47 seats in the National Assembly. Subsequently, the President of Jobbika …

On 20 January, heavily-armed gunmen killed a prominent Shiite leader, Allama Alim Al-Musvi, in northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar. “Two gunmen opened fire on the scholar and escaped when he came out of his house and walked towards the mosque,” media outlets quoted a local security official as saying. No …

Allamah Raja Nasir Abbas Jafri, secretary general of Majlis-e-Wahdat-e-Muslimeen (MWM), has announced that MWM would launch a movement to protest against the pro-Taliban and pro-takfiri policies of the PMLN-Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz Sharif) government. “Punjab’s government too has become the patron-in-chief of the Taliban [and the takfiri] terrorists, with the …

Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has been informed by the committee dealing with negotiations with Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) that the TTP has specified certain demands for negotiation.   The Taliban have welcomed Prime Minister Sharif’s latest offer of peace talks, but demanded that the negotiations take a low profile; that …

A Saudi prominent cleric says Takfiri groups as well as certain regional and international intelligence bodies are using Saudi youths as “firewood” for their own conflicts and problems. During his praying sermon on Friday in Saudi Arabia’s eastern city of Qatif, Sheikh Hassan Saffar criticized extremist groups for their “radical …

The recent announcement by Saudi Arabia concerning its fighters in Syria is no mere detail to gloss over. It is a decidedly serious indicator of the extent of pressure exerted by the United States, including the threat to cancel the expected visit by President Barack Obama to the kingdom. Yet …