South Asia Citizens Web

Mumtaz Hussain Qadri smiled as he surrendered to his colleagues after shooting Salman Taseer, the governor of the Punjab, dead. Many in Pakistan seemed to support his actions; others wondered how he’d managed to get a job as a state bodyguard in the carefully screened Elite Force. Geo TV, the country’s most popular channel, reported, and the report has since been confirmed, that ‘Qadri had been kicked out of Special Branch after being declared a security risk,’ that he ‘had requested that he not be fired on but arrested alive if he managed to kill Taseer’ and that ‘many in Elite Force knew of his plans to kill Salman Taseer.’

The historian Dorothy Thompson, who has died aged 87, was best known for her writing on the social and cultural aspects of the 19th-century Chartist movement. Her interest in the struggle of workers and women for rights had been awakened during her school days in suburban Bromley, Kent, when she was active in a communist youth group, and was deepened by her long engagement in radical politics.

NEWSWEEK’s Christopher Dickey chats with the octogenarian author and activist who refused to go home when protests in Cairo turned violent as pro- and anti-Mubarak forces attacked each other.

Key features of the law on Plastic Waste in India include:
It incorporates Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) for plastics waste
management for the first time, and is a significant change from the earlier
law made in 1999. (EPR makes waste as part of the life cycle of the
product/packaging, in legal and management terms)
1. plastic bags less than 40 micron banned
2. plastics bags will not be available free of cost to the consumer.
3. Introduction of a mandatory ’waste (…)

Members of Karachi’s civil society believe that parties, which have been historically progressive, can be nudged into action, even if for nothing but their own survival