A Canadian Muslim girl was allowed to marry her Dubai-based Indian lover after she wrote an online appeal for help while being in her father’s “captivity” in Saudi Arabia for three years.
The transcontinental rom-ance between Nazia Quazi, a Canadian of Indian Muslim origin, and Bjorn Singhal, born to a partially Hindu family, took many twists before culminating into a wedding last week, the report in the online version of the Telegraph said.
The girl was held captive for three years under a Saudi Arabian law which prohibits a girl from marrying against the wish of the nearest male guardian, mainly her father or brother. The girl’s father Quazi Malik Abdul Gaffar, who worked in Saudi Arabia, used his power under the kingdom’s rule to stop her leaving the country after she went on a visit.
The Quazi family had Canadian citizenship, and the pair met when they were both studying at Ottawa University in Canada. Singhal has a Hindu father and a Muslim mother, and although he practised Islam, Gaffar did not approve of the relationship. But following a campaign by supporters in Canada that was taken up by the media there, and even in Saudi newspapers, he relented and allowed the marriage to take place in Dubai, the online report said. The girl’s case was taken up by Human Rights Watch and other groups in Canada after she wrote an online letter appealing for help earlier this year.

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Phoenix, the Nasa Mars lander, dead
Washington, : It’s official, Nasa’s Phoenix Mars Lander is dead. Nasa has confirmed that its tenacious robot has not survived the harsh winter on the Red Planet and seems to have suffered serious ice damage to its solar panels.
The agency, which has been trying in vain to contact the spacecraft since January, said that a new image transmitted by its Mars Reconnaissance Orbi-ter showed signs of severe ice damage to the lander’s solar panels. Although the Odyssey orbiter “flew over the Phoenix landing site 61 times during a final attempt to communicate with the lander”, Phoenix remained silent. “It also did not communicate during 150 flights in three earlier listening campaigns this year,” the agency said. Phoenix was launched on August 4, 2007 and landed on Mars on 25 May 2008.
It last communicated on November 2, 2008, at the end of a mission during wh-ich it confirmed and examined patches of the widespread deposits of underground water ice detected by Odyssey. The lander also identified a mineral called calcium carbonate that suggested occasional presence of thawed water on the planet. The mission’s biggest surprise was the discovery of perchlorate — an oxidising chemical on earth that is food for some microbes and potentially toxic for others. —PTI