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A pair of German volleyball stars who threatened to boycott an upcoming tournament in Qatar have won their case. Officials in charge of the Katara Beach Volleyball Cup, a tournament scheduled to take place in the Muslim nation of Qatar had planned to make competitors ditch their traditional bikini wear and don sand trousers instead. However, German volleyball stars Karla Borger and Julia Sude threatened to boycott the event unless they could wear their bikinis in the expected 85-90 degree heat. “We are there to do our job, but are being prevented from wearing our work clothes,” Borger reportedly told...

German beach volleyball stars Karla Borger and Julia Sude have said they will boycott a tournament in Qatar because it is “the only country” where players are forbidden from wearing bikinis on court. “We are there to do our job, but are being prevented from wearing our work clothes,” Borger told radio station Deutschlandfunk on Sunday. “This is really the only country and the only tournament where a government tells us how to do our job – we are criticising that.”

Iran’s state media has alleged that in addition to the United States, several countries, including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Germany and Britain, had played a role in the assassination of its senior military leader Qassem Soleimani. Soleimani was killed in a US drone strike on January 3, 2020, while visiting Baghdad. According to DEFA Press, more countries would be added to the list once the investigation into Soleimani’s killing is completed. “We must learn from this experience, which came at a great price, and we must make every effort to preserve national unity and cohesion that was achieved...

Georgi Democratic Senate candidate Jon Ossoff has come under fire for refusing to disclose details about his personal finances and investments, including media deals he made with state-owned news outlets in Qatar and China.The 33-year-old trust fund Democrat is facing GOP Sen. David Perdue in one of two crucial Peach State races which will decide whether Democrats control the upper chamber of Congress, as the New York Post reports.On the campaign trail, Ossoff touts himself as a crusader against corruption who has produced hard-hitting documentaries on fraud in countries like Ghana through his production company, Insight: The World Investigates.But the...

Secretary General. Joined by 34 other countries, the document enshrines the Trump administration’s pro-life diplomacy on the official record of the General Assembly. “The United States strongly supports the dignity of all human beings and protecting life from the moment of conception throughout the lifespan,” Ambassador Kelly Craft wrote to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres transmitting the Geneva Consensus Declaration on Promoting Women’s Health and Strengthening the Family. Following the letter, the declaration was issued as an official document of the United Nations last week and circulated on December 11, after having been translated into all six official UN languages....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - White House senior adviser Jared Kushner and his team are headed to Saudi Arabia and Qatar this week for talks ... Kushner’s trip comes after the killing on Friday of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in Tehran... Days before the killing, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu travelled to Saudi Arabia and met with bin Salman, an Israeli official said, in what was the first publicly confirmed visit by an Israeli leader. Israeli media said they were joined by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The historic meeting underlined how opposition to Tehran is bringing about a strategic realignment of countries...

A curfew in Philadelphia tonight from 9pm to 6am. Streets in the downtown area closed. Members of the Pennsylvania National Guard deployed... A federal judge in Portland granting a preliminary injunction saying that federal officers denied First Amendment rights to peaceful protesters... Walmart removing firearms and ammunition from display floors...Today Walmart reversing course... The country with the highest coronavirus infection rate in Europe moving to a national lockdown. Belgium shutting down... In Canada Winnipeg the largest city in Manitoba moving to a Code Red coronavirus lockdown... An earthquake measuring 7.0 struck off the coast of Turkey today... The current UK...

Paris (AFP) — France’s largest employers’ federation on Monday urged companies to “resist the blackmail” over a product boycott by Arab countries as a backlash widens over Paris’s hardened stance against radical Islam. French President Emmanuel Macron has vowed to take the fight to Islamic radicals after the October 16 beheading of a history teacher who had shown cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed to pupils in a class discussion on free speech. But his comments triggered protests in Muslim-majority countries at the weekend, with people burning pictures of Macron in Syria and setting fire to French flags in the Libyan...

The women were checked for signs of having recently given birth after a newborn baby was found abandoned in a toilet at Hamad International Airport. The searches came to light when Australian women spoke out. Women from other countries were also examined. Kim Mills told the Guardian she was among those taken off the flight and led into a dark car park, where three ambulances were waiting to perform medical examinations. However, officials did not subject her to the examination due, she suspected, to her being in her 60s. Even so, she said, the experience was horrifying. The airport has...

The State of Oregon now requires everyone entering a business over the age of five to wear a mask-muzzle with no exceptions...Businesses have been told to call police if people enter a business without a muzzle covering their faces... In Miami-Dade County, Florida a coronavirus curfew imposed again... New Jersey Democrat Governor Phil Murphy signing an executive order this weekend extending the: "public health emergency"... Italy ordering more closures and restricted hours over a rise in coronavirus cases... Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez announcing a nationwide 'state of alarm' which will impose curfews on all of Spain excluding the Canary...

Universities in the United States reported $6.5 billion in previously undisclosed gifts and contracts from foreign sources as a result of an investigation by the Department of Education. Federal law requires universities to disclose substantial foreign gifts and contracts to the Department of Education (DOE) twice a year. Many have for years failed to do so, while others have underreported. After the department opened an investigation into the matter in 2019, 60 schools that had never complied with the law disclosed $350 million in previously unreported foreign funds, according to a report (pdf) released by the DOE on Oct. 20....

A reporter for Australia's ABC met two of the men charged in an alleged plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Journalist David Lipson suggests that the brothers Michael and William Null were more pretenders than the "real deal"..... A private security guard for a Denver TV station arrested after he shot and killed a conservative protester who sprayed him with mace following a verbal altercation..... Sweeping arrests in Portland late Sautrday night during a protest near a police precinct.... Also in Portland this weekend Patriot Prayer supporters removing a statue erected by anti-police violence protesters...... A federal appeals court...

...Northwestern University received more than $340 million from the country of Qatar from 2012 to 2019 as it operated a campus in the Middle Eastern country and continued a years-long collaboration with Al Jazeera, a media outlet owned by the Qatari government. That’s according to a 2019 Clarion Project report, which found that Al Jazeera and Northwestern University formed a relationship in 2008 when the Qatar Foundation, which the Clarion Project alleges of being linked to terrorism, funded a Northwestern campus in Qatar. Northwestern, one of the top journalism schools in the U.S., partnered with Al Jazeera in an agreement...

“The Arab world now says that relations with Israel is more important than the Palestinian issue, which cannot be solved by Abu Mazen, for the foreseeable future.” The constellations of moderate Sunni Arab states which are on track to normalize relations with Israel view Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas as irrelevant, a former top Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) official has told The Jerusalem Post. Former head of the counter-terrorism division for Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria Arik “Harris” Barbing told the Post on Sunday that, “the Palestinian issue is not a focus of the Arab states.” Harris said that, “Abu...

Today's top stories 29.09.20 Rival Palestinian factions reach an agreement that will see parliamentary and presidential elections held within six-months -- as part of a collective Palestinian effort to resist Israel's normalization with Arab and Muslim states.Damascus is reportedly seeking to revive direct-negotiations with Jerusalem.French president Emmanuel Macron accuses Hezbollah and its allies for the failure to attain much sought-after political breakthrough for Lebanon.

U.S. Africa Command says that at least two MiG-29 Fulcrum fighter jets, possibly piloted by shadowy Russian mercenaries, have crashed in Libya. Jared Szuba, the Pentagon correspondent for AI-Monitor, Tweeted out that one of the jets was apparently lost on June 28, while the other went down on September 7, 2020. This information had come in a statement from Rear Admiral Heidi Berg, U.S. Africa Command's (AFRICOM) director of intelligence. Another tweet indicates that Berg believes that "Russian fighter aircraft," presumably MiG-29s too, but potentially also Su-24 Fencer strike aircraft, have conducted airstrikes in Libya. AI-Monitor's Szuba follows that up...

Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, special aide to the president of the Islamic Parliament of Iran, said on Sunday that the United Arab Emirates had made a “big mistake” in normalizing relations with Israel. In an interview with Iran’s Arabic-language Al-Alam TV, Amir-Abdollahian, formerly Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister for Arab and African Affairs, said that establishing relations with “the cancer of the region, the Zionist entity,” was not in the UAE’s interest. The UAE may very well have upset its own security and stability with this move because Israel upsets the stability everywhere it is present, said the Iranian official, who added that...

Forget the happy talk of the mainstream media. The Democrats are a coalition of mutually antagonistic factions, united only by their hatred of President Donald Trump. They couldn't even keep a lid on the conflict between the dominant radicals and the pseudo-moderates propping up senescent Joe Biden as a putative centrist.  Don’t look for the mainstream media to mention this, but the Biden campaign actually disavowed one of the speakers during last night’s Democratic National Convention internet TV show, Linda Sarsour and she is muttering about retaliation at the polls.  Remember her? Sarsour, who has a history of controversial...

Turkey and Qatar have reiterated their support for Libya's internationally recognised government during a trip by their defence chiefs to the capital, Tripoli, where Germany's foreign minister also paid an unexpected visit... The country has been split since 2014 between factions based in the east and west, and regional powers have aligned themselves with the competing sides. While Turkey and its regional ally Qatar support the GNA, forces in the east led by renegade military commander Khalifa Haftar have received backing from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Russia. "We believe that we will achieve the wanted results by supporting...

Editor's Note: This piece was coauthored by Bruce Abramson.It’s hard to miss the stakes for America in November’s election. President Trump and the GOP base inhabit a starkly different world than do Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and progressive Democrats. That difference transcends mere policy debate; America’s political parties operate on different moral planes. In no foreign context is that moral divergence clearer than the Middle East. Two recent events illuminate the gap: The Biden-led 2020 Democrat Platform, and the UAE/Israel pact that President Trump brokered. The election will determine whether the Middle East continues on the path towards stability and...