Dawn: NEW DELHI: India’s Hindu nationalist premier Narendra Modi on Thursday rejected angry calls to dismiss a government minister whose derogatory comment about religious minorities has caused uproar in parliament. India’s upper house has been paralysed by opposition protests since Niranjan Jyoti told a crowd at a campaign rally on […]
Russia Today: Thousands of people have resigned from the Lutheran Church in Finland, after the nation’s parliament approved a same-sex marriage law and the church’s archbishop expressed support for the […]
NY times: WE Americans are a nation divided. We feud about the fires in Ferguson, Mo., and we can agree only that racial divisions remain raw. So let’s borrow a page from South Africa and impanel a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to examine race in America. The model should be […]
thelocal.se: The way Sweden treats children living in detention centres has been strongly criticised by the United Nations Committee against Torture, which also suggested some young offenders had experienced violence […]
chrisngwodo.blogspot.co.uk: A kingdom can endure with unbelief, but it cannot endure with injustice. […]
Guardian: The charity Save the Children faces a backlash from staff after it presented Tony Blair with a “global legacy award” in New York last week – despite privately acknowledging […]
Guardian: The gravest ethnic and political conflict in Russia today is not to be found inChechnya nor in the xenophobic capitals of Moscow and St Petersburg. Rather, it stalks the newly […]
By Michael Schulson Salon.com: Karen Armstrong has written histories of Buddhism and Islam. She has written a history of myth. She has written a history of God. Born in Britain, Armstrong […]
theparliamentmagazine.eu: According to a report presented by the UK’s prince of Wales on 4 November, across the world, Christians remain the most persecuted religious minority, while some Muslim countries are sadly among those states with the most serious reported violations of religious freedom. Among these, Pakistan is rated as one […]
Huff Post: All my life, I’ve dreamed of serving my country. But when I tried to enlist in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program at Hofstra University, I was told I couldn’t because of my religious beliefs. I follow the Sikh faith, which requires that I keep my hair […]
Daily Times: The Two Nation Theory, therefore, is a distant part of our history, a lawyer’s clever argument that unfortunately has become a blanket we cannot seem to rid ourselves of The Higher Education Commission (HEC) has laid another egg. This time, a certain Professor Kundi of the HEC was […]
Huff Post: On October 23, 2014, Aasia Bibi — the most prominent blasphemy case death-sentence prisoner in the history of one of Pakistan’s most controversial laws — had her appeal for retraction of her punishment met with rejection at the Lahore High Court. Her lawyers will move the appeal to […]
The News: Islamabad diary Once upon a time under-class Mohajirs in Karachi, residents not of Clifton and Defence but depressed localities, used to be an object of scorn for other communities, regularly picked upon by the mostly Punjabi police and treated roughly in public transport, mostly owned by Pakhtuns. Not […]
Washington Post: I knew the day would come, but I didn’t know how it would happen, where I would be, or how I would respond. It is the moment that every black parent fears: the day their child is called a nigger. My wife and I, both African Americans, constitute one […]
Dawn: GUJRAT: A police officer on Wednesday night murdered a detained man with an axe, later alleging that the man had committed blasphemy. 45-year-old Jhang resident Syed Tufail Haider was arrested a day earlier for wounding two people from a locality in Gujrat. According to police authorities, Tufail came to […]
United Nations (CNN) — The United States vetoed Friday a U.N. Security Council resolution that would have declared Israeli settlements in the West Bank illegal. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice said that while the United States agrees about “the folly and illegitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity, […]
ET: NEW YORK: Pakistani academics based in the United States have dismissed as draconian a Higher Education Commission (HEC) circular calling for heads of public and private degree awarding institutions to impose limits on formal or informal discussions. The circular —issued on October 28 with signatures of Prof Dr Mansoor Akbar […]
Salon.com: If there’s a single historical moment that captures what the author Karen Armstrong wants to convey in her new book, “Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence,” […]
Suggested Reading: Two Hundred Verses about Compassionate Living in the Quran LUBP: We welcome the tolerant and inclusive approach shown by Mualana Arshad Madni, senior Deobandi cleric of India’s Darul-Uloom Deoband […]
ET: KARACHI: A lower court on Thursday issued notice to the Leader of the Opposition in the National Assembly Khursheed Shah in response to an application levelling blasphemy charges against him. District and sessions judge Chaudhry Waseem Iqbal directed Shah – who represents Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) – to appear before […]