Missing Mary Road

CONGRATULATIONS ON SELECTING SEAT 21C! This manual is intended to familiarize you with the many options available to you.Before BUCKLING in, please note that the man standing in the aisle next to you is about to make a request. He wonders if it would be okay for you to switch seats with his wife, who is in the middle seat three rows ahead. She is the one seated between the former linebacker and the canola oil salesman, and is peering over the seatbacks at you with wide and imploring eyes.The man will ask this in a voice sufficiently loud that all passengers seated within several rows will look up from their sudoku puzzles and await your answer. If you say no, the passengers will all wonder: Why do you hate married people? You must be a bitter and lonely person. Note also that there is no overhead luggage space three rows ahead, so you will have to wait for the entire plane to empty to come back and retrieve your bags. Have a good flight up at 18E!

Once permanently seated, grasp both ends of SEAT BELT and press firmly together. If you hear only a dull metallic clanking sound rather than a smart “click,” extend half of the seat belt to your seatmate and awkwardly suggest that he must be sitting on your half.

If you would like a small and insubstantial PILLOW and cannot locate one, ring the flight attendant call button located directly overhead. If the flight attendant does not appear within five seconds, press the button repeatedly and with increasing urgency. If the flightattendant tells you no more are available, wait five minutes and repeat process.

Google tells me that 80 Billion Rupees is a lot of money. Seems like that’s how much the city of Karachi got pillaged. From Dawn,

The Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI) has demanded removal of top officials of police and Rangers for their failure to maintain law and order during three days after the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

KCCI president Shamim Ahmed Shamsi and Executive Committee member Siraj Kassam Teli said at a press conference here on Thursday that the business community had suffered a loss of Rs80 billion on account of damage to property, looting of factories and warehouses, torching of vehicles and other acts of violence that had shaken the city.

They warned that if the law-enforcement hierarchy was not changed within a week, the KCCI could give a call for a strike.

They said the Sindh government had failed completely to maintain law and order. When mobs ruled the streets in several areas of Karachi from Thursday to Saturday (last week), police and Rangers were nowhere to be seen. Troops were on standby in the cantonment but the caretaker government did not bother to seek their help.

They said the loss of life, incidents of looting and lawlessness would have been 50 per cent less if police and Rangers had remained vigilant and performed their duty. They said the government should seriously consider deputing senior local officials of police and Rangers in Karachi instead of bringing officers from other parts of the country. Both the departments whose duty was to curb violence had let down not only the citizens but also the business community by leaving the city at the mercy of mobs and angry protesters, the KCCI leaders said. They said more than 1,500 trailers had been burnt down in interior Sindh and over 1,000 vehicles in Karachi.

if you look at it and hold your eyes still it stands still. if you move focus away, watch it go purple nurple on you.

william dalrymple in outlook india hits the money shot. he’s one of the few people who have said the things that i feel about this issue on the so called ‘martyrdom of benazir’.

However the very reasons that make the West love Benazir are the same that leave many Pakistanis with second thoughts. Her English may be fluent, but you can’t say the same about her Urdu which she speaks like a well-groomed foreigner: fluently but ungrammatically. Her Sindhi is even worse: apart from a few imperatives, she is completely at sea.

Equally, the tragedy of Benazir’s end should not blind us to her as astonishingly weak record as a politician. Benazir was no Aung San Suu Kyi, and much of the praise now being heaped upon her is misplaced. In reality, Benazir’s own democratic credentials were far from impeccable. She colluded in massive human rights abuses, and during her tenure, government death squads in Karachi were responsible for the abduction and murder of hundreds of her MQM opponents. Amnesty International accused her government of having one of the world’s worst records of custodial deaths, killings and torture.

Within her own party, she declared herself the lifetime president of the PPP, and refused to let her brother Murtaza challenge her for its leadership. When he was shot dead in highly suspicious circumstances outside her home, Benazir was implicated. His wife Ghinwa, and her daughter Fatima, as well as Benazir’s own mother, all firmly believed that she gave the order to have him killed.

keep reading.