Moborate

Every newspaper does year-enders, you know those things that sum up what happened in the past year that everyone already knows about and which only those who didn't bother following the news the whole year bother reading? We, on the other hand, couldn't give a rat's arse about year-enders. More importantly, we have a hard enough time keeping up with news as it happens and nobody ever pays us to dig stuff up from a whole year. In that spirit, we present 2011's final awards in the Bizarre Newspaper Headline Contest ... yeah, they're not a round-up of all the wonderful headlines that may have entertained us through the year, just the most recent ones we remember. In any case, here they are: 1. The What Else You Gonna Call It Headline Award Winner: The News Lahore on November 14 for its main lead about a poor donkey that was strapped with explosives that were set off via remote-control in a crowded market in Khyber Agency. Had this been the Express Tribune , we would ...

I had promised a comprehensive post about the unraveling of Husain Haqqani when it first happened. The different aspects of the case (technical, political, legal) that led to his resignation as Pakistan's ambassador to the United States - now commonly and irritatingly dubbed 'Memogate' - however, not only required a lot more time to deal with than I then had available, but has already been commented upon in bits and pieces by various analysts all over in newspapers, on television and on the net. Far more importantly, it now seems like a footnote in the rush of current events.   Eye of the storm: Husain Haqqani Because I had promised a post on it, I will state briefly what I thought of the entire episode as well as state some things that all should be aware of: *** The Unravelling of Husain Haqqani *** 1. The military establishment was never pleased with the appointment of Haqqani as Pakistan's ambassador to the US and had been gunning for his head right from the beginni...

For the last five or six days I had been contemplating how best to present the information contained on a website that someone had stumbled upon and forwarded to me. Not because one did not believe the authenticity of the information on it but because it left unanswered a number of questions. Not least of which was who was behind the website and to what end. I could make a fairly straightforward and educated guess about the persons behind the site even though the site's owners had chosen to disguise their ownership while registering it. Zulfiqar Mirza swears on the Quran (Photo: PPI) After today's "atom bomb" presser by the redoubtable former Sindh Home Minister / PPP Senior Vice President / Sindh MPA Zulfiqar Mirza , I think it is quite obvious who is behind the site. The site of course is the imaginatively titled terroristleaks.com and contains pretty much all the information Mr Mirza spoke about and brandished in his presser today. Not only does it have the facs...

The recent spate of violence, mayhem and bloodletting in Karachi has drawn a number of responses, ranging from the outraged to the resigned, the depressed and confused . And all of them are understandable on their own terms. It would be fair to say, however, that in a city as teeming, complex and diverse, there is no single truth about the causes for the flare-up that trumps all others. Every actor in this sordid saga can (and does) point to the actions of other actors as an excuse for their own villainy. 'The burnt out ends of smoky days' (Photo source: Times of Karachi) If the MQM operates like a mafia, there is also no denying the underworld nexus that parties like the PPP and ANP are using to carve out their own slice of turf in the city. If Karachi's law enforcement is inefficient, corrupt and politicized, it is not an aberration from the rest of Pakistan where the writ of the state has been steadily eroded. If politicians are venal and self-serving about their po...

Pakistan Today's cover May 3, 2011 It can be argued that the world’s most powerful countries are those that understand the difference between perception and reality, and attach equal importance to controlling both. Pakistan’s reality is a harsh, challenging one, but unless we move proactively and immediately to counter the further degradation of our already distorted image, it is about to get a lot worse. Consider this, from Al Jazeera English : “The Arab Spring has eroded many of the conventional assumptions about the relationship between dictators, Islamists and the West. In Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria, we heard dictators playing the Islamist card for three decades – "support us unless you want the terrorists to win". The reality has been quite different...Today, the US continues to lavishly fund the Pakistani military, while using drones and secret soldiers such as Raymond Davis to attack the extremist forces that the same regime supports. It is up to the US...

Just when you think Pakistani political discourse cannot sink any lower, your delusions are undermined with even more sleaze. Our SleazeMaster of the Day is none other than Sindh Home Minister, Dr. Zulfiqar Mirza , who has never been a stranger to spouting crude diatribes in an 'I'll say what I want and I don't care what you think!' fashion. He has understandably been under some pressure recently since his party, the Pakistan People's Party 's (PPP's) main parliamentary ally, the Muttaheda Qaumi Movement (MQM), had sort of made his removal from his current post or a restraining order on his mouth a precondition for continuing support to the government. He seems to have been particularly irked by a story in The News and Jang  on March 14 that he was about to be shown the door as Home Minister within 10-12 days and it was partly the intervention of his wife, Fehmida Mirza , the current Speaker of the National Assembly, that prevented an immediate boot. Nothi...

We had internally decided to steer clear of commenting on the rumours circulating on the internet - apparently for a few months now though they seem to have got more notice in the last few days - about President Asif Zardari 's alleged secret marriage to a Pakistani-American physician Dr. Tanveer Zamani . The reasons for this were rather simple: in the absence of any credible evidence (even the blogs asserting this information admitted that they had no real evidence and were basing their claims on hearsay), any comment would be mere speculation and not a lot different from tabloid sleaze. Secondly, there's a tricky line here between 'public interest' and using someone's entirely private life to somehow discredit them in the eyes of some. Although it can be argued that Zardari re-marrying could impact national politics and thus be of 'public interest', until that information is confirmed, it remains within the realm of the millions of unverified rumours circu...

Much can be said - and is being said - about the latest Wikileaks saga. Around the world, the two biggest issues being grappled with are the future of diplomacy - would interlocutors be open and frank with each other if they fear that what they say in private is going to find its way to the web - and the repercussions on sensitive regions such as the Middle East of some of the explosive confirmations of what people sort of suspected anyway about their leaders and American designs on the world. Unfortunately, most of what is being said in Pakistan is terribly uninformed, and swings from one extreme of 'it's all a big CIA conspiracy to undermine the Muslim world' on the one hand to 'how can you argue with this gospel truth?' on the the other. The former position does not understand the phenomenon of Wikileaks in the first place and conveniently ignores the fact that, so far, only some 500 of the more than 250,000 confidential cables have been released in the media....

Hmmmm. Does the Guardian know something we don't? A screen-grab off the Guardian 's Wikileaks database... Thanks to Missing Romance for sending it on to us: Ayatollah Ali Zardari?!? First it was the New York Times and BBC Urdu Service leading the world (and the gullible Pakistani media) to believe Saudi King Abdullah said Asif Zardari was "the biggest obstacle to Pakistan's progress", when he actually only said that Zardari was "the primary obstacle to the government's ability to move unequivocally to end terrorist safe havens" in Pakistan (okay, so the actual phrasing is far more baffling than the misquote). Now we have the Guardian trying to imply stronger links with Iran than anyone knew. Just doesn't pay to be Zardari does it? Oh wait, that came out all wrong...

Remember this story in The News on November 3 by its Group Editor, Shaheen Sehbai ? The front page 'expose' of an allegedly massive corruption scandal around the Reko Diq copper and gold mining project in Balochistan set tongues wagging all over Pakistan and among Pakistani expatriates abroad. The scale of the scandal was said to dwarf all previous scandals. The headline screamed: "$260 billion gold mines going for a song, behind closed doors"   Front page of The News on November 3, 2010 Now, in case you didn't follow the story or do not remember the exact words Mr. Sehbai used in his typically convoluted but bombastic style, let me briefly remind you what the investigative story said. Mr Sehbai begins by building conspiratorial suspense, clearly implying that President Zardari and his partymen are on the take to sell national wealth down the river to line their own pockets: "Quietly, and below the media radar, some 20 top corporate bosses and lobbyists of...