Pakistan: Hearts and Minds
As new leaders in Washington and Islamabad struggle against a surge of Islamic militancy and growing political instability in Pakistan, their greatest challenge will be winning the hearts and minds of 170 million citizens in one of the world’s poorest and most densely populated Muslim countries. Sponsored by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Pakistan: Education at a Crossroads
Pakistan gets plenty of press for bomb attacks and international terrorist threats. After two months traveling the country last year, CLP journalists found that the ongoing crisis here has its roots in a corrupt and collapsing education system that is feeding poverty, discontent and violence.
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Poverty and Faith Fill Pakistan's Madrassas
For years, Pakistan's religious schools have been identified as breeding grounds for terrorists. But they're also the only opportunity millions of poor Pakistani children have to get an education. In this video, reporter Alex Stonehill goes inside madrassas to find out whats really being taught.
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Categories: Pakistan, Watch, Education, Poverty and Development, Politics and Conflict
Lessons from God Poverty and Faith Fill Pakistan's Madrassas
Peshawar, PAKISTAN – Rows of adolescent boys kneel in an open marble courtyard, dwarfed by the oversized, yellowing Arabic texts opened before them. Murmuring under white knit prayer caps, their small bodies sway in rhythm with their hafiz (memorization of the verses of the Koran by rote). The entryway is adorned by a faded poster of Mulana Sami al-Haq, the owner of the sprawling grounds of the Dar al-Haqqania Madrassa and principal administrator to its 3,000 students. Shrouded in green, he holds a Koran in one uplifted arm and a Kalashnikov in the other.
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Up All Night Telemarketing in Lahore, Pakistan
Like India, Pakistan has its share of call centers, offering everything from customer service and tech support to health insurance and home security systems. Jessica Partnow takes us through a night in the life of Ali Jaffri, a professional telemarketer in Lahore.
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Categories: Pakistan, Listen, Labor and Immigration, Poverty and Development
Pakistani immigrants in Seattle confront a huge challenge at home As highly skilled people pour out of the troubled country, the local Pakistani community is working to stop the brain drain and help educate those back home.
As the first notes of the Quran, sung by a diminutive imam in an embroidered prayer cap, fill the Westin Bellevue's ornate Grand Ballroom, a sea of hands moves to cover heads.
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Categories: Pakistan, USA, Read, Education, Labor and Immigration, Poverty and Development
Educating Humiera Pakistanis in Seattle give a Pakistan community the gift of girls' school
BUGNA, Pakistan — Thirteen-year-old Humiera Kausar's oversized sneakers hurry over piles of granite boulders and through scrubby pines bristling with last night's rain. A headscarf and pink shawl are wound tightly around her small frame to protect against the thick mist that has settled over her high mountain village.
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Categories: Pakistan, Read, Listen, Education, Gender, Poverty and Development
The Ghost Schools of Pakistan Frightening realities from inside an education system on the brink.
September 20, 2009: Story updated with radio feature and photo slideshow. Despite ankle deep garbage, charcoal-scribbled graffiti of machine guns and the scorched remains of squatters' fires, the dusty green chalkboard still reads "December 2, 2006," the last day that classes were held in the primary school wing of Mirza Adam Khan, a government-run compound of schools in the poor and violence plagued Karachi neighborhood of Lyari.
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Categories: Pakistan, Watch, Read, Listen, Education, Poverty and Development, Politics and Conflict
CLP Journalists Alex Stonehill and Sarah Stuteville on Frontline/WORLD Pakistan: Education's Fault Lines
Journalists Sarah Stuteville and Alex Stonehill spent six weeks crisscrossing Pakistan to report on the country's growing education crisis. Both are funded by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and spoke recently with iWitness from Karachi about their experience. Watch the interview and find out why they believe Pakistan's religious schools get an unfair rap from the West, and how so-called "ghost schools" are at the heart of the state's failings. The two also talk with a Swat resident in Karachi who has just fled the fighting, and why his presence in the city is causing new tensions.
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Categories: Pakistan, Watch, Blogs, Education, Human Rights, Poverty and Development, Politics and Conflict
Karachi Nights
No matter how frenzied the exhaust-coated sun-saturated day is in Karachi—this city really lives at night.
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Parrot Fortune Teller
People come to fortunetellers for answers and entertainment, but not all fortunetellers use a crystal ball. In Karachi, Pakistan, one street vendor tells fortunes with the help of a squawking parrot. Jessica Partnow had her fortune told by the bird and sent us this report.
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Big, bright and, to many, beautiful The truck artists of Karachi apply a splash of color to an otherwise bleak canvas.
KARACHI, Pakistan – At first glance, this is not a colorful city. An aerial view of Karachi reveals a sprawl of squat markets and utilitarian high-rises set among sparse vegetation and dull industrial public art, a landscape of stucco corroded by salty sea air and looming cement structures coated in urban grime.
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Categories: Pakistan, Watch, Read, Listen, Labor and Immigration, Poverty and Development
Hope for Pakistan's child workers A Karachi-based group bent on eradicating child labor is offering school lessons outside working hours.
KARACHI, Pakistan – Sher Shah is a hardworking neighborhood — a confusing knot of cramped lanes offering up a riot of rattling power looms, puttering motors and booming furnaces. This rough suburb, with its garment factories, machine shops and scrap-metal smelters far from the imposing cement skyscrapers of the city center, forms the industrial gut of Karachi.
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Categories: Pakistan, Read, Listen, Education, Human Rights, Poverty and Development
Bad times return to Karachi Renewed violence in this Pakistani port city is threatening its status as a safe haven from troubles farther north.
Despite Karachi’s decades-old reputation as Pakistan’s most violent city, over the last year this urban economic hub has remained a haven from the bombings and violence reverberating through the rest of the country. But a flaring of ethnic clashes in recent weeks, exacerbated by the arrival of thousands of refugees from the violence in northern Pakistan, has many worried that instability has returned to the streets of this massive port city on the shores of the Arabian Sea.
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Categories: Pakistan, Read, Listen, Poverty and Development, Politics and Conflict
Behind the Scenes Update from Karachi Pakistan Video blog from the CLP's multimedia team
The CLP team takes a break to reflect on the first half of the Pakistan: Hearts and Minds reporting project.
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Categories: Pakistan, Watch, Blogs, The Media, Politics and Conflict
Caught in Pakistan's crossfire Taliban militants, Pakistani military units, and US drone attacks spark an uneasy exodus.
The day is closing in Jellozai and children run along the narrow dusty rows of UNICEF-stamped tents, trying to squeeze a little more play time out of the dying evening. Some 43,000 people live in this refugee camp just outside of Peshawar, after fleeing violence in the tribal regions not far from here.
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Categories: Pakistan, Read, Human Rights, Labor and Immigration, Poverty and Development, Politics and Conflict
Letting the Terrorists Win
Pale columns of smoke are rising from a sea of blue tents stretching into the distance of the flat khaki plain that is Jellozai, a refugee camp eight miles outside of Peshawar, home to an estimated 43,000 people fleeing violence in the tribal regions not far from here.
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Categories: Pakistan, Blogs, The Media, Poverty and Development, Politics and Conflict
Pakistan's Viral Video
The release of a grainy video showing a girl being flogged for adultery by the Taliban in the Swat valley has created an uproar in Pakistan. In this video-blog, journalist Alex Stonehill discusses why, amidst all the violence in Pakistan, this particular video has evoked such a reaction.
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Categories: Pakistan, Watch, Blogs, Human Rights, Gender, The Media
Hanging with the Ladies
In the gray light of my first morning in Pakistan, the thick salty smell of sulfur introducing me to the seaside city of Karachi, the streets were full of men. With few exceptions it was men congregating in front of the still dark airport, men piled onto buses carnival-decorated with Technicolor and chrome, and men weaving through the thickening traffic on motorbikes and rickshaws.
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Categories: Pakistan, Read, Blogs, Education, Human Rights, Gender, Politics and Conflict
Fear Factor: Pakistan
I’ve become terrified of my e-mail. I’ve always been a little skittish of the inbox, never knowing what that first login might bring to my day – an outraged critique of a recent article, a Facebook request from a long-lost ex-boyfriend – but in the weeks leading up to our departure, my crowded inbox has set my stomach lurching in newly anxious ways as I sift through daily accounts of the chaos that has touched down in Pakistan.
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Categories: Pacific Northwest, Pakistan, USA, Read, Blogs, Education, The Media, Politics and Conflict
Pakistan: Education at a Crossroads
Pakistan gets plenty of press for bomb attacks and international terrorist threats. After two months traveling the country last year, CLP journalists found that the ongoing crisis here has its roots in a corrupt and collapsing education system that is feeding poverty, discontent and violence.
[more]
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