Month: July 2006

Urgent action against the death penalty in Pakistan

From the Amnesty UK web site:

Mirza Tahir Hussain is due to be executed on 3 August. Mirza was tried and convicted of murdering a taxi driver while travelling to the village of Bhubar from Rawalpindi, Punjab Province, on 17 December 1988. The taxi driver reportedly stopped the car and produced a gun, and Mirza Tahir Hussain, who was 18 years old at the time, was reportedly physically and sexually assaulted by the taxi driver. In the scuffle that followed, the gun went off, and the taxi driver was fatally injured.

Time is short for this action but you can send an appeal on Mirza Tahir Hussain’s behalf via this handy contact form for General Musharraf. There’s even a suggested letter that you can use on Amnesty’s action page.

Good feeling

Finding a brand new, as-yet-unpublished-in-the-UK book at the Amnesty book sale for £1.50, looking it up on amazon.co.uk and discovering that the retail price is ten times that. Go me! I am the king of bargain hunting.

So I’ve been reading Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi’s thoughtful and touching comic book account of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. This edition goes on to cover her life in Austria as a teenager and her return to Tehran before the Gulf War in 1991. It’s well worth reading and quite enlightening about Persian culture and the Islamic state in Iran.