Muslims in Buddhist-majority Myanmar usually keep a low profile for fear of intimidation, but Win Lae Phyu Sin, one of the community’s rare bloggers on beauty care, has gone the other way. The 19-year-old was the centre of attraction at a recent launch of beauty products in Yangon, her striking multi-coloured make-up offset by a […]
Continue ReadingThousands of mourners on Monday buried dozens of children killed in a Saudi-led coalition air strike on a bus in northern Yemen, one of the deadliest attacks on civilians in the three-year-old war. At least 40 children were killed in Thursday’s strike, which hit the bus as it drove through a market in Dahyan, a […]
Continue ReadingHundreds of ethnic Hui Muslims are staging a sit-in protest in China’s western region of Ningxia against government plans to demolish a huge new mosque, amid tightening curbs on Islam to pull its practice in line with the Chinese mainstream. China officially guarantees freedom of religion, but in recent years officials nervous about the possibility […]
Continue ReadingPrime Minister Theresa May has scolded her former foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, for saying that Muslim women who wear burqas look like letter boxes or bank robbers. Johnson, who resigned last month over the way May is negotiating Brexit, wrote in The Daily Telegraph this week that Denmark was wrong to ban the burqa, a […]
Continue ReadingThe U.S. ambassador joined a ceremony in Nairobi on Tuesday to commemorate 20 years since truck bombs hit the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 258 people and marking the start of al Qaeda’s global campaign of violence. Some 200 Kenyans and Americans, many of them survivors of the attack, gathered at Nairobi’s August […]
Continue ReadingSaudi Arabia has agreed to admit an Iranian diplomat to head an office representing Iranian interests in the kingdom, the official Iranian news agency IRNA reported on Sunday, in a rare move after the rivals broke off relations in 2016. “An informed diplomatic source said Sunday that Saudi Arabia had agreed to grant a visa […]
Continue ReadingAround 1,300 Danes marched through Copenhagen on Wednesday in protest at a new ban on the wearing of face veils in public, accusing the government of infringing on women’s right to dress as they choose. Denmark’s parliament enacted the ban in May, joining France and some other European Union countries to uphold what some politicians […]
Continue ReadingThirty-six years after losing his parents, sister and a four-year-old daughter in one of India’s worst sectarian massacres, Abdul Suban says he is still trying to prove he’s a citizen of the Hindu-majority nation. Suban is one of hundreds of thousands of Bengali-speaking Muslims categorised as “doubtful voters”, who will not find their names in […]
Continue ReadingA Michigan man seized overseas by a U.S.-backed Syrian militia has been charged with providing material support to Islamic State militants, the U.S. Justice Department said on Tuesday. Ibraheem Izzy Musaibli, 28, of Dearborn, Michigan, provided support to the group from 2015 until last month, the department said in a statement. Musaibli, a natural-born U.S. […]
Continue ReadingWomen will hit the roads in Saudi Arabia on Sunday with the lifting of the world’s last ban on female drivers, long seen as an emblem of women’s repression in the conservative kingdom. The move, ordered last September by King Salman, is part of sweeping reforms pushed by his powerful young son Crown Prince Mohammed […]
Continue Reading