A Pakistani court lifted a ban on Facebook yesterday after officials from the social networking site apologized for a page deemed offensive to Muslims and removed its contents, a top information technology official said.
The Lahore High Court imposed the ban almost two weeks ago amid anger over a page that encouraged users to post images of the Prophet Mohammed. Many Muslims regard depictions of the prophet, even favorable ones, as blasphemous.
“In response to our protest, Facebook has tendered their apology and informed us that all the sacrilegious material has been removed from the URL,” said Najibullah Malik, secretary of Pakistan’s information technology ministry, referring to the technical term for a Web page.
Facebook assured the Pakistani government that “nothing of this sort will happen in the future,” Malik said.
Officials from the Web site could not immediately be reached for comment. They said earlier the contents of the “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!” page did not violate Facebook’s terms.
The page encouraged users to post images of the prophet to protest threats made by a radical Muslim group against the creators of the US TV series South Park for depicting Mohammed in a bear suit during an episode earlier this year.
The controversy sparked a handful of protests across Pakistan, many by student members of radical Islamic groups. Some of the protesters carried signs advocating holy war against Facebook for allowing the page.
Bangladesh also decided to block Facebook on Sunday but said it would restore access to the site if the offensive material were removed.
It is not the first time that images of the prophet have sparked anger. Pakistan and other Muslim countries saw large and sometimes violent protests in 2006 when a Danish newspaper published cartoons of Mohammed, and again in 2008 when they were reprinted. Later the same year, a suspected al-Qaeda suicide bomber attacked the Danish embassy in Islamabad, killing six people.
As of midmorning yesterday, access to Facebook inside Pakistan was still restricted, but users outside the country confirmed the page that sparked the recent uproar was no longer accessible.
Pakistani government officials are waiting for a written court order lifting the ban before they advise Internet service providers to restore access to the site, Malik said.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
RSS