A Taliban-style Islamic court in the Pakistani capital has issued a fatwa against a female minister for posing in an "obscene manner" with French paraglider pilots, a top cleric said yesterday.
The government had no immediate comment on the fatwa, or Islamic religious decree, issued against tourism minister Nilofar Bakhtiar by the fundamentalist Red Mosque in Islamabad.
The move comes days after the top cleric at the mosque announced the creation of the Sharia or Islamic court and threatened a wave of suicide bombings if the authorities try to shut it down.
"The muftis [judges] issued a decree against tourism minister Nilofar Bakhtiar when their attention was drawn towards some pictures in which she appeared in an obscene and objectionable manner with paraglider pilots in Paris," the mosque's deputy leader deputy Abdul Rashid Ghazi said.
"They have called on the government to punish and sack her from the Cabinet," he said.
The pictures, published in a local Urdu-language newspaper, show Bakhtiar in brightly-colored paragliding gear taking part in a tandem glide during a trip to France and then hugging an instructor upon landing.
The government has so far taken no action against the Red Mosque despite its open defiance of the authorities by setting up a parallel justice system and its promotion of "Talibanization."
Female students from a school attached to the mosque late last month kidnapped an alleged brothel owner and made her publicly repent. Their male counterparts briefly abducted two policemen at the same time.
The mosque's baton-wielding devotees have also set up so-called morality patrols telling local shops not to sell "un-Islamic" music and movies.
They have occupied a nearby children's library since January in protest at plans to demolish several illegally built mosques in Islamabad.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS