More insanity from Afghanistan

Journalist U.S. Had Detained Is Killed - NYTimes.com

Parwez Kambakhsh was convicted of blasphemy for asking questions in a university class about women's rights under Islam. Prosecutors also said he illegally distributed an article he printed off the Internet that asks why Islam does not modernize to give women equal rights. He also allegedly wrote his own comments on the paper.

The case against the 24-year-old Kambakhsh, whose brother has angered Afghan warlords with his own writings, has come to symbolize Afghanistan's slide toward an ultraconservative view on religious and individual freedoms.

Human Rights Watch said Kambakhsh had not committed a crime and called on President Hamid Karzai to pardon him.

''The Supreme Court represented the last hope that Parwez Kambakhsh would receive a fair hearing, but once again justice was denied,'' said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch.

Another insane story from Saudi Arabia

Saudis order 40 lashes for elderly woman for mingling - CNN.com

Iraq's Unspeakable Crime: Mothers Pimping Daughters

She goes by "Hinda," but that's not her real name. That's what she's called by the many Iraqi sex traffickers and pimps who contact her several times a week from across the country. They think she is one of them, a peddler of sexual slaves. Little do they know that the stocky, auburn-haired woman is an undercover human rights activist who has been quietly mapping out their murky underworld since 2006.
That underworld is a place where nefarious female pimps hold sway, where impoverished mothers sell their teenage daughters into a sex market that believes females who reach the age of 20 are too old to fetch a good price. The youngest victims, some just 11 and 12, are sold for as much as $30,000, others for as little as $2,000. "The buying and selling of girls in Iraq, it's like the trade in cattle," Hinda says. "I've seen mothers haggle with agents over the price of their daughters."

Read the full story here