Stoned to Death for Taking Part in a Beauty Paegent

According to a report in British newspaper The Daily Telegraph, a teenage Muslim girl who had participated in a Ukrainian beauty pageant was stoned to death.

The body of Katya Koren, the 19-year-old who went missing after being ‘punished’ for violating Sharia Law, was found in a forest.

Police reports suggest that Koren received head injuries, which may have caused her death.

The Telegraph reports that there were conflicting stories of the motive behind the killing. Local newspapers claimed she was stoned to death by hardline Muslims who were angered by her participation in the beauty contest.

But the police said her killing had nothing to do with sectarian violence and that the girl had been killed by a psychologically troubled classmate who had possibly raped her before battering her to death with a rock.

“A student did it, killing his classmate. There is no other underlying reason, neither religious nor linked with inter-ethnic conflicts,” said a senior policeman involved in the case.

The Daily Mail  reports that the glamorous Muslim beauty queen may actually have been battered with a rock by a crazed stalker after she spurned his advances.

According to a report in the Huffington Post, the detained teenager, who is of Crimean Tatar descent, was pressured by police into accepting the blame for the murder.

Though initial reports claimed Koren, like her assailants, was Muslim, officials like the chairman now say she is actually Christian with Russian roots.“The girl was not Muslim. All these reports are a provocation and fabricated news.”

Nepali Muslims Want Political Power

Muslims call for constitutional input

Sheikh Islam, a local community leader in Mantikar, a tiny mountain village of 1,000 inhabitants in Nepal, has said recently that the Muslims in Nepal are Nepali as well. “We are a growing segment of society and we hope to have our voices heard as political leaders write a new constitution,” he said.

According to the Nepal Central Bureau of Statistics, 4.2 percent of Nepal’s 30 million inhabitants are Muslim //www.cbs.gov.np/index.php

More than 90 percent live in the Terai – the southern plains bordering India – one of the country’s most densely populated and poorest areas, where they are predominant in the Banke, Parsa, Kapilvastu, and Rautahat districts.

Nepal’s Constituent Assembly (CA), [http://www.can.gov.np/en ] a legislative body elected in 2008 to draft the next constitution, is working to complete the task by 27 May – its 5th deadline.

More than five years since the end of a decade-long civil war between Maoist forces and the government, in which 13,000 people died,  many Muslims complain that they have been left out of the drafting process.

“Here in our village, we are struggling to make life tolerable and our community has hopes that Muslims will have a voice in the drafting process,” Sheikh Islam noted.

His optimism does not appear to be widely shared among Muslims, who are under-represented in government. The 2007 interim constitution was the first time in Nepal’s history that Muslims were officially represented. Of the 329 members of the interim parliament, four are Muslim – much lower than the 4.2 percent in the overall population.

Nepal’s political leaders aim to develop a federal system that can incorporate the more than 100 ethnic groups in the former Hindu monarchy.

“In many ways, the Muslims in Nepal struggle like everyone else, but with the rising fear of Islam across the world, Nepalese remain scared of Muslims, which is why we are pressing for change,” said Sheikh Islam.

Making things tougher is an incident that occurred on 24 April. Muslim activists and politicians demonstrated at the District Administrative Office in Kathmandu, a prohibited zone that is off-limits to protesters, demanding that their voices be heard in the drafting of the constitution and their identity and religious background be supported – 23 were detained. Some in the community perceive this as a crackdown on Muslim activism and further action has been threatened.

A broad alliance of 31 Muslim groups submitted a 10-point memorandum to the CA in mid-April, calling for the formation of a constitutional commission and a federation that recognizes the Muslim community as an integral aspect of Nepali society. They also asked the state to adopt a policy of positive discrimination towards the community.

“We would really like to be able to build more mosques, expand our traditions and be able to publicly practice our faith without being fearful of repression,” said Sadrul Miya Haq, a Muslim MP and coordinator of the National Muslim Struggle Alliance (NMSA). “Fundamentally, the Muslim demands are part of the need to create freedom of religion that does not keep Nepal only Hindu.”

As the deadline for Nepal’s constitution approaches,  many contentious issues among Nepal’s ethnic, caste, regional and political groups remain to be resolved.  Analysts warn of further political instability unless a constitution can be agreed upon soon, while NMSA says it will launch a second phase of protests on 2 May to ensure constitutional guarantees for Muslims.

How America is Tracking the World?

13 Ways You Can Be Tracked By the US Government

Privacy is eroding fast as technology offers government increasing ways to track and spy on citizens. The Washington Post reported there are 3,984 federal, state and local organizations working on domestic counterterrorism. Most collect information on people in the US. Here are 13 examples of how some of the biggest government agencies and programs track people.

One. The National Security Agency (NSA) collects hundreds of millions of emails, texts and phone calls every day and has the ability to collect and sift through billions more. WIRED just reported NSA is building an immense new data center which will intercept, analyze and store even more electronic communications from satellites and cables across the nation and the world. Though NSA is not supposed to focus on US citizens, it does.

Two. The FBI National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC) has more than 1.5 billion government and private sector records about US citizens collected from commercial databases, government information, and criminal probes.

Three. The American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Times recently reported that cellphones of private individuals in the US are being tracked without warrants by state and local law enforcement all across the country. With more than 300 million cellphones in the US connected to more than 200,000 cell phone towers, cellphone tracking software can pinpoint the location of a phone and document the places the cellphone user visits over the course of a day, week, month or longer.

Four. More than 62 million people in the US have their fingerprints on file with the FBI, state and local governments. This system, called the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), shares information with 43 states and 5 federal agencies. This system conducts more than 168,000 checks each day.

Five. Over 126 million people have their fingerprints, photographs and biographical information accessible on the US Department of Homeland Security Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT). This system conducts about 250,000 biometric transactions each day. The goal of this system is to provide information for national security, law enforcement, immigration, intelligence and other Homeland Security Functions.

Six. More than 110 million people have their visas and more than 90 million have their photographs entered into the US Department of State Consular Consolidated Database (CCD). This system grows by adding about 35,000 people a day. This system serves as a gateway to the Department of State Facial Recognition system, IDENT and IAFSIS.

Seven. DNA profiles on more than 10 million people are available in the FBI coordinated Combined DNA index System (CODIS) National DNA Index.

Eight. Information on more than 2 million people is kept in the Intelligence Community Security Clearance Repository, commonly known as Scattered Castles. Most of the people in this database are employees of the Department of Defense (DOD) and other intelligence agencies.

Nine. The DOD also has an automated biometric identification system (ABIS) to support military operations overseas. This database incorporates fingerprint, palm print, face and iris matching on 6 million people and is adding 20,000 more people each day.

Ten. Information on over 740,000 people is included in the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) of the National Counterterrorism Center. TIDE is the US government central repository of information on international terrorist identities. The government says that less than 2 percent of the people on file are US citizens or legal permanent residents. They were just given permission to keep their non-terrorism information on US citizens for a period of five years, up from 180 days.

Eleven. Tens of thousands of people are subjects of facial recognition software. The FBI has been working with North Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles and other state and local law enforcement on facial recognition software in a project called “Face Mask.” For example, the FBI has provided thousands of photos and names to the North Carolina DMV which runs those against their photos of North Carolina drivers. The Maricopa Arizona County Sheriff’s Office alone records 9,000 biometric mug shots a month.

Twelve. The FBI operates the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative (SAR) that collects and analyzes observations or reports of suspicious activities by local law enforcement. With over 160,000 suspicious activity files, SAR stores the profiles of tens of thousands of Americans and legal residents who are not accused of any crime but who are alleged to have acted suspiciously.

Thirteen. The FBI admits it has about 3,000 GPS tracking devices on cars of unsuspecting people in the US right now, even after the US Supreme Court decision authorizing these only after a warrant for probable cause has been issued.

The Future
The technology for tracking and identifying people is exploding as is the government appetite for it.

Soon, police everywhere will be equipped with handheld devices to collect fingerprint, face, iris and even DNA information on the spot and have it instantly sent to national databases for comparison and storage.

Bloomberg News reports the newest surveillance products “can also secretly activate laptop webcams or microphones on mobile devices,” change the contents of written emails mid-transmission, and use voice recognition to scan phone networks.

The advanced technology of the war on terrorism, combined with deferential courts and legislators, have endangered both the right to privacy and the right of people to be free from government snooping and tracking. Only the people can stop this.

Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and professor at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. He is also a member of the legal collective of School of Americas Watch.
Dr. S. Akhtar Ehtisham
(607) 776-3336
P.O. Box 469,
Bath NY 14810
USA
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