Tens of thousands of Afghan mothers will quite possibly not be able to wave their children off to school in 2022 because their youngsters will have starved to death in a crisis brought about by the US government's decision to freeze $9.5 billion of Afghanistan's reserves held in American...

Iran must return to talks with world powers over its 2015 nuclear deal to avoid a diplomatic escalation that could jeopardize the negotiations, a French presidency official said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The official also said Iran could not set new conditions before returning to the talks in Vienna as the terms on...

Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas's long rigmarole at the UN General Assembly provided only a partial historical reckoning. The link between colonialism and the UN, notably within the context of UN Resolution 194 and the Palestinian right of return, was bypassed by regurgitating the outdated concept of an international...

The Taliban's acting justice minister vowed Tuesday to replace the Islamic Republic's Constitution with monarchy-era legislation from the 20th century, Anadolu Agency reported. Abdul Hakim Sharaey made the announcement in a meeting with China's Ambassador to Kabul Wang Yu, according to a statement on the Facebook page of the...

Speaking at a Future of the Oil and Gas Industry conference, Pulitzer prize-winning author and global energy expert Daniel Yergin said that the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed that the global gas market is more resilient than its oil counterpart. According to Mckinsey, the world is witnessing a new global...

Iran on Tuesday rejected a US call to grant UN inspectors access to a nuclear site, saying Washington was not qualified to demand inspections without condemning a sabotage attack on the facility, Iranian state media reported, Reuters reported. "Countries that did not condemn terrorist acts against Iran's nuclear site are not...

On Friday 24 September a conference titled "Peace and Recovery" was held in Erbil, capital of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. The conference, which was organised by an American centre called Peace Communications Centre, was attended by a number of Iraqis who were described as "tribal elders, writers and...

Labour's Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy claimed a motion calling for sanctions against Israel because it practises the crime of apartheid was not "comprehensive" or "balanced" and the leadership would not support it. The motion, voted in at the Labour Party Conference yesterday, called for sanctions on the State of...

The senior members of the Ennahda movement in Tunisia who have resigned from the party have told Arabi21 why they made the move. More than a hundred members resigned at the weekend. A joint statement said that they did so because "The wrong political choices of the leadership have...

Sudan's Transitional Government has been accused of illegally expropriating the assets of Malaysia's national oil company, Petronas, which could trigger legal proceedings against Khartoum in the International Court of Arbitration. Petronas is a multi-billion-dollar company, ranked amongst the largest corporations in the world with more than 20 years of...

Algeria yesterday demanded "direct negotiations" be held between Morocco and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Río de Oro (Polisario Front) over the disputed Western Sahara region. In a speech at the UN General Assembly, Foreign Minister Ramtane Lamamra stressed: "Algeria reiterates its permanent stance...

Tunisian President Kais Saied wasted all available opportunities for dialogue and it is time for him to be dismissed by parliament, the Secretary-General of the Movement Party told Al-Quds Al-Arabi. Lamia Al-Khameri said Kais Saied "exceeded even the limits of logic and rationality" through the steps he has taken to orchestrate...

The Yemeni government has urged the international community to provide it with urgent financial support to avoid further economic collapse in the country. Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly yesterday, Yemeni Foreign Minister Ahmed Awad Bin Mubarak said the measures taken by his government to mitigate the devastating...

Syria's Foreign Minister has claimed that the doors are open for refugees to return, even as warnings emerge about the dangers that returnees face in regime-controlled territory. Faisal Mekdad made his claim in his address to the UN General Assembly in New York yesterday. Mekdad gave assurances that the...

Egyptian researcher Patrick Zaki, held for 19 months since being arrested on a trip home from Italy, faced trial today on charges of spreading false news over an article he wrote about the plight of Egypt's Christians, Reuters reports. Zaki, 30, a graduate student at the University of Bologna, was jailed...

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has called on Iran to directly and peacefully negotiate the dispute over three islands in the Gulf and has condemned the country's interference in Arab regional affairs. Speaking at the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York yesterday, the UAE's Minister...

The political division in Palestinian society is deep-rooted, and should not be reduced to convenient claims about the "Hamas-Fatah split", elections, the Oslo accords, and subsequent disagreements. The division is linked to events that preceded all of these, and not even the death or incapacitation of the octogenarian Mahmoud...

Egyptian security forces have arrested an Egyptian media professor, Ayman Mansour Nada, who criticised media figures close to the regime. In a series of articles circulated on social media, Nada said that the opposition media abroad had reached a wider audience among Egyptians than the media within Egypt. In...

The Jordanian government has agreed to resume flights to the Syrian capital Damascus as of 3 October after a 10-year hiatus as a result of the Syrian civil war. Jordan's Interior Minister Mazen Al-Faraya also announced the reopening of the Jordanian-Syrian border from tomorrow morning to allow for the movement...

The year 2020 was the worst for the Palestinian Authority (PA) since its establishment in 1994 due to the Israeli occupation and the coronavirus pandemic, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) said yesterday. UNCTAD said in its annual report that the PA's economic decline in 2020 was...

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said it was extremely concerned about the sharp increase in the deaths and disappearances at sea of migrants trying to reach the Canary Islands along the West African coast. In a report issued last week, the organisation said by the end of August, its Missing...

Egypt has said it will tax social media content creators earning more than 500,000 Egyptian pounds ($32,000) annually. "Anyone who makes a profit in Egypt must be fairly taxed whatever their field of work is," said tax authority official Mohamed Al-Gayyer. Another tax official, Mohamed Keshk, said that anyone...

On Wednesday, the Russian city of Sochi will host a new summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, after no such meetings have been held for quite a while. The last summit between the two presidents was a year and a half ago, in...

Israel does not have conventional military capabilities that enable it to strike and permanently eliminate the Iranian nuclear project, as it did in Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in an opinion piece published in Haaretz's Hebrew site. Olmert said the policy adopted by...

Iraq holds a general election on 10 October, its fifth parliamentary vote since the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003 and ushered in a complex multi-party system contested by groups defined largely by sect or ethnicity. The vote had been set for next year but was brought forward to satisfy protesters who took to...

The head of Israel's National Security Council, Eyal Holata, is scheduled to meet US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan in Washington next week to discuss Israel's worries about the resumption of the Vienna talks on Iran's nuclear programme, Arab48.com reported on Monday. Israel is apparently working hard to persuade...

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas welcomed the passing of a motion at the UK Labour Party conference on Monday that recognised Israel as an "apartheid" state and called for sanctions against it, as well as the immediate recognition of Palestine, Wafa news agency has reported. Abbas said that the...

Imprisoned member of Fatah Central Committee, Marwan Barghouti, has said: "the Palestinian Authority (PA) has no authority" adding that the Battle for Jerusalem "revealed the inability and fragility" of the Palestinian political system, Sama news agency reported yesterday. Barghouti also said that the PA "has allowed the Israeli occupation to...

The Palestinian Authority security services arrested on Monday the key witness in the Nizar Banat murder case, local sources have revealed. Banat, a harsh critic of PA President Mahmoud Abbas, was killed by PA security officers in June. "My brother, Hussein Banat, the cousin of Nizar Banat, was arrested...

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi yesterday inaugurated the world's largest wastewater treatment plant. The Egyptian presidency said in a statement that 20 billion Egyptian pounds ($1.14 billion) were spent on building and preparing the facility, adding that it has a production capacity of 5.6 million cubic metres a day....

In cooperation with the UNDP, the Palestinian Ministry of Works has started work to demolish Al-Jawhara Tower which was repeatedly bombed by Israeli occupation forces during the latest offensive on Gaza in May, Anadolu reported yesterday. Al-Jawhara is a nine-story building located in the centre of Gaza City, which housed businesses...

Unidentified aircraft hit a base run by Iranian-backed militias in Syria's eastern province of Deir Ez-Zor near the Iraqi border where Tehran has in the last year expanded its military presence, residents and military sources said yesterday, Reuters reports. They said the strikes were south of the town of Mayadeen along...

Lebanon has had a rough ride over the past year: the failure to secure a viable government; the catastrophic Beirut blast; then the economic crash which caused its currency to go into freefall. On top of all of this looms Hezbollah, which is ever-present within the crumbling Lebanese political...

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, will discuss the most prominent developments in Syria, Afghanistan, and Libya during their meeting tomorrow, the Kremlin spokesman announced yesterday. Dmitry Peskov said preparations for the meeting were "underway," adding that it would be held in the Russian...

Lebanese Hezbollah yesterday condemned a normalisation conference held recently in the Iraqi city of Erbil. In an official statement, the group described the event as a "failed attempt to promote the culture of dialogue with the Israeli enemy." The group hailed the judicial procedures taken recently by Iraqi authorities...

Pakistan has discussed Taliban-led Afghanistan joining the multibillion-dollar China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) infrastructure project, the Pakistani ambassador to the country said on Monday, Reuters reported. "Regional connectivity is an important element of our discussion with Afghan leadership and our way forward for our economic interaction with Afghanistan," said Mansoor Ahmad Khan,...

Jordan will fully reopen its main border crossing with Syria from Wednesday, government and industry officials said, as a high-level Syrian team arrived in Amman to discuss how to ease the flow of goods hit by the pandemic and a decade of conflict, Reuters reported. Although the Jaber crossing has been...

Afghanistan's former president on Monday said his Facebook account has been hacked after a message in support of the Taliban was posted on the verified page, Anadolu Agency reported. "Urgent. The official Facebook page of Dr. Mohammad Ashraf Ghani has been hacked. Until it is recovered, the content posted on the...

No representative from Afghanistan will address the UN General Assembly on Monday, according to a report, Anadolu Agency reported. Afghanistan's current UN Ambassador Ghulam Isaczai, who represents the former government before the Taliban takeover, had been due to speak to world leaders later in the day. But Isaczai's staff told the...

Jordan said today that Crown Prince Al Hussein Bin Abdullah had contracted coronavirus, Reuters reports. "His Highness Prince Hussein, who had received the vaccine against the coronavirus, showed mild symptoms and is in very good health," the Royal Court said in a statement. King Abdullah and Queen Rania will be subject...

Nearly 400 journalists, academics, and cultural figures signed a letter of solidarity with journalist Nemi El-Hassan, after she was axed by Germany's WDR channel for attending a Palestinian solidarity demonstration in 2014. Twenty-eight-year-old El-Hassan attended the Al-Quds march in solidarity with Palestinians in 2014, when she was 20 years old....

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said today that Iran had crossed "all red lines" in its nuclear programme and vowed that Israel would not allow Tehran to acquire a nuclear weapon, Reuters reports. In his first speech before the United Nations General Assembly, Bennett said Iran sought to dominate the Middle...

Palestine's tourism revenue has continued to fall due to the coronavirus pandemic, officials have confirmed. There was an estimated loss of $1.5 billion last year, they added on World Tourism Day. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) and the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities the impact...

When Australia cancelled its French submarine deal and replaced it with a US nuclear submarine deal, Switzerland followed a similar path, deciding to buy the F-35 aircraft from America instead of France's Dassault Rafale combat aircraft. Less than 24 hours later, Romania announced that it no longer wanted to...

The military arm of the Sudanese Sovereignty Council has suspended all of its scheduled meetings with the civil side, local media reported on Sunday. News has also emerged that security guards have been withdrawn from their ministerial protection role. The head of the Sovereignty Council is military commander Abdel...

Former Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki called on the army and security forces to abandon the current President, Kais Saied, until he can be "isolated and put on trial." Taking to Facebook, Marzouki wrote: "To the lurking dictator: Tunisians cannot be ruled by decrees, but by laws, institutions, and the...

Bahrain's government sent a draft bill to parliament for approval to amend the value-added tax rate, currently at five per cent, from next January, the state-run Bahrain News Agency said today. Reuters reported the BNA did not say whether the amendment referred to a hike or a cut in the rate. But a...

Investment funds in Abu Dhabi are looking for investment avenues in Turkey, Bloomberg reports. According to the report, the negotiation meetings between the funds from the United Arab Emirates and companies in Turkey have been ongoing for months. Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), the emirate's biggest wealth fund, is among the...

The UK Labour Party Conference has today voted in favour of a motion to identify Israel as a state practicing the crime of apartheid, making it the first major political party in Europe to adopt such a position. The motion commits the Labour party to implementing sanctions including ceasing...

A probe into the catastrophic explosion at Beirut port was frozen today when a former minister wanted for questioning as a suspect filed a case questioning the lead investigator's neutrality, a judicial source said, Reuters reports. The 4 August 2020 Beirut port blast killed more than 200 people, injured thousands, and destroyed...