SHAFAQNA

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) -  Fourteen Mexican federal police officers have been charged with attempted murder over a shooting in August that  wounded two US government employees, reportedly CIA agents. The officers were charged on Friday and the Mexican attorney general's office said in a statement they had been formally placed under arrest. The statement did not indicate why the federal police officers opened fire. A spokesman for the prosecutor's office did not return calls seeking comment. The attorney-general's…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) -  A Moscow court has given a four-and-a-half-year jail sentence to an opposition activist, the first of 18 people on trial for protesting against Vladimir Putin's government. Maxim Luzyanin, 36, co-operated with investigators and pleaded guilty to charges of participating in "mass unrest" during a protest on 6 May, the eve of Putin's inauguration for a third term as president. The 17 other men and women charged in the so-called Bolotnaya affair – named after the…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) -  WHEN Barack Obama first ran for president, Emma Hamilton was part of that politically crucial cohort, the white working class. A tall woman with tawny hair, broad shoulders, a firm handshake and a forthright, direct manner, Ms Hamilton worked as a loader at a factory in Sumter, a modest city of 40,000 in east-central South Carolina. In July 2008, however, after seven years on the factory floor, she mangled her hand between two heavy…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – Claiming that the outfit opposed the bank’s policy, a veiled American Muslim woman has been asked to leave a Tulsa bank after refusing to remove her hijab, the policy widely criticized by Tulsa’s Muslim and Jewish civil groups. “I think there's a very clear difference between something like a ski mask, and something like a hijab,” Jillian Holzbauer with the Oklahoma Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, known as CAIR, told KJRH-TV. “We…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association)– CIA Director David Petraeus resigned on Friday because of an extra-marital affair. The resignation was first reported by MSNBC. The White House released this statement from President Obama Friday afternoon: David Petraeus has provided extraordinary service to the United States for decades. By any measure, he was one of the outstanding General officers of his generation, helping our military adapt to new challenges, and leading our men and women in uniform through a remarkable period of…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) -  An outbreak of hepatitis E has infected at least 1,050 Sudanese refugees in South Sudan, killing 26 and threatening to spread further among people still arriving in crowded camps, the United Nations said on Friday. About 175,000 people have already fled to South Sudan to escape fighting in Sudan's South Kordofan and Blue Nile states, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said. Thousands more are expected to cross in coming weeks after the rainy season…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) - China will overtake the US in the next four years to become the largest economy in the world, says a leading international thinktank. The Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said China's economy will be larger than the combined economies of the eurozone countries by the end of this year, and will overtake the US by the end of 2016. Global GDP will grow by 3% a year over the next 50 years,…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) - Nearly two years ago, as unrest spread throughout the Arab world, many wondered what trajectory future revolutions might take. As we now know, Islamists were able to wrest control and capitalise on the Arab Spring and later shaped much of the political and social agenda to their liking. At the beginning, however, it was far from clear that backward religious conservatives would prevail. Indeed, some may have hoped that the Arab revolutionaries, having sloughed…

Shafaqna (Shia International News Association) - When the the Right Reverend Justin Welby is confirmed as the next Archbishop of Canterbury tomorrow, it will be an announcement which has been months in the making. The current Bishop of Durham has been the favoured candidate to succeed Dr Rowan Williams for some time, despite the Church of England drawing out the decision making process since March. While clergymen may have delayed in reaching their verdict, for many of those who have worked…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association)– Francois Hollande, the French president, has accused Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, of transforming a memorial service for Jews slain by a gunman in southwestern France into a campaign meeting, according to a French newspaper. The two leaders attended a highly emotional service last week for a rabbi and three Jewish schoolchildren shot dead by al-Qaeda inspired killer Mohamed Merah on March 19 in the city of Toulouse. Hollande said Netanyahu, who faces legislative polls in January, had hijacked the event. "Netanyahu…