Syria says revolt over

Syria says the year-old revolt to topple President Bashar al-Assad is over, but the army again shelled opposition areas on Saturday and rebels said they would not cease fire until tanks, artillery and heavy weapons are withdrawn. Washington and Gulf Arab states urged peace envoy Kofi Annan to set a timeline for "next steps" if there is no ceasefire, and Saudi Arabia repeated a call for rebels to be armed. Annan has said neither measure would be helpful. The former U.N. chief's mission has brought no respite in the killings. Syria also said it would keep its forces in cities to "maintain security" until it is safe to withdraw in line with the peace deal, which Assad has said he accepts. Annan's plan says the army must stop violence immediately and be the first to withdraw forces. "We cannot accept the presence of tanks and troops in armored vehicles among the people," a spokesman for Free Syrian Army commanders inside Syria said. "We don't have a problem with the ceasefire. As soon as they remove their armored vehicles, the Free Syrian Army will not fire a single shot," Lieutenant Colonel Qassim Saad al-Din told Reuters by telephone from Homs. A rebel officer in Damascus said separately: "When Assad's gangs stop the shelling and killing of civilians, then our leaders can issue an order to stop operations and we will commit to it to show our good intentions." Opposition activists reported 25 people killed and five bodies found bearing signs of torture, including two children. A protest singer in Kafr Ruma was killed when his house was raided. A young man and his sister were shot dead when state forces stormed their village, and a man died of gunshot wounds inflicted during a protest in Damascus. HOMS UNDER FIRE Artillery and mortars pounded a pro-opposition part of Homs city, killing one. Ten deaths were reported in Homs province. "Mortars are falling every minute and the sounds of explosions are shaking the (Khalidiya) neighborhood," the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. Rocket fire killed a child in the al-Bayyada area of Homs and a man was killed in crossfire in clashes near a checkpoint. In southern Deraa province, five were killed by machinegun fire in Kharbat Ghazaleh and three died from wounds sustained in clashes on Friday. Rebels killed six soldiers, including a lieutenant colonel in Deir al-Zor, the Observatory said. Despite the violence, Damascus says it has the upper hand. "The battle to topple the state is over," Syrian Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad al-Makdissi told Syria TV late on Friday. "Our goal now is to ensure stability and create a perspective for reform and development in Syria while preventing others from sabotaging the path of reform." His assertion follows army victories over rebel strongholds in the cities of Hama, Homs and Idlib, and Assad's acceptance this week of Annan's plan that does not demand he step down. The political opposition remains divided and prospects of Western-led military intervention are close to zero. Assad's opponents have not yet formally accepted the plan. They were due to meet the foreign ministers of allied Western powers, including U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on Sunday at a "Friends of Syria" conference in Turkey, which provides a safe haven for Syrian rebels. After Clinton met Gulf foreign ministers in Riyadh on Saturday, they said Annan should set a timeline for unspecified measures should his efforts fail to halt the bloodletting. "Given the urgency of the joint envoy's mission, (U.S. and Gulf ministers) urged the joint envoy to determine a timeline for next steps if the killing continues," a statement said. Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal told a news conference with Clinton: "The arming of the opposition is a duty, I think, because it cannot defend itself except with weapons." WESTERN SCEPTICISM Assad has endorsed Annan's six-point peace plan, which has the U.N. Security Council's unanimous backing, but Western leaders say the 46-year-old Syrian leader has broken similar promises before and must be judged by actions not words. Syria's Makdissi said Annan, who met Assad in Damascus on March 10, had acknowledged the government's right to respond to armed violence during the ceasefire phase of the peace plan. "When security can be maintained for civilians, the army will leave, he said. "This is a Syrian matter." Annan's plan says Syria must stop putting troops into cities forthwith and begin taking them out. "The Syrian government should immediately cease troop movement towards, and end the use of heavy weapons in, population centers, and begin pullback of military concentrations in and around population centers," it states. A sustained end to violence by all sides would be supervised by a U.N. team of around 250 monitors, diplomats said. Western diplomats say the key to any ceasefire deal lies in the sequencing of the army pullback and ending rebel attacks. They say the opposition won't feel safe negotiating before the army stops shooting, but also note it would be impractical to expect a complete government pullout before rebels respond. More than 9,000 people have been killed by Assad's forces during the revolt, according to the United Nations, while Damascus says it has lost about 3,000 security force members. Western and Arab foreign ministers backing Syrians trying to topple Assad will seek clear endorsement of the Annan plan from the Syrian National Council (SNC), although they themselves doubt whether Assad will genuinely try to implement it. In Libya a year ago, the West and the Arabs quickly granted recognition to a revolutionary national council as the sole legitimate government of Libya. They are not close to doing the same for the splintered SNC in Syria, diplomats say. There is also little chance they will agree to arm rebels. If Assad fails to keep his word, Annan would have to decide whether to call time and tell the United Nations he has failed to make peace through a "Syrian-led process". The issue would then return to the U.N. Security Council, with increased pressure on Assad's allies Russia and China, which have endorsed Annan's mission, to get tough with Damascus.

Trayvon Martin marchers to Sanford, Fla., police: 'We want an arrest. Shot in the chest'

Civil-rights leaders from the NAACP and other groups led thousands of other protesters on Saturday in a march to the city’s police headquarters to demand the arrest of the man who shot and killed Trayvon Martin.The Rev. Jesse Jackson, the Rev. Al Sharpton and NAACP President Benjamin Jealous were among those leading the rally through Sanford’s streets, marching behind a huge yellow banner with the words “Justice for Trayvon.” “We want an arrest. Shot in the chest,” marchers chanted.

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gospel music playing in the background, protesters were marching from a technical high school campus on 13th Street through a predominantly black neighborhood to the Sanford Police Station several blocks away. The throng stretched for blocks, weaving past homes, churches and small businesses, many of them boarded up. The rally was organized by the NAACP. Its chapters from South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama arranged buses to bring participants to the rally, while others traveled by car. "Because of the age of the young man and because of the circumstances of his death, every community can identify with that," said Bernard Simelton, president of the Alabama state conference of the NAACP. "We've had things like that happen in Alabama where somebody gets killed and the police just sweep it under the rug. It just touches everyone."

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The marchers were demanding the arrest of George Zimmerman, the 28-year-old neighborhood watchman who says he was defending himself when he fatally shot 17-year-old Martin during a scuffle. Martin, who was black, was unarmed as he walked from a convenience store, and the case has become a racial flashpoint with protesters across the nation calling for his arrest. Zimmerman's father is white, his mother Hispanic. Sanford police did not immediately arrest Zimmerman, saying they had no information to disprove his assertion that he acted in self-defense. A special prosecutor has since been named to look into the case.At a press conference before the march, Jealous and Sharpton denied media reports that Sharpton planned to call for an economic boycott of Sanford or the surrounding central Florida area, calling it a "media fabrication." "Put to rest the rumor that there is any discussion of a boycott of the community," Jealous told reporters.Sharpton said there could still be unspecified action against national corporations that support the "Stand Your Ground" laws like the one police cited when they declined to arrest Zimmerman. The law gives citizens wide latitude to use deadly force when a threat is perceived. Sharpton declined to identify those corporations but said, "We take nothing nonviolent off the table." A Florida NAACP leader said that Sanford Police Chief Bill Lee’s stepping aside temporarily was not enough, and that he should be fired. Martin’s death has also attracted international attention. About 300 people gathered outside the U.S. Embassy in London on Saturday in a show of solidarity for the Martin family's cause. Some read poems and others carried placards with the slogan 'No Justice, No peace.' At the end of the three-hour vigil, 17 black balloons where released in honor of the slain teenager.

Three winners in record $656 million U.S. lottery

Three winners who could share a $656 million windfall from the largest lottery jackpot in U.S. history bought their lucky tickets at a 7-Eleven store in Maryland, a Motomart convenience story in Illinois and somewhere in northeast Kansas, lottery officials said on Saturday. Lottery officials said the 7-Eleven store was in Milford Mill, Maryland, near Baltimore, and the Motomart convenience store in the southern Illinois farming town of Red Bud, Illinois. Kansas lottery officials were not releasing the exact location where the ticket was sold except to say that it was in the most populated northeast part of the state. "Each of the winners gets $105.1 million in cash after taxes roughly, but who cares about pennies at this point?" said Carole Everett, spokeswoman for the Maryland Lottery. The winners whose tickets had all six numbers of the Mega Millions lottery drawn on Friday night will split the jackpot, the biggest in U.S. history, which rose to $656 million after all sales were tallied, lottery officials said. The winning numbers announced at the drawing in Atlanta were 2-4-23-38-46 and Mega Ball 23. Winners could receive either a one-time payment of their share or take it in 26 annual installment payments. A pre-dawn call alerted store manager Denise Metzger to news from lottery officials that a winning ticket was sold at her Motomart in the tiny farming community of Red Bud, with less than 4,000 residents, about 30 miles southeast of St. Louis. "I screamed, I woke my husband up," said Metzger. Residents swarmed the store within hours of the announcement to check their tickets, although no winner has yet emerged, she said. "I think everyone in town has been here already," she joked. Though the winner may want to remain anonymous, in Illinois the state is required to eventually list his or her identity in public records. The winning Maryland ticket was a single quick pick ticket, in which numbers are automatically selected, sold at about 7:15 p.m. on Friday at the 7-Eleven franchise in Milford Mill in the Baltimore area, Everett said. "They are shocked they are getting the $100,000 bonus," Everett said of the family that has owned the franchise for 10 years after learning of the reward that goes to the sellers of winning tickets. In addition to the three jackpot winners, there were three tickets that matched the Mega Ball number to win $1 million each and 158 tickets that picked five of the six chosen numbers to win $250,000 each, said Kelly Cripe, spokeswoman for the Texas Lottery, which oversaw the Mega Millions game. There had been a tremendous amount of excitement ahead of the drawing, with over one billion tickets sold, lottery officials said. The previous largest Mega Millions jackpot was $390 million in 2007, which was split between two ticket holders in Georgia and New Jersey. About half the lottery money goes back to ticket holders in the form of winnings, 35 percent to state governments and 15 percent to retailer commissions and lottery operating expenses. No matter who won the jackpot, one certain winner is the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. The tax-collecting agency subjects lottery winnings of more than $5,000 to a 25-percent federal withholding tax.

Obama proposes new rule for immigrant families

The Obama administration

is proposing to make it easier for illegal immigrants who are immediate family members of American citizens to apply for permanent residency, a move that could affect as many as 1 million of the estimated 11 million immigrants living here illegally.

The new rule, which the Department of Homeland Security will post for public comment Monday, would reduce the time illegal immigrants are separated from their American families while seeking legal status, immigration officials said. Currently, such immigrants must leave the country to apply for a legal visa, often leading to long stints away as they await resolution of their applications. The proposal is the latest move by the administration to use its executive powers to revise immigration procedures without changing the law. It reflects an effort by President Obama to improve his standing among those Latino voters who feel he has not met his 2008 campaign promise to pursue comprehensive immigration reform. The president's push to pass the Dream Act, a law that would have created a path to citizenship for young illegal immigrants enrolled in college or enlisted in the military, was defeated in the Senate in December. No reform legislation has been under serious consideration since, yet the U.S. has deported a record number of illegal immigrants under Obama. Many immigrants who might seek legal status do not pursue it out of fear they will not receive a "hardship waiver" of strict U.S. immigration laws: An illegal immigrant who has overstayed a visa for more than six months is barred from reentering the U.S. for three years; those who overstay more than a year are barred for 10 years. Lisa Battan, an immigration attorney based in Boulder, Colo., said the current process is "encouraging people to remain illegal." The revised rule would allow illegal immigrants to claim that time apart from a spouse, child or parent who is a U.S. citizen would create "extreme hardship," and would permit them to remain in the country as they apply for legal status. Once approved, applicants would be required to leave the U.S. briefly, simply to return to their native country and pick up their visa. The change could reduce a family's time apart to one week in some cases, officials said. The White House hopes to have the new procedures in place by the end of the year. David Leopold, a Cleveland attorney and past president of the American Immigration Lawyers Assn., said the change was a "minor processing tweak, but it has great value to families." Hundreds of thousands of the estimated 2.5 million illegal immigrants in California could benefit from the proposed change, according to immigration activists. Republicans accused Obama of making an end run around Congress. "President Obama and his administration are bending long-established rules to grant backdoor amnesty to potentially millions of illegal immigrants," Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said in a statement Friday. U.S. immigration officials counter that the revision affects only how the applications are processed, not whether the legal status ultimately is granted. "I don't think that criticism is warranted at all," said Alejandro Mayorkas, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. "What we are doing is reducing the time of separation, not changing the standard of obtaining a waiver." That the proposal is being announced in an election year has a whiff of political calculation, said Javier Ortiz, a Republican strategist. "It looks like the president is pandering to Hispanic voters," said Ortiz, asserting that Obama could have proposed the change three years ago when he took office. "I would argue that Hispanics are smarter than that, and they know he has failed to bring forward comprehensive immigration reform." The White House has previously made other administrative changes, such as a policy announced in June that gave prosecutors new authority to put on hold cases against immigration violators who have strong ties to the U.S. and no criminal record. The "discretion policy" encouraged immigration agents to focus on the removal of illegal immigrants who pose a threat to public safety or are repeat immigration law violators. A program intended to cull so-called "low priority" cases from immigration courts began in Denver and Baltimore early this year and is being expanded to six other cities across the U.S. over the next four months, including Los Angeles and San Francisco. The more-targeted approach hasn't reduced the total number of people being deported annually from the U.S. Last year, 396,906 people were deported, a record number for the third consecutive year, and many of the deportees were relatives of U.S. citizens. In the first half of last year alone, immigration officials deported more than 46,000 parents of U.S. citizens, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. For some immigrants, the danger of returning to their home country for a long period discourages them from seeking legal status. Mexican nationals are required by the State Department to apply for their hardship waivers at the U.S. consulate in Juarez, Mexico, a city plagued by drug cartel violence that saw about 2,000 homicides in 2011. Abel Aguirre de la Cruz and his wife, Jessica Martinez, a U.S. citizen, were carjacked at gunpoint with their infant child in November 2010 in Fresnillo, Mexico, while going through the waiver application process, according to Battan, the Colorado-based lawyer, who represents the couple. On March 15, 20 months after the family first applied for a waiver, the consulate in Juarez requested more information. After the administration's new proposal is posted in the Federal Register on Monday, the public will have 60 days to critique the change.

President Obama: GOP Wouldn't Elect Abraham Lincoln Today

Republicans wouldn't elect Abraham Lincoln if he were alive today, President Barack Obama said during a campaign stop in Vermont on Friday.

Bemoaning the fact that many Republicans these days are opposed to spending more on infrastructure or investing in new technologies, Obama told a crowd at the University of Vermont that it didn't used to be that way. He invoked the 16th president: "The first Republican president, President Lincoln, who, by the way, couldn't win the nomination for the Republican primary right now," Obama said, "in the middle of the Civil War helped to make the Transcontinental Railroad possible, the land grant colleges, the National Academy [of Sciences]." "This has not traditionally been a Democratic or a Republican idea," Obama noted about infrastructure spending. "It was a Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, who called for a progressive income tax. It was Dwight Eisenhower who built the interstate highway system." Lincoln "understood that we're in this together; we've got to make an investment in our futures," Obama said. "It was with the help of Republicans that FDR was able to give millions of returning heroes, including my grandfather, the chance to go to college through the GI bill." The president's remarks came just hours after he signed a 90-day extension of the federal transportation act, funding highways and other transit projects that would have run out of money on Saturday. The GOP House refused to consider a Senate bill, opposed by more conservative members, that would have provided two years of funding.

President Obama: 'See what change looks like'

China rejects Obama’s push to punish countries importing Iranian oil, SKorea seeks agreement

China rejected President Barack Obama’s decision to move forward with plans for sanctions on countries buying oil from Iran, saying Saturday that Washington had no right to unilaterally punish other nations. South Korean officials said they will continue working with the U.S. to reduce oil imports from Iran, as other U.S. allies who depend on Iranian oil worked to find alternative energy supplies. Obama announced Friday that he is plowing ahead with the potential sanctions, which could affect U.S. allies in Asia and Europe, as part of a deepening campaign to starve Iran of money for its disputed nuclear program. The U.S. and allies believe that Iran is pursuing a nuclear bomb; Iran denies that. China is one of the biggest importers of Iranian oil, and its Foreign Ministry reiterated its opposition to the U.S. moves. “The Chinese side always opposes one country unilaterally imposing sanctions against another according to domestic law. Furthermore it does not accept the unilateral imposition of those sanctions on a third country,” the ministry said in a brief statement Saturday. Beyond the rhetoric, Beijing has taken a two-pronged approach to the U.S. demands, insisting that China has the right to import oil from Iran or any other country while quietly reducing imports of Iranian oil. Though the government has not explained the reductions, oil traders and industry executives have said it may stem more from a pricing dispute with Iran than as a response to U.S. pressure. Behind the scenes, Washington has repeatedly encouraged Beijing to seek supplies elsewhere, and Saudi Arabia offered to fill a shortfall when Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao visited Gulf countries early this year. The looming U.S. sanctions aim to further isolate Iran’s central bank, which processes nearly all of the Iran’s oil purchases, from the global economy. Obama’s move clears the way for the U.S. to penalize foreign financial institutions that do oil business with Iran by barring them from having a U.S.-based affiliate or doing business here. Obama’s goal is to tighten the pressure on Iran, not allies, and already the administration has exempted 10 European Union countries and Japan from the threat of sanctions because they cut their oil purchases from Iran. Other nations have about three months to significantly reduce such imports before sanctions would kick in. The main importers of Iranian oil that have not received exemptions from the U.S. are China, India, Turkey, South Africa and South Korea. The administration would be loath to hit a close friend like South Korea or India, or a NATO ally like Turkey, with sanctions, and is working with those countries to reduce their imports. Foreign Ministry officials in South Korea said Saturday that they expect to reach an agreement with Washington by late June on reducing oil imports from Iran. The officials declined to be named because discussions were still under way. The U.S. sanctions are set to take effect on June 28. A European oil embargo, approved in January, starts in July. Put together, Obama administration officials contend Iran is about to face its most severe economic pressure ever. The United States imports no oil from Iran. Energy-starved India, which relies on Iranian oil for 12 percent for its power needs, has said that it does not heed unilateral sanctions such as those imposed by the U.S. and EU. Nevertheless, New Delhi has not remained completely immune to sanction pressures and is slowly easing its dependence on Iranian oil, with a slow decline in Iranian oil imports. The Western sanctions also have made it harder for Indian companies to pay for Iranian oil, with international banks unwilling to handle transactions from Tehran. In February, India irked the West by arranging to make 45 percent of its yearly $11 billion oil payments to Iran in Indian rupees, with the rest paid in a barter system as Tehran seeks Indian-made machinery, iron and steel, minerals and automobiles. Turkey announced Friday it was shrinking oil imports from Iran by 20 percent, apparently bowing to pressure from the United States and th

In Pakistan, a hunt for the million-dollar falcons

So what happened to the million-dollar falcons? That’s the question Pakistani officials have to answer for a wealthy Arab sheikh who alleges that the government snatched his four rare falcons — valued at 350 million rupees, or nearly $3.9 million — from the Islamabad airport. The birds apparently were released into the wild — but maybe not. Customs and wildlife officials have been ordered to produce the falcons. Sheikh Muhammad Sultan Ahmed Mualla, a United Arab Emirates prince, filed a lawsuit this month to force officials to hand over the birds. The sheikh says the falcons were brought into the country legally, with all required passports, visas and medical certificates. The lawsuit states that the situation “may affect foreign relations of both the countries and will lower the prestige of Pakistan in the comity of nations,” according to local media. Falcons in the UAE are issued passports to combat illegal trading and smuggling of the birds. They are in high demand in the region because they are used in the centuries-old sport of falconry, which is popular in the Middle East. The prince brought the birds to Pakistan to give to friends, according to The News, a daily newspaper here. But given recent events, he has decided to take the birds back to the UAE. If he can recover them, that is. Customs officials claim that the sheikh lacked the requisite paperwork. So, realizing the valuable birds would need special care and handling, they requested that the Wildlife Department take custody of them for safekeeping until the owner provided the necessary documents. But wildlife officials say the falcons were unaccompanied and because no one came to claim them within 12 hours, they were released into the wild. “They had no legal documents,” Wildlife Department deputy director Raja Javed said. “If you have falcons, you must claim them.” Wildlife officials orchestrated elaborate media coverage, convening journalists and television crews to document the four captives being released into the air and using the event as an opportunity to tout ongoing efforts to stop illegal falcon smuggling. What exactly happened remains murky — and both agencies are in a PR mode and offering competing narratives. But some believe there has been foul play. “It is strongly suspected that the falcons flown into the air are not the original ones and the originals have been kept with some greedy motivations,” said The News reporter Umar Cheema, who has been covering the scandal. “The entire thing is embarrassing for everyone.” Federal tax authorities ordered television stations covering the release of the falcons to turn over footage of the event. The film could reveal whether common falcons were substituted for the rare birds. So will the government produce the falcons in court? “They have been freed and we do not know where they are,” Javed said. “These are migratory birds. They migrate and they pass through Pakistan.” And, he noted: “This is migration season.”

In Afghanistan, Businesses Plan Their Own Exits

America may be struggling to come up with a viable exit plan for Afghanistan, but Abdul Wasay Manani is sure of his. The broad-set Afghan butcher spent the past seven years trucking cattle in from the Pakistan border and building a thriving business for himself and his family, serving up some of the best hamburgers in Kabul for the embassies and expatriates and their barbecues. But this month, Mr. Manani, 38, flew to India for 14 days to scout out a new business, and a new home, ready to leave Afghanistan and everything he worked to build here, just in case things fall apart when most Americans and other foreign troops leave in 2014. “If the Taliban come like last time, ordering people around with whips, I can’t stay here,” he said. “I have to leave this country to keep my family safe.” Many Afghans share his concern. Interviews with business owners, analysts and economists paint a picture of extreme anxiety in both the domestic and international business communities here as the Afghan-United States relationship deteriorates and as the Western drawdown begins. In this environment, troubling indicators are not hard to find. More than 30,400 Afghans applied for asylum in industrialized nations in 2011, the highest level in 10 years and four times the number seeking asylum in 2005, according to provisional figures from the United Nations. Meanwhile, the number of displaced Afghans outside the country seeking to come the other way slowed to 68,000 last year, down from 110,000 in 2010 and a big decrease from the 1.8 million Afghans who repatriated in 2002, the year after the Taliban were driven out of power. The only Western bank operating here said on Wednesday that it would be leaving. Piles of cash equaling about a quarter of Afghanistan’s annual economic output were physically carried out of Afghanistan last year. Fewer foreign companies are seeking to do business here, and those already here are downsizing and putting off new investments. And there are businessmen like Mr. Manani who already have a foot out the door, working actively toward a Plan B for life and business outside Afghanistan. Senior Afghan officials are acutely aware of it, and are alternately worried and angry. “Sometimes I hear that some businessmen are fleeing and moving their businesses to outside Afghanistan,” President Hamid Karzai said at a news conference this month. “Curses be upon such businessmen that made tons of money here and now that the Americans are leaving they flee. They can leave right now. We don’t need them.” Given the importance of trying to bolster economic independence in the overall plan for Afghanistan, the skittish responses and decreasing investment and hiring strike right at hopes that this impoverished nation, still barely on the cusp of modernity, can thrive on its own. Large companies are expressing worries about security. One of the most significant is Standard Chartered, the only big Western bank with a branch in the country, which said Wednesday that it was turning over its operations to a local Afghan bank and withdrawing mainly because of deteriorating conditions. Mohammad Qurban Haqjo, chief executive of the Afghanistan Chamber of Commerce and Industries, said the head of one of the country’s four big cellphone companies had told him that he planned to take his investments out of the country after 2014. “It is still two years to go, but we are hearing from our businesses that everybody is raising this question,” Mr. Haqjo said. Even those who are trying to stay, foreign companies in particular, have become very conservative. According to the Afghanistan Investment Support Agency, capital spending by foreign companies newly registered in the past year, at $55 million, was the lowest rate in at least seven years, and about one-eighth the rate’s peak in 2006. According to Masuda Sultan, an Afghan-American businesswoman who grew up in Queens, the caution is expressing itself in businesses that are downsizing work forces, for example, or holding off on new investments. “Among the people I know, there is planning going on in terms of investment decisions,” she said. “They are not packing up their bags just yet, but people are looking to diversify abroad or into other business sectors within Afghanistan.” Some of the companies that are more heavily dependent on the military and the aid economy, like construction and logistics businesses, are trying to stay put by reconfiguring toward the few areas where analysts feel Afghanistan might have growth potential, like mining or trade. But others are nervous that Afghanistan’s nebulous private sector will not be enough to fill the gap left by the United States’ military and development spending. World Bank figures back up those fears: the bank estimates that outside aid is equivalent to more than 90 percent of the country’s total economic activity, and forecasts a slowdown in growth in the coming years to 5 or 6 percent from about 9 percent, or much lower if security worsens. That is in part because, despite the billions in reconstruction and aid money poured into Afghanistan, there still is no major manufacturing or technology base that could be a driver of future prosperity. A new Pepsi bottling plant on the outskirts of Kabul is trumpeted as one of the few new investment triumphs. “There is a sense that they have to change from a war economy to a postwar economy, and people definitely expect it to contract,” said Thomas Rosenstock, a lawyer, originally from New York, who helps foreign companies entering the Afghan market. “It’s uncertain how dramatic the contraction would be.” Then there are those who are voting with their cash. Each week tens of millions of dollars — some thought to be diverted American aid or drug money — are packed into suitcases or boxes and loaded onto planes leaving Kabul International Airport for destinations like Dubai, capital flight that is increasing steadily ahead of the 2014 deadline, officials say. Noorullah Delawari, the central bank governor, recently imposed restrictions limiting the amount a passenger can take out of the country to $20,000 a trip. But the mountain of departing cash that is officially declared — about $4.6 billion last year, the same size as the Afghan government’s annual budget — may be matched by money fleeing through other airports and over borders, or seeping out through the black market, an Afghan official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “We really don’t know how much is being moved,” the official said. Security officials are still struggling to ensure that people passing through the V.I.P. area of the Kabul airport put their bags through X-ray machines installed a few years ago in part to keep people from sneaking cash out, the official said. For Mr. Manani, the butcher, and others like him who do not have huge amounts of capital as a safety blanket, the hopes that they can stay at home and still expand their businesses are being tempered by the need to ensure their families’ safety. His plan is rooted in an effort to start a second business in New Delhi with his local Sikh business partner there, he says. That would enable him to get a long-term visa, and so a way out for his wife and five children, as well as his parents, brothers and a sister and their children, all of whom depend on him and would have to move with him, he says. “Every businessman is just thinking about how to move from here, about how to be safe,” Mr. Manani said as he stood in front of a big cooler where sides of beef and lamb were hanging. Through the doorway into another room, four workers were busily cutting and packing. He grew up in the north of Afghanistan and fought in the bitter civil war of the 1990s. There is no way he wants to relive that experience, he said. “I don’t have the energy to take the gun again and start fighting,” he said. “That’s why I am looking for a way out.”

U.S. Has No Need to Test Atomic Arsenal, Report Says

The United States does not need to explode nuclear weapons in order to be sure its aging arsenal is still potent, and its ability to detect weapons tests by others is good, according to a report released Friday by the National Academy of Sciences. Those conclusions run counter to some of the arguments raised by opponents of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which was rejected by the Senate in a landmark vote in October 1999. The report, updating one on the same subject 10 years ago, said it is highly unlikely the United States would need to resume testing, even though many weapons are decades old, because the weapons can be refurbished with a high degree of confidence that they will still work. “We’ve done life extension programs, and we’ve shown we’re able to reset the clock on these weapons,” said Marvin L. Adams, a professor of nuclear engineering at Texas A&M University and a co-author of the report. Judging from the last ten years, he said, “the summary conclusion is that: yup, it’s difficult, but, gosh, we can do it.” Even if other nations conduct tests and develop nuclear weapons capabilities, that would probably not be a reason for the United States to resume testing, the report said, and if the United States needed to develop new weapons, like an earth-penetrating bomb or a very low-yield weapon, it could probably do so without testing. Testing might be needed, though, to develop a bomb intended to release an electromagnetic pulse, the report said. Such a bomb could be detonated at high altitude to destroy electronic and electric systems. The report said that American intelligence agencies have the technology to be confident in their ability to identify the nuclear blasts of other nations. The agencies use satellites, seismic instruments and underwater microphones that can detect explosions, and sniffers that distinguish between chemical or nuclear blasts. Some very small blasts have a good chance of avoiding detection, but these would be too small to be useful in developing a thermonuclear weapon, the authors said. The study was described as a technical effort and explicitly avoided analysis of whether the treaty should be ratified. When brought to a vote in October 1999, the treaty fell 19 votes short of the two-thirds needed for ratification. It was the first time the Senate had voted down a major international security agreement since the Treaty of Versailles, which created the League of Nations, failed to win approval in 1920. The treaty would take effect if ratified by 44 countries that had either bombs or reactors in 1996. But only 36 have ratified the treaty, according to the National Academy of Sciences. Those include Russia, the United Kingdom and France. Arms control advocates say the United States, which already has a large stockpile of advanced nuclear weapons, would benefit if a ban on testing became the norm, because that would slow the spread of weapons. But even the treaty’s supporters acknowledge there is no prospect of another attempt to ratify it in the near future. The report “should dispel the doubts and the concerns that senators who voted no had in 1999,” Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said. “It makes the case very clearly that this treaty is in our national security interest, because we do not need nuclear test explosions, but other nations could benefit from a world in which we have nuclear testing.” Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement that “10 years after the Senate debated the nuclear test ban, the world is much more technologically advanced,” with higher confidence in maintaining a stockpile without testing and catching countries that signed up for a test ban but cheated. “But the political reality is that the Senate’s still not there yet,” he said. “Groundwork has to be laid and the case developed so this issue can ripen and senators can look anew at the science, and make a decision on the technical merits.” He said that “obviously we need to get past this election season and see what the political landscape looks like.”

U.A.E. Closes Down U.S.-Financed Democracy Group

On the eve of a summit meeting here between the United States and Arab nations of the Persian Gulf to deepen security ties, one of those countries, the United Arab Emirates, announced that it had shut down an American-financed organization that promotes democracy, State Department officials said. The United Arab Emirates announced the shutdown on Friday of the office of the National Democratic Institute, State Department officials said, a day before the meeting on Saturday attended by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. The country, which has good relations with the United States, did not explain the action, which seemed especially provocative with Mrs. Clinton in the region. Egypt’s recent prosecution of the group, along with the International Republican Institute and Freedom House, prompted a fierce debate in Washington over whether to continue providing military assistance to the Egyptian military. The Obama administration eventually allowed $1.3 billion in arms sales to move ahead, but only after Egypt allowed American employees of the groups to leave the country. The State Department defended the National Democratic Institute’s work in the United Arab Emirates, but provided no detail about what led to the closing of the offices of the group, which is closely affiliated with Congress. A German organization also targeted in Egypt, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, recently closed its office in the U.A.E. at the demand of the emirates’ foreign ministry. The closing of democracy-building organizations cast a shadow on the meeting here Saturday, which was intended to inaugurate a strategic multilateral alliance with the nations in the Gulf Cooperation Council. In addition to the emirates, the group includes Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and Oman. Mrs. Clinton said the alliance would create “opportunities to pursue multilateral cooperation on shared challenges, including terrorism, nuclear proliferation and piracy.” As with Egypt, though, she found herself defending American nongovernmental organizations in countries that are important to the United States on security matters. The State Department said the closing of the institute’s office in the Emirates was especially troubling because it coordinated the group’s efforts in the region. When pressed during a news conference about the closing, Mrs. Clinton said “we very much regret it” and said she had brought it up with the country’s foreign minister, Abdullah bin Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan, at the conference. “I expect our discussion on this issue to continue,” she said. She added that the administration remained committed to the organization’s work in the region, but also said the overarching interest was to cooperate, particularly in the areas of security and antiterrorism. The idea for Saturday’s meeting took shape last fall as the Obama administration moved ahead with its withdrawal of the last American troops from Iraq, reducing the American military presence in the region at a time of brewing tensions with Iran over its nuclear programs. The United States has close bilateral military relations with all six gulf nations, but the administration hopes to develop a more united military strategy and “security architecture” that would include an integrated missile defense system, intended to combat any attack in the region from Iran. (The system would be separate from one based in Europe that the administration said is also meant to guard against Iranian attacks.) “We’re working with each of our partners to develop that architecture, because in order to protect the gulf, no one nation can protect itself,” a senior State Department official said, speaking on condition of anonymity according to department rules. “It needs to rely on its partners in order to have an effective missile defense system.” The United States has recently stepped up arms sales to gulf nations, including a $30 billion sale of 154 F-15 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia and a nearly $2 billion to provide the United Arab Emirates with one of the most sophisticated antimissile systems, known as the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense, or Thaad. The Gulf Cooperation Council, dominated by Saudi Arabia, has become increasingly active beyond its borders. Qatar and the United Arab Emirates sent combat aircraft to the Mediterranean last year as part of the NATO-led intervention against Libya, while Bahrain and the emirates have forces in Afghanistan. That has made the United States eager to work even more closely with the nations as a group. At the same time, however, the gulf nations are some of the least democratic in the world, putting them at odds with the Obama administration’s advocacy of basic freedoms. Mrs. Clinton spent two days in Saudi Arabia last week for talks that focused on Iran and Syria ahead of an international meeting in Istanbul on Sunday devoted to the crisis there. Saudi Arabia and Qatar have pressed for more aggressive actions against Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, to halt the forceful crackdown against protests and, increasingly, armed opposition fighters. Mrs. Clinton also confirmed Saturday that Iran and six world powers including the United States have agreed to meet in Istanbul on April 13 for the latest round of talks about Iran’s nuclear program, the Associated Press reported.

ISI 'funding' politicians: Probe reports can't be traced

Pakistani authorities were unable to trace the reports of two commissions that investigated the funding of politicians by the ISI in 1990, the government's top law officer informed the Supreme Court on Friday.When a three-judge bench headed by Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry resumed.by ex-air force chief Asghar Khan against the distribution of funds among politicians by the ISI, Attorney General Anwar-ul-Haq said the reports of two commissions that probed the issue could not be found in the Law Ministry. The Chief Justice remarked that the reports were very important and need to be declassified. He directed the Attorney General to produce them in court at the next hearing on April 23. The bench also took up a recent media report which had alleged that Rs 270 million were withdrawn from the Intelligence Bureau's secret fund to change the government in Punjab province in 2009. Intelligence Bureau chief Aftab Sultan, who personally appeared in court, sought more time to ascertain the facts. Sultan told the bench that the register in which expenditures from the secret fund were recorded was unavailable on Friday. Besides, he pointed out, the reasons for such expenditures are not mentioned in the register. The Chief Justice remarked that the Intelligence Bureau's secret fund was meant to be used for the national interest and not to weaken democracy. He directed the spy agency chief to check the accounts for 2009 and inform the apex court if funds were spent as had been alleged in the media report. The Chief Justice said the journalist who filed the report was standing by his claims while the Intelligence Bureau had not denied the accusations as yet. He asked the Intelligence Bureau chief to submit his response in a sealed envelope at the next hearing. The Supreme Court recently resumed hearing on Asghar Khan's petition against the funding of politicians by the ISI after a gap of over 12 years. Banker Yunus Habib has testified in court that he arranged Rs 1.48 billion for the military, and about Rs 400 million were distributed among politicians linked to the army-backed Islami Jamhoori Ittehad in a bid to prevent the Pakistan People's Party from coming to power in the 1990 general election.

The plea of minorities in pakistan

The national flag of Pakistan has been reduced to little more than a piece of cloth and a splatter of paint, over the years — just as the dreams it once represented, have lost their inspiration and verve. The white space on the flag, signifying the religious minorities in Pakistan, has diminished day-by-day where as the green, denoting Muslim majority, has continued to accrue deeper shades. Unfortunately, the flag and its changing hues are the least of our problems. The problem is not just the constriction of the political space in which the minorities are allowed to operate — our problem is the treatment with which we grace our fellow countryman and how it is, intrinsically, linked to our perception of that person, his community or fellowship — our problem is that the whites of our flag have fallen dim. The political space, supposed to be legitimately that of religious minorities, has virtually ceased to exist. We, as a Muslim majority nation, have convinced ourselves that we are the only target of all oppression, western or otherwise — that there are conspirators behind every shadow — that everyone in the world is out to get our, proverbial, goat and that anyone who is not Muslim is a de facto ally of our perceived enemies. This is why we choose to punish our minorities for crimes that they haven’t committed.

Minorities in Pakistan, today, enjoy a whole range of ‘rights’, be it the talibanised form which gives them a ‘right’ to choose between death or conversion or the more enlightened and civilised one which allows them the ‘right’ of absolute authority over picking the colour of their own, personal and separate tableware, but little else. These minorities are disenfranchised economically — by disallowing them access to respectable jobs or only allowing them access to menial ones. They are oppressed politically by being systemically denied any real voice on any public forum. The voices that do represent them come from throats attached to people as, socially, distanced from a poor Christian or pitiable Hindu as a capitalist is from an ordinary worker. They are broken, culturally, by having their places of worship turned into warehouses or shops of the very items that those particular religions prohibit. It is not without merit that we are ranked high on the Amnesty International’s list of countries with endangered minorities — and how we strive, tirelessly, to safeguard this mantle of ‘honour’.

In this way a new culture emerges, a culture of the oppressed; a culture which transcends all religions, castes, creeds or identities. This culture links every member of Pakistan’s minorities with every other member of the same. This is our gift to our fellow Pakistanis; those who worked and toiled with us to define the Pakistan that we live in today; those whose ancestors gave just as many sacrifices as ours in the ‘good’ fight — our gift to those who bear the burden of our country just as much as we do, if not more. It is from such cultures that new voices emerge – voices laced with the anguish and pain that is felt by members of those communities. Such a voice is the Human Right’s Monitor’s 2007 Report on Religious Minorities in Pakistan. It gives factual details regarding the persecution felt by religious minorities in Pakistan. It gives details of individual cases involving families or communities who have been wronged in the name of religion, sex or class. It is high time that we, as the Muslim majority of Pakistan, come to realise the needs and aspirations of our fellow non-Muslim Pakistanis — that we come to appreciate the pain that we have caused them through our planned and malicious ill-treatment of the minorities; otherwise we will be forced to mourn the day when, there will be no need of any whites in our flag.

Pakistan's Shia community Patterns of death

Patterns of death THE NEWS The minority Hazara community based primarily in Quetta continues to come under attack again and again. This time the killings took place on the Spini Road in the Balochistan capital, as a van carrying Hazaras returning to Hazara Town - one of the areas where the minority Shia community lives in larger numbers - came under gunfire. Five of the victims including a woman died instantly, six others were taken to hospital. It has been stated in the past by Hazara community leaders, and is no doubt the case, that it is the extremist Sunni groups that are targeting them — though some believe their ethnicity may also be a factor. The Spini Road incident on Thursday was followed by more violence as angry protests broke out in Hazara dominated areas, with infuriated people condemning the failure of the authorities to protect them. A police check post and a girl’s college were torched and firing led to the deaths of two more people - a policeman and a protester. Rage is clearly rising. It is hard to understand why so little has been done to deal with the fanatics who have splintered into many groups. Meanwhile, another act of murder in the town of Mastung claimed two local workers employed with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. Killings of this kind too have been seen before. These patterns of death never seem to change, winding like serpents gobbling much of the peace and calm that we try to retain. The government has miserably failed to protect people from the monster of hate and obscurantism. As citizens we deserve to hear some answers.

India crowns its beauty queens for 2012

Vanya Mishra, a 19-year-old student from Chandigarh, Prachi Mishra, a 24-year-old investment advisor from Allahabad and 23-year-old TV anchor Rochelle Maria Rao from Chennai won the top honours at the Pantaloons Femina Miss India beauty pageant.

Vanya Mishra was crowned Miss India-World while Prachi will represent the Miss Earth competition and Rochelle Maria Rao will be India's girl at Miss International. The event held in Mumbai featured prominent Bollywood stars including Sonam Kapoor [ Images ], Riteish Deshmukh [ Images ], Tusshar Kapoor [ Images ], Sonu Nigam [ Images ] and Ekta Kapoor [ Images ] among others. Also performing on stage were Akshay Kumar [ Images ], Ali Zafar [ Images ] and Nargis [ Images ] Fakhri even as Tusshar and Riteish promoted their film even as they ribbed the judges including Tusshar's sister Ekta. When time came to select the top winner, the choice was made easy by Vanya Mishra when she was asked to pick between providing 1000 permanent jobs and feeding 1000 underprivileged kids. Mishra picked the latter and walked home with the crown.

In Pakistan, Hindus Say Woman’s Conversion to Islam Was Coerced

By DECLAN WALSH GHOTKI, Pakistan — Banditry is an old scourge in this impoverished district of southern Pakistan, on the plains between the mighty river Indus and a sprawling desert, where roving gangs rob and kidnap with abandon. Lately, though, local passions have stirred with allegations of an unusual theft: that of a young woman’s heart. In the predawn darkness on Feb. 24, Rinkel Kumari, a 19-year-old student from a Hindu family, disappeared from her home in Mirpur Mathelo, a small village off a busy highway in Sindh Province. Hours later, she resurfaced 12 miles away, at the home of a prominent Muslim cleric who phoned her parents with news that distressed them: Their daughter wished to convert to Islam, he said. Their protests were futile. By sunset, Ms. Kumari had become a Muslim, married a young Muslim man, and changed her name to Faryal Bibi. Over the past month, this conversion has generated an acrid controversy that has reverberated far beyond its origins in small-town Pakistan, whipping up a news media frenzy that has traced ugly sectarian divisions and renewed a wider debate about the protection of vulnerable minorities in a country that has so often failed them. At its heart, though, it is a head-on clash of narratives and motives. Hindu leaders insist that Ms. Kumari was abducted at gunpoint and forced to abandon her religion. Local Muslim leaders say she wanted to marry her secret sweetheart: Naveed Shah, a young neighbor who said he had been conducting a secret courtship with her via mobile phone and the Internet for several months. Ms. Kumari, for her part, has said in a court filing and media interviews that she converted of her free will — but public figures have questioned whether she had been pressed or intimidated into saying that. The truth may emerge Monday, when the young woman is due to testify before the Supreme Court in Islamabad. For the past two weeks she has been sequestered in a women’s shelter in Karachi on court orders. When she takes the stand on Monday, many Pakistanis hope she can resolve the central mystery: where do her religious, and romantic, intentions lie? In one sense, the drama is an old story in South Asia, where the contours of society have been shaped by waves of conversions over the centuries. Since the founding of Pakistan, most conversions are to Islam, the state religion. But such conversions usually take place quietly, even in an organized fashion, and the unusual furor surrounding the latest case stems partly from the brash manner of her conversion at the hands of a divisive local politician, Mian Mitho. After Ms. Kumari declared herself a Muslim in her town court on Feb. 27, Mr. Mitho triumphantly led the new convert from the courthouse, parading her before thousands of cheering supporters. Then he drove her in a caravan to an ancient Sufi religious shrine controlled by his family and famed as a site where Hindus have been converted. There, Ms. Kumari was welcomed by Mr. Mitho’s elderly brother, Mian Shaman — the same cleric who had converted her three days earlier — who led her into the towering shrine. When she emerged, now wearing a black veil, gunmen unleashed volleys of celebratory Kalashnikov fire into the air and shouted “God is calling you!” Hindu leaders, enraged, viewed the images as a crass provocation. “If the couple was really in love, then why this fanfare of guns?” said Amarnath Motumal, a Hindu lawyer and human rights activist in Karachi. “It clearly shows they are trying to embarrass the Hindu community and are bent on taking our girls forcefully.” Ms. Kumari’s parents pursued the case through the courts, claiming that their daughter had been abducted by a Muslim supremacist, and that the police and judiciary were biased against them because they came from a minority background. “Mian Mitho is a terrorist and a thug. He takes the girls, and keeps them in his home for sexual purposes,” said Ms. Kumari’s father, Nand Lal, a government schoolteacher, noting that Mr. Mitho’s armed guards had escorted his daughter to court appearances and news conferences. His wife, Sulachany Devi, issued an anguished appeal. “Rinkel was my blood, and she remains my blood. All I want is for her to return home,” she said. Mr. Mitho, in an interview, denied the allegations against him. “I am merely protecting her human rights,” he said. And at the Sufi shrine in Ghotki district, his brother, the cleric who converted Ms. Kumari, was equally unapologetic. “We are saving them from the fires of hell,” said Mian Shaman, a frail man in his 70s with a mottled complexion and a wavering voice. “We consider they are born again, and the sins of their previous life are washed away.” Mr. Shaman estimated he had converted 200 people the previous year. He insisted none had been coerced. “Forced conversions are not permitted in Islam,” he said firmly. Mr. Shaman led the way into the mosque, a spectacular building covered in intricately patterned indigo tiles and a carved wooden roof. Then he walked into the adjacent shrine, where murmuring pilgrims rocked back and forth in front of four tombs containing the bones of the cleric’s ancestors. Women are not permitted inside, he said — they may only peek through a small barred window in the tomb wall — but he made an exception for Ms. Kumari. “She was a special lady,” he said. The case has caused division within the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party, of which Mr. Mitho is a member. Earlier this month, President Asif Ali Zardari privately intervened to have Ms. Kumari taken into protective custody. Later, the president’s sister, Dr. Azra Fazal Pechuho, delivered an impassioned speech to Parliament about the plight of the Hindu community. “I have a lot of discomfort with this kind of behavior,” said a senior party member from Sindh Province, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the political delicacy of the matter. “The state is not giving the Hindus an equal environment. So they are turning to a narrative of forced conversion to fight back.” Pir Muhammad Shah, the local police chief, agreed that Mr. Mitho’s actions had aggravated the situation. “It teased the whole Hindu community, and led them to believe the conversion had been done at gunpoint.” Although Pakistan is blighted by sectarian bloodshed, rural Sindh Province is a relative beacon of religious tolerance. The majority of the country’s Hindus, estimated to number more than three million people, live here, and they have a history of tranquil co-existence with Muslims. The two communities share religious festivals, go into business together, and attend one another’s weddings and funerals. Yet it remains a delicate social balance. In many Sindhi towns, wealthy Hindu traders have been targeted by kidnappers. Conversions, which are freighted with notions of collective honor, can present a jarring social fault line. Officials with the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan have spoken of up to 20 forced conversions a month — and Hindu families fleeing for India — but they admit that the research is thin. As Ms. Kumari’s anticipated court date nears, it has revived many old tensions. And while no one is expecting widespread violence in her case, in some of its particulars it bears a remarkable resemblance to an earlier conversion scandal — one in 1936, when a British magistrate returned a Hindu girl to her parents after she had been converted. The result was an 11-year uprising by Muslim Pashtun tribesmen that at one point involved 40,000 British troops.

Afghanistan presses for answers on long-term US military bases

Afghanistan wants the United States to clearly spell out what sort of military presence it will leave behind once most of its combat troops leave by the end of 2014, a senior Afghan official said. It is also pressing Washington in talks over future cooperation to detail to be more forthcoming on what will be on offer for Afghan forces as they ready to take over responsibility security in the country that is still at war. “These are issues that concern us. We want to know how many bases will be there, how many soldiers and what will be their mission.And what will we get from the United States for our security forces,” President Hamid Karzai’s chief spokesman Aimal Faizi told Reuters, without specifying what levels he thought would be appropriate. In negotiations for a Strategic Partnership Deal on long-term cooperation, one of the stumbling blocks is the US plan for a limited military presence to ensure members of al Qaeda and other militant groups do not find a sanctuary again. Countries such as Russia, China and Pakistan are wary of an indefinite US military presence in the region. Neighbouring Iran strongly opposes the plan. “Ultimately, it is we who are responsible for our security. We are moving towards taking full control. If there will be foreign military, then it has to be put clearly in a future security document,” another senior Afghan official said.

The issue comes at a time of growing sensitivity over the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan after a series on incidents involving US troops. In January a video surfaced, showing US Marines urinating on Taliban corpses, followed by burning of copies of the Quran at the main American base in Bagram. Then this month 16 people, mostly children and women, were killed in two villages of Kandahar in an unexplained shooting rampage blamed on a US soldier. Karzai called for Nato forces to pull out of rural areas and stay in their bases, saying he was at the “end of the rope.” A spike in so-called green-on-blue attacks on foreign forces by Afghan army and police has stoked concern that some of that anger is spilling over into the security forces and turning them against their western allies. The talks halted after the Kandahar killings but have since resumed. Because of Afghan concerns, both sides have agreed to separately discuss the issue of military bases while pressing on with the strategic partnership deal they hope to wrap up by May when a Nato summit in Chicago is scheduled. “Right now negotiations are taking place, almost on a daily basis. We think we will have an agreement soon,” Faizi said. Afghanistan, which earlier had sought a blanket ban on the night raids by foreign troops, says it is ready to consider them as long as they are “Afghanised” or conducted by Afghan forces and in accordance with the laws of the country. “You just can’t have a situation where a bunch of people land up somebody’s house, break open the door and go in,” Faizi said. The United States says the night raids are a key element in the fight against the Taliban who it says operate in many parts of the country from within population centres.

Baloch ruling elite’s lifestyle outshines that of Arab royals

Balochistan is considered to be a neglected province where a majority of population lacks basic amenities, but the ruling elite of the province has an entirely different story. Many members of the club have pieces of land greater in size than some small towns of the country, using precious vehicles rarely seen even in big cities and having more glamorous lifestyle than even royal families of the Arab world. According to a statement of assets and liabilities submitted to the Election Commission for 2010-2011, Balochistan Chief Minister Nawab Muhammad Aslam Khan Raisani uses a luxury sport utility vehicle (Hummer H2) gifted by an unnamed friend from United Arab Emirates (UAE) and a Harley Davidson motorcycle brought to Pakistan after a waiver on customs duty. The price of Hummer and motorcycle has been cited as Rs180 million and Rs3.2 million, respectively. He has two other vehicles, including a land cruiser. He owns a safety and security firm and a mining company with a capital investment of Rs106.5 million. He also owns over 30 properties valued at Rs150 million in his own and wife’s name. The Minister for Home and Tribal Affairs, Mir Zafar Ullah Khan, owns 24,338 acres of land, most of which he has inherited and is yet to be distributed. He has Rs51 million in two bank accounts and owns Rs20.7 million house. The Minister for Building, Agha Irfan Karim, owns four properties, including a farm house, 150 acres of agricultural land and a house in Quetta, but has not mentioned the price, just writing “not evaluated” in the remarks column against the detail of immovable property. He owns two diamond-studded Rolex wrist watches, two more with gold and silver, 10 diamond-studded cufflinks and 200 tola of gold. Pir Abdul Qadir Algilani owns 3,200 acres of land in Kalat and Lasbella, and an under-construction farm in Lasbella on 400 acres. His other properties include a two-acre hut in Gaddani. The Pir also has Rs33 million. He has mentioned investment in stocks, too, in his statement. His other properties include two coal mines, three manganese mines, one cooper mine and one iron ore mine in his own and his wife’s name. Pir Abdul Qadir has 300 guns issued by the Ordnance depot of the GHQ as his mother’s inheritance from Khan of Kalat, her father. He also owns antiques and gems of unspecified quantity and value. The Minister for Fisheries, Mir Hammal Kalmati, owns assets worth Rs238 million. He owns seven properties worth Rs238 million and has over Rs28 million in bank accounts. However, in contrast to most of the cabinet members in Balochistan, the Minister for Higher and Technical Education, Tahir Mehmood Khan, has assets of Rs86.5 million in Quetta. He has jewellery valued at Rs1.5 million and Rs63,600 in two bank accounts. Jan Ali Changezi has no immovable property in or outside Pakistan. The total worth of assets, including furniture, jewellery and cash in hand and bank, comes to Rs1.6 million. Muhammad Ismael Gujjar owns property worth Rs19.65 million. He has not mentioned the value of a dairy farm, eight commercial vehicles and two unspecified Pakistan-made cars of 2011 models and one Japan-made car of 2007 model. He has around Rs400,000 in two bank accounts. Sardar Masood Ali Khan owns assets worth Rs235 million, including commercial and residential property, and 500 grams of gold ornaments. He owns no car. The total worth of Mohammad Younas Mullazai’s assets, including a house and a commercial plot, is Rs5.5 million. He too owns no car. Ali Madad Jattak has put at Rs7.3 million the value of his house and 18,000 sq feet land he had purchased after selling livestock — 48 camels, 23 cows and buffalos and 525 goats and sheep valued at Rs15.34 million. He has Rs0.5 million in cash and owns no car. Ainullah Shams owns a house, agricultural land and open plots worth Rs 12.6 million, but has no bank account and owns no car. The most valuable thing under possession of Molvi Abdul Samad is his car worth Rs350,000 followed by the share in a house mentioned as Rs50,000. He has put the value of furniture in his use at Rs200,00 and holds the same amount in cash as well. He has Rs3,800 in his bank account. Syed Matiullah Agha has Rs9.1 million in his bank accounts. He has put the value of his four properties, including agricultural land and plots, at Rs4.5 million. He has an automobile engineering business in Karachi and owns a shop in his village. He also does not own a car. Asfandyar Khan Kakar has an open plot in Pishin he purchased in an unspecified year for Rs2.8 million, with a present market value of Rs7 million. He has Rs575,315 in two bank accounts, but has no car.

Pakistan: Alarming rise in Population

Pakistan's overall population rose by 47 percent in just 14 years, according to preliminary results of the housing listings 2011. This is a very disturbing figure as it necessitates a Gross Domestic Product growth in excess of 7 percent per annum just to sustain the existing quality of life. The fact that our growth rate is stagnating to under 3.5 percent, partly due to global recession, partly due to the government's failure to implement austerity reforms and partly due to the severe ongoing energy crisis that has compelled the government to revise its growth statistics, is a source of serious concern to economists in general and social scientists in particular. The population density of China and India is considerably higher than Pakistan's and yet the two countries have emerged as enviable economies. The blame in Pakistan's case, analysts maintain, can be placed on the doorstep of successive governments, including the incumbent government, because outlay on education remains appallingly low, well below the United Nations recommended minimum of 2 percent of GDP while China and India have invested and continue to invest heavily in education. It is their sustained effort to invest in higher education that accounts for about 80 percent of those on the Fortune top income earners' list being of Indian origin. There are two major reasons behind Pakistan's sustained failure to invest in education. First and foremost, analysts maintain that low education levels are a means to ensure that the baradari system remains intact which allows the area landlord to win local, provincial and national elections. There is a perception in Pakistan backed by numerous studies around the world that an educated citizenry would link development in the area, inclusive of social and physical infrastructure, with the performance of the elected official/politician and that would determine their voting patterns in the next elections. Thus politically it is just not considered expedient to invest adequately in the education sector. Secondly, investment in education has long-term national gains and with politicians focused on the next general election Pakistani governments would rather spend on sectors with a quicker turnaround period. Additionally, children of Pakistani politicians as well as of the elite rarely study in local schools, colleges and universities which accounts for their low interest in this sector. Budgetary allocations for development (as opposed to the current) component of the education sector were periodically subjected to a massive cut whenever the federal government was unable to meet its budget deficit target. This unfortunately has occurred with an alarming frequency. However, with the devolution of education ministry to the provinces the total national development outlay on education has become difficult to quantify and there are fears that the total national outlay has declined as the provinces struggle to meet natural challenges. For example, floods in Sindh and dengue in the Punjab last year. There is thus an urgent need for the governments - federal as well as provincial - to turn their attention towards not only investing adequately in the education sector but also in population or family planning.

If we can summon PM, why not Punjab CM: SC

Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry expressed his displeasure over the Punjab Police’s inefficiency in Sonia Naz rape case and said that if the Supreme Court (SC) could summon the prime minister, it can also summon the Punjab chief minister. A three-member bench – headed by the CJP – heard the suo motu case regarding the rape of the woman by Punjab Police officials in 2005. The bench reprimanded the Punjab Police officials for changing their stance over whereabouts of the accused (retired and serving officers). The CJP expressed his astonishment that former Faisalabad superintendent of police (SP) Ahmed Raza Tahir, against whom adverse findings were made in a judicial inquiry report, had been posted as the Lahore regional police officer (RPO). The bench told Additional Inspector General (AIG) Aslam Tareen, “It is an example of good governance of your province. He has been made RPO to confront the judiciary.” Tareen told the bench that the main accused former SP Abdullah Khalid was alive and had absconded. Later, the AIG told the court that the former SP was in Sheikhupura. Naz was produced before the bench. She told the court that she could not appear in the court as she was pressured by the accused, which led to a one-sided decision. According to media reports, on May 3, 2005, SP Khalid Abdullah and Inspector Jamshed Chishti along with two police constables had abducted Naz from her home in Johar Town and raped her. The accused were arrested in October 2005 after the CJP took a suo motu notice. The court adjourned the hearing until April 23.

ANP chief asks workers not to get provoked

Awami National Party chief Asfandyar Wali has appealed party supporters not to get provoked in the wake of recent spree of violence in Karachi. Hidayatullah Mehsood, a member of ANP Sindh Council, was gunned down by unidentified bikers in Peerabad area among five others, triggering more killings in the reaction. Meanwhile, at least seven more people lost their lives till Saturday morning, taking the death toll to 17 over the past three days. In his statement, ANP chief condemned murder of Mehsood, calling for early arrest of the culprits. “ANP could not be bowed down by any cruel mean. The party will not withdraw its support for the victim families of Karachi. I appeal the workers that they should observe restraint in this situation,” Wali said in a statement.

Zardari orders crackdown against Karachi terrorists

President Asif Ali Zardari issued orders on Saturday for a complete crackdown against terrorists in Karachi, a private TV channel reported. Zardari and Sindh Chief Minister Syed Qaim Ali Shah met here to analyse the critical situation of Karachi. Moreover, Sindh Home Minister Manzoor Wasan directed the IG Sindh and Rangers officials to restore the law and order situation in Karachi as soon as possible. Wasan ordered the patrolling of SHOs in their respective areas and immediate arrest of suspects involved in target killings.

Baluchistan separatists in Pakistan beset by divisions

The insurgents' presence is obvious in the mountains and ravines of Pakistan's western Baluchistan province, where hilltops are fortified with slabs of rock to serve as secure lookout posts for snipers. From there, they observe the comings and goings of potential threats — mainly Pakistani paramilitary forces — and plot attacks from the thorny brush along the isolated roads. Pointing to footprints in the sand marking the insurgents' path through the brush, the Baluch activists in this farming district on the periphery of an eight-year nationalist rebellion said that ambushes are common here because the prey have nowhere to run. Baluchistan — a vast wilderness bordering Afghanistan and Iran — has become the chaotic battleground for cloak-and-dagger conflict between Pakistan's military intelligence services and nine insurgent groups. But activists, insurgents and political analysts say that the festering insurgency lacks the political direction and momentum of a coherent independence movement, thwarting chances for a swift resolution to a conflict that's become increasingly deadly. Violence spiked in Baluchistan last year, when 621 people died in insurgency-related violence, including 231 people who were kidnapped and later found dead, human rights groups have reported. The conflict briefly attracted the attention of Congress in February, when Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, the California Republican who chairs the oversight subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, voiced support for an independent Baluchistan, citing allegations of widespread human rights abuses by Pakistani security authorities. Islamabad, which flatly denies any abuses in Baluchistan, reacted angrily, and Rohrabacher's call was quickly disowned by the Obama administration. The White House has no interest in further straining ties with the Pakistani government, whose help is considered key to ending the war in neighboring Afghanistan. Indeed, Baluch separatists have little backing from the outside world. Neither neighboring Afghanistan nor Iran has any interest in fueling the insurgency, analysts said. The conflict largely has been an internal tussle between powerful tribal chiefs and the Pakistani government for control of Baluchistan's natural resources, particularly natural gas. Since the 1960s, the Baluch have watched as gas produced here — some 36 percent of Pakistan's total supply — is transported by pipeline to the rest of the country while their own province remains Pakistan's least developed. "Gas, electricity, water — we are fighting for control of these resources," said Amir, a Baloch activist who asked that his full name be withheld to shield him from reprisals. However, activists and analysts said the insurgent groups in Baluchistan lack the manpower and armed capability — and arguably even the ambition — to mount a fight to the end against Pakistan's powerful military. Direct confrontations between the insurgents and army-led paramilitary forces of the Frontier Corps are relatively infrequent, they said. Rebel ambushes of paramilitary convoys and posts have tended to be in revenge for kidnap, torture and murder incidents allegedly carried out by the military's intelligence services. Mostly, the insurgents have specialized in sabotage, repeatedly blowing up sections of the pipelines carrying natural gas from fields in Baluchistan and the railway lines that link it to the rest of Pakistan. Various insurgent faction leaders living in exile in Britain, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates also have been reluctant to form a united political platform, although they loosely share independence as their stated objective. The analysts said the political incoherence of the insurgency was a direct reflection of Baluch culture, with most fighters restricted to territory defined by their leader's tribal identity. "Different armed groups operate in various districts and they do not interfere in each other's areas of operation," said Malik Siraj Akbar, editor-in-chief of The Baluch Hal, an English-language news website covering Baluchistan. The website was blocked by the Pakistani authorities in 2010 and Akbar, a respected columnist in Pakistan's mainstream press, sought political asylum in the U.S. after repeatedly being threatened, allegedly by intelligence agents. Increasingly, the tribal chiefs leading the insurgency are under pressure from younger, educated activists to unite on a single platform. In February, Hyrbyair Marri, an exiled insurgent leader based in Geneva, traveled to Britain to meet separately with another exiled leader, Barambagh Bugti, grandson of the late Akbar Bugti — a rebel tribal chief whose death during a Pakistani army operation in 2006 sparked the current uprising — and Mir Suleman Dawood, the Khan of Kalat, who's the most important tribal chief. The initiative amounted to nothing — inflating suspicions among Pakistani analysts that the tribal leaders of the Baluch insurgency, rather than agitating collectively for independence, are preoccupied with obtaining greater power and royalties for themselves. The poverty of the Baluch, the analysts argue, is largely attributable to the feudal powers wielded by tribal chiefs. They also practice a harsh and often arbitrary form of justice that includes the forced exile of erring clans and, infamously, the determination of a suspect's guilt by making them walk on red-hot coals — no blisters means innocent, blisters means guilty. In Lasbela, concrete-walled canals carrying water from the hills are owned and used exclusively by the local chiefs to irrigate their farms. The chiefs were also the sole local beneficiaries of quarries that provide building materials — from marble to crushed sandstone — to the booming Karachi construction market. The loosely joined independence effort masks the intense rivalries between the tribal chiefs and fears that if Baluchistan were to gain autonomy, it would implode into civil war as the chiefs jockeyed for political and economic supremacy. "The timing of the movement is all wrong. None of the regional powers is really interested in seeing an independent Baluchistan and, without reliable supply lines from a neighboring state, no insurgency can succeed," said Mujahid Barelvi, a political commentator and TV talk-show host based in Karachi. Nonetheless, Baluchistan recently has raced to the top of Pakistan's domestic political agenda. Politicians and the Supreme Court have expressed concern that the alleged human rights abuses by the military intelligence agencies have created a "1971-like situation" — a reference to the civil war that led to the secession of Bangladesh, after India militarily intervened to support a popular separatist movement. Pakistan's military denies any direct involvement in the counterinsurgency operation, but the province's chief minister and governor have consistently complained that the military has seized most political, administrative and policing powers. Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani recently endorsed that view, saying the military intelligence agencies "ought to respect the mandate of the provincial government." In Lasbela, an hour's drive west of Karachi, the locals — farmhands, mostly — were unnerved by the presence of an outsider and brushed off interview requests. While the rebellion also recently has attracted middle-class Baluch, such as human rights workers, students and writers, their attempts at peaceful agitation have been met with violent suppression, allegedly by the military's intelligence operatives. "Actions by Pakistani security forces have radicalized even moderate Baluch activists and citizens," said Akbar, the website editor. "There are no peaceable Baluch left." Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/03/29/4376790/baluchistan-separatists-in-pakistan.html#storylink=cpy

TB Alarmingly Spreading in Balochistan

Creating awareness amongst the masses about

Tuberculosis is inevitable as it is alarmingly spreading in Balochistan and other part of the country. “Victims of this disease in Balochistan are not restricted to poor, middle class rather people belonging to different walks of life even financially sound people are also suffering from this disease in Balochistan,” says President of Pakistan Chest Society Center Dr. S.M Naeem Agha while talking to the Baloch Hal in connection with the International Day of Tuberculosis. “We urge the media to create the desired awareness about this fatal disease as majority of the fresh cases are being registered of youngsters and this is a matter of great concern,” he informed. Dr. Agha says the exact number f TB patients in Balochistan is not known as another department deals with it, yet we can say that the number of patients runs into several thousands. He said factors which have resulted in the increase of TB patients is unhygienic conditions, presence of Afghan refugees who suffer the most from this disease, besides non awarness among the masses as a result of which much needed precautionary measures are not taken. “Pakistan Chest Society Balochistan Chapter arranged a walk on World Tuberculosis Day to create desired awareness and help check major health problem,” he added. Dr. Agha, informed that about two billion people around the globe carry active form of TB of which 1.4 million die due it every year, this means around 4, 500 persons die daily. He emphasizes that fact of the matter remains that political leaders and members of the civil society should come forward and create awareness in this regard. He also pointed out towards shortage of drugs in Fatima Jinnah Chest and General Hospital for TB patients.

The killing fields of Balochistan

EDITORIAL:DAILY TIMES Once again a sectarian attack has killed Shia Hazaras in Quetta. A van carrying members of the Hazara community was riddled with automatic arms fire in the Balochistan capital, killing five people, including a woman, and wounding six others. Riots broke out in the city after the incident, leading to more deaths and destruction. One policeman was killed and two protestors are reported to have been killed in an exchange of fire between protestors and the police while vehicles and buildings were torched. The Hazara Democratic Party and the Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami Party separately called for a shutterdown strike on Friday, a call that was supported by the ANP, JWP, BNP and Anjuman Tajiran Balochistan. The Tahafuz-e-Azadaran Council and the Balochistan Shia Conference have also come out with their response. While the former announced three days of mourning, the latter proposed the formation of a grand jirga comprising the PPP’s alienated Lashkari Raisani and other leaders to stop the systematic killings of the Hazara community. One report says the Taliban’s Jundullah faction has claimed responsibility for the dastardly attack. As if all this was not bad enough, on the very same day two UN workers were killed and one wounded in an ambush on their car near Mastung. Although no one has accepted responsibility, it may be recalled that Mastung was the site of one of the most gruesome Shia massacres when people were taken off a bus and shot in cold blood. Whether the latter attack has a sectarian colour or not is not known at this time, but there is little doubt that the killings of Hazara Shias in Balochistan is beginning to take on a sinister pattern. One reason why this may be so is that the Hazara community is known as one of the most peaceful, law abiding and hard working communities in the province. Perhaps the sectarian terrorists see them as ‘easy pickings’. The latest victims of this dance macabre have been added to the thousands of victims of sectarian killings since Ziaul Haq’s unleashing of Sunni extremist groups in the 1980s. What is surprising in the whole episode is that after the pattern of sectarian attacks against the Hazara community cane to the surface in recent months, why have the law enforcement authorities fallen asleep instead of taking extraordinary measures to protect the vulnerable community? One explanation for this lapse may be sought in the fact that the law enforcement agencies have their hands full in combating the Baloch nationalist insurgency, which by now has spread to virtually the whole province. While the military authorities and the hated FC seem to be concentrating on trying to eliminate all active nationalists, whether moderate or militant, through their ‘kill and dump’ policy, the disturbed conditions in Balochistan have left space for sectarian terrorists and even criminal gangs to freely indulge in kidnappings for ransom and other crimes without let or hindrance. In the context of the newfound interest by some US Congressmen in Balochistan’s plight, it is advisable that the civilian leadership in the province and the Centre wake up to their responsibilities, take control of the province’s affairs, stop Balochistan turning increasingly into a killing field, and open a channel of talks with the estranged Baloch nationalist leadership and all other stakeholders to bring peace back to the province through political means. If they fail the people of Balochistan in continuing to show their helplessness in the province’s affairs at the hands of the military, history may one day record how Balochistan was steadily driven out of the federation. If such a cataclysmic development were to actually transpire, what would be left of Pakistan?