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from Photographers Blog:
Lahore Inferno: Losing the battle with fire
WARNING: DISTURBING CONTENT
Lahore, Pakistan
By Damir Sagolj
A man wearing traditional white Pakistani clothes disappeared from the window back into the burning building. A minute later, a different man wearing black emerged from inside but it looked like someone was holding his lifeless body. The body was slowly pushed over the edge of the window and then released. Twenty seconds later the man in white came out again. He sat calmly for a few seconds in the open window with his back turned outwards and then just fell.
GALLERY: MEN FALL FROM BUILDING INFERNO
And that was it; both men were dead in less than a minute. After several long hours of fighting a raging fire (or were they short hours? Time gets twisted in extreme situations like this), this part of the story ended in the way I had feared from the beginning - the worst possible way. I shot pictures of people falling from the building to their deaths, of others crying on the ground, of desperate and helpless rescue workers.
It was supposed to be an easy pre-election day in Lahore. We did expect some heat as the campaign of the two main candidates was coming to an end but what happened that Thursday still haunts me without any signs of easing. What started as an easy day for me and poor government workers in their modern office building in Punjab’s capital ended with more deaths than in election violence across the country over the next few days.
Earlier in the day, just after arriving in Lahore I received a short text message saying that a fire had broke out on the seventh floor of a government building and that there could be some people trapped inside. I was on my way to the hospital where Imran Khan, the former Pakistani cricket player and rising star in politics, was recovering from an injury. He was big in the news and there was a possibility for journalists to see him but a building on fire, with people trapped inside, is always the priority. I put Imran aside for a while and headed toward the LDA Plaza.
from The Great Debate:
Impressions of a Pakistan election monitor
Voters at a polling station on the outskirts of Islamabad May 11, 2013. REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra
Pakistan’s national and regional elections Saturday marked the first peaceful transition from one civilian government to another since the country’s founding in 1947.
As expected, Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League - Nawaz (PML-N) party, which held power several times in the 1990s, won a plurality of the National Assembly seats, and is likely to form a government.
from Breakingviews:
Polls give strife-hit Pakistan a shot at stability
By Andy Mukherjee
(The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own)
Pakistan’s election may just give the troubled country a shot at stability. Investors will discount much of the hyperbole from political parties about the economic possibilities ahead. The question is whether the poll - the first proper democratic transfer of power in Pakistan’s history - can provide stable, effective leadership that keeps the army out of politics while uniting the country in dealing with Taliban-sponsored sectarian violence.
from Photographers Blog:
Backstage is where the fashion is
Karachi, Pakistan
By Insiya Syed
A few days after I photographed my second Fashion Week story in Karachi over the course of a month, a friend of mine asked me a legitimate question: “Why do these organizers call it "week" when it's never a week? Why not just call it a month then? Or a millennium? Pakistan Fashion Millennium! That sounds so nice."
Each year, Pakistan has a few of these events: Pakistan Fashion Week, Karachi Fashion Week, Pakistan Fashion Design Council Fashion Week... And then there’s Bridal Couture Week, which I’ve now had the opportunity to cover two years in a row.
from Pakistan: Now or Never?:
One man’s fight for justice after a song brought death to a Pakistani village
When tribal elders reportedly ordered five girls killed in remote northern Pakistan for singing and clapping, outraged media coverage prompted the Supreme Court to order an investigation.
The deeply flawed investigation concluded the girls were alive and the matter was dropped. But new killings - and new evidence collected by Reuters - suggests the girls are dead.
from Events:
Brennan’s confirmation and where CIA drones go from here
If President Obama’s chief counterterrorism advisor John Brennan is confirmed as director of the CIA on Thursday, he will take the role of the lead authority for CIA drone strikes, institutionalizing a program that has killed an unknown number of suspected militants and civilians since 2004. Although his confirmation is expected to help preserve the drone program while glossing over concerns about its transparency and effectiveness so far, his appointment leaves a bigger question about the CIA's future role.
Brennan’s open hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday has been pegged as a time to demand answers about the highly secretive U.S. campaigns to target and kill al Qaeda militants using unmanned aerial vehicles in places like Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. The administration is tight-lipped on the subject, and critics have assailed the campaign over its lack of public accountability. U.S. drone strikes have killed not just foreign militants, but also civilians and American citizens. Rights groups have lambasted the extrajudicial killings of American citizens, including the “Internet imam” Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son in Yemen. A New York Times report last May revealed that the government’s troubling definition of a “militant” suggests any military-age man in a strike zone is fair game. On Tuesday, a 16-page memo from the Justice Department published by NBC News further outlined the vague criteria for who can target and be targeted, as well as showed an expanded definition of conditions that the government can use to order strikes.
from Thinking Global:
Obama’s Afghan test
Munich – For America’s friends and allies, who will welcome Vice President Joe Biden to the annual Munich Security Conference this weekend, President Obama’s second inaugural address was notable for its single-minded focus on U.S. domestic issues even as global challenges proliferate. It was the clearest sign yet that Obama intends to build his historic legacy at home.
No one quibbles with Obama’s conviction that America’s global role can best be sustained through a period of “nation-building at home.” The problem is the world is unlikely to hit the pause button as America gets itself off the fiscal cliff, reforms its immigration system, modernizes its infrastructure, fixes its education system and focuses on other long-neglected home chores.
from India Insight:
Firing on LoC: Blame game and spillovers continue
Firing between India and Pakistan along the Line of Control (LoC) in the disputed region of Kashmir has left five soldiers dead (two Indians and three Pakistanis). In India, the issue became a front-page story with the media expressing outrage over reports that the body of one Indian soldier was allegedly mutilated by the Pakistanis.
The incident fuelled tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbours and Indian political parties have minced no words in their calls for retribution.
from India Insight:
LoC killings: Is a third-party probe the way ahead?
(Any opinions expressed here are those of the author, and not necessarily of Thomson Reuters)
The death toll on the Line of Control in Kashmir is four since Jan. 6: two from India's military, two from Pakistan's. One thing is sure: neither side started it, judging by what you hear from both countries' armed forces and from media reports.
from Pakistan: Now or Never?:
At war’s end, ramping up drone strikes in Afghanistan
The United States carried out more drone strikes in Afghanistan this year than it has done in all the years put together in Pakistan since it launched the covert air war there eight years ago. With all the attention and hand wringing focused on the operations in Pakistan, it's remarkable that such a ramp-up just over the border has gone virtually unnoticed.
The two battlegrounds are not the same, of course. Afghanistan is an open and hot battlefield where U.S. forces are deployed and the drones are part of the air support available to troops. Pakistan is a sovereign nation and the United States is not in a state of war with it and so you wouldn't expect the same pace of operations, even though U.S. commanders say the Taliban insurgency draws its sustenance from the sanctuaries in the Pakistani northwest.
