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| This week's massacre was in Thousand Oaks. PHOTO: Marcio José Sánchez / AP |
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- An ex-Marine shot dead 12 mostly young people at a California bar
- New US sanctions bit deep into an already-shaky Iranian economy
- An out-of-favour Emmanuel Macron called for a pan-European army to face threats from Russia, China and even America
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Tanzanian police clamped down on the country's gay community
- Hindus celebrated Diwali, the exquisite festival of lights
- The Madagascan presidential election was marred by voter-suppression
- San Franciscans voted for a 'homelessness tax' on local tech giants
- Theresa May's Brexit deal slipped further into the future
- As many as 12,000 bodies in 200 mass graves have been discovered in territory formerly held by ISIS
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Jack Ma called the trade war "the stupidest thing in the world"
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| A test case for religious freedom in Pakistan. PHOTO: Aamir Qureshi / AFP |
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By their very nature criminal trials are agonistic; concerned with competing and unreconcilable dualities. And acquittals (think OJ, or Zimmerman) are bittersweet affairs. For the past two weeks Pakistan has been gripped by an acquittal that cuts to the heart of the nation's struggle with religious freedoms. This week we ask; who is Asia Bibi and why do so many people want her dead?
A costly sip
We must begin in the downtrodden hamlet of Ittan Wali, some 30 kilometres outside of Lahore. It's June 2009, and being June the temperature reaches highs of 39°C during the day (at night it barely drops below 30°C). Aasiya Noreen - aka Asia Bibi - is picking falsa berries with other women from the village. She is asked to fetch water, which she does, but having drawn water from the well she drinks from a metal cup lying on the ground. A neighbour witnesses this apparent transgression and confronts her.
The problem is simple, yet irresolvable: Bibi's family are the only Catholics in a heavily-Islamic town. Pakistan's caste system dictates she is a lower order of human, a cleaner or sweeper at best. A crowd forms as Bibi is castigated for sullying another's cup (locals practice holds that christians must not use the same utensils as devout muslims).
An argument ensues: Bibi says that she defended the honour of her lord and saviour Jesus Christ, her neighbours say she committed blasphemy most foul, smearing the name of the prophet Mohammad. Either way, a mob descends on her home. She is badly beaten, saved from death by police intervening to arrest her.
Blasphemers and believers
Ratting people out to religious authorities over personal grudges is a practice as old as organised religion itself. There are numerous example of faith being subverted during the Spanish Inquisition - a practice mirrored today. For example, people living under ISIS rule would settle scores by reporting neighbours to the fearsome Hesba Division (religious police), an action likely to result in a death sentence. In Asia Bibi's case it was a feud over property damage that led a neighbour to denounce her.
After a year in jail without charge, Bibi became the first Pakistani woman to be sentenced to death for blasphemy. Religious freedom advocates and and their moderate urban allies were aghast at the ruling. Her husband Ashiq Masih successfully appealed the decision in the Supreme Court. They were not without allies in high places: the local governor Salmaan Taseer looked into the affair on behalf of the government. The governor believed Bibi and organised a presidential pardon. However, the religious establishment were of another mind and the pardon was blocked in the courts. Stalemate.
Bibi would spend nearly a decade of her life in solitary confinement. Her universe reduced down to a 2.4m x 3.0m cell while outside the case grew through symbolic resonance for both sides. Pope Benedict prayed for her. Civil rights groups campaigned to change the laws; fanatic religious groups bayed for blood. The blasphemy debate devolved into violence - in March 2011 the Minister of Minority Affairs Shahbaz Bhatti was assassinated for his leniency. Just months later the merciful Punjab governor Taseer was shot 26 times by his own bodyguard.
Catch and release
On October 31st a three-judge panel from Pakistan's Supreme Court found that Bibi had been falsely accused of blasphemy and promptly acquitted her. A spasm of protests wracked the capital. Supporters of the hardline Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan blocked arterial roads into Islamabad. The plume of burning cars hung over the city for days. More radical elements of the religious establishment have openly called for the assassination of not just Bibi, but the judges that acquitted her.
Prime Minister Imran Khan was hounded by radicals to keep Bibi in the country, and then hounded by moderates for bowing to those demands. Still, Bibi was released this week and has been squirrelled away by police in Islamabad. Her family are reportedly nearby. Once her final status is cleared by the courts she will be free to accept asylum in any number of the European countries that have offered it. It's believed her family will lodge a claim in the Netherlands. Their lawyer Saif-ul-Malook has already fled the country for fear of his life.
There is obviously no future for Asia Bibi in Pakistan, but hopefully something can be learnt from this. It is a small victory for those fighting intolerance in Pakistani society. Hopefully it won't be a fleeting one.
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| Halting Trump's legislative agenda. PHOTO: Getty |
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Washington divided, again
Having overdone it a bit in 2016, the gods of chaos delivered a less unexpected result in the US Midterms this time around. Democrats won back the House of Representatives in a 30+ seat swing but lost ground in the Senate, all largely as predicted.
Among the more noteworthy state-level decisions - Utah, Idaho and Nebraska voted to expand Medicaid. Florida re-enfranchised ex-prisoners who had been unfairly stripped of their voting rights. And the US Congress is now significantly more representative: more young people, more women, more minorities, more visibility for diverse sexual orientations.
Trump surprised many in his post-election speech by offering the olive branch of bipartisanship to Nancy Pelosi (infrastructure is shaping up as an area for easy agreement). But he didn't surprise anyone by swiftly following up the offer with a salvo of threats and innuendo. In the immediate aftermath Trump fired Jeff Sessions and got in a shouting match with CNN's Jim Acosta during a presser. The White House have since revoked Acosta's press-pass and fabricated a reason to justify it.
Theatrics aside, what do these results really mean? Gridlock. (Running off the assumption that this newfound lip-service to bipartisan spirit will not, in fact, hold.) House Democrats can't pass legislation without Senate Republicans. What they can do is empanel all manner of investigatory committees to harass America’s most easily-annoyed president. Legislative action on politically-sensitive issues will be glacial for the rest of Trump's first term.
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| Bill Gates and a jar of faeces. PHOTO: Reuters |
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Beyond Porcelain
Of all the necessities taken for granted in the developed world, functioning toilets may be the most common. But their existence is by no means a universal experience; billions live without the privacy and hygiene that a flushing toilet provides. UNICEF calculates that 2.9 billion are denied "improved sanitation" such as a latrine, and that nearly 900 million are forced to defecate in the open. One of the great challenges for aid organisations is managing the attendant health risks of poor hygiene: typhoid, cholera, dysentery, polio and more.
Enter Bill Gates. The billionaire philanthropist headlined the Reinvented Toilet Expo in China this week with an unusual prop. A jar of human excrement. In his speech Gates detailed the contents: 200 trillion rotavirus cells, 20 billion Shigella bacteria and 100,000 parasitic worm eggs. Untreated, such threats spread exponentially and kill as many as half a million children under the age of 5 annually. The expo featured 20 different designs for a toilet that will separate humans from the waste they produce. Some ingenious models turned the waste into potable water, others refined excrement into fertiliser.
The Gates Foundation has given more than $276M to support research and development of safe sanitation technologies.
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| . PHOTO: Bryan R Smith / AFP |
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Google searches its soul
Last week 20,000 Google employees walked out of 50 offices around the world over the company's inequitable sexual harassment policy. Staff were furious over Mountain View awarding a $90m severance package to an executive tarnished by a credible allegation of sexual misconduct. This week CEO Sundar Pichai relented, promising to drop the hated practice of forced arbitration. It's a step forward for Silicon Valley and the broader tech community which has struggled to address rampant sexual abuse.
Repairing atmospheric holes
It's not all bad news in inkl's Environment section (swipe left from Lead Stories in the inkl app). New research shows that the global move to ban Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the 80's worked. It appears as though the hole that our coolants and aerosols punched through the ozone layer is shrinking. In fact it should be entirely healed by the 2060s. While there has been minor backsliding on the use of harmful CFCs in rural China, on the whole we've done a fairly comprehensive job. Good one.
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| Saudi Arabia's latest victims in Yemen. PHOTO: Reuters |
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Kingdom of fear
The international pressure on Saudi Arabia reached critical mass last month. A journalist had been murdered and only lobbyists and fools maintained Riyadh's increasingly surreal excuses. Critics wondered whether the House of Saud would finally be held accountable for its actions - and for the first time the mainstream international media entertained the idea. Some dared to hope that the global community may just intervene to stop the vicious war and artificial famine in Yemen. Wishful thinking.
This week the Gulf Arab states announced that any peace negotiations would have to wait, and continued their advance on the port of Hodeidah. The assault on the city endangers hundreds of thousands of lives. The whole affair reminds us of a Kurt Vonnegut quote:
“During the Vietnam War, every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”
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Quote of the week
"Yes, I look bad now, but I’m being cured by good, Ukrainian doctors. And I know this: I look a lot better than the state of Ukrainian fairness and justice today." - A plucky Kateryna Handzyuk was badly scarred in an acid attack. The Ukrainian activist succumbed to her injuries this week. It's believed she was killed for her criticism of Russia.
Headline of the week
Midterms 2018: Republican who asked why it is unacceptable to call women 'sluts' loses seat to a woman - The Independent
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