Newly inaugurated Iranian president Hassan Rouhani came in for criticism last August when he nominated Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi, who then headed Iran’s General Inspectorate Organization, to be his administration’s justice minister. Human rights groups had previously dubbed Pour-Mohammadi “minister of murder” for his key role in the 1988 executions of thousands...

Boko Haram – a jihadist group whose name literally translates to “Western education is sinful” – is suspected of being behind the mass murder of at least 40 students in north-east Nigeria. The university-aged students were asleep in their dormitories when the massacre began: Islamist insurgents have shot dead at...

Responding last July to news that Turkey was planning to purchase air defense systems from China, a NATO official declared that the decision – if confirmed and implemented – “would certainly leave many of us speechless.” Last week Turkey announced that it was moving ahead with purchasing the FD-2000 missile...

At least 78 people were killed in a bombing outside of a Pakistani church Sunday, with the attack being only the latest in a cascade of anti-Christian violence that has rocked the Middle East and Africa in recent months. In Egypt, Islamist supporters of the country’s deposed former President Mohammed...

A group of European and global leaders – drawn from political, military, intellectual, and activist circles – are calling on European Union foreign ministers to reevaluate recently passed guidelines cutting off cooperation between European institutions and Israeli establishments beyond Israel’s 1948 armistice lines. A letter sent by the group (embedded...

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) seemed set Friday night to adopt a resolution aimed at dismantling Syria’s vast arsenal of chemical weapons. For weeks the UNSC’s Western nations – the United States, Britain, and France – had been demanding that the measure include some means of automatic enforcement if...

The phone call today between President Barack Obama and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was the first direct contact between a U.S. president and his Iranian counterpart since Iranian revolutionaries stormed the U.S. embassy during Iran’s Islamic Revolution and seized fifty two American hostages. The New York Times notes that Rouhani,...

Egypt’s media is responding to President Barack Obama’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly with something between enthusiastic approval and outright euphoria. The overarching perception is that, the occasional caveat aside, the White House has accepted that American interests require ongoing work with the army-backed interim government: Analysts believe the US...

The war of words between Hamas and Egypt – which occasionally slips into more than words – seems to be escalating despite efforts by Hamas to prevent its leaders and Gaza-based preachers from antagonizing Cario. AFP earlier this week noted that that Hamas had redoubled such efforts: The Hamas rulers...

CNN struggled today to address accusations that it had mistranslated an interview between the station’s Christiane Amanpour and Iranian president Hassan Rouhani. Two key passages of the interview – condemning the “Holocaust” and declaring that “whatever criminality they [the Nazis] committed against the Jews, we condemn” – were cited as...