A court in southern China has handed out a death sentence to a man involved in a brawl in July blamed for being the trigger to deadly riots in the restive far western region of Xinjiang. State media said the fight erupted between a group of Han Chinese and ethnic Uighur workers from Xinjiang at a factory in Shaoguan, Guangdong province, after a rumour spread that some Uighurs had raped two women. The courts in Shaoguan also gave another man life imprisonment, and nine others got sentences ran...

Bank Negara Malaysia should help defaulters of the popular ‘Bai Bithaman Ajil’ (BBA) home financing so that consumers who have put their faith in Islamic financing are not short-changed. Consumer’s Association of Penang (CAP) president S. M. Mohamed Idris said presently the defaulters ended up worse than defaulters of other conventional housing loans as BBA was an Islamic home financing where interest was not allowed to be charged. International Islamic University Malaysia&r...

Turkey’s decision to exclude Israel from an annual military drill ought to come as warning bell to the Israeli people. Although diplomatic relations between the two countries have at times experienced periods of strain, Israel’s relationship with Turkey’s military, which is highly secular and generally supportive of Israel, has remained strong. The apparent disruption of the two countries’ strategic military cooperation is therefore a sign that something is going terri...

The Georgian Interior Ministry rejected Russian accusations that the country was helping the Al-Qaeda terrorist group to send terrorists to Chechnya and deliver weapons to Dagestan. The allegation was “a complete falsehood and misinformation,” said Shota Khizanishvili, head of the Georgian Interior Ministry. He described the claim as preposterous and accused Moscow of stoking tensions. Earlier Alexander Bortnikov, director of the Russian Federal Security Service, accused Georgia o...

Germany’s Bundesbank has stripped board member and former Berlin finance minister Thilo Sarrazin of his central duties after offensive remarks about Turkish and Arab immigrants in the capital city. Sarrazin caused outrage across the nation at the end of September when in an interview published in the journal Lettre International he said, “I don’t need to respect anyone who lives off the state, denies the state, doesn’t do anything to educate their kids, and ju...

Ahmed Aboutaleb, a Moroccan-born son of an Imam, is the first Muslim immigrant to become a mayor of Rotterdam, a major Dutch city. His is the classic immigrant success story, the saga of a youth who landed in the Netherlands as a teenager, worked hard and climbed the social ladder, first as a journalist, then as a politician in free-wheeling Amsterdam. With ethnic minorities accounting for almost half its population, the city serves in many ways as a laboratory of demographic change for the r...

The banquet hall at King Fahd Cultural Centre in Riyadh was booked to host a mass wedding party worth SR3 million for 50 disabled persons with Prince Sattam Bin Abdul Aziz, Deputy Emir of Riyadh, gracing the event. The mass wedding would teach the disabled a sense of independence, acceptance of others, and always a desire to do the best for one’s body, friends, family and community, a disabled man, who wanted to remain anonymous, has said. The mass wedding has been arranged by the Disab...