With just two weeks until Pakistan's general election, a muted campaign is set to heat up with Benazir Bhutto's husband taking to the stump for the first time since her assassination.
Asif Ali Zardari will battle for votes after the 40-day Muslim mourning period for his wife finishes on Thursday, with campaign preparations already under way for the Feb. 18 polls, his Pakistan People's Party (PPP) said.
Campaigning has been almost non-existent since the opposition leader's death in a suicide attack on Dec. 27, with the only sign of activity being the colorful political banners that hang in every town and village.
"Candidates are conducting their own electioneering in their constituencies but the co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari will start the election campaign from February 7 after the Chehlum," spokesman Farhatullah Babar said.
The Chehlum is the ceremony marking the end of mourning.
"There is lot of frustration and tempo [of the campaign] is very slow. From one point of view it is not good but then from another angle the sympathy element is very strong," Babar said.
Zardari's first major engagement is a public meeting on Saturday in the rural town of Thatha in Sindh Province, senior party official Qaim Ali Shah said.
"He will also likely hold a rally in Karachi before heading off to Punjab," the country's most populous province, Shah said.
Western diplomats have warned of possible unrest at events to mark the end of mourning for Bhutto.
But the political scene has been eerily quiet since her death.
Opposition parties say the government of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is talking up the threat to candidates, such as former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, in a bid to stifle electioneering.
Interior ministry spokesman Brigadier Javed Cheema said the threat was genuine and that authorities were making "foolproof security arrangements for politicians who face threats from terrorism."
"Political parties have been advised to eschew large rallies and processions and restrict their public meetings at specified venues," Cheema said.
"These precautionary measures are the need of the hour in view of terrorist attacks including the assassination of major national leader Benazir Bhutto," he said.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
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
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
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS