Girl jailed, accused of blasphemy
Girl jailed, accused of blasphemy
ISLAMABAD
A Christian girl was sent to a Pakistani prison after being accused by her furious Muslim neighbors of burning pages of the Islamic holy book, the Quran, in violation of the country’s strict blasphemy laws.
A police official said Monday there was little evidence that pages of the book had been burned and that the case likely would be dropped. But hundreds of angry neighbors gathered outside the girl’s home last week demanding action in a case raising new concerns about religious extremism in this conservative Muslim country.
Some human-rights officials and media reports said the girl was mentally handicapped. Police gave conflicting reports of her age as 11 and 16.
Part of immigrant law struck down
ATLANTA
Part of Alabama’s immigration law that ordered public schools to check the citizenship status of new students was ruled unconstitutional Monday by a federal appeals court that also said police in that state and Georgia can demand papers from criminal suspects they have detained.
The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Alabama schools provision wrongly singles out children who are in the country illegally. Alabama was the only state that passed such a requirement, and the 11th Circuit previously had blocked that part of the law from being enforced.
The court, however, upheld parts of immigration laws in Alabama and Georgia allowing law enforcement to check documents for people they stop.
Rover flexes arm for 1st time on Mars
LA CANADA FLINTRIDGE, Calif.
NASA’s Mars rover has taken another small step for robot-kind.
Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California say the rover Curiosity flexed its robotic arm Monday for the first time since before its November launch.
They say they’ll now spend weeks testing and calibrating the 7-foot-long arm and its extensive tool kit — which includes a drill, a scoop, a spectrometer and a camera, in preparation for collecting its first soil samples and attempting to learn whether the Martian environment was favorable for microbial life.
Attacks leave 100 dead in Syria
TEL RIFAT, Syria
Government forces pummeled the battered city of Aleppo with airstrikes and tanks and shelled parts of Damascus and southern Syria on Monday, killing at least 100 people during a major Muslim holiday, rights groups and activists said.
The violence escalated dramatically after a one-day lull on Sunday, the start of the three-day Eid al-Fitr holiday which marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan. The renewed fighting showed President Bashar Assad’s regime is not letting up on its drive to quell the 17-month-old uprising out of respect for the occasion.
Obama sticking to war strategy
WASHINGTON
President Barack Obama declared Monday he is sticking to his war strategy of using U.S. troops to advise and mentor Afghan forces, even as a suddenly growing number of Americans are being gunned down by the very Afghans they are training to take on insurgents.
In just the past 10 days, Afghan forces have attacked their coalition partners seven times, killing nine Americans. For the year there have been 32 such incidents, killing 40, compared with 21 attacks killing 35 troops in all of 2011.
Associated Press