Roundup: Day in Pictures

The BBC's picks for the day: Blue-dyed sheep, a contortionist who fits inside a TV screen and the first cricket bat used by Australian cricket legend Sir Donald Bradman.

The New York Times takes a more serious tone with Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke, and Christopher Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission appearing before the Senate Banking Committee. Also: Police arresting Indian activists, Pakistani workers in front of the Marriott Hotel destroyed by suicide bombers three days ago in an attack that killed 60, and workers removing notes from the Western Wall — Judaism's holiest site — in preparation for Rosh Hashana next Monday.

In the Reuters photo blog David Gray travels to the Chinese-North Korean border-town of Dandong following reports that the North Korean leader Kim Jong-il was sick. Shannon Stapleton covers the seventh anniversary of 9-11 and Eric Thayer discusses the "art of the underexposure."

(Photo: BBC/PA)

Link Roundup: The Next War in Pakistan

Pakistani villagers were killed earlier this September when US troops crossed the Afghanistan border into Pakistan. The Pakistani Foreign Ministry immediately condemned the attack calling it a "grave provocation."

This is only the latest round in increasingly aggressive talk regarding Pakistan. Already by mid 2007, Barack Obama had stated his policy on Pakistan saying "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will." So much for national sovereignty.

The discussion has been getting narrower and with a charged US election approaching, the media has hardly done anything to expand the debate. In a recent Huffington Post, blogger Brandon Friedman uses the Pakistan issue to criticize McCain predicting that it will become McCain's next flipflop. According to Friedman, Obama had it right. Whither the anti-war liberals?

The limited grounds for debate have been prepared for at least a year now. First, Newsweek came out with an article titled "Pakistan The Most Dangerous?" The Economist followed suit putting it bluntly: "Pakistan The Most Dangerous Place" and finally the Washington Post: "Pakistan Still the World's Most Dangerous Country".

The US debate on Pakistan leaves Pakistanis wondering whether the US is capable of delivering anything other than bombs and bombast. The headlines, meanwhile, leave little doubt about what the conclusions of that debate will be.

Memorable Moment: Pakistan Snapshots

The US is keen to invade Pakistan with a single-minded view towards routing out Islamists in FATA. Meanwhile, Pakistanis are motivated by another cause –the fight to reinstate the Supreme Court judges that Musharraf deposed last year. This is the democracy movement in Pakistan today and many Pakistanis connect it with their own struggle for daily necessities. This isn't about votes and governments; it's about food, electricity, rights.

MEERWALA
She smiles easily. It would be hard to guess that Mukhtar Mai is a gang-rape survivor and activist for women's rights. She puts the issue bluntly. “If something can happen to the Chief Justice, then you can see what will happen to the rest of the public.” She sits up on her bed. It's late night and the darkness is heavy in the village where Mukhtar Mai makes her home, a spread of concrete, enclosed rooms and open terraces overlooking her school where 300 girls and another 300 boys come for a primary education.

At the moment, you can’t see any of it though because there's loadshedding, a term for a rolling blackout. These planned power outages happen upwards of 12 hours per day across Pakistan. One hour on. One hour off. On. Off. The heat pushes us all outside and I feel my way to a rough stone step. It's difficult to see how businesses, hospitals, daily life can function with this sort of instability.

Tractors roll in the distance harvesting wheat. Old songs float out from them into the dense black night. It’s a sweet sound in a country where the wheat crisis currently tops the list of problems.
I grab my cell phone for light. It flicks on. Amidst fields, in this tiny village that isn't even a dot on a map, I have a signal.

Peshawar, NWFP
At the smuggler’s bazaar on the border between Peshawar and Khyber Agency, DVDs calling for death to America and are available for purchase if you know how to ask for them. A vendor who sells them also hands out a bonus DVD to ensure repeat customers. It’s pornography and it may be the real seller.

The frustration with corrupt politicians is more palpable here. One man says, "Look at what happened with the judges” He grows impassioned. “This is not a democracy, this is a dictatorship. They’ve deceived us. They’ve deceived the poor and tried to finish the poor.” He forcefully marks his point in the air. “They want to end the poor but the poor will fight. The poor will commit suicide bombings and the poor will make America flee from here and make him [Musharraf] run too.”