A Dinosaur Name in ‘Jurassic World’ is So ‘Racist’ That the Movie Has Come Under Fire

“Jurassic World” was an instant box office hit when it opened in theaters two weeks ago. But now, moviegoers are noticing details that aren’t sitting well with some people. The uproar started when moviegoers began complaining about one of the dinosaur species in the movie called Pakisaurus.

ijreview.com

Pakistan court upholds death penalty for Asia Bibi

The first Christian woman to be sentenced to death under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws had her appeal rejected by the High Court in Lahore on Thursday.

Aasiya Noreen, commonly known as Asia Bibi, received the death penalty in 2010 after she allegedly made derogatory comments about the Prophet Mohammed during an argument with a Muslim woman. While the two women were working together, the Muslim woman had refused water from Noreen on the grounds that it was unclean because it had been handled by a Christian.

The Muslim woman, together with her sister, were the only two witnesses in the case, but the defence failed to convince the appeals judges that their evidence lacked credibility. Noreen, first arrested in the summer of 2009, has already spent five years in prison. Her defence team has one more opportunity to appeal her case by taking it to Pakistan’s Supreme Court.

Noreen was accused of blasphemy against the Prophet of Islam and the Qur’an in June 2009, when she was working in the fields as a laborer in Sheikhupura. A religious argument broke out between her and her co-workers after she brought water for one of them. One of her co-workers objected that the mere touch of a Christian had made the water haram, or religiously forbidden for Muslims. Noreen was told to convert to Islam in order to become purified of her ritual impurity. Her rejoinder was perceived as an insult of Islam and hence she was accused of committing blasphemy.

Muhammad Amin Bukhari, the Superintendent of Police who investigated Noreen’s case, testified in the trial court that the religious argument broke out over the drinking water, and not about the Prophet or the Koran. The trial court judge nonetheless convicted her and gave her the death penalty.

worldwatchmonitor.org

Council of Islamic Ideology declares women’s existence anti-Islamic

The Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) concluded their 192nd meeting on Thursday with the ruling that women are un-Islamic and that their mere existence contradicted Sharia and the will of Allah. As the meeting concluded CII Chairman Maulana Muhammad Khan Shirani (see his Facebook page) noted that women by existing defied the laws of nature, and to protect Islam and the Sharia women should be forced to stop existing as soon as possible. The announcement comes a couple of days after CII’s 191^st meeting where they dubbed laws related to minimum marriage age to be un-Islamic.

After declaring women to be un-Islamic, Shirani explained that there were actually two kinds of women – haraam and makrooh. “We can divide all women in the world into two distinct categories: those who are haraam and those who are makrooh. Now the difference between haraam and makrooh is that the former is categorically forbidden while the latter is really really disliked,” Shirani said.

He further went on to explain how the women around the world can ensure that they get promoted to being makrooh, from just being downright haraam. “Any woman that exercises her will is haraam, absolutely haraam, and is conspiring against Islam and the Ummah, whereas those women who are totally subservient can reach the status of being makrooh. Such is the generosity of our ideology and such is the endeavour of Muslim men like us who are the true torchbearers of gender equality,” the CII chairman added.

Pakistan Today

Secret Pakistan - Double Cross

"Secret Pakistan" by BBC showing involvement of ISI and Pakistan Army in helping taliban.

Part 2 Secret Pakistan - Backlash

Pakistan sisters killed for dancing in the rain

Two teenage sisters in Pakistan have been shot dead in a suspected 'honour killing' after a video clip emerged of them dancing in the rain.

Five unidentified men in the Chillas town in the Northern areas of Pakistan shot and killed Noor Basra, 16, and Noor Sheza, 15, and their mother, News24online reported. Local police have detained Khutore, 22, the sisters' step brother, for allegedly planning the attack. "It seems that the two girls have been murdered after they were accused of tarnishing their family's name by making a video of themselves dancing in the rain,” a police officer said.

The West Australian

Rape victim and 'black virgin' condemned to die in Pakistan over rape

When she was gang-raped by four men at the age of 13, her village classed her as a "black virgin" and ordered her killed. In the rural village of Dadu in southern Pakistan, tradition held that Kainat Soomro's own family should murder her, as her sexual assault had made her a token of disgrace.

Four years later, Kainat is alive and a documentary about her story is premiering on television in the US. But that doesn't mean she or her family is safe. As the film Outlawed in Pakistan shows, Kainat Soomro is still "destined to be killed" because she took the step - extraordinary in Pakistan - of fighting for justice.

The film is a testament to her family’s strength and endurance in a life which has only become more difficult the longer they have stood up against tradition. The Soomros have faced isolation, fear and intimidation from the four men Kainat accused of raping her, and from the members of the small village who were afraid of challenging moral laws which have been in existence for centuries. By virtue of making the rape accusation, Kainat is an outlaw in her own country.

The Australian – Facebook

The Pakistani Ambassador to the U.S. to be investigated for blasphemy

Sherry Rehman, the Pakistani Ambassador to the United States, is under investigation by Pakistani police for allegedly blasphemous remarks she made more than two years ago on a Pakistani talk show, Agence France-Press reports. If convicted, Rehman could be sentenced to death. A senior police official confirmed to AFP on Tuesday that authorities had begun investigating Rehman on orders from the Pakistani Supreme Court.

According to CBS, the case is a response to a 31-year-old Pakistani businessman's complaint to authorities, in which he singled out Rehman for remarks she made during a Nov. 30, 2010, appearance on Dunya TV news program “Dunya Meray Aagay.” Rehman's contentious statements were made during a discussion about Aasia Bibi, an impoverished Pakistani Christian woman who had been sentenced to death a few weeks earlier for allegedly insulting the Prophet Muhammed.

In Pakistan, anyone who insults the Prophet (even indirectly or implicitly) can be given a death sentence or life imprisonment. Recently, a 14-year-old girl named Rimsha Masih was arrested and jailed for allegedly burning pages from the Quran. She was later freed after a Muslim cleric was accused of framing her. Over 1,200 people have been charged with blasphemy in Pakistan since the harsh law was enacted in 1986, according to English-language Pakistani newspaper Dawn. Critics of the measure say the law is often used to persecute religious minorities or settle personal vendettas. While there have been no verified reports of anyone being officially executed, angry lynch mobs have reportedly bypassed the judicial system and carried out the executions themselves.

More on Huffington Post

Extreme Peace

British ex-Defense Minister, Lord Gilbert, has threatened militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan with a neutron bomb. The UK could create "cordons sanitaire along various borders where people are causing trouble", he said.
"Your Lordships may say that this is impractical, but nobody lives up in the mountains on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan except for a few goats and a handful of people herding them," Lord Gilbert said unveiling his plan to the House of Lords.
"If you told them that some ERRB warheads were going to be dropped there and that it would be a very unpleasant place to go, they would not go there," he added. "You would greatly reduce your problem of protecting those borders from infiltration from one side or another."
The remarks came in the midst of a Thursday debate over eliminating nukes across the world. Enhanced Radiation Reduced Blast (ERRB) warheads, or as simply put neutron bombs are a type of a weapon that kill people while leaving buildings intact.

RT Global Report

Hillary Clinton : We created Al-Qaeda

In this video Hilary Clinton admits that the US government created and funded Al-Qaeda in order to fight the soviet union, and she even considers that as a good thing.

Pakistan acid attack parents 'feared dishonour'

A couple arrested in Pakistan on suspicion of killing their 15-year-old daughter with acid say they carried out the attack because she looked at a boy. The girl's father told the BBC that they feared she would bring dishonour on their family. Her mother said it was her "destiny" to die that way. The couple were arrested in Pakistani-administered Kashmir last week.

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan reported 943 women were killed in honour killings last year. That represented an increase of more than 100 from 2010.

Police say that the incident took place in a remote village in the southern district of Kotli. They say that the case was brought to their attention by the couple's eldest daughter. The girl, known only as Anusha, was found to have burns over 60% of her body. Her father Muhammad Zafar told the BBC what happened: "There was a boy who came by on a motorcycle. She (Anusha) turned to look at him twice. I told her before not to do that, it's wrong. People talk about us because our older daughter was the same way," he said.

Her mother Zaheen described the aftermath: "She said 'I didn't do it on purpose. I won't look again.' By then I had already thrown the acid. It was her destiny to die this way." Anusha's father is reported to have taken his daughter inside, beaten her and then acid was poured over her with the help of his wife. Officials say that the couple did not take their daughter to hospital until the following morning.

BBC

UK support for US drones in Pakistan may be war crime

The British government's support for US drone operations over Pakistan may involve acts of assisting murder or even war crimes, the high court heard on Tuesday. In the first serious legal challenge in the English courts to the drones campaign, lawyers for a young Pakistani man whose father was killed by a strike from an unmanned aircraft are seeking to have the sharing of UK locational intelligence declared unlawful.

Noor Khan, 27, is said to live in constant fear of a repeat of the attack in North Waziristan in March last year that killed more than 40 other people, who are said to have gathered to discuss a local mining dispute. The British government has declined to state whether or not its signals intelligence agency GCHQ passes information in support of the CIA drone operations over Pakistan, although the court heard that media reports suggest that it does.

The Guardian

Malala Yousafzai can make smooth recovery

Malala Yousafzai, the teenage girl flown to Britain for treatment after being shot in the head by Taliban gunmen in Pakistan, has the potential to make "pretty much a full recovery", her doctors have said. She was "not out of the woods but is doing very well", said Dr Dave Rosser, medical director of the University Hospitals Birmingham NHS foundation trust.

The bullet, fired at point-blank range, struck just above the back of the left eye, went down through the side of her jaw, damaging the skull and the jaw joint on the left side, went through the neck and lodged in the tissues above the shoulder blade. Shock waves from the bullet shattered the thinnest bone of the skull and fragments were driven into the brain.

"The bullet grazed the edge of her brain," Rosser said. "Certainly if you're talking a couple of inches more central, then it's almost certainly an unsurvivable injury." Doctors say she has memory but they have not talked to her about the shooting. "From a lot of work we have done with our military casualties we know that reminding people of traumatic events at this stage increases the potential for psychological problems later, so we wouldn't do that," Rosser said.

"She is keen that people share the details. She is also keen that I thank people for their support and their interest. She is obviously aware of the amount of support and interest this has generated around the world. She is keen to thank people for that," Rosser said.

Malala was shot along with two classmates as they made their way home from school in north-west Pakistan, in what the foreign secretary, William Hague, described as a "barbaric attack".

Malala Yousafzai can make smooth recovery, doctors say | World news | guardian.co.uk

Malala sent to UK for treatment

A Pakistani schoolgirl shot by the Taliban because she campaigned for the right of young females to an education is en route to the UK for specialist treatment.

Malala Yousafzai, 14, was shot in the head last Tuesday in an attack that prompted widespread revulsion, in Pakistan and abroad. It also raised fresh questions about the state's ability to tackle militancy. Malala's life was saved by neurosurgeons in a Pakistani military hospital and she has since been in intensive care.

Doctors have recommended she be transferred to a UK centre "which has the capability to provide integrated care to children who have sustained severe injury", a Pakistani military spokesman said. The flight left Rawalpindi on Monday morning. She is travelling with an army intensive care assistant on a specially equipped air ambulance leased from the UAE and will be treated at an NHS hospital in the UK.

The Guardian

Taliban gunmen shoot 14-year-old girl activist

Fourteen-year-old Malala Yousufzai was admired across a battle-scarred region of Pakistan for exposing the Taliban's atrocities and advocating for girls' education in the face of religious extremists. On Tuesday, the Taliban nearly killed her to quiet her message. A gunman walked up to a bus taking children home from school in the volatile northern Swat Valley and shot Malala in the head and neck. Another girl on the bus was also wounded.

The young activist was airlifted by helicopter to a military hospital in the frontier city of Peshawar. A doctor in the city of Mingora, Tariq Mohammad, said her wounds weren't life-threatening, but a provincial information minister said after a medical board examined the girl that the next few days would be crucial.

Malala began writing a blog when she was just 11 under the pseudonym Gul Makai for the BBC about life under the Taliban, and began speaking out publicly in 2009 about the need for girls' education — which the Taliban strongly opposes. The extremist movement was quick to claim responsibility for shooting her.

CNSNews.com

UPDATE: Surgeons in Pakistan say they have removed a bullet from Malala Yousafzai. BBC

Civilian Deaths from US Drone Attacks Much Higher than Reported

New investigative work shows that civilian deaths in Pakistan, including from second wave attacks, higher than Pentagon reports.

Pakistani girl (11) accused of Qur'an burning could face death penalty

An 11-year-old Christian Pakistani girl could face the death penalty under the country's notorious blasphemy laws, after she was accused by her neighbours of deliberately burning sacred Islamic texts. Rifta Masih was arrested on Thursday, after complaints against her prompted angry demonstrations. Asif Ali Zardari, the president, has ordered the interior ministry to investigate the case.

As communal tensions continued to rise, about 900 Christians living on the outskirts of Islamabad have been ordered to leave a neighbourhood where they have lived for almost two decades.

Relations between the communities had been simmering for months after complaints were made about the noise coming from three churches in the area during religious services. Two of the landlords who owned the buildings had already ordered an end to worship and some services were forcibly broken up. But there was no indication that all the Christians would be forced out so suddenly until Rifta was accused of the provocative act of burning the sacred words of Islam.

The Guardian

Balochistan: Crossroads of Another US Proxy War?

The United States views Balochistan, an area that encompasses western Pakistan, eastern Iran, and a piece of southern Afghanistan, as critical to the maintenance of US hegemony in the Middle East and Central and South Asia. Conversely, China regards the region as necessary for its own economic and political evolution into a world superpower.  Seen in this way, Balochistan becomes central to the development of geopolitical power in the 21^st Century.

Balochistan is located in one of the most geographically and politically significant places anywhere in the world.  Not only does the region sit astride three countries which have become central to Western political and military power projection, it is also central to the development and export of energy from Central Asia, access to the Indian Ocean, and a host of other geopolitical imperatives for both the West and the SCO/BRICS countries.  Because of this, the region has grown exponentially in importance to all the major powers of the world.

Though the land seems, on the surface, to be inhospitable, it also holds great wealth just beneath the soil.  Aside from what is believed to be a large quantity of natural gas and/or oil, the earth under the feet of the Baloch people holds vast quantities of minerals necessary for economic development.  Because of this, the conflict raging in the region takes on the added dimension of being a resource war, on top of a geographical and political one.

Balochistan’s location has another crucial element that makes it geopolitically necessary: it sits at the crossroads of the most important trade routes between West and East.  Although, in the public mind, trade crossroads seem to be a thing of the past (one might imagine the Silk Road being travelled by camel), in fact, they are essential to development.  Land-based trade, something the Chinese understand to be a linchpin of their economic and political evolution into a superpower, is impossible without a stable and dependable Balochistan, and this is precisely what the United States and the West seeks to prevent.

This focus on land-based access to trade should always be seen in the context of energy. China’s insatiable thirst for oil and gas makes the development of pipelines from Central Asia, Iran, and elsewhere invaluable to them.  The Iran-Pakistan pipeline, the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline, and other projects all serve to increase the importance of Balochistan in the eyes of the Chinese.  Additionally, the Chinese-funded, Pakistani Gwadar Port is the access point for Chinese commercial shipping to the Indian Ocean and on to Africa.  With all of this as a backdrop, one can begin to see just why Balochistan is so significant to the Chinese and, conversely, why the United States and its Western puppets seek to destabilize it.

More on globalresearch.ca

Balochistan: Pakistan's other war

The ongoing conflict in the remote province of Balochistan is often called Pakistan's "dirty war". Ethnic Balochi politicians and leaders share their vision of self-determination and freedom from Pakistani rule. Al Jazeera World

Sarkozy named in arms deal corruption scandal

Nicolas Sarkozy has been named by an investigation into an alleged party funding corruption scandal said to have led to the deaths of 11 French engineers in a Pakistan bomb attack. It is claimed Mr Sarkozy must have been aware of the establishment of a shell company suspected of diverting cash from arms sales commissions to fund the 1995 presidential campaign of then prime minister Edouard Balladur.

The commissions, paid as part of arms sales to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, were not illegal under French law at the time, but channelling the money back to France was, and remains so. Magistrates also allege the subsequent freezing of the payments by President Jacques Chirac led indirectly to a bomb attack on a bus in Pakistan which killed 11 French engineers.

Mail Online

Pakistani Actress Defies Mullah Accusing Her of Immoral Behavior

Pakistani Actress Veena Malik is absolutely right. It's so hard to look at her crying, when she hasn't done anything wrong. Good luck to her and all open-minded people !! (YouTube Comment)