Current Final

Category: Politics

  • Did PM Imran just give the corrupt a chance to whiten their black money?

    Did PM Imran just give the corrupt a chance to whiten their black money?

    With Prime Minister (PM) Imran Khan offering amnesty for the construction sector, netizens are expressing their “disappointment” at what they say is the premier “flip-flopping on his ideals to hold the corrupt accountable”.

    PM Imran on Friday gave the status of industry to the construction sector, as he announced opening of the sector along with a package of incentives to boost it with a view to keeping the wheels of economy moving and mitigate the impact of the lockdown on people.

    Speaking to reporters after a meeting of the National Command Centre, the PM said the government provided these exemptions to provide employment to the labourers so that they can be saved from “hunger and the coming difficult circumstances”.

    In line with the relief package, the government will not ask construction entities about their source of income for this year as well as approval of a fixed tax regime for the sector.

    The PM said: “This [move] will bring down the amount of tax to be paid. Also, if the investment is for the Naya Pakistan Housing Scheme, we will exempt 90% of the tax on it.”

    He announced an Rs30bn subsidy for the Naya Pakistan Housing Scheme, saying that on the one hand, it will regulate economic activity and on the other, ensure houses for the poor were also built.

    He also said that withholding tax on materials and services had been abolished in the informal sector. “Tax will be collected only on steel and cement, mainly because these are the formal sectors.”

    Here’s what Twitterati have to say in this regard:

    Meanwhile, some resorted to meme-ing it out:

    What do you think of the incentives announced by the PM? Let The Current know in the comments…

  • Exclusive: Ehsanullah Ehsan speaks out for the first time after escaping from military custody

    Exclusive: Ehsanullah Ehsan speaks out for the first time after escaping from military custody

    “The Pakistani Taliban has suffered from American and Pakistani security operations in recent years, but its cells are still active in Pakistan’s cities and are still capable of carrying out attacks,” he told Al Jazeera in his first interview since escaping from Pakistani military custody in January.

    The groups are active in the eastern provinces of Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan, said Ehsanullah Ehsan.

    He further added, “We cannot say that the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, Jamaat-ur-Ahrar or other anti-Pakistan [armed] groups are completely finished. They definitely have a set-up and perhaps they have gone silent as part of a plan. They are present in Pakistani cities and they have the ability to carry out attacks.”

    The interview was conducted from an undisclosed location through voice notes exchanged over an internet-based messaging service.

    As per the report, Pakistan’s military is provided with a detailed list of the allegations made by Ehsan in this interview, but they offered no comment. The Pakistani interior ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

  • Inflation at seven-month low in March

    Inflation at seven-month low in March

    Pakistan’s Consumer Price Index (CPI)-based monthly inflation slowed to 10.24 per cent in March 2020 as compared to the previous month, Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) reported.

    This is the second month in a row that the CPI reading has eased by more than 2 per cent. The bureau had recorded CPI inflation at 12.4 per cent in February. Inflation at 10.2 per cent is the lowest reading in the past seven months.

    According to PBS data, commodity prices remained largely unchanged and markets functioned normally in March despite partial lockdown of the country to control the spread of coronavirus.

    In addition to fuel charges, the prices of food items, including pulses, fresh vegetables and wheat, which have been the main drivers of inflation, also saw a significant downtrend, the bureau said.

    However, it added, the real impact of slash in demand or short supply of commodities due to the shutdown of the market is yet to come.

    “The government’s move to keep the trade of groceries unaffected may support the fall of inflation even in the coming months.”

    The average inflation in the first nine months (July-March) of fiscal year 2020 stood at 11.53 per cent, which in the same period of the last year was 6.3 per cent.

    As per the data, the rate of inflation during the month under review slowed down both in urban and rural areas. Food inflation in urban areas that stood at 15.2 per cent in the preceding month eased to 13 per cent in March. Similarly, in rural areas, the food inflation pace slowed down from 19.7 per cent in February to 15.5 per cent last month.

  • ‘Shoot them dead’: President Duterte warns against violating coronavirus lockdown

    ‘Shoot them dead’: President Duterte warns against violating coronavirus lockdown

    Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has warned he would order the country’s police and military to shoot dead anyone “who creates trouble” during a month-long lockdown of the island of Luzon enforced to halt the spread of the coronavirus, France 24 reported.

    “Let this be a warning to all. Follow the government at this time because it is critical that we have order,” he said in a late-night televised national address on Wednesday.

    “And do not harm the health workers, the doctors … because that is a serious crime. My orders to the police and the military, if anyone creates trouble, and their lives are in danger: shoot them dead.”

    “Do not intimidate the government. Do not challenge the government. You will lose,” he added in Filipino and English.

    Duterte’s warning came after residents of a slum in Manila’s Quezon City staged a protest along a highway near their shanty houses, claiming they had not received any food packs and other relief supplies since the lockdown began more than two weeks ago.

    Village security officers and police urged the residents to go back to their homes, but they refused, a police report said.

    Police broke up the protest and arrested 20 people, the report added.

    Health authorities in the Philippines have recorded 2,311 cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus as of Wednesday. At least 96 people have died.

  • VIDEO: CM Buzdar wants Punjab to beat the world in introducing coronavirus vaccine

    VIDEO: CM Buzdar wants Punjab to beat the world in introducing coronavirus vaccine

    Punjab Chief Minister (CM) Usman Buzdar has said that the province is doing “groundbreaking research” as the global coronavirus pandemic continues to spread and he wants Pakistan to become the first country in the world to introduce vaccination for COVID-19.

    Even the most effective containment strategies have only slowed the spread of the respiratory disease while some 35 companies and academic institutions around the world are racing to create a vaccine that can prevent people from getting sick as COVID-19 leaves around 940,000 people infected globally with at least 47,000 fatalities.

    While the number of confirmed cases in Pakistan stands at 2,252 with at least 32 deaths and 107 recoveries, Buzdar’s Punjab is the worst-hit with 845 infections and Sindh is trailing behind at 709.

    “Pakistan could become the first country to prepare a vaccine for coronavirus with Punjab taking the lead in this regard,” the provincial chief executive said during a press conference in Lahore on Tuesday. “I will assure them [experts] that I will exhaust all available resources for the research.”

    WATCH VIDEO:

    Earlier, the Punjab CM had directed experts to accelerate research activities for the eradication of coronavirus.

    A meeting chaired by the provincial chief executive told that four study groups had been formed and research had been started under the supervision of the University of Health Sciences (UHS).

    CM Buzdar directed the experts to make fruitful efforts to deal with coronavirus as soon as possible. He was informed that a BSL-3 Lab had started working at Jinnah Hospital and Pakistan Kidney and Liver Institute (PKLI).

    The experts briefed the meeting that COVID-19 found in Pakistan was quite different from the coronavirus found in Wuhan and Iran.

  • Britain, France, Germany bypass US sanctions to send medical aid to virus-hit Iran

    Britain, France, Germany bypass US sanctions to send medical aid to virus-hit Iran

    Britain, France and Germany have for the first time used a complex financial system that bypasses United States’ (US) sanctions to send medical aid to Iran, raising hopes of salvaging the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, Telegraph reported.

    The German Foreign Ministry said the medical goods were now in Iran and added that the Instex trade mechanism and its Iranian counterpart would now work on more transactions and on enhancing the system.

    Britain, Germany and France had earlier offered a $5.5 million package to Iran to help fight coronavirus there and said they would also send medical material, including equipment for laboratory tests, protective body suits and gloves.

    Washington’s major European allies opposed the decision by US President Donald Trump in 2018 to abandon the nuclear deal, under which international sanctions on Iran were lifted in return for Tehran accepting curbs on its nuclear programme.

    The European trade vehicle was conceived as a way to help match Iranian oil and gas exports against purchases of EU goods. However, those ambitions have been toned down, with diplomats saying that, realistically, it will be used only for smaller trade, for example of humanitarian products or food.

    The three European powers are shareholders in the Instrument In Support Of Trade Exchanges, or Instex, and hope other states will join later.

  • Coronavirus: ‘Military sidelined PM Imran to enforce countrywide lockdown,’ NYT claims

    A report in The New York Times has claimed that the military “sidelined Prime Minister (PM) Imran Khan to enforce a countrywide lockdown” last week as the coronavirus pandemic in Pakistan worsened while the premier rejected calls from healthcare workers and provincial officials to enforce the same, saying it would ruin the economy.

    “[Imran] Khan rejected calls from healthcare workers and provincial officials to enforce a lockdown, saying it would ruin the economy. Instead, he urged citizens to practice social distancing and ordered everyone back to work, many returning to the sweltering, cramped factories that are the backbone of the economy,” the report said.

    It added, “Finally, the military stepped in on Sunday and sidelined Khan, working with provincial governments to deploy across the country and enforce a lockdown. They erected a maze of military checkpoints in cities like Karachi and sent baton-wielding police officers to violently disperse crowds.”

    While the report suggested that the action might be too late, it is pertinent to note that governments of Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Punjab had last Sunday sought the army’s help in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, asking it to assist civil institutions as the number of confirmed cases in the country crossed 600. The requests had come a day after the Sindh government’s decision to impose a complete lockdown and seek military help under Article 245 of the Constitution.

    The 18th Amendment provides the provinces with significant decision-making autonomy. While Sindh imposed a lockdown on March 23 and requisitioned the army to help carry it out, other provinces followed with varying levels of the halt.

    The Interior Ministry had approved the deployment of the army across the provinces and Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) Director General (DG) Major General Babar Iftikhar had on Monday confirmed Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Qamar Javed Bajwa’s directions for troops and medical resources to be deployed “as per need” in order to contain the spread of the new coronavirus.

    Addressing a press briefing, the military spokesperson had said that the government summoned army for assistance in accordance with the constitution. “This is the time to take tough and difficult decisions on an individual, familial and societal basis.”

    Click here for latest COVID-19 updates from Pakistan and around the world

  • Fawad says ignorance of conservative religious class, not coronavirus, god’s wrath

    Fawad says ignorance of conservative religious class, not coronavirus, god’s wrath

    Federal Minister for Science and Technology Fawad Chaudhry has said that God’s wrath “was the ignorance of the conservative religious class that had led to the coronavirus outbreak in Pakistan”.

    “The global outbreak of coronavirus has spread in Pakistan due to ignorance of the religious community and now they say coronavirus is a punishment from God and we need to repent,” he tweeted.

    He added that scholars who have the knowledge and the intellect were blessings of Allah, but to give an ignorant status of a scholar was destruction.

    “66 studies are going on in which 43 are on new vaccines, 16 on new antibiotics and seven are focusing on antibodies,” the minister said later.

    On Wednesday, several of Pakistan’s senior religious leaders announced that they would keep mosques open for group prayers, on a day when the country’s confirmed cases of COVID-19 crossed the 1,000 mark.   

    The declaration seemed to counter an announcement from President Arif Alvi that upon his request, Egypt’s Al-Azhar University’s religious clerics’ council issued a fatwa — an Islamic religious edict — that public gatherings, including group prayers in mosques, can be banned in the interest of public health. 

    The Cairo-based university is one of the oldest seats of Islamic learning, founded almost a century before Oxford University, the oldest university in the English-speaking world. 

    The Pakistani clerics said young children, old people, those who were sick or taking care of the sick could stay home. They also guided their followers to install sanitizers at the entrances of mosques, and advised more cleanliness.

  • Pakistan blamed for spread of coronavirus to Muslim World

    Pakistan blamed for spread of coronavirus to Muslim World

    The first two cases of the new coronavirus in the Gaza Strip — a war-shattered Palestinian territory with a fragile health system — were confirmed in men who attended a mass religious gathering 10 days ago in Pakistan, United States’ (US) National Public Radio (NPR) has quoted an Islamabad-based Palestinian diplomat as saying.

    The diplomat said the men were part of a two-day gathering that ended March 12. The gathering of the Tablighi Jamaat, a global Muslim missionary group, brought together tens of thousands of preachers from some 80 countries and raised concerns about the virus’ spread in Pakistan and beyond.

    The Pakistani authorities had urged for the cancellation of the five-day Tablighi Ijtema congregation hosted annually near Lahore but organisers from the movement had ignored government advice to postpone, The News reported.

    A longtime Pakistani Tablighi Jamaat member, Arif Rana, said the gathering was canceled on March 12 because of rain — attendees sleep in the open. But Azhar Mashwani, focal person to the Punjab chief minister (CM) on digital media, said that it ended because of coronavirus fears.

    Most attendees were Pakistani, but at least a few thousand came from other countries, Rana told NPR.

    Omar al-Tabatibi said his 79-year-old grandfather, Mohammed, and friend Amer Doghmosh had attended the Lahore event.

    Previous statements from health officials had misidentified the men as being between 30 and 40. “My grandfather learnt about the conference by chance from a friend while he was in Pakistan so he wanted to attend,” Tabatibi said.

    After returning from Pakistan, his grandfather stayed several days in Egypt before taking the long journey overland to Gaza, Tabatibi said. “Maybe, my grandfather caught corona in Egypt and not Pakistan, no one knows,” he added.

    Five preachers from Kyrgyzstan stayed in a mosque in Islamabad after attending the Tablighi Jamaat gathering and have also tested positive, said a senior health official who did not want to be named because he was not authorised to speak to the press.

    On Twitter, Muhammad Hamza Shafqaat, the deputy commissioner of Islamabad, accused the Kyrgyz group of “criminal carelessness” because “they knew that one of them had symptoms and they kept on roaming around”.

    Concerns have also been raised in Southeast Asia about infection after a Tablighi Jamaat gathering outside Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in late February and early March. Malaysian media reported that more than half of the country’s known coronavirus cases were traced to the gathering. Preachers who attended also spread the virus to Brunei and Thailand, The New York Times reported, saying the gathering created “the largest known viral vector in Southeast Asia”.

  • Coronavirus: PM Imran walks out of high-level meeting ‘paid for by Bilawal’

    In what is being termed as his “non-serious attitude towards a health crisis”, Prime Minister (PM) Imran Khan on Wednesday walked out after addressing parliamentary leaders on the coronavirus outbreak via video link that, according to sources, was paid for by Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) chief Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari.

    “The link… the subscription of the software is owned by the PPP and was shared with the government for the emergency moot as it only had Skype and couldn’t manage,” sources informed The Current.

    Earlier, the premier said he wanted all political parties to unite on one forum and fight against COVID-19. “All political parties and provinces will be included in the victory against corona[virus],” he reportedly said in his address at the parliamentary leaders’ conference that he later left midway, drawing a strong reaction from opposition leaders.

    Leader of the Opposition in the National Assembly and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) President Shehbaz Sharif also left the meeting in protest over the “carefree attitude” of PM Imran while the country suffered because of what Shehbaz said was the worst health crisis in its history.

    With the PPP chief following suit, Shehbaz tweeted:

    Meanwhile, party sources informed The Current that Bilawal will soon be addressing a press conference over the events that marred Wednesday’s high-level meeting between national leaders.