Davis holds diplomatic passport: Malik

ISLAMABAD: Interior Minister Rehman Malik on Wednesday informed the Upper House of Parliament that the accused, Raymond Davis, involved in the killing of Pakistani nationals, would be treated in accordance with the law of the land.

“Law will take its course and no favour will be done with the accused,” said the minister while responding to various point of orders raised by the senators.

Malik informed the House that the person arrested by the Punjab police is holding a diplomatic passport.

He also said that central and provincial governments would not hinder the court proceedings regarding Raymond Davis.

“We will follow whatever the court said and would provide all information desired by the court regarding the case of the US citizen involved in the killing of two Pakistanis.”

He added that on the instructions of the honourable court, the name of the Raymond Davis has been put in the Exit Control List (ECL).

The minister said that holding an open debate on such a sensitive issue would be inappropriate as it would influence the investigation being conducted by the Punjab police.

Malik said that the information will be shared with the House shortly as the investigation report from Punjab would reach within a few days.

He said it is unfortunate that some elements are spreading news about rifts in the federal government and provincial government on the issue of Davis.

“There is no rift between the two governments on the issue, we are on the same page and will follow whatever the law of the country said.”

Malik also dispelled the impression that federal government is interfering in the issue.

Pakistan-Egypt hockey series postponed as protests continue

LAHORE: The Pakistan Hockey Federation (PHF) has officially postponed the proposed tour of Egypt, citing the poor law and order situation presently gripping the African state.

The national squad were to tour Egypt from Feb 22 and in response Pakistan was to host them in April.

“After receiving advice from the federal government, the PHF has decided to postpone the tour and any further decision in this regard will be taken with the mutual consent of the Egyptian hockey authorities,” the PHF secretary Asif Bajwa said on Tuesday.

Bajwa further said the bilateral series might also be cancelled if the current situation in Egypt did not improve in the near future.

He said Egypt was interested in the series as it could help their team prepare for the Olympic qualifiers in April, the PHF official remarked.

If the Pakistan-Egypt contests did not materialise in the near future, the series would not serve the real purpose and thus it could be cancelled, Bajwa revealed.

The PHF was also interested in the series since it wanted the resumption of international hockey in Pakistan which has been not been possible for the last many years due to terrorism.

‘Jihad Jane’ terror suspect pleads guilty in US

PHILADELPHIA: A suburban woman who was the live-in caretaker for her boyfriend’s elderly father calmly told a US judge Tuesday that she had worked feverishly online under the name “Jihad Jane” to support Islamic terrorists and moved overseas to further her plan to kill a Swedish artist who had offended Muslims.

Colleen LaRose, 47, faces the possibility of life in prison after pleading guilty to four federal charges, including conspiracy to murder a foreign target, conspiracy to support terrorists and lying to the FBI.

LaRose, who spent long hours caring for the father, also was building a shadow life online from 2008 to 2009. According to prosecutors, LaRose “worked obsessively on her computer to communicate with, recruit and incite other jihadists,” using screen names including “Jihad Jane,” “SisterOfTerror,” and “ExtremeSister4Life.”

LaRose returned to the United States in November 2009 and was immediately taken into FBI custody at Philadelphia International Airport. She remained in secret custody until March, when her indictment was unsealed hours after Irish authorities swept up an alleged terror cell that included another American women, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, 32, of Colorado, and her Algerian husband. LaRose had previously denied the allegations against her and had pleaded not guilty before changing her plea Tuesday.

But prosecutors said LaRose and her co-conspirators had hoped her all-American appearance and US citizenship would help her blend in while carrying out their plans.

“Today’s guilty plea, by a woman from suburban America who plotted with others to commit murder overseas and to provide material support to terrorists, underscores the evolving nature of the threat we face,” said Assistant US Attorney General David Kris.

Speaking clearly but quietly, the 4-foot-11 (1.5 meter) LaRose told a judge Tuesday she had never been treated for any mental health problems and was entering her plea freely.

She whispered a few comments to her lawyers, some of them prompting a smile from public defender Mark T. Wilson.

Wilson declined to comment afterward.

“We’ll have a lot to say at sentencing,” he said.

LaRose and Paulin-Ramirez are the rare US women charged with terrorism. Paulin-Ramirez has pleaded not guilty and her lawyer, Jeremy Ibrahim, declined to say whether she will enter a plea or head to trial on May 2.

However, he believes LaRose’s plea will benefit his client’s case.

“With LaRose’s plea it removes some pretty prejudicial evidence from coming in at Jamie’s trial, evidence of making plans to kill someone, evidence of using the Internet to recruit enemies of America, that might otherwise become difficult for a jury to segregate in their minds who did what,” defense lawyer Ibrahim told The Associated Press.

In e-mails recovered by the FBI over 15 months, LaRose had agreed to marry an online contact from South Asia so he could move to Europe. She also agreed to become a martyr, the indictment said.

Her would-be spouse directed her in a March 2009 e-mail to go to Sweden to find the artist, Lars Vilks, who had depicted the Prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog, the indictment said.

Vilks has questioned the sophistication of the plotters but said he is glad LaRose never got to him.

Both women left troubled lives behind, LaRose having survived a suicide attempt in Pennsburg and Paulin-Ramirez, according to her mother, an abusive first marriage and a childhood marked by bullying.

LaRose, born in Michigan, moved to Texas as a girl and had married twice by age 24.

Her first marriage came at 16, to a man twice her age in Tarrant County, Texas. Both unions were long over by the time she met Pennsylvanian Kurt Gorman in 2005.

LaRose lived with Gorman and his father, about an hour northwest of Philadelphia, caring for the older man while Gorman worked. He called her a “good-hearted person” who mostly stayed around the house.

But her online ties grew to a loose band of allegedly violent co-conspirators from around the world, prosecutors said. They found her after she posted a YouTube video in June 2008 saying she was “desperate to do something somehow to help” ease the suffering of
Muslims, the indictment said.

Despite Web images that show LaRose in a Muslim head covering, Gorman said he never picked up on any Muslim leanings. She did not attended religious services of any kind, he said. Gorman said he sensed nothing amiss in their five-year relationship — until LaRose fled days after his father’s funeral.

LaRose had removed the hard drive from her computer and set off for Europe, according to the indictment. She had swiped Gorman’s passport and planned to give it to the co-conspirator she had agreed to marry, the indictment said.

It’s unclear how she was able to travel overseas, given that the FBI, presumably tipped to her online postings, had interviewed her in July 2009. According to the indictment, she then denied soliciting funds for any terrorist causes or making the postings ascribed to “Jihad Jane.”

LaRose left for an undisclosed location in Europe on Aug. 23, 2009.

By Sept. 30, 2009, she wrote online that it would be “an honour & great pleasure to die or kill for” her intended spouse, the indictment said. “Only death will stop me here that I am so close to the target!” she is accused of writing.

Among those LaRose allegedly recruited was Paulin-Ramirez, a single mother who also spent long hours on the Internet as “Jihad Jamie” before moving to Ireland on Sept. 11, 2009, with her 6-year-old son. She married the Algerian man the day she arrived.

According to her mother, Paulin-Ramirez had met her fourth husband online. She was pregnant by the time she and LaRose appeared in court together in the United States in May. On Tuesday, Ibraham declined to say if or when his client’s baby had been born.

Her older son is now in protective custody.

The mother has described her as a troubled single mother who had the “mentality of an abused woman.” When Paulin-Ramirez discussed jihad with her stepfather, a Muslim convert of 40 years, she said she would strap on a bomb for the cause, her mother said.

Paulin-Ramirez now faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted of aiding terrorists. Both she and LaRose remain in custody. LaRose’s sentencing has not yet been scheduled.

“The guilty plea in this case today demonstrates our need to remain vigilant to the continuing and evolving threats that we face in addressing terrorism,” said George C. Venizelos, special agent-in-charge of the FBI’s Philadelphia office.

Australians flee, jam shelters ahead of “catastrophic” cyclone

SYDNEY: Thousands of people fled their homes and crammed into shelters in northeastern Australia on Wednesday as the most powerful cyclone in the country’s history barreled toward a string of popular tourist cities lining the coast.

Police were forced to turn away people from some shelters which were already full, and engineers warned that even “cyclone proof” homes could be blown apart by winds expected to reach 300 per hour when it hits later on Wednesday.

“We are facing a storm of catastrophic proportions,” Queensland state premier Anna Bligh said after Cyclone Yasi was upgraded to a maximum-strength category five storm.

More than 400,000 people live in the cyclone’s expected path, which includes the cities of Cairns, Townsville and Mackay. The entire stretch is popular with tourists and includes Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

Satellite images showed Yasi as a massive storm system covering an area bigger than Italy or New Zealand, with the cyclone predicted to be the strongest ever to hit Australia.

“All aspects of this cyclone are going to be terrifying and potentially very , very damaging,” Bligh said.

The greatest threat to life could come from surges of water of up to seven metres above normal high tide levels along the coast at the town of Cardwell, she said. The storm is due to hit when the tide is high.

Mines, rail lines and coal ports have all shut down, with officials warning the storm could drive inland for hundreds of kilometres, hitting rural and mining areas still struggling to recover after months of devastating floods.

Outside a shuttered night market in the tourist city of Cairns, nervous backpackers tried to flag down cars and reach temporary evacuation centres at a nearby university.

“We are terrified. We have had almost no information and have never seen storms like this,” said Marlim Flagar, 20, from Sweden.

Struggling with a surge of people arriving at the centre, police later blocked more people from entering.

“We’re disappointed we can’t take any more people in but I’ve been through there but it’s just not safe,” Acting Inspector John Bosnjak told Reuters.

ABC media reported that all evacuation centres in the Cairns region were now at capacity and that several were closed.

The bureau of meteorology said in a bulletin that the impact of Yasi was “likely to be more life threatening than any experienced during recent generations”. At a sprawling shopping centre, hundreds of people streamed into a makeshift shelter carrying backpacks, blankets and food.

“We’ve only got a loaf of bread and a few other things, so we hope it doesn’t last too long or we’ll run out,” said local woman Kirsty Munro as she tried to gather her three children aged two, four and eight in the crush of people.

Windows Taped

Australia has strict building standards and Queensland suffers regular cyclones, but experts warned that many homes and buildings may not be able to withstand winds of this magnitude.

“The building regulations make things a lot better off at lower wind speeds but once you get to extreme cases you are in uncharted ground,” said Robert Leicester, a researcher at the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, who has studied the impact of previous cyclones.

Hundreds of people were lining up in a supermarket on the western side of Cairns, stocking up on staples such as bread, milk and tinned goods.

The cyclone is expected to make landfall at 10 pm local time on the Queensland coast between Cairns and Innisfail.

Its strength is on a par with Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005. Media reports said Yasi had knocked out meteorology equipment on Willis Island in the Coral Sea, 450 km east of Cairns.

Some rain was starting to fall and winds were picking up in Cairns. The main streets were largely deserted. Shops were closed and windows taped to stop shards of flying glass.

At a coffee shop on the Cairns waterfront, Scott Warren covered windows with black plastic sheeting and sandbags from a pickup truck, trying to work out how high he would need to build the barrier to escape a possible surge of seawater.

“We get a heap of cyclones every year, but this one has got everyone’s attention,” Warren said. “We’re hoping for the best, but expecting the worst to be honest.”

Power, Mobile Phones May Go Down

State premier Bligh warned that the mobile phone network may go down and said current estimates were that 150,000-200,000 people could lose power if winds topple transmission towers.

She also said that those in low-lying areas facing a risk of flooding from storm surges had “a window of opportunity” of a matter of hours to leave.

“Do not bother to pack bags. Just grab each other and get to a place of safety,” she said.

In Townsville alone, the storm surge could flood up to 30,000 homes, according to the town’s web site.

SC summons nine PCO judges on Feb 21

ISLAMABAD: A four-judge bench of the Supreme Court on Wednesday issued its verdict on a petition regarding the contempt of court cases against PCO judges, DawnNews reported.

The bench rejected the PCO judges’ petitions and has summoned nine PCO judges on February 21.

The verdict said contempt of court proceedings will go ahead against the PCO judges.

Moreover, the bench requested Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry to constitute a separate bench to hear a petition requesting to issue contempt notices to former military ruler Pervez Musharraf, former premier Shaukat Aziz and the corps commanders at the time of the imposition of the November 3, 2007 emergency.

The four-judge SC bench comprising Justice Mahmood Akhtar Shahid Siddiqui, Justice Jawwad S. Khwaja, Justice Khilji Arif Hussain and Justice Tariq Parvez had been hearing contempt cases against Justice (retd) Abdul Hameed Dogar, former chief justice of the Supreme Court; Iftikhar Hussain Chaudhry, former chief justice of the Lahore High Court; and eight sitting judges — Justice Sayed Zahid Hussain of the Supreme Court and Justices Khurshid Anwar Bhinder, Hamid Ali Shah, Zafar Iqbal Chaudhry, Hasnat Ahmed Khan, Syed Shabbar Raza Rizvi, Yasmin Abbasey and Jehan Zaib Rahim of different high courts.

The judges were facing contempt charges for taking oath under the PCO in defiance of arestraining order issued by a seven-judge bench on November 3, 2007, moments after theproclamation of emergency by Pervez Musharraf.

New Harry Potter movie bewitches box office

LOS ANGELES: The new Harry Potter movie enjoyed the biggest box office debut of the entire boy wizard series and the fifth largest ever, making 61 million dollars on its first day, estimates said Saturday.

“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One” made 24 million dollars in midnight Thursday screenings, followed by 37 million for the rest of the day Friday, according to Box Office Mojo.

If confirmed, the Potter movie will have had the fifth best opening day ever, behind the last two “Twilight” movies, “The Dark Knight,” and “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” Entertainment Weekly reported online.

The Friday figure would also be the biggest opening the Potter franchise, beating “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” which made 58.2 million in its debut last year.

Entertainment Weekly forecast that “Deathly Hallows” could make up to 156 million dollars on its first weekend, although a more conservative estimate would put it at 130-140 million dollars.

“Which as Ron Weasley would say, is ‘bloody brilliant,’ its box office analyst commented.

In the new movie evil Lord Voldemort and his evil henchmen control huge swathes of the wizarding world and Harry is constantly in danger.

Harry, Hermione and Ron leave behind the safety of school and their families and set out alone to seek out horcruxes, items in which Voldemort has hidden pieces of his soul, so they can destroy them and ultimately bring him down.

Much of the film revolves around a road trip, as the trio travel around Britain to try to stay safe, and focuses on the close friendship between the main characters, in particular the budding romance between Hermione and Ron.

It ends on a cliffhanger, however, as the final resolution will not be known until Part Two, which is due out in July. That will cover a final, explosive battle between Potter and his allies and Voldemort’s dark forces.

Box offices estimates by the more widely used box office tracker, Exhibitor Relations, are due out on Sunday, while full weekend figures are published on Monday. — AFP

Spirited Khan gives Pakistan squash silver

Aamir Atlas Khan’s great run at the 16th Asian Games squash competition came to a halt in the final courtesy a brilliant performance by Malaysia’s Mohammad Azlan Iskander.

World No. 15 Iskander overpowered Khan, the nephew of former world champion Jansher Khan, 11-6, 11-7, 11-6. Iskander along with Malaysia’s top women’s player Nicol David gave their country a squash double at the Games. David, who has been world number one for a record 56 consecutive months, arrived in Guangzhou having won the Commonwealth Games title in New Delhi in October.

“Every point felt so long and I have to keep myself focused all time,” Iskander said.

Khan engaged Iskander in long rallies in all the three games, but felt he had not enough energy left in him to compete in the final after playing Ong in the semifinals.

“Azlan played well and responded by picking the balls from all corners of the court,” Khan said.

“But I feel good that after a long time we had won at least silver medal.”

Pakistan, which ruled the squash world through Jansher and Jehangir Khan until the late 1990s, last time won gold in the Asian Games through Zarak Jehan Khan in 1998.

However, Khan’s silver-medal-winning performance will do the game in the country a world of good.