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Australia on Tuesday urged Egypt's new leader Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to issue a presidential pardon for Al-Jazeera journalist Peter Greste to prove to the world Cairo is on a path to democracy. Australian Greste and his Al Jazeera colleague, Egyptian-Canadian Mohamed Fadel Fahmy, were both sentenced to seven years in Jail by a Cairo court on Monday for aiding the blacklisted Muslim Brotherhood and "spreading false news".

Egypt's military-dominated government has delivered a humiliating, public slap in the face to John Kerry, the US secretary of state, by sentencing three al-Jazeera journalists to long prison terms only hours after Kerry personally expressed his deep concern about the case in high-level meetings in Cairo. The snub represents a disastrous beginning to Kerry's already fraught Middle East tour, which took him to Baghdad on Monday for crisis talks about the Islamist extremist uprising. The verdict, by a court responsive to government wishes, will also be seen as a deliberate, crude signal to President Barack Obama, who criticised Egypt's deteriorating...

Al Jazeera English’s senior political analyst is under fire for telling a prominent Jewish writer that he “gives Jews a bad name” and should know his place by showing “some Jewish humility.” Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst and host of its show Empire, made the comments on Twitter after Bloomberg columnist Jeffrey Goldberg complimented Al Jazeera. Goldberg had tweeted a link to an article in the left-leaning Israeli publication Haaretz headlined, “Why all Jews are cowards,” with the commentary: “Haaretz publishes headlines that al Jazeera never would, in part because al Jazeera is often more sophisticated.” This prompted...

The White House inadvertently blew the cover of the CIA’s top officer in Kabul during President Obama’s surprise trip to Afghanistan on Sunday. The name of the spy agency’s station chief in Kabul was included on a list provided to news organizations of senior U.S. officials participating in Mr. Obama’s visit with U.S. troops. The White House provided the list that was sent out in a “pool report” by a reporter traveling with the president to thousands of journalists, including foreign media, who receive the reports.

The CIA’s top officer in Kabul was exposed Saturday by the White House when his name was inadvertently included on a list provided to news organizations of senior U.S. officials participating in President Obama’s surprise visit with U.S. troops. The White House recognized the mistake and quickly issued a revised list that did not include the individual, who had been identified on the initial release as the “Chief of Station” in Kabul, a designation used by the CIA for its highest-ranking spy in a country. The disclosure marked a rare instance in which a CIA officer working overseas had his...

The CIA’s top officer in Kabul was exposed Saturday by the White House when his name was inadvertently included on a list provided to news organizations of senior U.S. officials participating in President Obama’s surprise visit with U.S. troops. The White House recognized the mistake and quickly issued a revised list that did not include the individual, who had been identified on the initial release as the “Chief of Station” in Kabul, a designation used by the CIA for its highest-ranking spy in a country. SNIP The Post is withholding the name of the CIA officer at the request of...

In an April 20 (given the deep connections between the Brotherhood and the Nazi Party, the date may not have been an accident) story in the Jerusalem Post, the question was asked, Will Qatar abandon the Muslim Brotherhood? As they put it, Qatar is the only country who openly supports the Muslim Brotherhood. This followed the pressure exerted on Qatar to do just that from its three Gulf neighbors, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates. Saudi Arabia even threatened a blockade should Qatar not comply. Clearly the Brotherhood, and their revolutionary aims, had been recognized as a threat...

Al Gore is richer and skinnier than ever, 14 years out of the White House, a tech titan with elder statesman clout, whose disdain for politics in the capital where he lived most of his life has only grown with each year he’s lived away from it. Sure, this new Gore has a great life, what with a net worth well over the $200 million mark following the sale of his Current TV network to Al Jazeera last year, that seat on the Apple board and his starring roles with two investment companies that tout their environmentally friendly business styles:...

There's a reason why overwhelming evidence hasn't spurred public action against global warming. In the run-up to Earth Day this year, two major reports were released by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the largest such body in the world. On March 31, Working Group II released its report, Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, and on April 13, Working Group III released its report, Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. Both reports cited substantially more evidence of substantially more global warming and related impacts than past reports have, and they did so more lucidly than in...

Al Jazeera America, which launched last August with nearly 850 employees and 12 news bureaus in the United States, has laid off dozens of employees as part of restructuring. The channel is disbanding its sports unit and scaling back its social-media-driven show The Stream from a daily show to a once-a-week program.

Cable channel Al Jazeera America, which launched less than a year ago, is slashing expenses and laying off staff as it struggles to gain a foothold in the US. The news outfit is letting go of scores of staffers after its Mideast backers spent millions getting the channel off the ground, according to sources close to the company. “They’re not making their numbers or the revenue they thought,” said a source. “They have a really convoluted background of people in from Qatar [headquarters]. They really don’t get the US market.” Al Jazeera America is averaging just 15,000 total viewers, roughly...

UPDATE [12:37]: Tuoi Tre, a leading daily in Vietnam, reports that the Vietnamese Navy has confirmed the plane crashed into the ocean. According to Navy Admiral Ngo Van Phat, Commander of the Region 5, military radar recorded that the plane crashed into the sea at a location 153 miles South of Phu Quoc island. When contacted, Malaysia Airlines declined to confirm or deny the reports, saying that the Malaysian authorities are working together with the Vietnamese government on the matter. Meanwhile, Al Jazeera reports that China has dispatched two maritime rescue ships to help locate the missing plane.

Al Jazeera America, which launched last August with nearly 850 employees and 12 news bureaus in the United States, has laid off dozens of employees as part of restructuring. The channel is disbanding its sports unit and scaling back its social-media-driven show The Stream from a daily show to a once-a-week program. our editor recommends Al Jazeera America: Can Oil Money Buy Relevance for the Controversial Network? CNN's Jeff Zucker: Larry King/Piers Morgan-Style Interview Shows 'No Longer Viable' MSNBC Host Ed Schultz Must Again Face Partnership Lawsuit Inside Roger Ailes' Fox News Suite (Photos) CNN Announces Primetime Lineup, New Shows...

By 1997, with the word out that NASA planned to land on Mars, bin Laden called for all Americans and Jews, including children, to be killed. That summer three of his operatives living in Yemen launched a little known threat against NASA, via the judicial system. They warn both NASA and the USA that the Yemeni people (of which bin Laden is a member and believes he can trace his blood line back to the time of Queen Sheba) own Mars and they have 3,000-year-old (Sumerian?) tablets to prove it. On July 24th of 1997 the Al-Thawn weekly newspaper reported...

You may not have known it, but there is an infant-mortality crisis sweeping the country. An hour-long documentary from the new cable-news channel Al Jazeera America called attention to the situation, with correspondent Sebastian Walker reporting from Cleveland, Ohio, “America’s infant-mortality capital.” There, he spoke with new mothers about why a country that spends so much on health care is “failing to ensure the health of its newest citizens.” A disproportionate number of African-American babies die in the first year of their lives. “So you have this huge, huge disparity, and that’s kind of business as usual. It’s been going...

Twenty journalists, including four foreigners, have gone on trial in the Egyptian capital, Cairo. They face charges including aiding a terrorist organisation - as the Muslim Brotherhood was designated in December - and endangering national security. Eight defendants are in custody, among them al-Jazeera's Egyptian-Canadian bureau chief Mohamed Adel Fahmy and Australian correspondent Peter Greste.

An Australian journalist, who is being held in an Egyptian jail with two colleagues, says their detention is an “attack on freedom of speech”. “We have not been formally charged, much less convicted of any crime,” Peter Greste wrote in a letter. The Al-Jazeera journalists were arrested on 30 December in Cairo for allegedly holding illegal meetings with the banned Muslim Brotherhood. …

Yes, they really said that. Let's go to the videotape (Hat Tip: Tom Gross).

By shifting the spectrum of debate, here's how America's rightward march has been normalized throughout history. From Nixon to Reagan to Gingrich to Bush to Paul Ryan and Chris Christie today, leaders who’ve shifted America to the right have been aided by moderating misrepresentations. In the case of Reagan, it was not just the man, but conservatism itself that received the flattering reinterpretation. That was a difference that mattered; it goes to the heart of why Reagan is the American right’s touchstone. But the more general process of misrepresenting and reinterpreting increasingly radical ideological figures as if they were normal,...

Cairo (AFP) - Egyptian secret police have arrested an award-winning Australian journalist and an Egyptian reporter for the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera channel suspected of illegally broadcasting news harming "domestic security," the interior ministry said. The arrests come amid a widening crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood of ousted president Mohamed Morsi, which the military-installed government declared a "terrorist organisation" last week. Al-Jazeera confirmed the arrests, and said police also detained a producer and a cameraman. Officers of the National Security service raided the broadcaster's makeshift bureau at a Cairo hotel on Sunday, arresting two of the journalists and confiscating their equipment, said...