Hulleye Comes By!

Militants behead law-enforcement men in public
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By Hameedullah Khan
SWAT, Oct 26: Militants on Friday publicly executed four law-enforcement personnel in a village, 16km west of Mingora, the district headquarters, and exchanged heavy gunfire with security forces in a nearby sub-district. “It was gruesome,” was how a resident of Shakkardarra described the scene of beheading of the law-enforcement personnel.Requesting anonymity, he told Dawn on phone that masked militants armed with rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles brought the four men to the village at around 5pm, fires a few shots in the air and then beheaded them…

http://www.dawn.com/cgi-bin/dina.pl?file=top1.htm&date=20071027

Judges not answerable to any group: Justice Javed
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ISLAMABAD, Oct 26: Mr Justice Javed Iqbal, who heads an 11-member bench of the Supreme Court hearing petitions challenging the acceptance of Gen Pervez Musharraf’s nomination papers for the presidential election, said on Friday that the decision on the petitions would be in accordance with the Constitution. He also said that the court might announce its verdict on Thursday. He was responding to questions after addressing the inaugural session of a two-day workshop on “Delay Reduction Techniques-cum-Training: the Trainers for District and Sessions Judges” jointly organised by the Federal Judicial Academy and the Access to Justice Programme…

http://www.dawn.com/cgi-bin/dina.pl?file=top3.htm&date=20071027

$60bn income likely from mega projects
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By Khaleeq Kiani
ISLAMABAD, Oct 26: Pakistan expects to earn $60 billion a year from transit trade after completion of the national trade corridor, a couple of shipyards and improvement of the North-South road network. The estimate has been prepared by the Planning Commission that is seeking advisory services from international firms for establishment of two large shipyards at Port Qasim and Gwadar Port on a fast track basis. The appointment of an adviser for preparation of project structure would lead to international competitive bidding to develop the shipyards and related infrastructure at an estimated cost of $500 million, to be raised through an emerging public-private partnership facility…

http://www.dawn.com/cgi-bin/dina.pl?file=top4.htm&date=20071027 

Benazir sends ‘defamation’ notice to Arbab
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By Amir Wasim
ISLAMABAD, Oct 26: Pakistan People’s Party chairperson Benazir Bhutto has sent a legal notice to Sindh Chief Minister Arbab Ghulam Rahim demanding cash compensation of Rs100 million for allegedly defaming her by “levelling baseless, malicious, concocted and fabricated allegations” against her. The legal notice has been issued through her counsel Senator Farooq Naek…

http://www.dawn.com/cgi-bin/dina.pl?file=top6.htm&date=20071027

430 Afghans, Uzbeks held
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By Saleem Shahid
QUETTA, Oct 26: Around 430 Afghan and Uzbek nationals were arrested from the border town of Chaman and some other areas of Balochistan on Friday. Sources said police and Anti-terrorist Force personnel raided several localities in Chaman and arrested 163 Afghans and Uzbeks who had entered the country illegally. Border security officials also handed over to police 127 Uzbek and Afghan nationals arrested while trying to cross the border, the Balochistan police chief said. He said 112 Afghans and Uzbeks had been arrested from Dalbandin and 59 from Mastung….

http://www.dawn.com/cgi-bin/dina.pl?file=top13.htm&date=20071027

Ambassador rejects Benazir’s charge
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By Masood Haider
NEW YORK, Oct 26: Ambassador of Pakistan to the United States Mahmud Ali Durrani has rejected former prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s charge that some current and former government officials could be involved in the recent attempt on her life. “I think, with due respect to her, it was absurd,” Mr Durrani was quoted as telling the New York Times’ editorial board during a meeting on Thursday. Mr Durrani expressed confidence that the suicide bombers would be identified and their backers apprehended by the Pakistani government without American or other international assistance…

http://www.dawn.com/cgi-bin/dina.pl?file=top8.htm&date=20071027

Benazir reiterates call for US, UK role in probe
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By Amir Wasim
ISLAMABAD, Oct 26: Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) chairperson Benazir Bhutto on Friday formally requested the government to seek assistance from the US and the UK in carrying out investigations in the Oct 18 bomb attack on her rally in Karachi. “The PPP asks you to immediately assist the poorly-equipped Pakistan police investigation with sophisticated technology and scientific techniques available to Scotland Yard and the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) to assist in the investigation and bring the culprits to book,” Ms Bhutto wrote in a letter sent to the federal interior secretary. She forwarded copies of the letter to President Gen Pervez Musharraf, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry and Chief Justice Sindh High Court Justice Sabihuddin Ahmad…

http://www.dawn.com/cgi-bin/dina.pl?file=top7.htm&date=20071027

Karachi Stocks up 88.83, points:
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KARACHI, Oct 26: At the close of trading the KSE-100 index was at 14449.98,up 88.83, points.

Forex update:
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KARACHI, Oct 26: The Pakistani Rupee was traded at Rs 60.7, to the US Dollar in the open market.

Return of Benazir Bhutto The Kleptocrat in an Hermes Headscarf By
JEMIMA KHAN
She’s back. Hurrah! She’s a woman. She’s brave. She’s a moderate. She speaks good English. She’s Oxford-educated, no less. And she’s not bad looking either.

I admit I’m biased. I don’t like Benazir Bhutto. She called me names during her election campaign in 1996 and it left a bitter taste. Petty personal grievances aside, I still find jubilant reports of her return to Pakistan depressing. Let’s be clear about this before she’s turned into a martyr.

This is no Aung San Suu Kyi, despite her repeated insistence that she’s “fighting for democracy”, or even more incredibly, “fighting for Pakistan’s poor”. This is the woman who was twice dismissed on corruption charges. She went into self-imposed exile while investigations continued into millions she had allegedly stashed away into Swiss bank accounts ($1.5 billion by the reckoning of Musharraf’s own “National Accountability Bureau”).

She has only been able to return because Musharraf, that megalomaniac, knows that his future depends on the grassroots diehard supporters inherited from her father’s party, the PPP.

As a result, Musharraf, who in his first months in power declared it his express intention to wipe out corruption, has dropped all charges against her and granted her immunity from prosecution. Forever. Notably, he did not do the same for his other political rival, Nawaz Sharif, who was recently deported after attempting his own spectacular return to Pakistan. But the difference is that Benazir is a pro at playing to the West. And that’s what counts. She talks about women and extremism and the West applauds. And then conspires.

The Americans and the British are acutely aware that their strategy in the region is failing and that Musharraf’s hold on power is ever more tenuous. They have pressed hard for Benazir and the General to cut a deal that would allow them to share power for the next five years in a “liberal forces government”. It’s all totally bogus. Benazir may speak the language of liberalism and look good on Larry King’s sofa, but both her terms in office were marked by incompetence, extra-judicial killings and brazen looting of the treasury, with the help of her husband–famously known in Pakistan as Mr 10 Per Cent.

In a country that tops the international corruption league, she was its most self-enriching leader.

Benazir has always cynically used her gender to manipulate: I loved her answer to David Frost when he asked her how many millions she had in her Swiss bank accounts. “David, I think that’s a very sexist question.”

A non sequitur (does loot have a gender?) but one that brought the uncomfortable line of questioning to a swift end. Of all Pakistan’s elected leaders she conspicuously did the least to help the cause of women. She never, for example, repealed the Hudood Ordinances, Pakistan’s controversial laws that made no distinction between rape and adultery.

She preferred instead to kowtow to the mullahs in order to cling to power, forming an expedient alliance with Pakistan’s Religious Coalition Party and leaving Pakistan’s women as powerless as she found them.

The problem is that the West never seems to learn; playing favourites in a complicated nation’s politics always backfires. Imposing Benazir on Pakistan is the opposite of democratic and doubtless will cause more chaos in an already unstable country.

Make no mistake, Benazir may look the part, but she’s as ruthless and conniving as they come–a kleptocrat in a Hermes headscarf.

Jemima Khan is an ambassador to Unicef.

“So here’s the funny thing. I’ve used Windows since 1.0. I’ve lived through the bad times of Windows/386 and ME, and the good times of NT 3.51 and 2K. I know XP if not backwards, then with a degree of familiarity that only middle-aged co-dependents can afford each other… Then how come I’m so much more at home with Ubuntu than Vista? It boils down to one abiding impression: Ubuntu goes out of its way to get out of your way… Vista goes out of its way to be Vista and enforce the Vista way.”

– Rupert Goodwins writing in ZDNet UK (click for more of the article)

Today no other country on earth is arguably more dangerous than Pakistan. It has everything Osama bin Laden could ask for: political instability, a trusted network of radical Islamists, an abundance of angry young anti-Western recruits, secluded training areas, access to state-of-the-art electronic technology, regular air service to the West and security services that don’t always do what they’re supposed to do. (Unlike in Iraq or Afghanistan, there also aren’t thousands of American troops hunting down would-be terrorists.) Then there’s the country’s large and growing nuclear program. “If you were to look around the world for where Al Qaeda is going to find its bomb, it’s right in their backyard,” says Bruce Riedel, the former senior director for South Asia on the National Security Council. The conventional story about Pakistan has been that it is an unstable nuclear power, with distant tribal areas in terrorist hands. What is new, and more frightening, is the extent to which Taliban and Qaeda elements have now turned much of the country, including some cities, into a base that gives jihadists more room to maneuver, both in Pakistan and beyond.

In recent months, as Musharraf has grown more and more unpopular after eight years of rule, Islamists have been emboldened.

gutsy is out. go get yours.

improvement summary

•     native ntfs read AND write support
•     wifi manager that supposedly just works
•     superior printer support
•     compiz enabled by default (dunno if that’s a good thing)
•     java and flash support

a while back in january i wrote about how complex artificial intelligence was becoming and how much it had actually “learned”. one of the things i mentioned was one of the impossibilities that AI could never beat. the game of GO. seems like there have been advances in the field now and we should be biting our tongues.

Click Here Now tell me if the girl was moving clockwise or anti-clockwise.

If clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa.

Most of us would see the dancer turning anti-clockwise though you can try to focus and change the direction; see if you can do it. Was clockwise for me.

Update: some discussion on this illusion is here.

one of the biggest realities that we deal with in our world today is that for some reason people believe we are different from one another if we are born on another side of a line of latitude or longitude or border or village or fence or train track. whichever the case, people believe we are different from one another. and it would not be okay to associate with certain people but yet allright to do so with others. it would also be allright to remove some people from existence, as it would not be for others. unfortunately, these are the realities today. unfortunately, these realities have existed for a long, long time. three years ago iman-al-hams was murdered. [3qd]

The daily realities of living under an illegal military occupation are unimaginable to anyone who hasn’t lived under them. No matter how much one writes, it is impossible to convey the ghastliness, injustice, oppressiveness and inhumanity of being ruled over by a repressive military accountable to no one. The death of Iman Al-Hams, however, may provide an illustrative anecdote.

On the morning of the 5th of October, 2004, a morning as rudimentarily awful as any lived under a brutal occupation, 13-year-old Iman, wearing her blue and white school uniform and carrying her schoolbag, left her house in Rafah refugee camp to go to school. Iman wandered a few meters away from her usual route to school and ventured into the large security zone surrounding an Israeli military base, which is, as is common, located near Palestinian civilians’ houses and schools. What follows is a gruesome tale of sickeningly cold-blooded murder.

Iman was spotted by the Israeli military base’s watchtower. She was about 100 yards away from the military base when the following conversation took place between a soldier in the watchtower, an army operations room and a certain Captain R, who remains unnamed to this day:

**************

From the watchtower: “It’s a little girl. She’s running defensively eastward.”

From the operations room: “Are we talking about a girl under the age of 10?”

Watchtower: “A girl about 10, she’s behind the embankment, scared to death.”

A few minutes later, Iman is shot from one of the army posts

Watchtower: “I think that one of the positions took her out.”

Captain R: “I and another soldier … are going in a little nearer, forward, to confirm the kill … Receive a situation report. We fired and killed her … I also confirmed the kill. Over.”

Captain R—along with another soldier—walks towards Iman, and shoots two bullets at point-blank range into her head to “confirm the kill.” He starts to head back to his base, before turning around again and emptying all the bullets from his machine gun into the body of Iman.

Captain R then “clarifies” why he killed Iman: “This is commander. Anything that’s mobile, that moves in the zone, even if it’s a three-year-old, needs to be killed. Over.”

**************

After she was taken to the hospital, doctors counted 17 bullet wounds in Iman’s body, and three in her head, though they were unsure of the exact number since her little body was shattered to the point where one couldn’t accurately count how many bullets had riddled it.

Anywhere in the world, you would expect such a murderer to be tried and to receive a very harsh sentence. Unfortunately, the laws that apply in most of the world do not apply to Palestinian children and their murderers. An Israeli military court, on October 15, 2004, cleared the soldier of any wrongdoing or unethical behavior, declaring that “confirming the kill” is standard procedure.

A few of the soldiers serving with Captian R seem to have not been satisfied. They were apparently motivated by racist animosity towards him (he is Druze, they are Jewish), and took the matter to a Military Police court. He was charged not with the murder of Iman, but with “illegal use of his weapon, conduct unbecoming an officer and perverting the course of justice.” He was cleared on all counts.

To add insult to fatal and gruesome injury, Captain R was then compensated with 80,000 Israeli Sheckels (around US$20,000) plus legal fees for the inconvenience of being taken to court over a triviality such as the life of a Palestinian child. The court also criticized the Military Police for investigating the case in the first place. Captain R was then promoted to the rank of Major, and continues to serve in the Israeli Army, where he may well have murdered other children in the past three years.

This is by no means an isolated incident or a freak failing of the “justice” system, but rather one example of many such stories that will shock anyone with an ounce of conscience or humanity in them. One could write whole books with the stories of children like Iman, killed in callous cold blood, whose murderers faced no repercussions whatsoever for their crimes. Since 2000, almost 1,000 Palestinian children have been murdered by the Israeli Army, and countless other thousands injured. Not a single Israeli soldier has faced any form of punishment, demotion, or even reprimand over any of these murders.

As The Guardian’s Chris McGreal put it back in June 2005:

B’Tselem argues that a lack of accountability and rules of engagement that “encourage a trigger-happy attitude among soldiers” have created a “culture of impunity” - a view backed by the New York-based Human Rights Watch, which last week described many army investigations of civilian killings as a “sham … that encourages soldiers to think they can literally get away with murder”.

In southern Gaza, the killings take place in a climate that amounts to a form of terror against the population. Random fire into Rafah and Khan Yunis has claimed hundreds of lives, including five children shot as they sat at their school desks. Many others have died when the snipers must have known who was in their sights - children playing football, sitting outside home, walking back from school. Almost always “investigations” amount to asking the soldier who pulled the trigger what happened - often they claim there was a gun battle when there was none - and presenting it as fact.

The tragedy of these stories is not just that these lives of innocent children have been lost, but that the Israeli Army, backed by the government, has made it entirely clear that all Palestinians are fair game to their soldiers. Had Iman’s murder been an isolated incident whose perpetrator was punished, one could argue that the Israeli army was not complicit in it. But by acquitting the proudly self-confessed murderer, along with hundreds of his likes, the army is sending a clear message to anyone who would listen that it is an institution that finds child-murder acceptable.

This is illustrative of the real injustice and tragedy of the occupation. Callow 18-year-olds, drunk on their power, sit behind some of the most sophisticated murder machinery in the world and unleash it on a civilian population. Their trigger-happy guns are the only judge, jury and executioner around. There are no moral imperatives, no accountability, and not even any incentive to attempt to minimize damage to civilians. The lives of those surrounding this murder machinery are dispensable.

This is why it is imperative that the occupation end. It is a fundamental right of the Palestinian people, like any other people, not to have their children murdered with impunity by an occupying army. Only when this happens can there be any prospect for peace. Ending the occupation is not conditioned on what the Palestinians do or how they behave, or whether they resist the occupation or not; it is a fundamental right for Palestinians, on a par with the right not to be enslaved.

Under occupation, every child, woman and man is collateral damage waiting to happen. Three years ago it was Iman’s turn. If the world lets the madness of this occupation continue, we will witness a new Iman Al-Hams every day, and our silence will make us complicit in her murder as well.

the genius of pervez hoodbhoy last month wrote an article on the demise of science in the islamic world. he poses the question, “With well over a billion Muslims and extensive material resources, why is the Islamic world disengaged from science and the process of creating new knowledge?” it’s a wonderful read as he explains how islam first encountered science, excelled at it, how it is ailing, what current progress has been made, how it is currently related with religion and how science can return to the islamic world”. definitely give it a read. it’s worth at least brimming through.

Why do mathematicians like national parks?
Because of the natural logs.

Why do mathematicians think Halloween and Christmas are the same?
Because 31 Oct = 25 Dec.

Why did the chicken cross the Möbius strip?
To get to the same side

What do you call an eigen-sheep?
A lamb, duh.

A mathematician, an engineer and a chemist are at a conference. They are staying in adjoining rooms. One evening they are downstairs in the bar. The mathematician goes to bed first. The chemist goes next, followed a minute or two later by the engineer. The chemist notices that in the corridor outside their rooms a rubbish bin is ablaze. There is a bucket of water nearby. The chemist starts concocting a means of generating carbon dioxide in order to create a makeshift extinguisher but before he can do so the engineer arrives, dumps the water on the fire and puts it out. The next morning the chemist and engineer tell the mathematician about the fire. He admits he saw it. They ask him why the hell he didn’t put it out. He replies contemptuously “there was a fire and a bucket of water: a solution obviously existed.”

Three statisticians go duck hunting. Their dog chases out a duck and it starts to fly. The first statistician aims and takes his shot, it misses a foot too high. The second statistician aims and takes his shot, it misses a foot too low. The third statistician says, “We got him!”

An atom is walking down the street when he meets a friend of his, who is evidently distraught. “What’s the matter…is everything OK?” the atom asks his friend. “Well, I think I might have lost an electron,” responds the other atom. “Are you sure?” asks the first. “I’m positive!” replies his friend.

At first there was post-secret. And then there were lolcats. And now, they’ve come together, as lolsecretz.

“Some of these are too funny to be sad; others are too sad to be funny”

this is fascinating news. from the wonderful AIP newsletter.

Modern physics has shown that the vacuum, previously thought of as a state of total nothingness, is really a seething background of virtual particles springing in and out of existence until they can seize enough energy to materialize as *real* particles.  In high energy collisions at accelerator labs, some of the original beam energy can be consumed by ripping particle-antiparticle pairs out of the vacuum.  Sometimes this process is the very reason for doing the experiment, but sometimes it is only a detriment.  For example, in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), under construction at the CERN lab in Geneva, a major source of beam losses (particles exiting from the usable beam) for heavy-ion collisions is expected to be a class of event in which the counter-moving ions pass each other and don*t interact except to spawn a pair of particles—an electron and positron—one of which (the positron) goes off to oblivion while the other (the electron) latches onto one of the ions.  This ion, bearing an extra electric charge, will now behave slightly differently as it races through the chain of powerful magnets that normally steer the particles around the accelerator.  Going a certain distance, the modified ion will leave its fellows and smash into the beam pipe carrying the beams, thus heating up the pipe and surrounding magnet coils. Fearing these future beam losses, accelerator physicists have sought to observe this effect at an existing machine, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the Brookhaven Lab on Long Island.  And they found what they were looking for, a tiny splash of energy amounting to about .0002 watts, or about what a firefly puts out.  The RHIC beam for these tests consisted of copper ions each carrying 6.3 TeV of energy (about 100 GeV per nucleon).  According to CERN scientist John Jowett (john.jowett@cern.ch, 41-22-7676-643) this troublesome class of events, referred to as bound-free-pair production (or BFPP, the bound referring to the electron and the free to the positron), will be much more formidable at LHC than at RHIC.  First of all, the pair production scales as the atomic number of the nucleus (or the charge of the nucleus, denoted by the letter Z) raised to the seventh power.  The LHC heavy-ion collisions will use beams composed of lead ions.  The more highly charged nucleus and the larger energies (574 TeV per lead nucleus) mean the BFPP process should be some 100,000 times more prominent than in the test at RHIC. This would amount to about 25 watts, the equivalent of a reading lamp.  That doesn’t sound like much but, when deposited in the ultra-cold (1.9 K) magnets of the LHC, it could bring them to the brink of “quenching” out of their superconducting state, interrupting the operation of the huge machine. (Bruce et al., Physical Review Letters, 5 October 2007; journalists can obtain the text from www.aip.org/physnews/select; other background material at arxiv.org/abs/0706.3356v2), http://cern.ch/AccelConf/e04/PAPERS/MOPLT020.PDF, Vol. I, Chapter 21 of the LHC Design Report, available at http://ab-div.web.cern.ch/ab-div/Publications/LHC-DesignReport.html)

I’ve mentioned beauty in science before and how science can bring up the most striking images which are remarkably stunning, captivating and mesmerizing at the same time. national geographic recently just honoured the best science images of 2007. Shown below, it may look like a strange insect , but this is actually a CT image revealing the delicate structures underlying the human nose. The multicolored pockets, seen in a cutaway from below the nose looking up, are the paranasal sinuses—the air-filled spaces in the skull that are the bane of many an allergy sufferer.