By Jian Junbo SHANGHAI – The United Nations’ climate change conference in Copenhagen at the end of last year highlighted an emerging new international order that will be dominated by international groupings rather than by individual state powers. The conference’s agenda was dominated by informal groupings, particularly between the United States and China, but also between the world’s largest developing countries. Developed powers such as Europe and Japan were largely sidelined and, significantly, it was last-minute bilateral cooperation between the US and China that saved the conference from collapse. This highlights that bilateral interactions between the US and China, be … Continue reading Copenhagen changed the political climate

By Donald Kirk NEW YORK – It was as though the voices of the North Korean Foreign Ministry and the United States State Department were reverberating in an echo chamber with no real awareness of the messages that each side was conveying. The anonymous North Korean “spokesman” was again sounding off about a Korean War peace treaty while a US envoy talked tough about the North’s human-rights record. No sooner had North Korea come out with a deceptively conciliatory plea calling for talks for a treaty to replace the armistice that ended the Korean War in 1953 than the US … Continue reading Pyongyang gets a piece of US’s mind

US revives Asia trade agenda By Benny Teh Cheng Guan PENANG – A speech by United States President Barack Obama in Tokyo has elevated the status and prospect of the little-known Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement, known by many observers as the P4, to the center stage of regional economic cooperation. Obama said during his December speech that the US was “engaging with the Trans-Pacific partnership countries with the goal of shaping a regional agreement”. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), as the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) would have it called, is a free-trade agreement (FTA) between Brunei, Chile, … Continue reading US revives Asia trade agenda

By Gareth Porter WASHINGTON – The New York Times reported on Tuesday that Iran had “quietly hidden an increasingly large part of its atomic complex” in a vast network of tunnels and bunkers buried in mountainsides. The story continued a narrative begun last September, when a second Iranian uranium enrichment facility near Qom was reported to have been discovered by United States and Western intelligence. The premise of that narrative is that Iran wanted secret nuclear facilities in order to be able to make a nuclear weapon without being detected by the international community. But evidence indicates that the real … Continue reading Iran places trust in ‘passive defense’

By Pepe Escobar HONG KONG – One’s got to hand it to failed underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab. He is the real Man of the Year. With a single twitch of his lower parts, the now iconic young Nigerian single-handedly not only forced the Barack Obama administration to unleash tight airport security measures, a new virtual striptease craze bound to bolster the fortunes of selected players in the security industry; but he also managed to place no fewer than 675 million Muslims (plus sundry Nigerian and even Cuban Christians) on a Cyclopean terror list of 10 “prone to terrorism countries”. … Continue reading Empire reloaded

By Stephen Zunes The United States may be on the verge of involvement in yet another counter-insurgency war that, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, may make a bad situation even worse. The attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight by a Nigerian and apparently planned in Yemen, the alleged ties between the perpetrator of the Fort Hood massacre to a radical Yemeni cleric, and an ongoing US-backed Yemeni military offensive against al-Qaeda have all focused US attention on that country. With a population of about 24 million, Yemen has almost as large a population as Saudi Arabia, yet … Continue reading Yemen left with little wiggle room

by Sheila Musaji The Jamaica Observer reports that Sheikh Abdullah al-Faisal has been arrested in Kenya for allegedly violating his Kenyan visitor’s visa by preaching in a local mosque. Sheikh Abdullah El-Faisal (aka Trevor William Forest), was born in Jamaica and trained in Islamic studies in Saudi Arabia for seven years.  He went to Britain where he served at the Brixton Mosque where he was ousted in 1993.  He served four years in a British prison for urging his followers to kill non-Muslims, including Americans, Hindus and Jews and was deported from Britain to Jamaica in 2007.  He is the … Continue reading Abdullal El Faisal, Revolution Muslim, and Islamic Thinkers Society

// // The well-regarded Muslim organisation, British Muslims for Secular Democracy (BMSD), has announced that it is joining the Accord Coalition, which brings together religious and non-religious groups to promote community schooling and reform the way faith schools currently operate. BMSD’s director, Tehmina Kazi explained: “Our goals in this area coincide, as BMSD wishes to see more faith schools embrace a broad and objective curriculum that teaches pupils about a variety of religious and non-religious beliefs.” Kazi continued: “It is vital that we embed a culture of respect for these different beliefs, and we are confident that this will equip … Continue reading Muslim group joins coalition to reform faith schools

// // By OLIVIER ROY FLORENCE, ITALY — What do the terrorists who attempted to strike U.S. territory in 2009 have in common? What is their connection with the Arab Middle East, often presented as the cradle of Islamic radicalization? The answer seems to be very little. What ties together Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian-born, British-educated, trained-in-Yemen man charged in the failed Christmas Day plane bombing; Anwar al-Awlaki, the fierce radical Islamic preacher who, in fact, holds a degree in civil engineering from Colorado State University rather than a master’s in divinity from an Arab theological school; and Nidal Malik … Continue reading The Allure of Terrorism