Pakistani court sentences woman to death for WhatsApp ‘blasphemy’

Islamabad, Pakistan – A Pakistani court has sentenced a Muslim woman to death for committing “blasphemy” by sharing images deemed to be insulting to Islam’s Prophet Muhammad and one of his wives, also considered a holy personage by many Muslims.

The trial court in the northern Pakistani city of Rawalpindi on Wednesday sentenced Aneeqa Ateeq under the country’s strict blasphemy laws, which impose a mandatory death penalty for insulting the Prophet Muhammad.

Pakistan’s Imran Khan warns of ‘civil war’ in Afghanistan

Islamabad, Pakistan – Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has warned of the risk of a “civil war” in Afghanistan if the Taliban is unable to form an inclusive government there.

“If they do not have an inclusive government, and gradually it descends into a civil war, which if they do not include all the factions sooner or later [will happen], that too will impact Pakistan,” Khan told the BBC network during an interview aired on Tuesday.

Taliban claims capturing key Afghan border crossing with Pakistan

The Taliban says it has captured the strategic border crossing of Spin Boldak along the frontier with Pakistan, continuing sweeping gains made since foreign forces stepped up their withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The Afghan interior ministry on Wednesday, however, insisted the armed group’s attack had been repelled and government forces had control.

But Pakistani authorities confirmed to Al Jazeera that they have sealed their side of the country’s border crossing with Afghanistan at the Chaman-Spin Boldak frontier.

Pakistan honours Saudi crown prince with highest civilian award

Islamabad, Pakistan – Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been conferred with Pakistan’s highest civilian honour a day after signing $20bn in investment deals with the South Asian country.

On the second day of his trip to Pakistan on Monday, Prince Mohammed (also known as MBS) met President Arif Alvi in the capital Islamabad, where he was awarded the Nishan-e-Pakistan (Order of Pakistan) at a formal ceremony.

China And Pakistan Plan To Get Rich Together. The Price? Human Rights.

My big brother and I got into a shouting match about our country last summer.

We’d been talking about a trip I took a few years ago to Gwadar, a centuries-old fishing community that millions of Pakistanis ― including my brother ― see as a portent of a glamorous, wealthy and once-unimaginable future. Gwadar is located just by the entrance to the Persian Gulf, in the southwest of the exceptionally poor and rarely peaceful Pakistani province of Balochistan. Eventually, it’s supposed to become the crown jewel of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a $62 billion branch of China’s “Belt and Road” plan to expand trade and relationships across Asia and Europe.

Forget North Korea. The Next Nuclear Crisis Festers On The India-Pakistan Border

WASHINGTON ― While President Donald Trump is focused on North Korea’s nuclear madman, a more alarming threat is rising in South Asia: an explosive mix of nuclear weapons, terrorism and hair-trigger war plans.

Pakistan, already a major nuclear weapons power with well over 100 warheads and the missiles to carry them, is racing to expand its arsenal of short-range tactical weapons meant as a deterrent against India, its larger, more powerful neighbor and blood enemy. India is thought to have around 100 nuclear warheads of its own. (North Korea is estimated to possess enough fissile material to make several warheads.)

Pakistani Defense Minister Makes Nuclear Threat Against Israel After Fake News Provocation

Pakistan’s defense minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, wrote a frightening Twitter post in response to a fake news article stating that Israel would attack Pakistan with nuclear weapons.

“Israeli def min threatens nuclear retaliation presuming pak role in Syria against Daesh,” Asif wrote on Twitter Friday, referring to the Islamic State. “Israel forgets Pakistan is a Nuclear state too.”

According to The New York Times, Asif appeared to be responding to a fake news article published earlier in the week on awdnews.com titled, “Israeli Defense Minister: If Pakistan send ground troops into Syria on any pretext, we will destroy this country with a nuclear attack.”

Pakistani Military Kills Dozens Of Militants In Retaliation For School Massacre

ISLAMABAD (AP) — Pakistan hanged two convicted militants Friday in the country's first executions in years, while warplanes and ground forces pounded insurgent hideouts in a northwest region bordering Afghanistan — part of a stepped-up response to the Taliban slaughter of scores of schoolchildren.

Unchastened by criticism from all corners of the globe, the Taliban threatened earlier Friday to kill more children if executions were carried out as promised.

"We can create a mourning situation at the homes of many army generals and politicians," spokesman Mohammad Khurassani said in a statement emailed to reporters.

Courting Disaster -- Why does the Pakistani military pick unwinnable fights?

Pakistan suffers from an enduring sense of vulnerability that was born of the calamities that attended its creation. It was the trauma of partition that formed Pakistan’s national psyche. The new nation inherited all of British India’s security challenges but with a fraction of its resources. In the post-partition distribution of state assets, it got the short end of the stick. Its military was formed from the rump of the old British Indian Army. Handicapped and impoverished, it had to contend with a troubled western frontier where Afghanistan—the only country to vote against its admission to the United Nations—was making irredentist claims. Its eastern neighbor, India, bore it even less good will. Its most populous province, Bengal, was separated by over a thousand miles of hostile territory.

THE UNBLINKING STARE -- The drone war in Pakistan.

At the Pearl Continental Hotel, in Peshawar, a concrete tower enveloped by flowering gardens, the management has adopted security precautions that have become common in Pakistan’s upscale hospitality industry: razor wire, vehicle barricades, and police crouching in bunkers, fingering machine guns. In June, on a hot weekday morning, Noor Behram arrived at the gate carrying a white plastic shopping bag full of photographs. He had a four-inch black beard and wore a blue shalwar kameez and a flat Chitrali hat. He met me in the lobby. We sat down, and Behram spilled his photos onto a table. Some of the prints were curled and faded. For the past seven years, he said, he has driven around North Waziristan on a small red Honda motorcycle, visiting the sites of American drone missile strikes as soon after an attack as possible.

Mob Lynches Christian Couple In Pakistan, Dozens Arrested

LAHORE, Pakistan, Nov 5 (Reuters) - Police in Pakistan arrested dozens of people on Wednesday after a mob beat a Christian couple to death and burned their bodies for allegedly desecrating a Koran.

Blasphemy is a serious offense in conservative Muslim Pakistan where those accused are sometimes lynched on the spot.

The latest incident took place in a village in Punjab province on Tuesday when a local cleric told his community through the loudspeakers of his mosque to punish the couple for burning a few pages of the Koran, a police source said.

Clashes In Kashmir Between India And Pakistan Are The Worst In Years

DHAMALA HAKIMWALA, Pakistan (AP) — Iram Shazadi was making breakfast for her family when bullets started whizzing through her dusty Pakistani village just a half-kilometer (quarter-mile) from the Indian-controlled area of disputed Kashmir.

Then a mortar shell fired by Indian forces slammed into her home, killing her two young sons and her husband's mother in the worst spasm of violence in the tense Himalayan region in years. So far, 19 people — 11 on the Pakistani side, eight on the Indian — have died over the past week. Dozens have been injured, and tens of thousands have fled their homes.

Jamila Bibi, Saskatoon Woman Deported To Pakistan, Faces Stoning

TORONTO - A 65-year-old woman working as a cook in Saskatoon has been deported to her native Pakistan, where her lawyer says her life could be in danger.

Lawyer Bashir Khan says Jamila Bibi was flown out of Toronto on Tuesday afternoon.

He says his client has been barred from re-entering Canada on any visa on the future.

Khan says Bibi fled to Canada in 2007 after being falsely accused of adultery by her husband.

Monsoon Floods Kill Nearly 300 In India, Pakistan

SRINAGAR, India (AP) — Landslides and flash floods triggered by heavy monsoon rains have killed nearly 300 people in large swaths of northern India and Pakistan, officials said Sunday.

Five days of incessant rains in Indian-controlled Kashmir have left at least 120 people dead in the region's worst flooding in more than five decades, submerging hundreds of villages and triggering landslides, officials said. In neighboring Pakistan, more than 160 people have died and thousands of homes have collapsed, with an official saying the situation was becoming a "national emergency."

The Killing of Hakimullah Mehsud

It’s easy to dismiss the killing of Hakimullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, via drone attack as simply more of the same, but in fact it’s a complicated story.

There’s a great deal of spy-vs.-spy in this event, since it emerged last week that (1) Pakistan was seeking to make a deal with the Pakistani Taliban aimed at winding down the conflict, and (2) Afghanistan was trying to make a secret pact with the Pakistani Taliban designed to give Pakistan a taste of its own medicine, since Kabul blames Islamabad for supporting, arming and sustaining the Afghan Taliban against it.

Pakistan, Yemen And Afghanistan Have Children Too, And They Are Being Killed by Our Drones

The death of a child -- any child -- is always painful and shocking. The awful gassing of children in Syria breaks the heart and tortures the soul. We all should and must speak up about this outrage.

But the deaths of 178 Pakistani children by American drones must also be acknowledged. We must put an end to killing children in the name of security. As National Security Advisor Susan Rice has said, "Nations cannot unleash the world's most horrific weapons against innocent civilians, especially children." She was talking about chemical weapons, but "death by drone" is equally horrific. Take one look at the photos of children killed by our drones, provided to me by Noor Beham when I made a trip to Pakistan last year, for graphic confirmation.

Aid-for-Leverage Failed in Pakistan—It Won't Work in Egypt

As the Egyptian army continued its violent crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood this week, White House officials said that the United States can't cut off its $1.3 billion a year in aid to Egypt. To do so would cause Washington to lose "influence" with the country's generals. Vital American security interests are at stake, they argued, and keeping the torrent of American aid flowing gives Washington leverage.

If that argument sounds familiar, it is. For the last decade, the United States has used the same logic in Pakistan. Washington has given $11 billion in military aid to the Pakistani army in the name of maintaining American "influence" in Islamabad. From new equipment to reimbursements for Pakistani military operations, the money flowed year after year, despite complaints from American officials that the Pakistanis were misusing funds and inflating bills.

First Leaked Pakistani Report on U.S. Drone War Undermines Claims of Low Civilian Toll

A leaked Pakistani government report has bolstered claims that civilian casualties from U.S. drone strikes are far higher than the Obama administration has been willing to admit. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has released figures from the Pakistani government’s own research into casualties from drone attacks in Pakistan’s tribal areas. The Pakistani report investigates 75 CIA drone strikes and five operations by NATO between 2006 and 2009. It finds that the attacks left at least 746 people dead, including at least 147 civilians, 94 of them children — a conservative count given the omission of key data. The high number of civilian casualties directly contradicts statements made by senior Obama administration officials and top lawmakers. We go London to speak with Chris Woods, a reporter with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s drones investigation team, which won the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism last month.

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Source: democracynow.org
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Exclusive: Leaked Pakistani report confirms high civilian death toll in CIA drone strikes

A secret document obtained by the Bureau reveals for the first time the Pakistan government’s internal assessment of dozens of drone strikes, and shows scores of civilian casualties.

The United States has consistently claimed only a tiny number of non-combatants have been killed in drone attacks in Pakistan – despite research by the Bureau and others suggesting that over 400 civilians may have died in the nine-year campaign.

New Pakistan PM calls for end to U.S. drone strikes

Pakistan's new prime minister took office Wednesday vowing to fix the country's ailing economy and end electricity blackouts while also calling for an end to American drone strikes in the tribal areas.

Nawaz Sharif was elected to an unprecedented third term as the prime minister of this country of 180 million people by an electorate frustrated with corruption, inflation and unemployment and looking to him for quickly needed solutions.