
Stephen Hawking, world-renowned physicist and a former math professor at the University of Cambridge, has hopped aboard the boycott bus of Israel, in protest of the nation's perceived poor treatment of Palestinians.

Google has in effect declared a state of Palestine. The company on Friday announced it would change the name of all its products that cited Palestinian Territories to simply Palestine.

Russian authorities secretly recorded a telephone conversation in 2011 in which one of the Boston bombing suspects vaguely discussed jihad with his mother, officials said Saturday, days after the U.S. government finally received details about the call.
A world-renowned Sunni cleric boycotted an interfaith conference in Qatar on Tuesday to avoid sitting next to Jewish participants.

Turkey has become the first state to appoint and recognize an ambassador to Palestine.

Iran and the world powers trying to curb Tehran's nuclear progress are coming to the negotiating table this week with the window shrinking on diplomacy. The Islamic republic is moving closer to the ability to make atomic arms, and that risks the threat of Mideast conflict.

One key shift in U.S. policy was overlooked in the barrage of news about President Obama's eventful 50-hour visit to Israel last week. That would be the demand that Palestinians recognize Israel as the Jewish state, called by Hamas leader Salah Bardawil "the most dangerous statement by an American president regarding the Palestinian issue."

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday suggested that "normalization" of ties with Israel would take time, hinting that Turkey wanted to ensure the victims of a flotilla raid were compensated and Israel remained committed to the easing of restrictions of goods to Gaza before relations are restored between the two nations.

There he goes again. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon erroneously has asserted, for the fourth time in two years, that “all [Israeli] settlement activity in the occupied Palestinian territory, including east Jerusalem, is illegal under international law.”