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American President Barack Hussein Obama ended his Middle East tour and headed to Germany Thursday after he addressed the Muslim world from a tightly secured Cairo where he quoted from Islam’s Holy Book and stressed the United States was not in competition with Islam in a bid to heal the rift that has developed between the two.

Obama was in Cairo following a brief stop in Saudi Arabia, where he held talks with King Abdullah, and arrived at Cairo University to give a landmark speech that was a fulfillment of his inaugural speech promise to reach out to Muslims.

American President Barack Obama arrived in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday on his first stop of his regional Middle East mission, where he would seek Arab backing for his bid to revive peace moves while the U.S. adopted a firmer tone with its ally Israel.

On a trip highlighted by his long-awaited address to the Muslim world in Cairo on Thursday, Obama will also attempt to prod moribund regional peace diplomacy back to life.

He left the White House late Tuesday enroute to Saudi Arabia for talks with King Abdullah, who has been trying to re-launch a 2002 Arab-backed peace initiative.

Washington, June 03: The United States has refused to send Yemeni “enemy combatants” held at Guantanamo Bay back to their home country over fears they could join the local al-Qaeda movement, press reports said on Tuesday.

Although U.S. President Barack Obama promised in January to close the controversial prison it was still unclear what would happen to the 240 detainees currently being held in Cuba.

President Barack Obama says he hopes his June 4 speech to the Muslim world will repair broken trust. He may find his audience disagrees on what needs to be fixed.

Resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, say some. Dispel Western perceptions all Muslims are terrorists, say others. Then there are those focused on what the U.S. should — or shouldn’t — do about civil-liberties breaches in Islamic countries.

Washington, May 30: US President Barack Obama will deliver his long-awaited speech to the Islamic world on 4 June in Cairo.

Already in his inaugural speech, he clearly stated the United States’ desire for a renewed relationship with the Muslim world, based on mutual interests and mutual respect.

London, May 28: Photographs of Iraqi prisoner abuse which US President Barack Obama does not want released include images of apparent rape and sexual abuse, Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper reported on Thursday.

The images are among photographs included in a 2004 report into prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison conducted by US Major General Antonio Taguba.

Taguba included allegations of rape and sexual abuse in his report, and on Wednesday he confirmed to the Daily Telegraph that images supporting those allegations were also in the file.

Some American experts are accusing the FBI of “cooking” an alleged plot to attack Jewish synagogues and military planes in New York by implanting an informant in a mosque to induce people into terror intrigues. “This whole operation was a foolish waste of time and money,” Terence Kindlon, a New York-based lawyer, told.

“It is almost as if the FBI cooked up the plot and found four idiots to install as defendants.”
Police arrested four people last week on charges of plotting to attack two Jewish synagogues and a military base in New York.

When Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakasa announced the military defeat of LTTE, saying the troops have “freed the nation from three decades of terror”, his words meant only one thing: Velupillai Prabhakaran was dead. For his ardent followers, this 54-year-old was a freedom fighter who waged an unrelenting struggle for Eelam the Tamil homeland free from the Sinhalese-majority island-nation.

For his adversaries, he was a blood-thirsty terrorist and a megalomaniac who detested even an iota of disagreement with his idea of Tamil homeland and undisputed leadership.

Ahead of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s trip to Washington this week, the US has been urging Israel to “tone down” its rhetoric on Iran and to stop threatening a military strike on its nuclear installations, The Jerusalem Post has learned.

This was one of the purposes of a secret trip to Israel three weeks ago by CIA Director Leon Panetta, foreign diplomatic sources said.

Bollywood’s reigning royal couple, Shah Rukh and Gauri Khan, are ensconced in a deeply comfortable cream leather couch in the living room of their beautiful home, casually dressed and exuding a zest for life which tells you why they command the love of millions.

We are at Mannat, a 7-storey mansion, in a living room that, with its sumptuous furniture, massive art pieces and oversized coffee tables strewn with silver champagne urns carrying imported wines, shows off the impeccable taste of the style diva that Gauri Khan is.

Even as all the major political parties in Andhra Pradesh are busy in finalizing suitable candidates for the 42 Parliamentary seats, Hyderabad is the one constituency where the battle lines have already been drawn. The only Muslim dominated Lok Sabha constituency in Andhra Pradesh (now with whopping 70% Muslim electorate after the delimitation) Hyderabad has traditionally been a stronghold of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM) and it has won all the elections from here since 1984.