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HYDERABAD: India has denied award-winning British journalist Yvonne Ridley a visa. She was scheduled to address the Spring of Islam conference being held here by the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind. The London-based journalist, who was captured by the Taliban on an undercover assignment in Afghanistan in 2001 and converted to Islam after her release in 2003, was to address various sessions at the three-day conference, which began Friday. "The Indian Government is refusing to give me a conference visa to address 50,000 women in Hyderabad about women's rights ... I would have thought after the catastrophic handling of the Dehli rape case,...

A prominent Muslim scholar banned from the United States for six years returned Wednesday for visits to four cities... "In the name of your fear or mistrust of Muslim-majority countries, you may end up betraying your own values," Tariq Ramadan ... Ramadan said he was happy to be in the U.S. ...to speak on a panel Thursday at The Cooper Union college. "My name has been cleared," he said. The 47-year-old professor at Oxford University in England was permitted to return to the United States after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in January signed orders enabling re-entry for him...

A humanitarian convoy led by maverick MP George Galloway carrying medical supplies for Gaza has come under attack in Egypt The convoy, carrying aid worth £1 million, was pelted with stones and vandalised after it stopped in El-Arish, a small town around 28 miles from the Rafah border crossing with Gaza. "It's an absolute disgrace,'' convoy organiser Yvonne Ridley told AFP. "The power was cut. Under cover of darkness members of our convoy were attacked with stones. "Vandals also wrote dirty words and anti-Hamas slogans,'' she said. "Several people in the convoy were injured in the attack." (snip) "George Galloway...

SO it wasn't a political stunt. It isn't about Iraq. And the threat of Islamist terror right here is more real than many pretend. How real? If the police are right, they have saved scores of you from being blown up -- as people in Madrid and London were blown up. As NSW Police Commissioner Ken Moroney put it, the arrest yesterday of 17 Muslim men disrupted "the final stages of a large-scale terrorist attack". He said explosive material had already been collected. Yet only last week, Prime Minister John Howard was pilloried by many for having warned of an...

Yvonne Ridley, the reporter imprisoned by the Taliban and then vilified by Fleet Street, found Islam and an unlikely supporter. But her new career at al-Jazeera has come to a mysterious end, she tells Julia Stuart It was a curious way to be given the boot. At 11pm a secretary from al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite news station, popped round to Yvonne Ridley's home in Doha, Qatar, and informed her that she was "terminated". Ridley, who had worked as a senior editor on the station's English-language website since July, was warned not to go back to the office and that security...

CHICAGO, August 27 (IslamOnline) - British journalist Yvonne Ridley has announced that she plans to convert to Islam. IslamOnline talked to Ridley about her religious background, her encounters with the Taliban, and her decision to convert to Islam. Ridley made international headlines last year when she entered Afghanistan and was held captive by the Taliban. She was eventually released and went on to write about her experiences in a book entitled In The Hands of the Taliban published by Robson Books in the U.K. Ridley told IslamOnline, “I was brought up a Protestant, in the Church of England. I sang...