Unfaithful suspicions
A poll conducted by the Financial Times and Harris Interactive has shown that nearly two-fifths of Britons are skeptical about whether someone can be Muslim as well as British. The poll, which focused on religion and global security, was conducted in the United Kingdom, United States, France, Spain, Italy and Germany. Other countries polled in the survey were far more convinced that Islam didn't erode national identity.Keep up to date with the latest developments and sharpest perspectives in a world of strife and struggle.
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In mosques in the north of England, a government-sponsored ethics programme seeks to teach the obligations of citizenship to young Muslims through Islamic canonical tradition.
In the New York Times Magazine, Columbia professor Mark Lilla examines the history of the "Great Separation" of church and state in western Europe, seeing an unbridgeable chasm between the "west" and the experience of Islam.
Die Tageszeitung in Germany reports on how Islamists in Egypt are using subtler tactics to build alliances and advance their illiberal agendas.
Patience runs thin in Washington
High-ranking Republican and Democratic senators have called for current Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki to be booted from office. John Warner and Carl Levin, both on the Senate Armed Services Committee, claimed that Maliki's government was so shot through with regional and sectarian loyalties that it is now beyond redemption.
Mohammed Ali al-Hassani, governor of the southern Iraqi province of Muthanna, was assassinated by a road-side bomb. The killing has been pinned on internal Shia rivalries, not sectarian strife.
Bernard Kouchner, France's foreign minister, toured Baghdad in the first visit of a French minister to Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion of the country. Newly-elected French president Nicolas Sarkozy has steered Paris closer to Washington after the two capitals fell out over the Iraq war. Kouchner announced that France was "ready to be useful".
Revisiting Tora Bora
Hundreds of American and Afghan soldiers have poured into Nangarhar Province in eastern Afghanistan in an ongoing offensive against suspected Taliban and al-Qaida militants sequestered in the rugged mountainous area of Tora Bora. Hundreds of villagers, meanwhile, have been forced to flee the area.
Visiting Afghanistan, the British army chief General Richard Dannatt insisted that though British forces are hard-pressed in the southern province of Helmand, they are still "taking the fight to the Taliban".
Pakistani security forces have secured the release of 21 Iranian hostages taken by Sunni Muslim insurgents in the southeastern Iranian province of Sistan-ve-Baluchestan. The largely ethnic Baluch and Sunni Muslim militant group Jundallah operates with relative impunity across the porous Pakistani-Iranian border.
On Monday, a suicide bomber killed three Pakistani paramilitary soldiers and wounded 18 people in another spate of violence in the restive northwest of the country.
The "Terrorism Index"
In its poll of 100 foreign policy analysts, Foreign Policy magazine reveals that scholars and experts have lost faith in the current trajectory of the Bush administration's foreign policy. Thanks to the failed Baghdad surge, hostility to Iran, and failure to handle the middle east crisis, the world has become a more dangerous place in the last six months.
According to a study conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, coverage of the Iraq war has diminished by a third in the US media in 2007.
Basilan battles
Fighting continued in the southern Philippine island of Basilan, where military forces shelled positions held by Abu Sayyaf militants. Government sources claim that at least 40 of the Islamist militants have been killed in recent clashes, while 15 marines have died.
Refugee camp clashes
A Lebanese soldier died as fighting continued in the Nahr al Bared refugee camp where government forces and Islamist radicals remain embattled after three months of clashes.
