Latest Middle East News
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Iraqi Shiite fighters flock to Assad’s side
Bashar Assad but against them. Dressed in jeans, their hair cropped short, the 12 men awaiting their flight are Iraqi Shiites, among hundreds heading for what they see as a struggle to defend fellow Syrian Shiites and their holy sites from the ...
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Obama on Syria – too little too late
WASHINGTON: For a measure of the snail’s pace of President Barack Obama’s decision-making on Syria, look at two dates: Aug. 18, 2011, and June 14, 2013. One marks the first of several calls for ...
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Daphne Bramham Refugees and their hosts pay high cost of Syria’s civil war
Fourteen-year-old Arwa is wearing a sparkly blue scarf and white socks covered in dust. She looks up at me with sweet brown eyes and shows me her drawing. An intensely coloured red heart ripped apart by a knife and a vast pool of dripping blood."Can you write 'Syria Bleeding' in English for me please?" she asks. I do this. Then, I find her another piece of paper and she draws ...
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New Middle East virus spread in hospitals
Egyptian medical workers wear masks as they leave the emergency section in King Fahad Hospital in the city of Hofuf, 230 miles east of the Saudi capital Riyadh, on June 16, 2013. The new MERS virus, which has infected 64 people and killed 38 of them, is mostly spread in hospitals and it will take special care to prevent bigger outbreaks, experts reported on Wednesday.An investigation into the ...
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Egypt Luxor protests appointment of governor linked to terrorist group
Residents in the Egyptian city of Luxor protested on June 19, decrying the appointment of a member of a hardline Islamist group as the new governor of their province. Adel Mohamed al-Khayat is a member of al-Gamaa al-Islamiya – a former militant group responsible for the 1997 massacre at a Luxor temple that killed 62 people, including 58 foreign tourists. Demonstrators rallied against ...
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Driven by war a beloved Syrian tradition - ice cream - sets up shop in Jordan to exiles joy
Customers visit the Bakdash ice cream store, in Amman, Jordan, Wednesday, June 19, 2013. For Syrians, no visit to Damascus' Old City is complete without a stop at a more than century-old ice cream parlor in its main souq where you can watch them make their distinctive desert by pounding it into shape with giant wooden mallets, then enjoy a bowl of it sprinkled with pistachios. (AP ...
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Infiltrators from Syria clash with Jordanian soldiers at border post 1 killed
ZAIN, Jordan - Jordan's military says infiltrators from Syria have clashed with Jordanian soldiers near the border. One infiltrator was killed and two wounded. The attackers opened fire on a border post on Wednesday, according to a Jordanian military spokesman. Soldiers returned the fire. The spokesman would not say how many infiltrators were involved or disclose other details. He spoke ...
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US officials say help for Syria likely gradual
By Jim Miklaszewski and Courtney Kube, NBC News U.S. military officials said Friday that American help for Syrian rebels is likely to escalate gradually, beginning with basic equipment like body armor and night-vision goggles and shifting later to weapons and ammunition.The officials told NBC News that providing the rebels with heavy weapons, such as anti-tank or anti-aircraft rockets, was not ...
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Iraq Chevron Total expand Kurdish drilling
Iraq's Kurds have consolidated their growing energy sector with Chevron Corp. securing a third exploration block in the semiautonomous northern region that increasingly operates as a de facto independent state and France's Total buying a majority stake in ...
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Welcome to Russia’s Syria doublespeak
joint communique on Syria at the end of the G8 summit, the closing media remarks made it clear that Vladimir Putin hasn’t actually moved an inch on the issue. The Russian president once again lashed out at the European Union and the United States for considering arms shipments to the Syrian opposition, suggesting it will further destabilize Syria. At the same time, he made it clear that ...
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Mexican Bishop Who Was Nobel Nominee Aims to Fact-Find in Syria
Delegation Set to Collect Information on Rights Violations in War ZoneROME, May 30, 2013 (Zenit.org) - Bishop ...
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Fast-Spreading Virus Under Inquiry in Saudi Arabia
A man in a Saudi hospital has pneumonia. The patient in the room next door gets sick, and before anyone realizes what is happening he infects seven others, each of whom infects at least one more. An outbreak is born. A detailed investigation of the viral illness first detected last year in Saudi Arabia has revealed the chilling ease with which the virus can spread to ill patients in the ...
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Syria infiltrators Jordan military clash 1 dead
ZAIN, Jordan -; Jordan's military says infiltrators from Syria have clashed with Jordanian soldiers near the border. One infiltrator was killed and two ...
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Half-Finished Buildings A Symbol Of Forgotten Promise In Egypt
Marsa Alam is a region of more than 100 miles of beautiful coastlines, coral reefs and diving spots. But the city itself is a microcosm of neglect in Egypt since the revolution. It is a ghost town of unfinished construction and promised infrastructure that still doesn't exist. There is no power grid, no water so local hotels and resorts must provide their own generators and water source. ...
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Telecom operator Viva National Bank of Kuwait Group sign USD270m deal
(MENAFN) Telecoms operator Viva's Chief Executive Officer, Salman Al Badran, stated that the company signed a financing deal of USD270 million with the National Bank of Kuwait Group, reported Arabian Business.Al Badran also said that the funds will be used to help the Kuwait-based firm in upgrading its network and further expanding in the country.It is worth noting that Viva is 26 percent ...
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Qatar Diar govt in talks of acquiring 70 stake in Salam Yiti
(MENAFN) Chief Executive Officer of Qatar Diar Real Estate Investment Company (Qatar Diar) said that the company and the Qatari government are looking into acquiring a seventy percent stake in Salam Yiti from Sama Dubai, reported Times of Oman.The CEO noted that work will be resumes on the project that was launched back in 2007 and suspended in 2009 when the global economic crisis hot many ...
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Oman- inflation falls to 40-month low
(MENAFN - Muscat Daily) Helped by moderating global commodity prices and a strong US dollar, to which Oman keeps its currency pegged, the sultanate's annual inflation fell to a 40-month low in April.The annual inflation, based on the consumer price index (CPI), dropped to 1.2 per cent in April, the lowest level since December 2009 when it hit a low of 0.9 per cent. Annual inflation came in ...
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Oman- Omran plans new Muscat hotels to host first OCEC event in 2015
(MENAFN - Muscat Daily) The tourism development and investment arm of the sultanate, has announced plans for two new five-star hotels in Muscat and said it expects to host the first event at its upcoming Oman Convention and Exhibition Centre (OCEC) by the end of 2015.Speaking at a media briefing on Omran's ongoing and upcoming development projects and its joint tourism assets, chief ...
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Kuwait- KSE opens Wednesdays trading on mixed board
(MENAFN - Kuwait News Agency (KUNA)) Trading at Kuwait Stock Exchange (KSE) started on Wednesday on a mixed board with the weighted index doing down by 0.19 points and the price index going up by 5.83 points. The KSX 15 index, which reflected trading in blue-chips, decreased by 0.86 points at 9:15 a.m. Value of transactions reached KD 4.7 million, volume stood at 72.5 million shares, while ...
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Qatar- QCB move draws flak from investors
(MENAFN - The Peninsula) Qatar Central Bank's (QCB) decision to tighten cap on local banks' investment in stocks and bonds, has drawn flak from a section of investors and market analysts. The central bank's directives to the banks to restrict their total investment in equities and debt instruments to 25 percent of their capital and reserves is "untimely" and would ...
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Entrepreneurs launch initiative for Palestinian future
RAMALLAH - Young Palestinians who are fed up with the existing leaders' attempts to establish an independent Palestinian state launched their own initiative designed to give the young people a voice in determining the Palestinian future.Several Palestinian entrepreneurs launched NEWpal, a youth group based in this city, which got started this week by hosting a full day "Future ...
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Irans Presidential Election Sparks Mixed Reactions
. Voting was extended by five hours, a decision some argue simply met the demand, while others suggest it was a political move to showcase participation. On one side there was nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili, and on the opposite side a former nuclear envoy, Hasan Rowhani. Officials say there's no clear front-runner in the fight to succeed controversial President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but ...
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Mass anti-Morsi June 30 protests permitted - Egypts top Muslim cleric
Sheik Ahmed al-Tayeb, Egypt's leading Muslim cleric. (AFP file photo, courtesy of dailynewsegypt.com) Egypt's top Muslim cleric says that peaceful protests against the president are ...
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Letters International intervention in Syria
Prime Minister David Cameron speaks during a press conference at the G8 summit in Northern Ireland where leaders called for a peace conference on Syria to be held. Photograph: Matt Cardy/AFP/Getty ...
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Syria crisis needs political solution David Cameron tells MPs
Syria , putting his strongest emphasis yet on a political solution to the crisis as he came under pressure from his own backbenchers and Labour not to supply weapons to the Syrian rebels.Cameron was reporting back to the Commons from ...
Middle East Focus
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Israel and Palestine as one country?
Peace in the Middle East, it’s as illusive now as it was ten years ago and ten years before that. For many commentators, peace in the Middle East has become a myth, something local and international governments strive for or claim to support without any real hope of realization of the goal. With the current impasse between Israel and the Palestinian Authority ongoing, an old theme is being kicked around again, that of a single state that incorporates Israel and Palestine.
A single state solution is an idea that grew up in the 1920s and then died with the Six-Day War when divisions between the newly-founded Israeli state and the rest of the region were too entrenched for the idea to retain any traction. The political landscape after the war and even today is what many Jewish groups feared when Jewish Zionists were calling for a return to the biblical homeland to develop a Jewish state. Read more
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