Rafia Zakaria,, Babar Sattar (I)

Pakistani women then must get this straight. Pakistani customs and heritage dictate their persecution. These customs will not come to their rescue if they are abducted, sold into prostitution, or exchanged as chattel to settle debts. These traditions will not recognise even their minimal right to life in cases where they are hacked to death (and nearly 180 women have been axed to death in 2008) or attacked with acid, or maimed with knives or buried alive or in the present case, paraded naked in the streets.Ours is an ancient culture, so ancient that it predates all forms of female uplift in its pursuit of authenticity and chronological primacy. In maintaining proximity to our original tradition then, Pakistan has outdone every human civilisation in the world. Straight Talk

Even lawyers accustomed to deciphering legalese for a living hardly expect to stumble into a lengthy legal text the reading of which could itself be deemed a source of pleasure. But mulling over the 379-page judgment rendered in the PCO Judges Case was simply exhilarating. This judgment endeavors to clean up our rotten constitutional jurisprudence and lay down a solid legal foundation to support a constitutional and political structure rooted in rule of law and ethical values. It is no less than a watershed in the history of our nation that has been struggling for 62 years to embody the spirit of constitutionalism. Whether viewed as the end of a volatile phase of our rule of law movement or the starting point of a born-again independent court that is translating the rhetoric of democracy and rule of law into practical reality, this ruling must be a source of pride and reassurance for all the starry-eyed dreamers whose conviction in the ability of ordinary right-thinking people to engineer progressive change actually resulted in a miracle. Babar Sattar - Legal Eye I

James Zogby: Obama's Next Middle East Challenge - With the dust having settled following President Obama's New York meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, a sober...

Make Love or Make War: Two Sides of the Israeli Coin - By Jim Miles - That Israel exists and has the power to continue existing is very much a fact. With a sophisticated military establishment including more than 200 nuclear weapons (at lowest estimates) there is no way Israel would stop existing as a state of some kind. The argument within Israel, minimally interpreted from a few written works, is how will Israel survive into the future along the lines of what kind of state will it be and how will that be achieved.