The brutal decapitation of Aasiya Hassan in the Buffalo, USA, allegedly by a husband she was seeking to divorce has brought honour killings to the fore. Asra Q. Nomani investigates for The Daily Beast
On the night of Feb. 12, 2009, Aasiya Hassan was allegedly murdered and beheaded by her estranged husband Muzzammil Hassan in the office of their jointly operated American-Muslim TV venture, Bridges Network Inc. Their two children—four-year-old Rania and six-year-old Danyal—were in a car outside the building, waiting for her with their father’s 17-year-old son from an earlier marriage, according to people familiar with the details of the case.
It isn’t clear where the children were when police discovered their mother’s body, but the account reveals how the unhealthy cycle of family violence can ensnare the lives of children when it goes untreated. Coupled with details revealed in a Flower Mound, Tex., police report, when Aasiya Hassan went to the police with Muzzammil Hassan’s brother, seeking protection from her husband, it seems that the extended Hassan family had long been struggling with how to handle Muzzammil Hassan’s allegedly mercurial and violent ways. Flower Mound police official Wess Griffin said that family violence “wraps itself around everybody.”
Global factors bring a long civil war to a close but, says Harsh V Pant in Yale Global Online, only reconciliation can end an extremist ideology
One of the world’s longest running insurgencies might be coming to an end with the Sri Lankan government close to overrunning the last remaining holdouts of the Tamil Tiger rebels. The same conjunction of global forces that enabled the government to turn the corner, however, could make the victory costly if it does not show restraint towards the defeated opponent. In a pointed allusion to acknowledging this reality, Sri Lanka’s main donors – the US, the EU, Japan and Norway – have called for a truce and ask the government to look beyond victory on the battlefield.
The Zardari Government is making peace with the Taliban which is hanging amputated bodies from electric poles. In Tehelka, Islamabad-based journalist Amir Mateen analyses the dangers for Pakistan:
The rich have left for Peshawar – 70 miles away, and the richer for more posh Islamabad – 100 miles in the south. The poor, with no place to go, suffered the trauma that makes Hollywood horrors look like a picnic. Intelligence sources dubbed as ‘spies’ and government officials – particularly from law-enforcing agencies – were specifically targeted by the Taliban. They were abducted and maimed and their killing turned into a gruesome spectacle in order to send a message to others.
The reign of terror is symbolised by what has come to be known as Khooni Chowk – the Crossing of Blood. A band of Taliban would, late at night, block the central crossing in the city centre of Mingora, the district headquarters the size of Srinagar and no less beautiful. They hung amputated bodies – some headless – on an electrical pole in the middle of the crossing, with notes giving their name and details of their ‘misdeeds’ against Islam. The bodies were not to be removed before a given date. Anybody violating this dictat could do so only at the risk of being himself put up headless.
Also in Tehelka, Ahmed Rashid, author of a book on the Taliban, tells that even India needs to worry enormously. In an interview with Harinder Baweja, Rashid said: “The fact is that there are Pakistani Taliban fighting in Afghanistan and there are Afghan Taliban fighting in Pakistan. I think it would very immature for us to be in a state of denial about that. The Afghans are not in denial about that but elements in Pakistan certainly are.” More here:
Mint-Lounge commemorates the actor’s remarkable journey with an essay by Rachel Dwyer, professor of Indian cultures and cinema at the School of Oriental and African studies, University of London, and author, most recently, of What do Hindus Believe? What makes the Big B legacy, she asks. And what does it say about us?
Bachchan is more than just a highly successful film star. How did he come to represent India itself on the world stage in the last decade of his 40-year-old career? What does this tell us about him, the nature of stardom, Hindi films and the vision that new India has of itself?
Dwyer says the other Bollywood icon, Shah Rukh Khan, “may be the current top box-office star, someone who is likely to enjoy many more years of stardom, he is not yet half way to Bachchan’s 40 years in cinema.” Click here to read the full essay, One-man show
When Sanjukta Sharma of Mint-Lounge asked Bachchan how he would assess his own body of work, he said, “Mediocre! I have had the privilege though to have been in the company of some of the great directors and actors of my profession, who have truly been masters. I doubt I ever lived up to their expectations. It was their generosity to have tolerated my incompetence.” Click here to read the full interview
The Daily Beast has an interesting piece by Max Blumenthal on the Republican leader Bobby Jindal.”How many Americans know that Jindal boasted of participating in an exorcism that purged the spirit of Satan from a college girlfriend,” writes Blumenthal.
“Born in Baton Rouge in 1971, Jindal rarely visited his parents’ homeland. His birth name was Piyush Jindal. When he was four years old, Piyush changed his name to “Bobby” after becoming mesmerized by an episode of The Brady Bunch. Jindal later wrote that he began considering converting to Catholicism during high school after “being touched by the love and simplicity of a Christian girl who dreamt of becoming a Supreme Court justice so she could stop her country from ‘killing unborn babies.’” After watching a short black-and-white film on the crucifixion of Christ, Jindal claimed he “realized that if the Gospel stories were true, if Christ really was the son of God, it was arrogant of me to reject Him and question the gift of salvation.” “
Anand Giridharadas in International Herald Tribune:
If India’s well-to-do ran the world, the film that dominated the Academy Awards this week might simply have been called “Millionaire.”
That aspect of the movie – about hope – the well-to-do liked. It was the other aspect, distilled in the word “Slumdog,” that was so deflating.
The boom era now fading left two longings among India’s globalized rich. The first is a desire for recognition by the West, through magazine covers and Booker Prizes and Grammys. The second is a desire to show the world the most sanitized representation of India, not the stereotypical India mired in poverty and degradation, but an India as pristine as the elite’s own posh homes.
Kadukutty, India: Last December, a day after returning to Dubai from his lavish wedding ceremony in this Indian village, Gilson Rodrigues was jolted out of newlywed bliss. Because of the global recession, management told him, he was laid off from his job cleaning rooms in a four-star hotel.
For a month, Mr. Rodrigues unsuccessfully sought another employment in the Persian Gulf emirate. He’s now back in the village, nestled among coconut groves in the southern Indian state of Kerala, and is eking out a living as a day laborer on local farms.
“I had a lot of dreams when I went to Dubai,” says Mr. Rodrigues. “Now, all my dreams are broken.”
An Indian politician, a Hindu, became a Muslim to marry his mistress; Then things got messy. Yaroslav Trofimov in The Wall Street Journal:
Chander Mohan and his second wife, Anuradha Bali, in December. PTI image
As India was reeling from the Mumbai terrorist attacks in December, Chander Mohan, deputy chief minister of the northern state of Haryana, made a shocking announcement.
Mr. Mohan, whose overwhelmingly Hindu state of 23 million people is among India’s most prosperous, declared that he had converted to Islam. The 43-year-old father of two added that he had also just wed a second wife, another Muslim convert.
What’s happened since has all the trappings of a Bollywood plot, replete with an alleged kidnapping and mysterious disappearances. The drama’s serious subtext shows how crucial religious identity remains in a country that bills itself as the world’s largest secular democracy.
As Megan Mylan’s Smile Pinki, the story of a poor Indian village girl whose cleft lip made her a social outcast, wins an Oscar for the best short documentary, journalist Anubha Sawhney Joshi, who was born with a double cleft on the lip, tells her story in this beautiful piece in The Times of India:
Friends were okay, but would the boy one liked never ever look my way because of the defective lip? The first one didn’t. Neither did the next few. Some said they didn’t really mind when the truth was that they did. Some who actually didn’t really mind were not my type. I had my standards, cleft or no cleft, and so what if they were double! The first kiss something i spent long days and unending nights fretting over was silly, hurried and uneventful as first kisses usually are. More
A mutiny by Bangladeshi border guards in the capital Dhaka has spread to other towns, threatening to plunge the entire country into chaos two months after emergency rule was lifted. The Guardian has a Q&A on why are Bangladesh’s border guards revolting and what it mean for the newly elected government.
A revolt has been brewing since the Bangladesh Rifles (BDR), the official name for the paramilitary units, first called for pay parity with regular soldiers six months ago. The guards feel they are treated as second class citizens; their officers come from the regular army not their own ranks and they do not get paid as much as army troops. More:
And in The Telegraph, Calcutta: It appears the leadership had no inkling of the gathering storm — Hasina, who rode to power on a landslide in December, had only a day earlier taken salute at a parade at the same base.
Here’s what TIME says about Zeb and Haniya’s debut album, Chup: “The Indians may have cornered the bhangra market, but when it comes to rock ‘n’ roll, it’s the Pakistanis who have found their rebel yell.”
Their website says “The Zeb and Haniya band is a project started by two musicians, Zebunnisa Bangash and Haniya Aslam, based in Lahore, Pakistan. Though the music and sound of Zeb and Haniya is hard to confine to one genre, it has been described at various times as Alternative, Art Folk, Ethnic Blues, and World Music.”
His stock might have taken a hit after his televised response to Barack Obama’s first speech to Congress but all is not yet lost for Piyush Bobby Jindal. BBC has a profile.
Bobby Jindal, the 37-year old governor of Louisiana and the first Indian-American to occupy such a post, is one of the Republican Party’s rising stars, tipped as a likely contender for the White House four years from now.
Piyush Jindal was born in Baton Rouge, the capital of the southern state of Louisiana, to Indian parents who had immigrated from the Punjab. He started calling himself Bobby from an early age and converted from Hinduism to Catholicism as a teenager.
India has an estimated 3.1 million HIV-positive people, but those affected by it may be up to 3 times more. Bhuma Shrivastava in Mint:
The frail grandmother of 14-year-old Anand and his younger brother Chiran shakes her bald head, a grimace deepening her wrinkles. She is determined that Mint should neither talk to nor photograph her grandchildren. The only family member left to care for the two boys after they lost both parents to AIDS seven years ago, she was forced to migrate from her village Kumavapalayam to Coimbatore.
Even in the city, the three have had to move house four times after neighbours discovered the family’s history and Anand’s HIV-positive status-a stigma that hounds victims and their families. “I have had enough of this (snide remarks and evictions). I’m too old to deal with this now,” she says.
Clover Stroud joins a high-level trek and finds a magical Himalayan kingdom still resisting the lures of the modern world. From The Telegraph:
Photo: Graham King
A Buddhist monk is dancing in the snow in front of me. At his feet, a fluffy, caramel-coloured puppy watches him as he leans down, laughing. He throws a handful of snow at the dog, which sneezes and runs between his legs. My head throbs because we’re at an altitude of more than 13,000ft, higher than I’ve ever been. Below us an eagle soars, etched against the clouds way below, clouds that seem so solid I feel I could step on one and float away. It’s very quiet, the air thick with the muffled silence of snowflakes. The monk dusts snow from his robes and laughs again. He looks no more than 17 or 18.
This is Bhutan, a magical land inhabited by magical people. While a monk laughing and dancing in the snow at dawn on top of a mountain is beautiful, it is hardly surprising. Here, I think, almost everything is magical and almost anything is possible.
Displeased with his portrayal in a bestseller based on him and his family, an Afghan bookstore owner has written his own book telling his angry, bewildered side of the story. Laura King in Los Angeles Times:
There’s one bookstore in the world where you’ll never, ever find a copy of “The Bookseller of Kabul.”
That would be the Bookseller’s. The epic literary feud that erupted with the book’s publication more than five years ago still endures — at least from the perspective of Shah Muhammad Rais, who hated his depiction as Sultan Khan, a liberal intellectual in public but a tyrant in his own home.
The author is Asne Seierstad, a young Norwegian journalist who had come to Afghanistan in late 2001 to cover the fall of the Taliban government. On arriving here in the capital, she encountered Rais, the erudite, English-speaking proprietor of the battered city’s best bookshop, which then had a branch in a half-ruined hotel where many journalists stayed.
British soldiers are engaged in “a surreal mini civil war” with growing numbers of home-grown jihadists who have travelled to Afghanistan to support the Taliban, senior Army officers have told The Independent.
Interceptions of Taliban communications have shown that British jihadists – some “speaking with West Midlands accents” – are active in Helmand and other parts of southern Afghanistan, according to briefing papers prepared by an official security agency.
The document states that the numbers of young British Muslims, “seemingly committed jihadists”, travelling abroad to commit extremist violence has been rising, with Pakistan and Somalia the most frequent destinations.
India’s euphoria over Slumdog Millionaire’s Oscar sweep reveals much about its national character, writes Tunku Varadarajan in Times Online
Search every corner of the globe, I say, and you will not find a people more complex – and complexed – than Indians. Quite without irony, a nation, many of whose citizens had just been heaping abuse and lawsuits on Slumdog Millionaire for showing India in a bad light, and for using the intolerable word “dog” to describe those poor little slum-wallahs, is now in a state of euphoric bhangra over its winning eight statuettes conferred by an “academy” that regards a bunch of Scientologists (not to mention Mickey Rourke) as icons. Maybe it’s a result of 200 years of colonialism, but Indians are world champions at caring – really caring! – about what foreigners (more accurately, Westerners) think or say about them. They will live blithely with impressively foetid slums in their midst, thinking nothing of the juxtaposition of Victorian-era poverty and world-class, 21st-century living standards. But the national outrage stirred when a Western film-maker uses “slumdog” in the title of his film is an incandescent sight to behold.
Art circles have long speculated that galleries artificially hike artist rates through a variety of means, including fake invoicing. In Mint, Khushboo Narayan reveals that at least two art houses, Osians and Saffronart, are under the scanner for irregularities, charges both deny.
An investigation into the business practices of Osian’s and Saffronart Management Corp., two of India’s premier art houses, has revealed several irregularities in their account books, including a possible attempt to rig the price of artworks and dupe investors, according to an income-tax (I-T) department official involved in the probe.
The two houses—both set up in 2000—separately denied any wrongdoing, claiming all their transactions were transparent, well documented and in line with the law.
The I-T department’s “appraisal report”, previewed by Mint, reveals that Osian’s had obtained fake purchase bills worth Rs15 crore for artworks. The department, which started a probe into alleged tax evasion in 2007, questioned three persons who provided Osian’s with such bills and admitted they were fake, the official said.
Why does Slumdog Millionaire – or for that matter, Bollywood — strike a chord with Americans? Cultural currency is capital, and America’s intensifying interest in India is an asset waiting to be used, writes National Review deputy managing editor Kevin D. Williamson in The Indian Express.
I knew things had turned a corner when garden-variety Anglo-suburban Americans started correcting my Marathi, which is to say when they started regarding my use of “Bombay” rather than “Mumbai” as denoting an embarrassing lack of sophistication on par with using a fork and spoon, instead of chopsticks, at a Chinese restaurant. Not that I speak a word of Marathi, at least not a word one would use in polite company. And not that these would-be sophisticates do, either, but I’ll bet dollars to dosas that it’s only a matter of time before American hipsters start eating khichdi with their fingers in trendy Indo-fusion bistros.
Slumdog Millionaire? In the US, it’s Slumdog Everywhere.
Well, take a look. What’s the bet that Rohan Antao will not be picking up any prizes in the beauty sweepstakes? So, did Freida Pinto really dump him? Were they secretly married? Is she, gasp, having it off with Dev Patel?
Tabloid fodder, yes (read the story here). But Rohan Antao we have a word of advice for you: Stop trying to spoil Freida’s party. Just take it on the chin, and move on man.
A wave of anti-offshoring sentiment in the U.S. Congress is prompting India’s biggest tech companies to prepare for something unexpected: hiring Americans.
Outsourcing giants Infosys Technologies Ltd. and Wipro Ltd. — long derided by some U.S. politicians for taking U.S. jobs away — are laying the groundwork to boost the number of jobs they create stateside, mostly to make sure they can still do business if the U.S. passes legislation that restricts their ability to send Indians to the U.S. to work.
As U.S. unemployment rises, such legislation could come soon, observers say. Already, a provision in the stimulus bill signed by President Obama on Tuesday makes it much harder for U.S. banks bailed out by the government to hire foreign tech workers.
A.R. Rahman might have infused Bollywood beats with a global rhythm, but alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa uses jazz to expolore his Indian classical music roots. In New Yorker, Gary Giddins tunes in.
Jazz musicians have two fundamental goals: creating music that keeps listeners wondering what’s next, and finding a novel context within which to explore old truths. (There are no new truths.) Whenever a musician achieves this synthesis, usually after years of apprenticeship and exploration, a rumble echoes through the jazz world. Such a rumble was heard last fall, when the thirty-seven-year-old alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa released an astonishing album, “Kinsmen,” on a small New York-based label (Pi), quickly followed by another no less astonishing, “Apti,” on a small Minnesota-based label (Innova). The breakthrough had been a long time coming, and, curiously enough, it justifies ethnic assumptions that Mahanthappa had for much of his career been working to escape.
A mixed neighbourhood, wonderful used book shops and bakery shops that sold the yummiest cream rolls. Darwaish goes down memory lane in All Things Pakistan
I grew up in Androon Shehr (old city) of Lahore in the 1980s.
Most of my childhood and teenage years were spent in my Nana Jan’s house located at Lodge Road in Old Anarkali. It was an old but large house, left by a Hindu migrant family, located inside a narrow street of hundreds of years old neighborhood with Jain Mandir (when it existed) just two blocks away and Mall Road merely a ten minutes walk.
Nana used to tell us that Gayan Chand, the head of that Hindu family, spent three long years building this house and it was a strange twist of fate that finally when it got completed in 1947 and he was just about to move in, partition took place. Not only did he lose his newly built house but he also had to flee the city where his forefathers had lived for centuries. Just like Nana Jan had to leave everything behind when he migrated from Amritsar, a high price that millions of people paid in 1947.
As the economic downturn deepens, people turn to religion for comfort, hope and sometimes rescue. Priyanka P. Narain in Mint:
Thousands of people waited for hours at the Babulnath temple in Mumbai on Monday, when Hindus celebrated a festival dedicated to the Lord Siva. Oldtimers said the crowds were so large they had to spend twice as long queing up. “Usually we get done with the darshan (viewing) in three, maybe four hours. Today I have been waiting in line for six hours and it will still take me another two hours before I am done,” said Chandrakant Malusare, a municipal clerk.
As the economic downturn deepens and bad news gets worse, people, regardless of the faiths to which they belong, are increasingly turning to the gods for comfort, hope and sometimes rescue. The fear of losing jobs or pensions or homes and the fear of not being able to care for their children is sending people to places of worship, said Subhash Mayekar, administrator at the Siddhivinayak temple.
Why is India going overboard about Slumdog Millionaire? It is not a victory for Indian cinema, says Sandipan Deb in The Indian Express. Yes, rejoice for the six children who acted in it. And for AR Rahman for winning two Oscars for his music. But Sandipan a;so says that Rahman’s music in the movie “is not even of his average quality.”He is all praise for the other ‘Best Film’ nominee: The Reader.
“Frankly, I don’t think Slumdog Millionaire deserved the Oscar for best film. And even more frankly, I don’t think Resul Pookutty should have invoked “my country and my civilisation” in his acceptance speech for best sound mixing.”
John Elliott (on his blog Riding the Elephant) has a different take on Slumdog’s Oscars. He says the awards “are a win in India’s success story.” “As A.R.Rahman, the Indian composer, who won two Oscars for the best score and for his hit song Jai Ho, said after receiving his award, Slumdog is all about “optimism and the power of hope in our lives”. And that is the mood of Dharavi and of India’s millions of budding success stories.”
A flat joke about his ‘ma’ and a bland generalisation about love. Here’s the acceptance speech that I would have written for A.R. Rahman for his two-Oscar win for best song (Jai Ho) and best soundtrack (for Slumdog Millionaire).
“Jai Ho to this wonderful audience and to audiences everywhere, including at home in India.
This award represents something awesome. For me, it is the recognition that Indian sounds are truly global. And just as the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan sahib took the sounds of his native Pakistan and mixed it to a world beat, working with the talented Peter Gabriel who is my co-nominee for his work in Wall-E, I too hope to be able to use my music to unite one world in one harmonious sound.
Slumdog Millionaire, as you know, is set in Mumbai which was the venue of a devastating terrorist strike on November 26. I don’t wish to trade charges or get into a blame game but I do wish to point out that Slumdog Millionaire is ultimately an affirmative film about hope and love and optimism. This is also the spirit of Mumbai which rose to the challenge of responding to the strikes. And this is also the spirit of human beings everywhere in the world: we will not be cowed down by terror.
[Insert para of people to be thanked, including mother, Danny Boyle etc]
Finally, I wish to thank Allah. I know many of you in this audience are victims of Fox News propaganda. I wish to assure you that the vast, vast majority of Muslims in the world are people like me – people who go about doing their jobs quietly and honestly; people who pray for a better world through music and through love.
From The Times: Scores of people gathered to watch the Oscars ceremony on television in the tiny ramshackle hutments of Garib Nagar, the area where the film’s British director, Danny Boyle, found Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, 10, and Rubina Ali Qureshi, 9, who play the film’s lead characters as children. In the photo above, neighbors of Azharuddin watch the a telecast near his home in a slum in Bandra, suburban Mumbai. Azharuddin, who is attending the ceremony, played the youngest version of Salim, the brother of the main character Jamal, in the movie.
Acceptances speeches
Best director Danny Boyle [comes on stage jumping]: “My kids are too young to remember this, but I swore that if this miracle ever happened, I would receive it in the spirit of Tigger from Winnie the Pooh, so that’s what that was about. Thanks everyone at Warner Brothers for passing on to Fox Searchlight. Just to say to Mumbai – unending, unseparable, unborn – all of you who helped us make the film and all of you who didn’t, thank you so much. You dwarf even the sky.”
A R Rahman (after winning best song): “All my life I’ve had a choice of hate or love, I chose love and I’m here. God Bless”
Freida Pinto and Kate Winslet
And what did you think ofFreida Pinto’s dress? “A royal blue success with an interesting neckline or a fussy style too dowdy for the young actress,” asks The Times in its story on 20 best and worst dresses. The paper puts Freida’s dress in the “We just can’t decide about…” category.
Please go to search or click the Movies icon for more stories on Slumdog Millionaire.
Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle’s adaptation of Vikas Swarup’s novel, Q&A, set in Mumbai, sweeps the Oscars with eight awards including best picture and best director. Music maestro A.R. Rahman scores a double win (best original score and best original song for Jai Ho along with Gulzar). And Resul Pookutty takes home a statue for best sound. “In 80 years of Academy history no Indian technician has been nominated for an Oscar. I’m the first to be nominated, and the first to win,” he is quoted saying backstage by BBC.
Graeme Wood profiles Lalu Yadav in The American: [via 3quarksdaily]
NEW DELHI-In his boyhood, long before Lalu Yadav became India’s most unlikely management guru, he sometimes strayed from his cows and scampered barefoot to the railroad tracks. Dodging crowds and porters, he made his way to the first-class cars and, for a few glorious moments, basked in the air conditioning that blasted from the open door. Then the police would spot him and shoo him away, into the moist trackside cowflap where he belonged.
The boy has grown up, but when I meet him in his New Delhi office, he’s still barefoot, and a headache for train conductors everywhere. Lalu Yadav, 61, is now the boss of all 2.4 million Indian Railways employees. When he wants air conditioning, he nods, and a railway employee hops up to twist the dial. As minister of railways, he rules India’s largest employer-one with annual revenues in the tens of billions-from a fine leather sofa, his sandals and a silver spittoon on the floor nearby and a clump of tobacco in his cheek.
Lalu is a happy man: happy to have risen to become rich, beloved, and reviled all over India; happy that a grateful nation credits him with whipping its beleaguered rail system into profitability; and happy that he’s managed to do all this and somehow stay out of jail. Under his leadership, Indian Railways has gone from bankruptcy to billions in just a few years. When Lalu presented his latest budget to Parliament on February 13, he bragged, “Hathi ko cheetah bana diya” (“I have turned an elephant into a cheetah”). What’s his secret?
Ramachandra Guha is a polymath who happens to write superbly on cricket. Suresh Menon at Cricinfo:
When my son was graduating and looking into the future, a professor told him of the choices ahead: pure science, technology, public service, media, or, he said, “Ramachandra Guha”. This was the first I was hearing of Guha as a career option; the professor meant it as generic term for brilliance spread over a number of fields.
The challenge here is to write about Guha without dwelling on how he has been picked as one of the Top 100 public intellectuals in the world, or that he is the recipient of India’s third-highest civilian award, or that he is a historian, biographer, sociologist, environmentalist, anthropologist with profound, seminal works on each of these subjects. He is among the finest essayists and columnists around, with a range of interests that goes beyond even that list, and takes in music, science, literature, fiction, travel.
But this is about Guha the cricket writer, and – after acknowledging that his work in other fields must inform his writings on cricket, placing them in context and taking them into avenues others leave unexplored – we must descend from the general to the particular.
On the night of Feb. 12, 2009, Aasiya Hassan was allegedly murdered and beheaded by her estranged husband Muzzammil Hassan in the office of their jointly operated American-Muslim TV venture, Bridges Network Inc. Their two children—four-year-old Rania and six-year-old Danyal—were in a car outside the building, waiting for her with their father’s 17-year-old son from an earlier marriage, according to people familiar with the details of the case.
