Reuters: Pakistan to pass law against honor killings in weeks: PM's daughter

Pakistan's ruling party plans to pass long-delayed legislation against "honor killings" within weeks in the wake of the high-profile murder of an outspoken social media star, the daughter of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said on Wednesday. [...]

Some 500 women are killed each year in Pakistan at the hands of family members over perceived damage to "honor" that can involve eloping, fraternizing with men or any other infraction against conservative values that govern women's modesty.

Maryam Nawaz Sharif said the government wanted to pass the law unanimously and had been negotiating with religious parties in parliament. [...]

The upper house of parliament passed the bill in 2014 but it lapsed after the government failed to put it up for a vote in the lower house because it was preoccupied with legislation aimed at tackling security problems and economic reforms.

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Business Insider: A campaign to register American Muslims to vote could have a pivotal impact in swing states

US Muslim leaders hope to register a million voters from within their community to help combat what they say is the anti-Muslim stance of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

The United States has only about 3.3 million Muslims, but campaign organizers say Muslim voters could have an outsize impact in swing states that are key to the November general election, such as Virginia and Florida. [...]

CAIR's database showed that 300,000 Muslims had registered since November, he said.

Awad said anti-Muslim sentiment had grown since the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, last year that authorities have said was inspired by Islamist militants, and due to comments by Trump. He has called for a ban on Muslim immigrants. [...]

US Muslim backers of Trump said they were trying to build their own coalitions in swing states.

Baltimore businessman Sajid Tarar said he launched American Muslims for Trump because he favored Trump's stance on combating radical Islam.

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Business Insider: Bookmakers are more sure than ever that Article 50 will never be triggered

Bookmakers are more sure than ever that Article 50 — the two-year notice period the UK must give to the EU before leaving — will never be triggered, despite Prime Minister Theresa May's continued insistence that "Brexit means Brexit."

Sky Bet currently gives odds of 2/1 of Article 50 happening in "2018 or later or not at all" — the shortest odds in the market. [...]

Marcus J Ball, the founder of the #BrexitJustice campaign, has already raised almost £100,000 to take Leave campaigners to court for lying to the public about what a Brexit would mean for the UK. If the case is successful, it could have severe implications on a Brexit.

On top of that, there is also the issue of Scotland's place in the EU negotiations. Scottish National Party leader Nicola Sturgeon has made it clear that a Brexit could mean another independence referendum, with Scotland leaving the UK but staying in the EU. May has stressed that a Brexit must happen as a union, which some took to mean it might not happen at all given Scotland's firm stance on the matter. [...]

To make matters even worse, the civil service has a severe shortage of trade negotiators, with only 12 to 20 officials “with direct knowledge of trade negotiations," available in Whitehall. Canada, which recently completed its own trade deal with the EU, has 830 by comparison.

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The School of Life: What Charity Really Means

The New Yorker: What Happened to the Ice Bucket Challenge?

All these critiques had the same underlying theme: the faddishness of the challenge undermined its value. This makes intuitive sense, but is it true? Actually, no. Silly though the Ice Bucket Challenge may seem now, it had far-reaching effects. It raised a reported two hundred and twenty million dollars worldwide for A.L.S. organizations; in just eight weeks, the American A.L.S. Association received thirteen times as much in contributions as what it had in the whole of the preceding year. Public awareness rose: the challenge was the fifth most popular Google search for all of 2014. Brian Fredrick, the vice-president for communications and development at the A.L.S. Association, told me, “The challenge suddenly made a lot of people who probably didn’t even know who Lou Gehrig was aware of the disease. It really changed the face of A.L.S. forever.” [...]

If the success of the challenge had come at the expense of other charities, ambivalence might be justified. But there’s almost no evidence that this was the case. According to Giving U.S.A., individual donations in the U.S. rose almost six per cent in 2014, which doesn’t suggest any cannibalization effect. Indeed, it’s likely that the very nature of the challenge, which belongs to a category known to anthropologists as “extreme ritual,” made people more openhanded. Dimitris Xygalatas, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut who has studied the effects of such rituals, ran a fascinating experiment with people who were undergoing kavadi—a Hindu ritual that commonly involves piercing the skin with sharp objects and then making a long procession while carrying heavy objects. Xygalatas found that people who did kavadi, and even people who just joined in the procession, donated more to charity than people in a control group. And those who gave the most painful descriptions of the experience donated the most. As a result, Xygalatas has suggested that the Ice Bucket Challenge, far from stealing from other charities, almost certainly increased the total size of the pie.

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