Pakistani girl, 16, survivor of Taliban, visits US

October 11, 2013

NEW YORK (AP) — A defiant 16-year-old Pakistani girl whose advocacy for education made her the target of a Taliban assassination attempt a year ago told an audience in New York on Thursday she one day hopes to become her country's prime minister.

Malala Yousafzai made her comments in an interview with CNN's chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour at the 92nd Street Y. She spoke a few hours after being awarded Europe's top human rights prize and on the eve of the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize, for which she is considered a likely contender.

Asked if she wanted to be a doctor or a politician, Malala said she initially wanted to be a doctor but had learned she could help more people as prime minister. "I can spend much of the budget on education," Malala said to applause and laughter as she sat next to her father, human rights activist Ziauddin Yousafzai, the founder of an all-girls school in Pakistan.

In the interview, to be broadcast on CNN on Sunday, Malala recounted the moment she was shot while sitting in the back of a vehicle traveling home from school and reiterated that she was not intimidated by threats.

"I'm never going to give up," Malala said when asked about repeated death threats made against her by the Taliban. "They only shot a body but they cannot shoot my dreams." On Oct. 9, 2012, a masked gunman jumped into a pickup truck taking girls home from the school and shouted "who is Malala" before shooting her in the head.

Her father asked his brother-in-law to prepare a coffin. But Malala woke up a week later at a hospital in Birmingham, England, and gradually regained her sight and her voice. She said Thursday her first thought was of two friends she was with who were also injured in the attack.

"If I was shot that was fine for me but I was feeling guilty that they have been the target," she said. The world's horrified reaction to the attack led to the creation of Malala Fund, which campaigns for girls' education around the world. Malala has received multiple awards, including the $65,000 Sakharov Award, which she was awarded just hours before her interview.

The assassination attempt drew worldwide attention to the struggle for women's rights in Pakistan. Malala addressed the United Nations on her 16th birthday, and she expects to meet with Queen Elizabeth II later this month.

The Nobel Peace Prize committee will say only that a record 259 candidates, including 50 organizations, have been nominated this year. Speculation on front-runners for Friday's announcement is primarily based on previous choices and current events.

Malala said Thursday it would a "great honor and more than I deserve" to win the accolade, but insisted she still had more to do before she felt she'd truly earned it. "I need to work a lot," she said.

Malala's father said he didn't regret how outspoken his precocious only daughter has been since she was 11 years old, when she first started blogging and speaking out against the denial of education to young girls in Pakistan's Swat Valley.

"I will never put my head into the yoke of slavery," he said. Malala spoke passionately Thursday against forced marriages and the denial of education to girls and boys throughout the world. She urged young girls in the developed world to take advantage of their education — and to do their homework and be kind to their teachers.

"I would like to tell all the girls: Realize its importance before it is snatched from you," she said. Malala lives with her family in Birmingham, England. She said that while in Pakistan she liked to listen to Justin Bieber, but now longs for the Pashto music of her homeland.

New major earthquake rocks southwest Pakistan

September 28, 2013

ISLAMABAD (AP) — A major earthquake rocked Pakistan's southwest Saturday, sending people running into the street in panic just days after another quake in the same region killed 359 people, officials said.

The U.S. Geological Survey said on its website that a 6.8 magnitude quake was felt in Pakistan's southwestern Baluchistan province. Pakistan's Meteorological Department measured the earthquake at 7.2 magnitude. The department said its epicenter was located about 150 kilometers (90 miles) west of the town of Khuzdar.

There were no immediate reports of casualties, said Abdur Rasheed, the deputy commissioner of Awaran district where both quakes were centered. There may have been little left to damage after Tuesday's disaster. Few of the mud and homemade brick houses in the area survived the 7.7 magnitude quake that leveled houses and buried people in the rubble.

Since then tens of thousands of people have been sleeping under the open sky or in tents. Rasheed said they had received reports that some homes damaged but still standing after Tuesday's quake had collapsed Saturday.

He said they are trying to get information whether people were living in some of the partially damaged homes. Chief Pakistani meteorologist Arif Mahmood told Pakistani television that it was an aftershock from this week's earthquake and such tremors might continue for weeks.

Pakistan television showed people at the main hospital in Awaran district fleeing into the street. In the provincial capital of Quetta, the tremor was so strong it prompted members of the local parliament to evacuate the building.

Baluchistan is Pakistan's largest but least populated province. The rough terrain and the lack of decent roads have made it difficult for rescue staff. The Pakistani Air Force has been making air drops of supplies and using helicopters to ferry injured people to medical care.

But at least two of those helicopters have come under fire from separatists, say Pakistani officials. The Pakistani military has been trying to suppress an uprising in the vast, arid province for years by separatists who want their own state for the Baluch people.

To the north Pakistan is dealing with militants who want to overthrow the central government and establish a hard-line Islamic state. Newly-elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has vowed to pursue peace talks with the militants as a way to end the fighting. But the militants have given little indication they are interested in negotiations. They initially rejected talks with the government and later demanded Islamabad release prisoners and begin withdrawing troops from the group's tribal sanctuary before talks could begin. Recent attacks have also called into question their interest in negotiating.

On Saturday, a spokesman for the Tehreek-e-Taliban criticized Sharif, saying his new government is not serious about holding peace talks. The spokesman, Shahidullah Shahid, did not explicitly reject the offer but his words gave little room for negotiations.

The comments appeared to have been sparked by an interview Sharif made with the Wall Street Journal during a trip to New York, in which he said militants must lay down their arms and follow the constitution. Previously Sharif had not given preconditions for the talks.

"By telling us that we will have to lay down arms and respect the constitution, the prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, showed that he is following the policy of America and its allies," the spokesman said. "We will hold talks with it only when it gets the real power to take decisions."

__ Sattar reported from Quetta. Associated Press writer Rasool Dawar in Peshawar contributed to this report.

Pakistanis struggle for food, shelter after quake

September 26, 2013

DALBADI, Pakistan (AP) — Survivors built makeshift shelters with sticks and bedsheets after their mud houses were flattened in an earthquake that killed 348 people in southwestern Pakistan and pushed a new island up out of the Arabian Sea.

While waiting for help to reach remote villages, hungry people dug through the rubble to find food. And the country's poorest province struggled with a dearth of medical supplies, hospitals and other aid.

Tuesday's quake flattened wide swathes of Awaran district, where it was centered, leaving much of the population homeless. Almost all of the 300 mud-brick homes in the village of Dalbadi were destroyed. Noor Ahmad said he was working when the quake struck and rushed home to find his house leveled and his wife and son dead.

"I'm broken," he said. "I have lost my family." The spokesman for the Baluchistan provincial government, Jan Mohammad Bulaidi, said Thursday that the death toll had climbed to 348 and that another 552 people had been injured.

Doctors in the village treated some of the injured, but due to a scarcity of medicine and staff, they were mostly seen comforting residents. The remoteness of the area and the lack of infrastructure hampered relief efforts. Awaran district is one of the poorest in the country's most impoverished province.

Just getting to victims was challenging in a region with almost no roads where many people use four-wheel-drive vehicles and camels to traverse the rough terrain. "We need more tents, more medicine and more food," said Bulaidi.

Associated Press images from the village of Kaich showed the devastation. Houses made mostly of mud and handmade bricks had collapsed. Walls and roofs caved in, and people's possessions were scattered on the ground. A few goats roamed through the ruins.

The Pakistani military said it had rushed almost 1,000 troops to the area overnight and was sending helicopters as well. A convoy of 60 Pakistani army trucks left the port city of Karachi early Wednesday with supplies.

Pakistani forces have evacuated more than 170 people from various villages around Awaran to the district hospital, the military said. Others were evacuated to Karachi. One survivor interviewed in his Karachi hospital bed said he was sleeping when the quake struck.

"I don't know who brought me from Awaran to here in Karachi, but I feel back pain and severe pain in my whole body," he said. Jan said he didn't know what happened to the man's family. He was trying to contact relatives.

Local officials said they were sending doctors, food and 1,000 tents for people who had nowhere to sleep. The efforts were complicated by strong aftershocks. Baluchistan is Pakistan's largest province but also the least populated. Medical facilities are few and often poorly stocked with supplies and qualified personnel. Awaran district has about 300,000 residents spread out over 29,000 square kilometers (11,197 square miles).

The local economy consists mostly of smuggling fuel from Iran or harvesting dates. The area where the quake struck is at the center of an insurgency that Baluch separatists have been waging against the Pakistani government for years. The separatists regularly attack Pakistani troops and symbols of the state, such as infrastructure projects.

It's also prone to earthquakes. A magnitude 7.8 quake centered just across the border in Iran killed at least 35 people in Pakistan last April. Tuesday's shaking was so violent it drove up mud and earth from the seafloor to create an island off the Pakistani coast.

A Pakistani Navy team reached the island by midday Wednesday. Navy geologist Mohammed Danish told the country's Geo Television that the mass was a little wider than a tennis court and slightly shorter than a football field.

The director of the National Seismic Monitoring Center confirmed that the mass was created by the quake and said scientists were trying to determine how it happened. Zahid Rafi said such masses are sometimes created by the movement of gases locked in the earth that push mud to the surface.

"That big shock beneath the earth causes a lot of disturbance," he said. He said these types of islands can remain for a long time or eventually subside back into the ocean, depending on their makeup.

He warned residents not to visit the island because it was emitting dangerous gases. But dozens of people went anyway, including the deputy commissioner of Gwadar district, Tufail Baloch. Water bubbled along the edges of the island. The land was stable but the air smelled of gas that caught fire when people lit cigarettes, Baloch said.

Dead fish floated on the water's surface while residents visited the island and took stones as souvenirs, he added. Similar land masses appeared off Pakistan's coast following quakes in 1999 and 2010, said Muhammed Arshad, a hydrographer with the navy. They eventually disappeared into the sea during the rainy season.

Santana reported from Islamabad. Associated Press writers Abdul Sattar in Quetta, Asif Shahzad in Islamabad and Adil Jawad in Karachi contributed to this report.

Death toll from Pakistani earthquake rises to 208

By Gul Yusufzai
QUETTA, Pakistan
Wed Sep 25, 2013

(Reuters) - The death toll from a powerful earthquake in Pakistan rose to at least 208 on Wednesday after hundreds of mud houses collapsed on people in a remote area near the Iranian border, officials said.

The earthquake struck Pakistan's thinly populated province of Baluchistan on Tuesday and was felt across South Asia.

It destroyed houses and cut communications with the worst affected district of Awaran, and was so powerful that it caused a small island to emerge from the sea just off the coastline in the Arabian Sea.

"We have started to bury the dead," Abdul Rasheed Gogazai, the deputy commissioner of Awaran, told Reuters by telephone from the affected area.

He said at least 373 people were injured.

The army deployed helicopters and hundreds of soldiers to help deal with the rescue effort in the huge, earthquake-prone province of deserts and rugged mountains bordering Iran and Afghanistan.

The United States Geological Survey said the quake was 7.8 in magnitude.

On the coast near Gwadar port, crowds of bewildered residents gathered to witness the rare phenomenon of the island that the quake forced out of the sea.

(Reporting by Gul Yusufzai; Writing by Maria Golovnina; Editing by Robert Birsel)

Source: Reuters.
Link: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/25/us-pakistan-quake-idUSBRE98N0HJ20130925.

Tunisia signs new constitution in step to democracy

TUNIS Mon Jan 27, 2014

(Reuters) - Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki and the head of the National Assembly on Monday signed the country's new constitution, officially adopting a charter that is one of the country's last steps to full democracy after a 2011 uprising.

(Reporting by Tarek Amara; writing by Patrick Markey; Editing by Jon Boyle)

Source: Reuters.
Link: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/27/us-tunisia-constitution-idUSBREA0Q0OU20140127.

Tunisia finally passes progressive constitution

January 27, 2014

TUNIS, Tunisia (AP) — After decades of dictatorship and two years of arguments and compromises, Tunisians finally have a new constitution laying the foundations for a new democracy.

The document is groundbreaking as one of the most progressive constitutions in the Arab world — and for the fact that it got written at all. It passed late Sunday by 200 votes out of 216 in the Muslim Mediterranean country that inspired uprisings across the region after overthrowing a dictator in 2011.

"This constitution, without being perfect, is one of consensus," assembly speaker Mustapha Ben Jaafar said after the vote. "We had today a new rendezvous with history to build a democracy founded on rights and equality."

The constitution enshrining freedom of religion and women's rights took two years to finish. During that period, the country was battered by high unemployment, protests, terrorist attacks, political assassinations and politicians who seemed more interested in posturing than finishing the charter.

At the same time, Egypt wrote two constitutions — and went through a military coup against an elected government. Egypt's charters were quickly drafted by appointed committees and involved little public debate or input. In Tunisia, an elected assembly of Tunisian Islamists, leftists and liberals worked on a detailed roadmap for their political future.

Tunisians hope its care in drafting the constitution makes a difference in returning stability to the country and reassuring investors and allies such as the U.S. "We needed time to get this constitution as it is today," said Amira Yahyaoui, who has closely followed the assembly's activities with her monitoring group Bawsala. "Clearly, writing this constitution to do a real transformation of the minds of people needed time and I absolutely don't regret these two years and I am happy we had time to discuss and think about all the arguments."

The new constitution sets out to make the North African country of 11 million people a democracy, with a civil state whose laws are not based on Islamic law, unlike many other Arab constitutions. An entire chapter of the document, some 28 articles, is dedicated to protecting citizens' rights, including protection from torture, the right to due process, and freedom of worship. It guarantees equality between men and women before the law and the state commits itself to protecting women's rights.

"This is the real revolution, many democratic constitutions don't even have that," said Yahyaoui. "It will have a real impact on the rest of the Arab region, because finally we can say that women's rights are not a Western concept only, but also exist in Tunisia."

Tunisia has always had the most progressive legislation on women's rights in the Arab world and Yahyaoui believes the long period of writing has made people comfortable with its contents. One of the most hotly debated articles guarantees "freedom of belief and conscience," which would permit atheism and the practice of non-Abrahamic religions frowned upon in other Islamic countries. It also bans incitement to violence and declaring a Muslim an apostate — a fallen Muslim — which leaves them open to death threats. In response, conservative lawmakers insisted that "attacks on the sacred" be forbidden, which many see as a threat to freedom of expression.

"This formulation is vague and gives too much leeway to the legislators to trample other rights such as the right to free expression, artistic creation and academic freedoms," warned Amna Guelleli, the Human Rights Watch representative in Tunisia. "However, the risk is reduced given the strong safeguards (in other articles) against overly broad interpretations."

Since the revolution, there has been a rise in convictions for so-called attacks on religion, especially by artists. A Tunisian cartoonist is in the second year of a seven-year sentence for posting cartoons insulting to the Prophet Muhammad on Facebook.

Constitutional scholar Slim Loghmani said despite some drawbacks, the constitution is an "historic compromise between identity and modernity" that can serve as a model for other countries in the region seeking a balance between an Arab-Islamic heritage and contemporary ideas of human rights and good governance.

"It's a step forward in the nagging question of cultural identity in Arab countries," he said, lauding in particular not just freedom of religion but what he calls the freedom "not to have a religion."

While the constitution itself will not solve the country's persistent unemployment, rising prices, crushing debt and constant demonstrations, Loghmani said it will move politics forward and reassure foreign investors that the country is back on track after a rocky transition.

"It will be a relief for the average Tunisian who is impatient to see the end of the transition period," he said. "It will reassure Tunisia's international partners that country is headed in the right direction."

The completion of the constitution is also a tribute to the assembly's disparate parties to compromise and negotiate to reach a consensus. The moderate Islamist party Ennahda, which holds more than 40 percent of the seats in the assembly, backed down on putting a number of religious-inspired measures into the constitution in the face of wide opposition.

At times the constitution looked like it would never get written, with numerous walkouts by different parties and at one point a complete suspension of its activities in the wake of the assassination of a left-wing deputy in July.

In the end, Ennahda made concessions to the opposition and stepped down in favor of a caretaker government to manage the rest of the transition, allowing the constitution to be completed. The willingness of Ennahda to negotiate stood in sharp contrast to the more overbearing approach of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which had a more dominant position in the elected parliament and held the presidency. It ran roughshod over the demands of the opposition, citing its electoral successes.

"Egyptian constitutional politics has been a winner-take-all game; Tunisian politics has been more consensual —though consensus has been difficult to achieve," said Nathan Brown, an expert on Egyptian law at George Washington University. "The Tunisian experience is one that is more likely to give birth to a functioning democracy."

The overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt by the military in July and subsequent violent repression was a stern warning to Tunisia, said Yahyaoui of Bawsala, and it helped the various parties find a compromise.

"The only people who won something out of what happened in Egypt was Tunisia," she said. "Ennahda saw what happened to the Brotherhood and they didn't want to see the same scenario in Tunisia."

Paul Schemm reported from Rabat, Morocco.

Oman orders NASAMS air defense system

Tewksbury, Mass. (UPI)
Jan 27, 2014

An advanced surface-to-air missile system developed by Raytheon and Norway's Kongsberg Defense Systems is being purchased by the Sultanate of Oman.

The purchase order -- a direct sales contract -- is valued at $1.28 billion and includes provisions for the supply of ground support equipment, training and technical assistance, Raytheon reported.

"The Sultanate of Oman's competitive selection of Raytheon's National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System validates the superior performance, system adaptability and overall security that NASAMS provides," said Dan Crowley, president of Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems. "Raytheon is committed to delivering the exceptional defense capabilities of NASAMS to Oman."

NASAMS is a modular, networked ground-based medium to long-range air defense system for AIM 120 AMRAAM missiles. It works with the Patriot Air and Missile Defense System and the Hawk Air Defense system and is used by Norway, the Netherlands, Spain and Finland. It is also deployed by the U.S. military in the National Capital Region.

A NASAM system consists of missile launchers, radars, a fire control center and a tactical control vehicle.

Raytheon said work on supplying the system to Oman will be conducted by Raytheon at its Integrated Air Defense Center in Andover, Mass., and in Kongsberg, Norway.

Kongsberg is a sub-contractor of NASAMS elements to Raytheon. Its work on the Oman project is worth more than $440 million.

"The cooperation with Raytheon has over the years developed into a close and strong partnership with a large potential market for our air defense solutions," said Walter Qvam, chief executive officer of Kongsberg. "This agreement with Oman is the single largest supply contract in Kongsberg's history and is strong evidence of NASAMS' international position.

Added Harald Annestad, president in Kongsberg Defense Systems: "NASAMS is the most sold air defense system in its class in the last 10 years. Its modularity and open architecture enable a continuous evolution in performance to meet the latest threats."

The contract for the system was signed at a ceremony attended by Mohammed bin Nasser al-Rasbi, secretary general at the Omani Ministry of Defense, Air Vice Marshal Matar bin Ali al-Obaidani, commander of the Royal Air Force of Oman, and others.

Neither the number of systems ordered by Oman nor their schedule for delivery have been announced.

The original NASAMS program by Raytheon and Kongsberg began as a joint effort on behalf of the Royal Norwegian Air Force. It became officially operational in 1998.

Raytheon, in announcing the contract with Oman late last week, said it was awarded in the fourth quarter of last year.

Source: Space Mart.
Link: http://www.spacemart.com/reports/Oman_orders_NASAMS_air_defense_system_999.html.