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It started with a retiree. Now the Women’s March could be the biggest inauguration demonstration.

Teresa Shook never considered herself much of an activist, or someone particularly versed in feminist theory. But when the results of the presidential election became clear, the retired attorney in Hawaii turned to Facebook and asked: What if women marched on Washington around Inauguration Day en masse?

She asked her online friends how to create an event page, and then started one for the march she was hoping would happen.

By the time she went to bed, 40 women responded that they were in.
When she woke up, that number had exploded to 10,000.

Now, more than 100,000 people have registered their plans to attend the Women’s March on Washington in what is expected to be the largest demonstration linked to Donald Trump’s inauguration and a focal point for activists on the left who have been energized in opposing his agenda.

Planning for the Jan. 21 march got off to a rocky start. Controversy initially flared over the name of the march, and whether it was inclusive enough of minorities, particularly African Americans, who have felt excluded from many mainstream feminist movements.

Organizers say plans are on track, after securing a permit from D.C. police to gather 200,000 people near the Capitol at Independence Avenue and Third Street SW on the morning after Inauguration Day. Exactly how big the march will be has yet to be determined, with organizers scrambling to pull together the rest of the necessary permits and raise the $1 million to $2 million necessary to pull off a march triggered by Shook’s Facebook venting.

The march has become a catch-all for a host of liberal causes, from immigrant rights to police killings of African Americans. But at its heart is the demand for equal rights for women after an election that saw the defeat of Democrat Hillary Clinton, the first female presidential nominee of a major party.

“We plan to make a bold and clear statement to this country on the national and local level that we will not be silent and we will not let anyone roll back the rights we have fought and struggled to get,” said Tamika Mallory, a veteran organizer and gun-control advocate who is one of the march’s main organizers.

More than 150,000 women and men have responded on the march’s Facebook page that they plan on attending. At least 1,000 buses are headed to Washington for the march through Rally, a website that organizes buses to protests. Dozens of groups, including Planned Parenthood and the antiwar CodePink, have signed on as partners.

Organizers insist the march is not anti-Trump, even as many of the groups that have latched on to it fiercely oppose his agenda.

“Donald Trump’s election has triggered a lot of women to be more involved than they ordinarily would have been, which is ironic, because a lot of us thought a Hillary presidency would motivate women,” said Dana Brown, executive director of the Pennsylvania Center for Women and Politics at Chatham University in Pittsburgh. “A lot of women seem to be saying, ‘This is my time. I’m not going to be silent anymore.’”

Trump Inaugural Committee spokesman Boris Epshteyn defended the president-elect’s popularity among women in an interview on CNN. While Trump did not receive the majority of women’s votes, he got an “overwhelming” number of them, Epshteyn said.

“We’re here to hear their concerns,” he said. “We welcome them to our side as well.”

That all this could grow out of a dashed-off post from her perch nearly 5,000 miles from Washington is amazing to Shook, who has booked her ticket and plans to be in the capital on Jan. 21.

“I guess in my heart of hearts I wanted it to happen, but I didn’t really think it would’ve ever gone viral,” said Shook, who is in her 60s. “I don’t even know how to go viral.”

Unsure of how to proceed in those initial few days, she said she enlisted the help of the first few women who messaged her to volunteer, some of whom independently also had an idea for a march. But as the march grew in prominence, it got caught up in a broader conversation in liberal circles about race and leadership, with activists and others criticizing that initial planning group for its racial makeup: Shook and all the women she tapped to help in the march’s nascent stages are white, she said.

Some also took issue with the name Shook had proposed, the Million Woman March, which was the name of a 1997 gathering of hundreds of thousands of black women in Philadelphia. The racial concerns set off a heated conversation on the group’s main Facebook page, with some African American women especially taking umbrage.

For her part, Shook said her aim was not to co-opt any other movement. It was just an idea that took hold after the victory of a president-elect caught on tape boasting of grabbing women’s private parts and the defeat of a woman who seemed to her much more qualified for the job. She said she had no idea of the race of the women she first contacted; in fact, she said, most had an image of Clinton as their Facebook profile photo.

Complicating matters, it became apparent that the march probably could not start at the Lincoln Memorial as Shook had proposed, since the inaugural committee has dibs on that space.

Overwhelmed and under pressure, the original organizers eventually handed the reins to a diverse group of veteran female activists from New York: Mallory, the gun-control activist; Linda Sarsour, executive director of the Arab American Association of New York; Carmen Perez, head of the Gathering for Justice, a criminal-justice-reform group; and Bob Bland, a fashion entrepreneur.

Together, they settled on a new name: The Women’s March on Washington, a nod to the 1963 demonstration that was a cornerstone of the civil rights movement. They even received the blessing of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s youngest daughter, Bernice King.

In the District, Janaye Ingram, the former executive director of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, has been working to secure permits and hash out logistics for the march, including ensuring there is a proper sound equipment and sufficient portable toilets.

People traveling to attend the march seem less concerned with behind-the-scenes politics than the chance to call for more family-friendly government policies, equal pay for women or reproductive rights. Some say they simply want to stand against the crass way Trump has spoken about women.

Lindsey Shriver, a 27-year-old former pastry chef who is an at-home mom in Ohio, said she was offended this election cycle by Trump’s rhetoric, which she characterized as “hateful and misogynistic.” She also wants to highlight the need for paid family leave and affordable child care.

“I realized that being a feminist in my own personal life wasn’t going to be enough for my daughters,” Shriver said.

Caroline Rule, 57, a lawyer living in Manhattan, says she will attend with her 15-year-old daughter. While she agrees with the pro-women message behind the march, she said she would probably participate in any march that pushed against Trump’s messages.

“I absolutely despise Donald Trump and everything he stands for,” she said.

Feminist icon Gloria Steinem has recently signed on as a march co-sponsor, and celebrities including Amy Schumer, Samantha Bee and Jessica Chastain say they plan to attend.

Feminist scholars say the march reflects an emerging view of feminism: one that is less defined by reproductive issues, such as birth control and abortion, and more by how the challenges faced by women intersect with those encountered by African Americans, the LGBT community and immigrants.

Still, reproductive rights will be a large part of the march, with Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America as key partners.

Hahrie Han, a political science professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara specializing in political organizations and political engagement, said it’s not all that surprising that individual women instead of an established organization founded this march. Established organizations all come with at least some political baggage.

“The challenge with having one organization brand it as its own is that each organization has its own image that draws some people and pushes others back away,” she said.

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The Problem With ‘Self-Investigation’ in a Post-Truth Era

No one would argue that Edgar Welch, the 28-year-old North Carolina man who loaded his car with weapons in early December and drove 350 miles to liberate the children he believed were being held in the basement of a Washington pizzeria, was a model citizen or even necessarily sane. But after a tragedy had been averted and he was in police custody, Welch transformed himself into something of an unlikely sage, stumbling on a surprisingly resonant explanation for the misguided quest that sent him ricocheting from internet conspiracy theories to armed vigilantism: He had decided, he said, to “self-investigate.”

At first, it sounds like a useless neologism: Aren’t all investigations self-investigations? But in today’s morass of disinformation — the “post-truth era” — the phrase reveals a radical new relationship between citizen and truth. Millions of people like Welch are abandoning traditional sources of information, from the government to the institutional media, in favor of a D.I.Y. approach to fact-finding. What they are doing is not quite investigating. It is self-investigating.

The phrase twins the American virtues of truth-seeking and individual resolve and suggests, at least superficially, an appealing, bootstrapping approach to information gathering. But an investigator tries to get to the bottom of things. For the self-investigator, there is no bottom, in large part because self-investigation — as I am defining it here — is confined to the internet. Proceeding from the assumption that the so-called experts are not to be trusted, self-investigators are pushed and pulled by the churn of memes and social media, an endless loop of echoes, reflections and intentional lies. With only themselves and their appetites as a guide, they bypass any information that doesn’t suit their predisposition and worldview. The self-investigator’s media diet is like an endless breakfast buffet, only without the guilt: Take what you want, leave what you don’t.

Our most famous self-investigator is, of course, our incoming president, Donald J. Trump; perhaps no one is more committed to embracing and trumpeting unproven claims from the internet. Six years ago, as he flirted with the idea of running for president, he became especially preoccupied with a theory being advanced by a right-wing extremist named Joseph Farah. A self-described ex-Communist, Farah presided over a nonprofit organization, the Western Center for Journalism, which was dedicated to promoting “philosophical diversity” in the news media, and now runs a popular website, WorldNetDaily, which bills itself as “America’s Independent News Network.” The Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that monitors U.S. hate groups, has a different point of view, calling Farah “the internet king of the antigovernment ‘Patriot’ movement.”

Somewhere along the way, the democratization of the flow of information became the democratization of the flow of disinformation.

Farah had floated plenty of specious arguments in the past, among them the claim that gay men orchestrated the Holocaust and that Muslims have a 20-point plan for conquering the United States by 2020. But the Farah campaign that captured Trump’s imagination held that America’s first black president, Barack Obama, might have been born outside the United States. Trump talked about this notion almost nonstop; he even said he was considering sending private investigators to Hawaii to prove that the president’s birth certificate was a forgery.

Farah later said he was surprised that a “multibillionaire” would make so much time for a side project like this. But single-minded persistence is the essence of self-investigation. Trump, for instance, also continued to insist on the guilt of the Central Park Five — five teenagers, four black and one Latino, whose convictions in the 1989 rape and beating of a jogger were later overturned — long after they had been exonerated by DNA evidence and the detailed confession of a serial rapist. Indeed, when Trump finally decided to let the birther issue go at an event at his new Washington, D.C., hotel in September, he also accused Hillary Clinton of starting the whole controversy. He was closing one self-investigation but providing fresh fodder for another.

The great promise of the internet was that it would bring democracies together, giving more people more access to more information, all beyond the control of any single authority. Curious citizens could develop a more nuanced understanding of what was going on; voters would be better informed; we would ferret out the truth from the bottom up and greater freedom would be the inevitable result. Way back in 1993, the activist computer programmer John Gilmore argued that the internet “interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”; as recently as 2011, activists still held out hope that access to Facebook and other social media could help bring about a peaceful revolution in the Middle East.

But somewhere along the way, the democratization of the flow of information became the democratization of the flow of disinformation. The distinction between fact and fiction was erased, creating a sprawling universe of competing claims. The internet can’t route around censorship when the people who use it remain in their own closed information loops, which is nothing more than self-imposed censorship.

A universe of competing claims is the perfect environment for the rise to power of a politician who has made a career of championing his own truths and manufacturing his own realities. Not that Trump will be our first president who likes to operate from a closed loop. Richard Nixon was broadly dismissive of the State Department and the “Ivy League liberals” at the C.I.A., relying instead on the wisdom of J. Edgar Hoover, the more like-minded head of the F.B.I.

In the age of Trump, data and evidence are just some unwanted roughage down at the end of the buffet.

Preserving the flexibility to pick and choose facts carries obvious strategic benefits. In the aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, President Bush and his senior aides wanted to be sure they received the intelligence they needed to justify their case for going to war in Iraq. They accomplished this by dismantling the information-filtering process that had been in place for decades. In its place, they created so-called “stovepipes” that fed raw intelligence from the field directly into the White House, thus routing around layers of professional analysts. Those bypassed analysts might have noted that much of the intelligence underpinning the administration’s assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction came from completely unreliable sources. Or they might simply never have passed on the intelligence in the first place.

But why accept someone else’s truth when you don’t have to? In 2002, a “senior adviser” inside the Bush administration told the journalist Ron Suskind (for an article later published in this magazine) that the mainstream media were part of “the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” But that’s not the way the world works anymore, the adviser explained. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

The adviser’s airy dismissal of discernible reality was weird and shocking when it was published in 2004, but today it feels a bit naïve. In the age of Trump, you don’t need to act to create your own reality; you can just tweet, whether it’s bogus crime and unemployment statistics or made-up accusations of widespread voter fraud. For that matter, you don’t even need to tweet; you can just retweet. In a world with no universally recognized standards for truth — a world in which journalists engaged in the study of discernible reality are dismissed as “dishonest” and “corrupt” — everything is fair game. Maybe Clinton’s campaign chairman takes part in occult rituals in which bodily fluids are consumed, maybe he doesn’t. Who’s to say, really? “U decide,” as the incoming national-security adviser, Mike Flynn, wrote in a tweet with a link to a post claiming that Clinton’s hacked emails contained enough evidence to put her away for life on charges including “sex crimes with minors.”

In the age of Trump, data and evidence are just some unwanted roughage down at the end of the buffet. Bush may have taken a selective approach to intelligence, but Trump, in his ongoing self-investigations, ignores it altogether, rejecting the daily national-security briefings traditionally provided to presidents-elect by the C.I.A. Even speaking under the cover of anonymity in a completely unguarded moment — is there such a thing as a guarded moment for Trump? — it’s impossible to imagine him drawing a line between “the reality-based” world and the conspiratorial world of self-investigation that he and his fellow travelers inhabit. It’s a distinction that he doesn’t recognize.

Edgar Welch was different. At a certain point, he stopped looking at the internet. All his hours in the Pizzagate feedback loop ultimately drove him not deeper down the rabbit hole, but out into the real world, where he could do some primary research. He was concerned that something very bad was happening in that pizzeria in Washington. When he decided to check it out for himself, and maybe even do something about it, Welch the self-investigator became an actual investigator, albeit a badly deluded, dangerous one. What he discovered — though not before he had fired off a couple of rounds, frightening a lot of people and possibly landing himself in prison for several years — was that he had been gorging on a lot of lies. Or, as he later told a reporter for The New York Times, coining another memorable phrase for our age, “the intel on this wasn’t 100 percent.” That, at least, was 100 percent true.

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Nearly 40 Killed in New Year’s Terrorist Attack in Istanbul

ISTANBUL, Jan 1 – A gunman opened fire on New Year revellers at a packed nightclub on the shores of Istanbul’s Bosphorus waterway on Sunday killing at least 39 people, including many foreigners, then fled the scene.

Some people jumped into the Bosphorus waters to save themselves after the attacker opened fire at random in the Reina nightclub just over an hour into the new year. Officials spoke of a single attacker but some reports, including on social media, suggested there may have been more.

The attack shook NATO member Turkey as it tries to recover from a failed July coup and a series of deadly bombings in cities including Istanbul and the capital Ankara, some blamed on Islamic State and others claimed by Kurdish militants.

Security services had been on alert across Europe for new year celebrations following an attack on a Christmas market in Berlin that killed 12 people. Only days ago, an online message from a pro-Islamic State group called for attacks by “lone wolves” on “celebrations, gatherings and clubs”.

The Hurriyet newspaper cited witnesses as saying the attackers shouted in Arabic as they opened fire at Reina.
“We were having fun. All of a sudden people started to run. My husband said don’t be afraid, and he jumped on me. People ran over me. My husband was hit in three places,” one club-goer, Sinem Uyanik, told the newspaper.

“I managed to push through and get out, it was terrible,” she said, describing seeing people soaked in blood.
The incident bore echoes of an attack by militant Islamists on Paris’s Bataclan music hall in November 2015 that, along with assaults on bars and restaurants, killed 130 people.

Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said 15 or 16 of those killed at Reina were foreigners but only 21 bodies had so far been identified. He told reporters 69 people were in hospital, four of them in critical condition.
“A manhunt for the terrorist is underway,” he said.

Nationals of Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Lebanon, Libya, Israel and Belgium were among those killed, officials said. France said three of its citizens were wounded.

Turkey is part of the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State and launched an incursion into Syria in August to drive the radical Sunni militants from its borders. It also helped broker a fragile ceasefire in Syria with Russia.

“As a nation, we will fight to the end against not just the armed attacks of terror groups, but also against their economic, political and social attacks,” President Tayyip Erdogan said in a written statement.

“They are trying to create chaos, demoralize our people, and destabilize our country … We will retain our cool-headedness as a nation, standing more closely together, and we will never give ground to such dirty games,” he said.

There has been no claim of responsibility, but Erdogan linked the attacks to developments in the region where Turkey faces conflict across its frontier in Syria and Iraq. Some three million Syrian refugees currently live on Turkish soil.

The Reina club is one of Istanbul’s best known nightspots, popular with locals and foreigners. Some 600 people were thought to have been inside when the gunman shot dead a policeman and civilian at the door, forced his way in and then opened fire.

Istanbul Governor Vasip Sahin said the attacker used a “long-range weapon” to “brutally and savagely” fire on people, apparently referring to some form of assault rifle.

U.S. President Barack Obama, on vacation in Hawaii, expressed condolences and directed his team to offer help to the Turkish authorities, the White House said.

“POLICE MOVED IN QUICKLY”
Dozens of ambulances and police vehicles were dispatched to the club in Ortakoy, a neighbourhood on the city’s European side nestled under one of three bridges crossing the Bosphorus and home to nightclubs, restaurants and art galleries.

“I didn’t see who was shooting but heard the gun shots and people fled. Police moved in quickly,” Sefa Boydas, a Turkish soccer player, wrote on Twitter.

“My girlfriend was wearing high heels. I lifted her and carried her out on my back,” he said.
Hurriyet quoted Reina’s owner, Mehmet Kocarslan, as saying security measures had been taken over the past 10 days after U.S. intelligence reports suggested a possible attack.

Turkey faces multiple threats including spillover from the war in Syria. Beside its cross-border campaign against Islamic State, it is fighting Kurdish militants in its southeast.

The New Year’s Day attack came five months after a failed military coup, in which more than 240 people were killed, many of them in Istanbul, as rogue soldiers commandeered tanks and fighter jets in a bid to seize power.

More than 100,000 people, including soldiers and police officers, have been sacked or suspended in a subsequent crackdown ordered by Erdogan, raising concern both about civic rights and the effectiveness of Turkey’s security apparatus.

On Dec. 28, the Nashir Media Foundation, which backs Islamic State, urged sympathisers to carry out attacks in Europe during the holiday period and to “replace their fireworks with explosive belts and devices, and turn their singing and clapping into weeping and wailing”.

A month ago, a spokesman for Islamic State urged supporters to target “the secular, apostate Turkish government”.
Turkey has seen repeated attacks in recent weeks. On Dec. 10, two bombs claimed by Kurdish militants exploded outside a soccer stadium in Istanbul, killing 44 people.

A car bomb killed at least 13 soldiers and wounded 56 when it ripped through a bus carrying off-duty military personnel in the central city of Kayseri a week later, an attack Erdogan also blamed on Kurdish militants.
The Russian ambassador to Turkey was shot dead as he gave a speech in Ankara on Dec. 19 by an off-duty police officer who shouted “Don’t forget Aleppo” and “Allahu Akbar”.

In June, around 45 people were killed and hundreds wounded as three suspected Islamic State militants carried out a gun and bomb attack on Istanbul’s main Ataturk airport.

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Held MPA implicates Sattar in May 12 case

KARACHI, Jan 1: An interned provincial lawmaker now belonging to the Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan has not only confessed to his involvement in the May 12, 2007 mayhem but also implicated party chief Dr Farooq Sattar in one of the most violent episodes of the country’s history, it emerged on Saturday.

Kamran Farooq, a member of the Sindh Assembly from Karachi, was arrested by the paramilitary Rangers on Dec 16 and was booked in two cases for allegedly carrying grenades and unlicensed weapons. He was one of the absconders in several cases pertaining to the May 12 violence.

He had recorded his confessional statement before a judicial magistrate under Section 164 of the criminal procedure code on Dec 20.

According to his statement, a copy of which is available with Dawn, suspect Farooq stated that he joined the MQM in 2000 and worked as the party’s “unit and sector in charge”. He added that he was given a party ticket to contest the 2013 general elections on the recommendation of the then chief of the Karachi Tanzeemi Committee, Hammad Siddiqui.

About his involvement in the May 12 events, he told the magistrate that a meeting was held on May 10, 2007 at the party’s Nine Zero headquarters in the presence of Dr Farooq Sattar, Mr Siddiqui and other leaders. He said that the “party leadership” had asked him and other “sector in charges” to ensure that lawyers could not reach Karachi airport to welcome the then deposed Chief Justice of Pakistan Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry on May 12, 2007.
He testified that he along with his armed accomplices blocked many thoroughfares on May 12 and resorted to firing leaving many wounded.

In April 2008, according to the statement, another meeting was held at the party’s headquarters in which he was told that Karachi Bar Association secretary Naeem Qureshi was planning to stage protests against the party as he was a complainant in one of the May 12 cases. He was asked to teach a ‘lesson’ to Mr Qureshi and he sent some workers to torch a building — Tahir Plaza — which housed the office of the KBA leader.
Tahir Plaza was set on fire on April 9, 2008 in which a lawyer and his five clients died.

He also told the magistrate about his involvement in targeted killing, extortion, providing arms licences to alleged hitmen during the tenure of Aftab Shaikh, the then adviser to the Sindh chief minister on home affairs, purchasing weapons, china-cutting and other offences.

Karachi Mayor Waseem Akhtar, MPAs Mohammad Adnan, Kamran Farooq and others were booked in cases related to rioting and attempted murder during the May 12, 2007 mayhem, in which around 50 people were killed and over 100 wounded.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for the MQM-Pakistan rejected the confessional statement of MPA Kamran Farooq who was in Rangers custody and said that such statements were part of the party’s media trial. The spokesman also slammed a plot to implicate Dr Sattar in false cases.

Another MPA gets interim bail in Baldia fire case

The administrative judge of the antiterrorism courts in Karachi on Saturday granted interim pre-arrest bail to MQM lawmaker Rauf Siddiqui in the Baldia factory fire case.
Applicant’s lawyer Shaukat Hayat submitted that a recently arrested suspect, Abdul Rahman, in his confessional statement named the applicant for allegedly lodging a case against the factory owners.

The counsel said that the applicant was neither nominated in the FIR nor named in the charge-sheets or any report of the joint investigation teams. The FIR against the factory owners was lodged by the SHO concerned on behalf of the state but the applicant was being framed in the present case.

However, since the detained suspect named the MPA in his confessional statement on the basis of hearsay, the applicant was ready to join the investigation and sought pre-arrest bail, the counsel added.

After a preliminary hearing, the judge in charge of the ATC-II granted him pre-arrest bail against a surety bond of Rs100,000 till Jan 12.

It may be recalled that Abdul Rehman alias Bhola, a key suspect in the factory fire case, confessed before a judicial magistrate on Dec 22 that he along with Zubair alias Charya and other accomplices set the factory on fire on the instruction of Hammad Siddiqui since the factory owners had refused to pay extortion.

He said that after the incident Rauf Siddiqui, then provincial minister for industries, allegedly got a case registered against the factory owners. According to the suspect, he came to know later that both Rauf Siddiqui and Hammad Siddiqui received Rs40 to Rs50 million from the owners in order to weaken the case against them.

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World’s highest bridge opens to traffic in China

The world’s highest bridge has opened to traffic in China, connecting two provinces in the mountainous southwest and reducing travel times by as much as three-quarters, local authorities said Friday.

The Beipanjiang Bridge soars 565 metres (1,854 feet) above a river and connects the two mountainous provinces of Yunnan and Guizhou, the Guizhou provincial transport department said in a statement on its official website.

The bridge cut travel times between Xuanwei in Yunnan to Shuicheng in Guizhou from more than four hours to around one, a truck driver surnamed Duan was quoted by the official news agency Xinhua as saying after the bridge opened Thursday.

It was “very convenient for people who want to travel between these two places”, he added.

The 1,341-metre span cost over 1 billion yuan ($144 million) to build, according to local newspaper Guizhou Daily.

It overtook the Si Du River Bridge in the central province of Hubei to become the world’s highest bridge, a separate statement by the provincial transport department said earlier.

Several of the world’s highest bridges are in China, although the world’s tallest bridge — measured in terms of the height of its own structure, rather than the distance to the ground — remains France’s Millau viaduct at 343 metres.

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Chinese firm to start cleaning up Karachi by early February

Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah met with chairman Fan Manguao of the Changyi Kangjie Sanitation Group, the firm recently contracted to provide garbage clean-up and disposal services in Karachi, in China on Friday

During the meeting, the company assured CM Shah that they would start their work in two districts of Karachi by the last week of January.

“[Our] machinery will reach Karachi on January 6 and within 10 days of its arrival, it will be cleared from the port,” said Manguao.

He added that his company will be able to start work most probably by the end of January or the first week of February.

“We will distribute dustbins home to home, and our lifting vehicles will collect them from the [designated] areas,” explained the chairman.

The Sindh government has been struggling to contain Karachi’s garbage emergency. In neighbourhoods across the city, mounds of garbage can be seen steadily piling up, often creating hurdles for foot and vehicular traffic.

There is no reliable data on the amount of solid waste the metropolis generates on a daily basis, though estimates suggest it runs into thousands of tonnes.

Much of the waste ends up in dumps, alleyways and open spaces, where it remains for weeks if not longer. Some of it is burnt in bonfires that are feared to create health and environmental hazards.

MoU to produce electricity from garbage signed
The Sindh government also signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with a Chinese company to produce electricity from garbage and agricultural waste in Karachi and other parts of Sindh.

The agreement was signed during CM Shah’s visit to the China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation (CSIC) in Beijing.

Under the MoU, CSIC and its sister company Dewe Group Holding Co. Ltd (DGHOL) will produce electricity from garbage lifted in Karachi, a spokesman for the Sindh CM told DawnNews.

The Chinese company will also generate power from agricultural waste collected from rural areas of Sindh, he said.
Besides shipbuilding, the CSIC has expertise in producing electricity from garbage. It is also involved in producing wind power, the spokesman said.

The agreement was signed by Sindh Board of Investment Chairperson Naheed Memon, CSIC Vice President Qian Jianping and DGHOL Vice President Ji Yutao.

The two companies will send their experts to Sindh to asses the investment required and decide a way forward.

During the meeting, CM Murad also invited CSIC to initiate a wind power generation project in Sindh. A team from the Chinese company will visit Sindh to look into wind power, the CM’s spokesman said.

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Why Astola is a Hidden Gem of Pakistan

Everyone is familiar with the beauty of Pakistan’s northern areas, but few have taken the time to discover the mesmerising charm of the country’s coast in the south.

I had never thought of exploring the coast either, until I met the famous British adventurer Tracy Curtin-Taylor who told me that she had never witnessed a coastline this beautiful.

I planned a trip with my friends to Astola Island, one of the many hidden gems of the part of the Arabian Sea that touches Balochistan.
We set off on our journey on a cool, November morning on a boat from Pasni, a fishing town 35km away from Astola. As we sailed and gained some distance, I looked back at the town: the Jabl-e-Zareen (Beautiful Mountain) was overlooking the pristine beach and the small buildings surrounded by golden sand dunes resembled something straight out of the Arabian Nights.

The golden sand dunes of Pasni in the distance as we were on our way to Astola.

The boat captain told us that the sea is calm during the winter season, making it the perfect time to visit the island.
Once we were in the open sea, we were welcomed by seagulls calmly flying above our heads and a fishing boat nearby, where a man was pulling up his net. The seagulls were silently observing, waiting for the right moment to dive in and steal a fish or two. A few of them succeeded, and it was exciting to see.

As we sailed further ahead, I saw larger fishing boats passing by. My friend Bakhshi, who works at the fishery department, told us that these boats are called “launches”.

Each boat is operated by a team of 15 to 20 men, who catch fish the whole day. The fish caught on the shores of Pasni is famous and is also exported.

As we neared Astola, my first sight of the island was of a tall, oddly-shaped rock standing in the middle of the sea. But as we inched closer, the crystal clear, turquoise water took my breath away and I had to remind myself that I was still in Pakistan and not at a beach on the Mediterranean.

Astola is also known as Jezira Haft Talar (Island of the Seven Hills) because of the small, rocky mountains that stretch across the 15sq km island.

The reason why the island’s exquisite beauty has remained untarnished is because of its remote location. From Karachi, it is a seven-hour drive to reach Pasni, from where you have to take a three-hour boat ride to Astola.

Once we reached the island, I wanted to see it from a height and so I hiked up one of the hills. The climb was tricky since the mud was soft and the rocks slippery.

After some struggle, I found a well-treaded path. The view was worth it when we reached the top as the island and its shores were even more alluring from above.

It was a thrilling experience climbing up and seeing this amazing view.

The colour of the water and pattern of the beach changes throughout the day depending upon the tide. The seabed is visible to about the depth of 20 feet.

There is no standing structure on the island except for the remnants of a lighthouse the government had built in 1983.

After a few hours on the hills, we climbed down and got on the boat to explore the other sides of the island. I found every side of the island to be different and more beautiful than the other. The southern side did not have a beach.

We went snorkeling and it was startling to see so many multi-coloured fish. When we went back on the boat, the fishermen showed us some of the fish they had just caught.

Since there are no facilities on the island, we had to pack everything from water, food, to camping supplies. We had lunch on our boat with jellyfish swimming around with their tentacles floating behind them.

One of my friends got stung and was in pain for the next 10 hours. People who are visiting for the first time should be aware that jellyfish only look pretty.

Vegetation on the island is sparse and consists of shrubs and large bushes that come to life when it rains. The island has no source of fresh water of its own. Keekar is the only tree which can survive the harsh conditions.

Astola is a tough yet popular destination for camping and eco-tourism. People usually set up camp at the beach and go snorkeling, deep sea diving and even hunt fish under water.

As Astola receives more recognition, the number of tourists will increase. Let’s hope that this doesn’t damage the island’s beauty.

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Afghan Response to Female Pilot’s U.S. Asylum Case: ‘I Am Sure She Lied’

KABUL, Afghanistan — Contending that her “life isn’t at risk at all,” military officials in Afghanistan have asked that the United States reject the asylum case of Capt. Niloofar Rahmani, the first female fixed-wing pilot in the Afghan Air Force.

On Thursday, Captain Rahmani revealed that she had applied for asylum this summer, saying she felt unsafe in Afghanistan, where she and her family have received death threats. For the last 15 months, she has been training at air bases in Arkansas, Florida and Texas.

Captain Rahmani said that her Afghan male colleagues in the air force treated her with contempt and that she felt at risk.

“Things are not changing” for the better in Afghanistan, Captain Rahmani said in an interview on Friday. “Things are getting worse and worse.”

Gen. Mohammad Radmanish, a Defense Ministry spokesman, disputed her claims of being in danger.

“I am sure she lied by saying she was threatened, just to win the asylum case,” General Radmanish said on Sunday. “It is baseless that she claimed her life was at risk while serving in the Afghan Air Force.”

“Since Captain Rahmani’s claim is new, we expect her to change her mind and return to her own country and continue serving as a pilot,” the general said. “We request from our American friends and government to reject her asylum case and send her back, because knowing the truth, Captain Rahmani’s life isn’t at risk at all.”

The American government has celebrated Captain Rahmani as an example of its success in advancing women’s rights in Afghanistan. In 2015 the State Department honored her with its annual Women of Courage award, and Michelle Obama praised her courage.

In Afghanistan, few supported her decision, and there were worries that her asylum request would affect the process of training Afghan pilots outside the country.

“Captain Rahmani’s claim that she was harassed in the workplace is not true, because in the air force all the pilots and staff are well-educated and highly trained people,” said Col. Ayan Khan, a helicopter pilot in the Afghan Air Force. “How can they harass their female colleague who serves along them?”

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A Female Afghan Pilot Soars and Gives Up

Perhaps no Afghan’s story better embodied America’s aspirations for Afghanistan than that of Capt. Niloofar Rahmani, the first female fixed-wing pilot in the fledgling Afghan Air Force.

She was celebrated in Washington in 2015 when the State Department honored her with its annual Women of Courage award. “She continues to fly despite threats from the Taliban and even members of her own extended family,” the first lady, Michelle Obama, said in a statement.

On Thursday, on the eve of her scheduled return to Afghanistan from a 15-month training course at Air Force bases in Texas, Florida and Arkansas, Captain Rahmani broke a sobering piece of news to her American trainers. She still wants to be a military pilot, but not under her country’s flag. This summer, she filed a petition seeking asylum in the United States, where she hopes to eventually join the Air Force.

“Things are not changing” for the better in Afghanistan, Captain Rahmani said in an interview on Friday. “Things are getting worse and worse.”

Captain Rahmani was 10 years old when the United States toppled the Taliban government in Afghanistan in 2001. As the Bush administration set out to rebuild a country scarred by war, it made promoting women’s rights a priority, a bold undertaking in a deeply conservative nation where women had been barred from schools and the work force.

During her teenage years, Captain Rahmani was inspired by America’s goal of emancipating Afghan women. When she was 18, with the support of her parents, she eagerly enlisted in her country’s air force. “It has been always my dream to do this job, be a pilot,” she said. “It made me really proud.”

The American government hailed her example as a bright spot in the difficult effort to build the Afghan Air Force, which has cost American taxpayers more than $3.7 billion. The endeavor has been marred by delays, logistical challenges and wasteful spending.

After photos of Captain Rahmani wearing tan combat boots, a khaki flight suit, a black head scarf and aviator glasses were published in the press when she earned her wings in 2013, she and her relatives in Kabul began receiving death threats. At work in Afghanistan, she said, she felt unsafe because most of her male colleagues held her in contempt. Still, she put on a brave face during the early months of her training in the United States, which began in September 2015.

“I would just want to encourage all of the females around the world, especially in my country where the females have no rights, to just believe in themselves and to have more self-confidence,” Captain Rahmani told an American military journalist in March 2015 during a visit to a Marine Corps air station.

But that resolve has eroded in recent months. The Afghan Air Force stopped paying her salary shortly after the American training program began, Captain Rahmani said. When female workers at an airport in southern Afghanistan were slain this month, she was horrified to hear some members of Parliament quoted as saying the women would have been safe if they had stayed at home.

This new phase of her life in the United States starts with trepidation. “It makes me really nervous,” she said of having her asylum petition pending when President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to bar Muslims from entering the United States. Still, Captain Rahmani said she sees the United States as a place where women can aspire to accomplish great things.

She doesn’t believe that to be true of her homeland. Pursuing pathbreaking goals in today’s Afghanistan as a woman is futile, she said. “It’s better to keep it as a dream and not let it come true.”

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Out and about: Jiyalas throng to welcome Zardari

KARACHI, Dec 24: Like devotees walking to a pilgrimage, a large number of Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) workers marched towards the old terminal of the Karachi airport from Star Gate to welcome their co-chairperson, Asif Ali Zardari, on Friday.

It appeared like a festival. People from all walks of life – from students and housewives to parliamentarians and corporate bosses – everyone who gathered, sported a smile alike, making victory signs to the cameras trying to focus on them.

“Bibi [slain former prime minister Benazir Bhutto] ka shohar, Bilawal ka baap aa raha hai. Khushi to bohat hai [The husband of Benazir Bhutto and the father of Bilawal is coming. It is immense happiness],” Kulsoom Baji, a jubilant worker of the party from its stronghold, Lyari, said, tailing her sentence with “Allah… “ as she clasped her hands together in a thanksgiving manner.

Slogans such as ‘Sub pay Bhari, Shairon ka Shikari, Phir agli Baari [Heavy on all, the hunter of lions, another turn for him]’ were raised with zeal. Nonetheless, the slogan of ‘Jiye Bhutto [Long Live Bhutto]’ maintained the ambience as workers religiously respond to it.

As the half of the nearly one-kilometre-long and 50-foot-wide Star Gate Road was allocated as Jalsa Gah, it was full to the brim with people at the peak time when Zardari spoke from behind a bullet-proof glass shield atop the same truck his slain wife used when she returned to the country.

Security was tightened around the premises since a day earlier. Public was allowed entry and exit from a single point. PPP leaders, including Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah, used the other road passing through the PIA engineering department building.

While a large number of people had gathered at the event, most of them appeared less interested in listening to the speech of their leader and were more engrossed in taking selfies. Nonetheless, some transmitted the speech and activities at the gathering live on social media through their smartphones.

Besides the workers, street vendors selling samosas, coconut pieces, paapar and other eatables made the most of the situation to boost their sales. They strolled about through the road, attracting customers with their unique calling.

As Zardari concluded his speech, the public walked back to the exit points all at once, resulting in a traffic mess on the road and the connecting Sharae Faisal. Traffic personnel were seen trying to handle the situation. However, most of the people seemed to be in a hurry as they had to catch a flight about to take off at the nearby Jinnah Terminal.

Traffic mess
Residents of Karachi faced immense difficulty in reaching the airport as the most important artery of the city got choked.

However, the Karachi traffic police had issued a diversion plan two days before Zardari’s arrival. During the procession, when thousands of PPP supporters had thronged the old terminal, Star Gate and Drigh Road got completely blocked due to parking of cars on the roads. People heading towards and leaving the airport also remained stuck at the Jinnah International Airport until the crowd dispersed.