Posted by Nadeem F. Paracha  What can one say about Imran Khan? A great former cricketer, a compassionate philanthropist … a sorry excuse for a politician. But his continuing forays into bad politics and tactical blunders can be excused, for he is yet to understand that politics is not a game of cricket, and that the democratic election process does not follow the selection policy he enforced as the captain of the Pakistan cricket squad. The truth is, Khan’s penchant for picking up talented players seemed to have gone haywire when he decided to pick his early political mentors. Coming … Continue reading The froth of Imran Khan (RCM) – Racist Champagne Mullah?

Alyssa Ravasio displays her page on the social networking site Facebook, while attending school in Los Angeles January 26, 2010. – Reuters LOS ANGELES: College senior Alyssa Ravasio gave up MySpace on the day she got a Facebook account and never looked back. She has already lost interest in Twitter. But how does Facebook know it can keep her loyalty? The brief history of the Internet is littered with the ghosts of websites that people have abandoned in their relentless pursuit of something newer, faster, better and cooler. Tech-savvy Ravasio, a 21-year-old UCLA student designing her undergraduate degree around the … Continue reading Facebook: A valuable Internet commodity?

Syed Talat Hussain US Defence Secretary Robert Gates’ visit to India and Pakistan last week was a classic study in contradictory behaviour. He praised India’s role in Afghanistan and mouthed the usual rhetoric about Pakistan being the epicentre of global terrorism As these lines appear in print, the London Conference on Afghanistan will be in full swing. This one-day event shall culminate in a communiqué from all the interested parties spelling out the course of the international community’s response to the Afghanistan challenge. It is good that the world is now waking up to the grim realities in this war-torn … Continue reading Cold and blinkered in London — Is it time Pakistan stood with a stronger backbone?

Miranda Husain Nothing is as fragile as the male ego and no one more bitter than a man scorned; such cads become genuinely and surprisingly affronted when a woman tries to steer the banter back to the path of most resistance A chance encounter with a former colleague has led me to ponder. About men and how even those who have perfected the art of projecting an outward image of sophisticated intellect still, when it comes to women, nurture the soul and ego of the adolescent schoolboy. Nudge nudge, wink wink. Take my former colleague, for example. The gentleman in … Continue reading Sex and the city!

Yemen pledges to reform and wins support for fight against al-Qaida Foreign ministers from the US, Britain, Saudi Arabia and 20 other countries met to pledge not to interfere in Yemen’s internal affairs Ian Black, Middle East editor guardian.co.uk, A protester holds a South Yemen flag during a demonstration outside 10 Downing Street. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images Yemen tonight won broad international and Arab support for fighting al-Qaida but was urged to carry out economic and social reforms to address the causes of its instability and stop it becoming a failed state where extremism can flourish. Foreign ministers from the … Continue reading Yemen pledges to reform and wins support for fight against al-Qaida

by Timothy R. Furnish Middle East Quarterly http://www.meforum.org/713/beheading-in-the-name-of-islam Print Send RSS Share: Images of masked terrorists standing behind Western hostages in Iraq and Saudi Arabia have become all too common on Arabic satellite stations such as Al-Jazeera and Al-Manar. Islamist websites such as Muntadiyat al-Mahdi[1] go further, streaming video of their murder. The February 2002 decapitation of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, true to its intention, horrified the Western audience. Chechen rebels, egged on by Islamist benefactors, had adopted the practice four years earlier,[2] but the absence of widely broadcast videos limited the psychological impact of hostage decapitation. The … Continue reading Beheading in the Name of Islam

A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Muslim Population Executive Summary A comprehensive demographic study of more than 200 countries finds that there are 1.57 billion Muslims of all ages living in the world today, representing 23% of an estimated 2009 world population of 6.8 billion. While Muslims are found on all five inhabited continents, more than 60% of the global Muslim population is in Asia and about 20% is in the Middle East and North Africa. However, the Middle East-North Africa region has the highest percentage of Muslim-majority countries. Indeed, more than half of the 20 … Continue reading Mapping the Global Muslim Population