Support Israel's Historic Ban on Fur Trade

Earlier this month, Israeli politicians were scheduled to vote on a historic bill to help thousands of animals. If successful, Israel would be the first country in the world to ban fur trade and production!

But this crucial vote was postponed when Israel's Minister of Religious Services intervened and requested that the bill be sent back for review. It's imperative that the vote proceeds!Please send the minister and his colleagues a message in support of the bill today.

We need to show that the majority of people around the world care about animals and want to see this legislation passed. Tell Minister Margi and his colleagues to resist the pressure from the cruel, self-interested fur industry.

Every year, approximately 70 million animals are killed for their fur -- more than one animal every second, day and night, throughout the year. Wearing fur is cruel and unnecessary.

Please write to the Minister of Religious Services and his colleagues immediately to let them know you support the ban, that the world is watching and that passing this historic legislation for animals would be seen as an important forward step for Israel to take.

Click on the links in red...or simply click on the title to go the page to sign up.

Source: Humane Society International

Facebook is Back

Well finally the day has come. My sister, who seriously missed facebook a lot these past few days and who I am sure would have protested like anything against all that happened. Anyway, I just got an update on twitter. The court has reversed its order and facebook ban has been removed.

Thus, we will be back to our normal routine :P And nobody would be cheating their way to facebook.I think it will be up by tomorrow.

The following I have taken from BBC News website and the article

PAKISTANI COURT REMOVES FACEBOOK BAN

A court in Pakistan has ordered the authorities to restore the Facebook social networking site.

The court had ordered the blocking of the site after a petition was filed against a competition featuring caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.

The petition, filed by a lawyers' group called the Islamic Lawyers' Movement, said the contest was "blasphemous".

Pakistan's deputy attorney told the court on Monday that Facebook had withdrawn the competition.

The Facebook page in question contained caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad and characters from other religions, including Hinduism and Christianity, as well as comments both critical and supportive of Islam.

On Monday, Justice Ejaz Ahmed Chaudhry of the Lahore High Court reversed his 19 May order to the Pakistani authorities to block the site.

"Restore Facebook. We don't want to block access to information," Justice Chaudhry told the court.

He asked the government to develop a system to find out how countries like Saudi Arabia were blocking access to "blasphemous" content on the internet.

"It is the government's job to take care of such things, which spark resentment among the people and bring them onto the streets.

"They should take steps to block any blasphemous content on the internet," Justice Chaudhry said.

Last week, Pakistan restored access to popular video sharing website YouTube only after blocking some pages for "sacrilegious content".

Correspondents say that the internet is uncensored in Pakistan but the government monitors content by routing all traffic through a central exchange.

In the past, Pakistan has often blocked access to pornographic sites and sites with anti-Islamic content.

It has deemed such material as offensive to the political and security establishment of the country, says the BBC's M Ilyas Khan in Islamabad.

In 2007, the government banned the YouTube site, allegedly to block material offensive to the government of Pervez Musharraf.

The action led to widespread disruption of access to the site for several hours. The ban was later lifted.

Source:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/south_asia/10196141.stm

Historic Victory for Seals!

The European Union just voted to ban seal products as a protest of Canada's commercial harp seal hunt, which kills hundreds of thousands of baby seals every year. This new ban, supported by most of the EU public and Care2 activists, will take effect for the 2010 hunt.

It looks like the Canada’s sealing industry may just see an end after all! The European Parliament has voted to support the ban on seal products closing a giant market.

According to the Humane Society,
The Canadian government estimates that losing this primary market will cost Canada’s sealing industry $6.6 million (CAD) each year. The hunt brought in less than $7 million last year. It's not hard to do the math.

Just the promise of an EU ban was enough to drive the prices for seal fur down to $15 (CAD) per skin -- a decline of 86 percent since 2006. As a result, many sealers stayed home. Out of this year's quota of 280,000 harp seals, fewer than 60,000 have been killed so far.

Now that the EU has banned its trade in seal products, countless more seals will live their lives in peace from this year forward.

While this is an amazing victory, there’s still more to do.

Sign this petition to support Canadian legislation that would end Canada's seal hunt forever.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/877541637?z00m=19760427

As I mentioned earlier on…these petitions are not sham. We get results, but we need to sign them. And it only takes a minute to sign any such petition. You know in all these years, I’ve met many people claiming to be such huge animal lovers but whenever they have been asked to help a little…they don’t show any interest. If you want to put an end to animal abuse, this is the least you can do & people don’t even want to do this. Some of my friends & I have been informing people about such links for almost 2 years on our animal community & believe me or not, I don’t have time to provide some useless link to people & then waste my time asking them to sign it.

My job is to inform people, not to convince anyone about signing these petitions. It’s entirely up to you. Anyway, this news about the victory for baby seals proves that Care 2 petitions are pretty authentic.

I’ve provided the link…you can go through it.
Source: http://www.care2.com/causes/animal-welfare/blog/historic-victory-for-seals/

Nadira Rahman