Baithak Desi May 17: Moniza Alvi, Dilshad Azeem, Marianna Babar, Cartoons

Moniza Alvi grew up in Hertfordshire but was born in Pakistan. Her voice is spare, oblique, surreal, compassionate and original. She has unique insight into splits, both emotional and cultural: "The receding east, the receding west", as she laconically puts it. At the end of Split World, a selection from all her books, are the poems with which she became the first, and so far as I know the only, poet to explore sustainedly what 9/11 has meant to Muslims living in Europe.

Alvi has trained as a counsellor, and her new collection, Europa, explores post-traumatic stress disorder and the meaning of rape while mining the international politics of east and west through the myth of Europa. Europa was a Lebanese princess, though in the bronze age you'd have said Phoenician. Phoenican was the culture that gave the Greeks their alphabet and first navigated the Mediterranean. Europa's father ruled a city jutting into the sea just south of where Beirut is now. The Greeks called it Tyre; Isaiah said its merchants were princes. Its name, Sur in Phoenician, Tzor in Phoenician's sister language Hebrew, meant "Rock". Israel last attacked this Rock in 2006, three millennia after Tyre's princess became the first human example of rape in western history. Review:Europa by Moniza Alvi and Split World: Poems 1990-2005


“The PPP and the PML-Q, minus the PML-N but including others, guarantee two-thirds majority not only in the National Assembly but also in the Senate,” a key Q Leaguer said while talking to The News here on Friday. Dilshad Azeem


The Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Thursday once again acted in indecent haste when the DG Administration at the Foreign Office asked Dr Shireen Mazari, the sacked DG Institute of Strategic Studies, to leave in 15 minutes. But before she quickly left for home and sent the official car back, Dr Shireen Mazari got a call from Hussain Haqqani, who landed at Mazari's office with a bouquet, which the angry Mazari left for her successor. Marianna Babar


And to achieve that the lawyers must boycott all courts – not just higher courts -- for at least a few weeks to bring the judicial system to a grinding halt. It is time to move from the go-slow phase to the pens-down phase at this decisive stage of this historic movement. Without this and a forceful street movement the deposed judges might be history. - Babar Sattar And who will bankroll them?


This cannot be jehad, say Jaipur's Muslims

PAKISTAN: Agitations Planned to Get Top Judiciary Reinstated