Mohamed Siruhan

An 18-year-old Saudi girl, who was staying with her Christian mother in the United States, has embraced Islam while she was in the Kingdom on vacation, said Majed Al-Osaimi, director of www.edialogue.org dawa website. Speaking to Arab News, he said the teenager, who is studying in the US, accepted Islam as her new religion after chatting with a woman dawa worker (propagator) associated with the website, whose name is Rukn Al-Huwar in Arabic. “The girl had obtained some knowledge about Islam and cleared all her doubts during the 20-minute conversation with our dawa worker and declared her Shahada,” Al-Osaimi said. He said his website, which was established in March this year, was instrumental in taking 119 people of different nationalities to the light of Islam. “Every day one or two individuals are accepting Islam as their religion through our website,” he pointed out. Al-Osaimi urged Saudis and other Muslims living in the West to teach their children about ...

The potent blast from the Sun unleashed a firestorm of radiation on a level not witnessed since 2006, and will likely lead to moderate geomagnetic storm activity by Wednesday, according to the National Weather Service. "This one was rather dramatic," said Bill Murtagh, program coordinator at the NWS's Space Weather Prediction Center, describing the M-2 (medium-sized) solar flare that peaked at 1:41am Eastern time in the United States, or 0541 GMT. "We saw the initial flare occurring and it wasn't that big but then the eruption associated with it – we got energy particle radiation flowing in and we got a big coronal mass injection," he said. "You can see all the materials blasting up from the Sun so it is quite fantastic to look at." Nasa's solar dynamics observatory, which launched last year and provided the high-definition pictures and video of the event, described it as "visually spectacular,...

A Pennsylvania man faces attempted homicide charges for allegedly beating his fiancee’s 2-year-old daughter because he thought the girl’s upbringing had been too lenient. Investigators say 24-year-old Brandon Bishop told officers the girl was a princess. The Morning Call of Allentown reports Bishop admitted punching, kicking and choking the girl and picking her up by her hair and dropping her. ReadMore

The inspector general of the Securities and Exchange Commission said Tuesday his office has investigated three more SEC employees, including two staff attorneys, and an agency contractor for using their government computers to view pornography. According to the latest semi-annual report from SEC inspector general David Kotz to Congress, his office also looked into charges that an employee at the SEC’s Washington headquarters told investors last year that a company that the agency charged with running a Ponzi scheme was legitimate; the employee was himself an investor with the company and was put on administrative leave pending further investigation. Kotz also investigated a lawyer in a regional office for allegedly disclosing confidential information about an FBI informant in a case. As of the end of March, the agency had not acted on his recommendation that the lawyer be disciplined. Kotz told Congress that the agency’s information technology security group gave him “...

Details pulled five years ago by an investigator in France from a notorious series of obscene Internet photographs resulted in the imposition Tuesday of what is believed to be most severe sentence ever in a Connecticut child pornography prosecution. A federal judge in Bridgeport sentenced truck driver William Oehne, who is 50 years old, to 45 years in prison for taking pornographic photographs of the 9-year-old daughter of a former girlfriend and using the Internet to distribute the images to pedophiles around the world. Specifically, U.S. District Judge Janet C. Hall sentenced Oehne to 30 years for the production of child pornography and a consecutive 15 years for distribution of child pornography. In their argument for severity, federal prosecutors attacked the insidious nature of child pornography in the Internet age, describing it as a crime that makes children victims for life when pedophiles around the world continuously trade exploitive images of them. "As a r...

A meeting of Church of England bishops in York this week has broken up without agreement on whether gay clergy should ever be allowed to be chosen for promotion to bishoprics. The leadership of the established church remains tied in knots over how far it can comply with the Equality Act in its treatment of gay people. Church lawyers have told the bishops that while they cannot take into account that someone is homosexual in considering them for preferment, they also cannot put forward clergy in active same-sex relationships and, even if they are celibate, must consider whether they can "act as a focus for unity" to their flocks if appointed to a diocese. Conservative evangelicals remain bitterly opposed to the ordination of gay people, even though many clergy are more or less openly gay, and some are in same-sex partnerships. ReadMore

A minister accused of sexually assaulting two women he once worked with resigned Sunday in an apparent bid to spare the French government the kind of notoriety the opposition has faced since its leading man, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was charged with attempting to rape a Manhattan hotel maid. A preliminary investigation was opened last week against George Tron, who served as a junior civil service minister, after two women alleged that he had attacked them between 2007 and 2010. One of the women said she was inspired to come forward after a housekeeper at a luxury Manhattan hotel claimed she was sexually assaulted by Strauss-Kahn, 62, a leading presidential hopeful in next year’s elections for the rival Socialist Party. He resigned his post as International Monetary Fund chief after charges were filed in New York. ReadMore