clinton Hints zaradari blinks tax on rich for flood

ISLAMABAD: A one-time flood tax will have to be imposed on the well-to-do and people with means to help shore up the relief and rehabilitation efforts, President Asif Ali Zardari said on Wednesday.

Addressing a women’s roundtable meeting consisting of federal ministers, parliamentarians and representatives of non-government organisations for the flood affectees at the Presidency, Zardari said, “Unless we are prepared to share bread with our grief and disaster-stricken brethren, we should not expect others to help us.”

He said he had already advised the government to tap indigenous resources wherever possible, adding that it should be done across-the-board and in a transparent manner….more

Obama’s inexperience deadly in South Asia

Kolkata, India. While Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is still congratulating the Pakistani government for “resolving its crisis,” by which she means an internal political spat; the real crisis is only getting worse. The Taliban continues its march through Pakistan, imposing Sharia law and persecuting non-Muslims as it does, while President Barack Obama continues to happily search for the “moderate Taliban” among them. And that’s not all.

Yesterday, police here foiled an attempted terrorist bombing by a former member of the Pakistani Rangers paramilitary force. According to Kolkata police and the Indian Border Security Force (BSF), Shahbaz Ismail, flew from Karachi, Pakistan northwest of India to the Bangladesh capital of Dhaka, which borders the Indian state of West Bengal that has Kolkata as its capital. He slipped across the border near Murshidabad not far from this sprawling metropolitan area, the world’s 14th largest. The BSF got a tip about Ismail and alerted the Kolkata police. “We found out that [Ismail] would go to Fairlie Place to buy a rail ticket,” a police spokesman said. Read more

Clinton Says U.S. Seeks Unity With Muslim World

TOKYO, — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Tuesday that the Obama administration will make “a concerted effort” to restore the image of the United States in the Islamic world and will seek to “enlist the help of Muslims around the world against the extremists.”

Clinton, who on Wednesday will travel to Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, told students at Tokyo University that “this is one of the central security challenges we face — as to how to better communicate in a way that gets through the rhetoric and through the demagogy and is heard by people who can make judgments about what we stand for and who we truly are.”

Clinton’s remarks came in response to a question about terrorism causing people in the United States to have anti-Muslim “prejudice,” a term she rejected forcefully. “I am a Christian,” she said. “Through the centuries we have had many people who have done terrible things in the name of Christianity. They have perverted the religion.”

Clinton’s visit to Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, appears to be part of the administration’s effort to reach out to Muslims during this week-long trip to Asia. President Obama spent part of his childhood in Jakarta and expectations are high in Indonesia that he will visit later this year.