Mahboba Andyar: A Poem #7 Posted by tahir

What a masterpiece of creativity! I reproduced this on Unplugged in your appreciation without your permission!

"The race is on: three, two, and one!
Burqa-clad our darling blindly runs
No one can ban what the Tallys can
They have a head-price on her buns."

Now Mr. Tahir, shall I title you with the epitome of Literary Romanticism - Mr. Shelley?

Mahboba Andyar: A Poem #3 Posted by quin,

I think the best path for you is to dedicate your life to saving stray cattle crossing rail tracks from oncoming trains.

Mr. Keats! Certainly she'll find asylum and do great business in Hamburg.

Exotic, you see, fetch higher fees in those parts.

However, I will take ALL my words back and apologize to you if you ever see her taking part in athletic meets in Hamburg too as she supposedly did in Kabul.

Late Colin David I saw his paintings the first time at an exhibition in Lahore Museum and was totally bowled over. He was a great artist.

Mahboba Andyar: A Poem An excerpt from the TIME link:

"... Italian police are investigating the disappearance, though there are no signs of foul play. Her bags and passport were also gone from her room, a sign that she may have left on her own ... One possible explanation is that the 19-year-old may be seeking asylum somewhere in Europe, following repeated threats and humiliation from Muslim extremists, including false rumors that she was a prostitute. Nick Davies, spokesman for the IAAF, the world track-and-field governing body, said there had been no signs that Andyar was having second thoughts about competing in Beijing. "It was quite a surprise to us," Davies told TIME. "We don't know where she is. All we know is that she and her bags are gone.""

... humiliation from Muslim extremists and false rumors she was a prostitute? Curious, because the naighbour who reported her to the police for prostitution was a Panjsheri anti-Taliban (as described in the Timesonline report link.)

She'll soon reemerge with an asylum application. So keep another bleeding heart poem handy, Mr. Keats!

America\'s Opportunity in Pakistan\'s Tribal Belt #82 Posted by tahir

... and if by "every useless gadget to our frontiers" you mean certain battery-operated pleasure-producing devices given as 'regulation issue' to the female soldiers of these global liberators?

Tahir Sahib Tsk Tsk ... don't you know why women were inducted into the US Army front-duty in the first place?

That's the lesson they learnt in Vietnam. Of-course then they used to send Jane Fonda and some other bimbos to entertain the fed-up US soldiers. Now they know better. Now it's 'Full Service'.

America\'s Opportunity in Pakistan\'s Tribal Belt #78 Posted by masadi,

The new and improved (from now on TNI) masadi ... as in TNI-masadi

Got it Sir!

America\'s Opportunity in Pakistan\'s Tribal Belt #74 Posted by masadi,

The new and improved masadi

Indeed, I noticed. BTW that should be H1-B monkeys instead of HI-B monkeys :)

America\'s Opportunity in Pakistan\'s Tribal Belt #71 Posted by tahir,

Well Tahir Mian, don't scare all these HI-B monkeys. They'll have to go back to bhangilauru and chase away the stray rabid dogs, thousands of them, roaming the neighborhoods.

America\'s Opportunity in Pakistan\'s Tribal Belt ... contd #67 in sequence ...

Abu Dhabi: Rising Power
Wednesday, Jul. 23, 2008

To track Barack Obama's path through the Middle East in recent days was to stick a pin in the region's bloodiest spots: Iraq, Israel and the Palestinian territories. But another Middle East was also on show this past week, and it is a place — a new world, actually — that is overflowing with wealth, confidence and ambition.

On July 22, General Electric announced a string of deals with the Mubadala Development Company, a government-controlled investment fund in the tiny Persian Gulf emirate of Abu Dhabi. Among other things, GE and Mubadala pledged to invest $8 billion in a joint venture to sell financial products in the Middle East and Africa. Ultimately, said Mubadala, it plans to be one of GE's 10 largest investors.

Flush with profits from huge oil and gas reserves, sovereign wealth funds like Mubadala have been on quite a spree of late, particularly in the U.S. Eager to reduce Abu Dhabi's economic dependence on energy, Mubadala has bought stakes in chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices and private equity giant the Carlyle Group; another sovereign wealth fund, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, paid $7.5 billion to become Citigroup's largest shareholder; and this month the Abu Dhabi Investment Council offered $800 million for a 90% stake in Manhattan's iconic Chrysler Building, pictured above.

Abu Dhabi's funds, and those in such places as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, are part of an epochal shift in the economic balance of power toward the energy-rich Gulf. It helps that the downturn in the U.S. economy and the anemic dollar are offering up relative bargains. Shares in GE — the great symbol of American management prowess — have fallen by more than a quarter in the last year.

Not so long ago, attempted acquisitions by interlopers from Dubai and China sparked a public outcry. But as long as the U.S. economy falters, nobody will grumble too loudly at this urgent injection of foreign cash. As they say on Wall Street, liquidity is like oxygen — you only notice how much you need it once it's gone. And if there's one thing these ascendant energy powers have, it's liquidity. Hundreds of billions of dollars of it.

TIME Magazine: Wednesday, Jul. 23, 2008.

America\'s Opportunity in Pakistan\'s Tribal Belt #65 Posted by tahir,

Sorry, now I must rush back to save GM (car-maker) that has just lost $15.5 somewhere! Damn I must save the global saviours....

Investing: That Sinking Feeling

Early last Winter, when the west was suffering the first casualties of the credit crisis, sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) rode to the rescue, providing over $40 billion in capital to some of the largest of the faltering U.S. and European banks. The U.S. government — reluctant to bail out banks directly — welcomed this infusion, even though SWFs are investment arms of foreign governments and American politicians are often suspicious of outsiders acquiring stakes in key domestic assets. So instead of a bailout of financial institutions by American taxpayers, we saw a foreign-funded bailout.

As mortgage losses continued to mount and the credit-crisis snowball rolled on, private equity, with some SWF support, took on the role of recapitalizing regional banks. Yet there's still no end to the crisis in sight. On July 11, U.S. regulators shut down IndyMac Bank, the second-largest largest financial institution to close in U.S. history. If current estimates are right and more losses are coming — Goldman Sachs says U.S. and European banks may need another $200 billion — where's the money going to come from to keep the financial system functioning?

One nonobvious answer is: the central banks of emerging economies. To keep their currencies from appreciating too much against the dollar, emerging nations continue to buy increasingly large amounts of U.S. debt. This provides the U.S. with an indirect funding source to prop up its banks and brokerages, but it's a compromised solution. After all, the willingness of central banks to lend almost without limit to America helped create this mess. Cheap money from abroad suppressed U.S. long-term interest rates, helping to set the stage for the housing bubble and its catastrophic collapse. Continuing such inappropriate monetary and exchange-rate policies feeds more asset bubbles in emerging economies as well as global inflation.

SWFs, on the other hand, control more than $3 trillion, an amount that is growing rapidly. That money needs a home, and the weak U.S. dollar presents foreign investors with opportunities to put it to work by snapping up "bargains" like the Chrysler Building and Citigroup stock. But after turning to SWFs in their hour of need last winter, will U.S. and European officials be willing to do so again?

Possibly — but SWFs may want better deals. In the first round of recapitalization, SWFs took small (less than 10%) stakes in financial giants including UBS and Citigroup by purchasing preferred or convertible shares without voting rights. In return, the funds got fairly high interest payments and the chance to buy into institutions at what they thought were cheap prices. They've since suffered losses on the order of 30-50%. SWFs might be wary of coming back for more unless they get more control, along with greater opportunities for synergies between Western banks and their own domestic financial systems.

It remains to be seen whether U.S. authorities will be comfortable with SWFs taking larger stakes. Consider that while the U.S. is aggressively pushing China to open up its banking system and financial markets to U.S. companies, regulators have been reluctant to issue licenses for Chinese state banks to open branches on American soil. While this impasse may be resolved, Washington's protectionist stance might make Chinese banks and sovereign funds less likely to invest in U.S. firms.

It is difficult for a borrower to set the terms of its lending, though the U.S. has been able to do this for some time. With the balance of economic and financial power shifting, it might be less able to do so in the future. Meanwhile, with so much money to invest and a reluctance to abandon currencies that track the greenback, the SWFs of China and other emerging countries have few other places to go — so mutual interests might allow this grand bargain to continue. Washington has so far skirted the complicated issues deriving from the need for further recapitalization of its financial system. But the wealthiest country in the world may no longer be able to afford to be so picky about who rides to its rescue and on what terms.

Nouriel Roubini is a professor of economics at New York University's Stern School of Business and is chairman of RGE Monitor; Rachel Ziemba is a senior analyst at RGE Monitor.

TIME Magazine: Thursday, Jul. 17, 2008.

America\'s Opportunity in Pakistan\'s Tribal Belt #65 Posted by tahir,

Sorry, now I must rush back to save GM (car-maker) that has just lost $15.5 somewhere! Damn I must save the global saviours....

Investing: That Sinking Feeling

The Indian Mujahideen – The Answer to BJP’s Pseudo-Secularist Fascism or a New Method to Spread Unrest? #166 Posted by alakshyendra re #163 by HP

Here's a web page from the Govt. of Balochistan's website on the names of the staff in the Gwadar Development Authority. As you can see, there is indeed a lady with the name Mazar.

It's obviously a typo. It should be Naeema Mazari and not Mazar. Mazari is a large and politically powerful Baluch tribe. HP is right there's no name of Mazar anywhere in Pakistan.

The Indian Mujahideen – The Answer to BJP’s Pseudo-Secularist Fascism or a New Method to Spread Unrest? #78 Posted by dost_mittar

And Air India bombing was not indiscriminate killing of Hindus only, several passengers and crew including the pilot were Sikhs.

Dost, what has happened to you? I can't believe you're trying to define what is indiscriminate and what isn't! Are you saying selectively indiscriminate is better or worse than randomly indiscriminate? What category were the Ahmedabad blasts?

I do believe you have allowed your true emotions to be revealed.

America\'s Opportunity in Pakistan\'s Tribal Belt #6 Posted by masadi

Zee, inappropriate and unbecomming of you

Yaar I guess you know by now these people will even worship a gutter rat if it promises to bomb Pakistan, let alone a murtid-mulatto son of a man-crazy puta like obama who prefers to be called a nigga out of his own choice.

Ahmedabad Blasts: Numbed Apathy and The Conspiracy Of Our Resilience masadi,

CJ Iftikhar Chaudhery is back in Karachi today. Let's see if madani's goons try another 12 May 2007 party.

Ahmedabad Blasts: Numbed Apathy and The Conspiracy Of Our Resilience Madani Saheb,

The Chief Editor of the ultra-liberal Daily Times group, Najam Sethi, writes in his current Friday Times editorial re MQM "... a cadre based ethnic party with a criminal and fascist record, though avowed secularists ..."

Are you sure of what you're gushing all over the place about?