Gold and oil prices up as dollar plummets
Gold prices rallied to another new high Wednesday on the back of a weaker dollar. Gold for December delivery rose to as high as $1,098.50 an ounce, before settling up $2.40 at $1,087.30 an ounce on the New York Mercantile Exchange, adding to big gains the day before. News that India’s central bank bought nearly $7 billion worth of gold from the International Monetary Fund triggered a frenzy of buying on Tuesday.
The Reserve Bank of India paid $6.7 billion for the bullion, which it bought from Oct. 19 to Oct. 30. It was “the biggest single central-bank purchase that we know about for at least 30 years in such a short period,” said Timothy Green, the author of “The Ages of Gold.” “The only comparable event was the U.S.’s steady purchases in the 1930s and 1940s.” Gold is seen as a hedge against a falling dollar and inflation. Demand for gold has risen steadily over the past few months as record-low interest rates pressure the dollar and drive investors to look for higher returns in other assets. Oil prices also got support from the weaker dollar, a big driver of higher energy prices this year. Light, sweet crude for December delivery rose 80 cents to $80.40 a barrel.
Swiss to hold referendum on banning the construction of masjids
An emotional debate over the role of Islam in Switzerland is heating up as a referendum approaches that would ban the construction of minarets on mosques. On Nov. 29, the Swiss will vote on a referendum to ban the construction of minarets, an initiative promoted by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party, who argue that a minaret is a symbol of Islamic intolerance. Minarets are tower-like structures capped with crowns; while the structure has no special religious significance, it is often used for the call to prayer for Muslims. The Swiss People’s Party gathered twice the required signatures needed to call a vote. Its campaign used posters depicting a woman in a burqa in front of a row of minarets shaped like missiles. Some cities, such as Basel, have banned the posters, while Zurich and others have allowed them in the name of free speech. A national poll by state-owned media group SRG shows that 53% of voters oppose the ban and 34% support it. About 400,000, or roughly 5%, of Swiss residents are Muslim. Most are of Turkish or Balkan origin, with a small minority from the Arab world. Only four of the roughly 150 mosques in Switzerland have minarets. Laws against sound pollution forbid mosques from using minarets to hold speakers for the call to prayer.
Israeli ambassador to Turkey pelted with eggs
Twenty Turkish students were arrested after they bombarded the car of Israel’s ambassador to Turkey with eggs. Gabi Levy had arrived to deliver a lecture at the Karadeniz Teknik University in the Black Sea port of Trabzon when he was confronted with Wednesday’s protest. The university students, who were reportedly protesting Israel’s military offensive in Gaza last winter, shouted “Israel is a murderer,” the Hurriyet Daily News reported.During a visit by Levy on Tuesday, a local Turkish mayor in a nearby town condemned Israel’s “policies of expansion and occupation” and said that self-defense should not involve “killing children,” according to Hurriyet. Israel-Turkey relations have grown tense since the Gaza war, with Turkey under US instructions taking the lead in some international forums in demanding that Israel be held accountable for alleged war crimes. Last month Turkey prevented Israel from joining a NATO-alliance military exercise that ultimately was cancelled due to Israel’s exclusion.
US admits to allowing al Qaeda into Pakistan
This week US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton conceded that the United States was responsible for allowing Al Qaeda to enter Pakistan. Clearly, Al Qaeda left Afghanistan. And we let them out, she told Greta Van Susteren of FOX News. You know, we should have taken them out when we had the chance back in 2001 and 2002 and they escaped. And they escaped into Pakistan. Asked if the US was also responsible for Al Qaeda’s presence in Fata, Secretary Clinton acknowledged that if the US had done a better job in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda would not have slipped into Pakistan. ‘If we had done a better job going into Afghanistan and capture the people who had attacked us or killed them you know, we would be in a different position,’ she said.
China launches strike hard campaign against Muslims
Police in China’s far west have stepped up a hunt for people who took part in deadly ethnic riots there four months ago and other so-called terrorists, the regional public security ministry said Tuesday. The “Strike Hard” campaign is to run from November through the end of the year and will cover all of the remote Xinjiang region, with police on high alert for alleged terror plots, the ministry said in a statement. Hundreds have already been arrested and nine people sentenced to death Uighurs are a Turkic Muslim ethnic group linguistically and culturally distinct from China’s majority Han. The Uighurs see Xinjiang as their homeland and resent the millions of Han Chinese who have poured into the region in recent decades. A simmering separatist campaign has occasionally boiled over into violence in the past 20 years. China says overseas Uighur separatists orchestrated the riots to worsen ethnic divisions and bolster their campaign for independence but the government has provided little evidence to back up its claim.