Renowned actress Shagufta Ejaz silenced slanderers by celebrating their wedding anniversary at the hospital with her husband, who is currently under medical treatment.
Some time ago, the senior actress took to social media users who criticised and slandered her for going abroad and said that she would never forgive the slanderers, adding that she would hold their neck on the Day of Judgment.
She recently shared a new vlog on her YouTube channel, which included her wedding anniversary, which she celebrated in her husband’s hospital room.
In the next part of the Vlog, the senior actress complained about the inadequate facilities of the private hospital and requested the fans to pray for her husband’s full recovery.
Yahya Siddiqui, husband of Shagufta Ejaz, has been suffering from cancer for five years and is undergoing treatment in a private hospital.
Actress Hajra Yamin is making waves with her performance as Sumbul in the drama Noor Jahan.
Recently, Hajra appeared as a guest on Gloss Etc by Maliha Rehman where she was asked, “If it was up to you, would you play Sumbhal or some other character?”
The Noor Jahan actress replied, “I would play Sumbul. I would definitely choose Noor Jahan if I were older. What a character and what an amazing job. Negativity aside, she is such a powerful woman. I love it.”
The host asked, “Is Saba Hamid as strict in real life as she portrays her characters, like Noor Jahan? Does she have a similar presence off-screen?”
Hajra Yamin said, “I will be very honest with you. Sometimes we feel that the people who seem very strict are actually more scared of us than we are of them. Maybe they have social anxiety; this is a very general statement, you know, because I have a little bit of social anxiety myself, which sometimes comes across as arrogance. Saba Aapa….the talent she has, the figure that she is, I was a bit anxious about how it would be. A lot of my work is with her, or has been with Kubra Khan, but it was nice, and she was clear about who should do what. There was one thing that was good, where I was a bit scared, but then there was Musadik, and he said, ‘No, Azaam, we’ll do it this way, and it’ll be fine.’ I said, ‘Alright, okay.’
“You know, I sometimes forget my lines. Saba Appa doesn’t forget her lines. She is a pro. Oh, she is so good. She is so good that she instantly remembers her lines. And the performance we saw on screen was amplified from what we saw firsthand. The gestures, the way she glared, the stern tone, she never shouted, but the sternness in her voice, in certain words, she emphasized it. And that was not missed by anyone. What I am really happy about is that the nuances of this story are visible to everyone,” Hajra Yamin added.
Noor Jahan is written by Zanjabeel Asim Shah and directed by Musadik Malek. It airs on ARY Digital on Friday and Saturday at 8:00 PM.
Chief Minister (CM) Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) Ali Amin Gandapur has reached Peshawar despite speculation of his arrest in Islamabad.
Yesterday, Information Advisor KP Barrister Muhammad Ali Saif claimed that Gandapur disappeared after the power show rally at Sangjani, and his phone number was switched off.
“Chief Minister Ali Amin Gandapur is in Islamabad, not Peshawar, but we have no information on his whereabouts,” he claimed yesterday.
Opposition leader in the National Assembly (NA) Omar Ayub Khan said that the federal government and establishment invited Gandapur for a cup of tea to discuss security concerns in KP, adding that they could not reach out to the security staff via mobile phone.
On the other hand, Zulfi Bukhari claimed on X (formerly Twitter) that CM KP Gandapur had been arrested/abducted.
Upon CM KP Ali Amin Gandapur’s arrival in Peshawar, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) lawmaker Shahid Khattak clarified that Gandapur was busy in various meetings in Islamabad, rejecting the rumours of disappearance.
On September 9, Islamabad police launched a crackdown against PTI leadership for violating the new public order law. They arrested prominent figures, including Chairman PTI Barrister Gohar Ali Khan and Sher Afzal Marwat.
Today, PTI leader Ali Muhammad Khan criticised the incumbent government in the National Assembly on the arrest of PTI lawmakers.
Posing a question, he said, “Today, I am making a case on democracy. What happened to democracy and to this parliament last night? We are not in Israel; we are in Pakistan.”
Defence Minister Khawaja Asif hit back at Khan, saying, “If you say ‘No founder PTI Imran Khan, no Pakistan’, what will be the reaction?”
“CM KP Gandapur, bring an army of Pashtuns and attack Punjab,” he added.
Actress Javeria Saud returns as Azra to lead the family in the much-anticipated sequel to the hit drama Baby Baji, titled Baby Baji Ki Bahuwain.
Azra was previously depicted as the fiery eldest daughter-in-law from the original ‘Baby Baji’.
The teasers released have already garnered millions of views, giving viewers a sneak peek of the upcoming family drama.
Fans have expressed their anticipation in the comments.
Tehseen Khan returns as the sequel’s director, and Saqib Ali Rana has written the script.
Alongside Javeria Saud, her real and reel-life husband Saud, and other actors including Hassan Ahmed, Sunita Marshall, Tuba Anwar, Junaid Jamshed Niazi, and Fazal Hussain, who will reprise their roles from the original hit series.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif announced on Monday that the government intends to present a constitutional amendment draft for the approval of both Houses of Parliament this week, ending long-debated speculations, to bring about significant changes in the judicial system.
While addressing a dinner for MNAs of his own and allied parties in the PM’s house, Sharif said that certain elements are busy undermining government performance but they would be helpless under the upcoming amendments.
Earlier, many YouTubers and journalists speculated about the government’s alleged plans to extend the tenure of Chief Justice Qazi Faez Isa through an upcoming judicial package; however, both the government and the CJP denied the claims.
He also asked coalition members of the parliament to ensure their attendance from September 10 till the adjournment of the current session.
Jang News reported that the government has attained a two-thirds majority in the Houses of Parliament for the proposed constitutional amendment.
Meanwhile, The News reported that the two major amendments include removing the suo motu powers of the superior judiciary and establishing a constitutional court under the Nawaz-Benazir Charter of Democracy signed in June 2006.
Punjab Assembly took up the issue of the elite club Lahore Gymkhana paying only Rs 417 per month as a lease for over 1,000 Kanals of state land, with the assembly speaker calling it “exploitation.”
The Punjab Assembly speaker, Malik Muhammad Ahmad Khan, referred the matter to a special committee, which will submit a report within two weeks.
Interestingly, it was also announced that the Gymkhana proceedings will not be in-camera.
Geo Fact Check’s investigations in May this year revealed that the lease agreement, signed in 1996, between the then deputy commissioner of Lahore and the secretary of Lahore Gymkhana Club allowed over a thousand kanals of public land in the centre of Lahore to the club for 50 years at the rate of Rs 5,000 per year.
The lease, effective from 2000, remains valid until 2050, reported Geo Fact Check.
The prestigious club is known for having top post bureaucrats, politicians, businessmen, and armed forces personnel as members, and it has over ten years of waiting lists for those who wish to join.
This development comes as the country goes through one of the most difficult economic periods. With high rates of inflation and increasing debts, the government is trying to reduce its bloated expenditures through an apparent austerity drive.
Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan, convicted on appeal of rape and sexual coercion by a Geneva court, is a Swiss intellectual accused of masking violence and radicalism behind a mild facade.
The Swiss court said it “annuls the judgement of 24 May 2023” and sentenced the 62-year-old former Oxford University professor to three years in prison, two of them suspended.
The verdict was slightly more lenient than the three years in prison — half suspended — requested by the prosecutor in the appeals case in May.
The ruling — dated August 28 but not made public until after it was reported by broadcaster RTS early on Tuesday — is likely to be subject to an appeal at Switzerland’s highest court.
Ramadan, a charismatic yet controversial figure in European Islam, has always maintained his innocence.
Ramadan’s accuser, a Muslim convert identified only as “Brigitte”, had testified before the court that he subjected her to rape and other violent sex acts in a Geneva hotel room during the night of October 28, 2008.
The lawyer representing Brigitte said she was repeatedly raped and subjected to “torture and barbarism”.
‘Trap’
Ramadan said that Brigitte invited herself up to his room. He let her kiss him, he said, before quickly ending the encounter.
He said he was the victim of a “trap”.
Brigitte was in her forties at the time of the alleged assault.
She filed a complaint ten years later, telling the court she felt emboldened to come forward following similar complaints filed against Ramadan in France.
The appeals verdict overturns a lower court finding last year acquitting Ramadan of rape and sexual coercion, citing a lack of evidence, contradictory testimonies and “love messages” sent by the plaintiff after the alleged assault.
But during their appeal, Brigitte’s lawyers alleged that Ramadan had exercised significant “control” over the woman, suggesting she had suffered something akin to Stockholm syndrome.
The three appeals court judges pointed to “witness testimony, certificates, medical notes and private expert opinions consistent with the facts presented by the plaintiff”.
“Elements collected during the investigation have thus convinced the chamber of the guilt of the accused,” the court said in a statement.
Ramadan was a professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford and held visiting roles at universities in Qatar and Morocco.
He was forced to take a leave of absence in 2017 when rape allegations surfaced in France at the height of the “Me Too” movement.
In France, he is suspected of raping three women between 2009 and 2016.
His large defence team is fighting a Paris appeals court decision in June that the cases can go to trial.
Who is Tariq Ramadan?
Ramadan, 62, is the grandson of the founder of the Islamist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and wrote his doctoral thesis on his ancestor.
He basked in the public spotlight in the 2000s as a professor at Britain’s prestigious Oxford university, lecturing across Europe as well as Morocco, Qatar and Japan, drawing crowds of students wherever he went.
Named by Time Magazine in 2004 among the 100 most influential people in the world for his influence on European Muslims, Ramadan has nevertheless stirred controversy throughout his career.
He has rejected allegations of anti-Semitism as attempts to silence what he sees as legitimate criticism of the Israeli state.
And French defenders of the country’s fierce secularism have accused him of smuggling an identitarian subtext within his modernising message, encouraging young girls to wear the Islamic headscarf or spreading religious fundamentalism.
Well turned-out with trademark trimmed grey hair and beard, Ramadan engaged in verbal jousts with opponents including French polemicist Eric Zemmour, who went on to stand as a far-right presidential candidate in 2022.
He fought back against allegations of fundamentalism, saying he encouraged young Muslims to involve themselves in their societies, calling the headscarf a matter of personal choice, urging “contextualisation” of Islam’s founding texts and condemning violence.
Nevertheless, his attempt to acquire French nationality in addition to his Swiss passport to “provide a concrete, positive example of upholding the values of the Republic” was rejected in 2016 by the then prime minister Manuel Valls.
Court battles in France
Ramadan’s fall from grace began in 2017 when he was first targeted with allegations of sexual violence in France.
In total, four women in France ultimately accused him of rapes between 2009 and 2016, while a Swiss woman converted to Islam filed a criminal complaint in 2018 for a rape she said took place in Geneva 10 years before.
The Swiss case is the one in which Ramadan has now been convicted on appeal.
As the allegations broke, he put his 12-year professorship in contemporary Islamic studies at the University of Oxford on hold as support for him haemorrhaged, including from Qatar.
His 2018 admission that he had sex outside his decades of marriage, in which he had four children with a French woman convert, tarnished his image for some religious and community leaders.
Saying he suffers from multiple sclerosis and depression, Ramadan retired early.
Alongside the Swiss case, a Paris appeals court ruled in June this year that Ramadan should be tried for raping three women between 2009 and 2016, a decision his lawyers have challenged.
The scholar spent more than nine months in pre-trial detention in 2018 but was released in November that year.
‘Fragile’ women
French investigators in 2023 said they had identified a pattern across all the rape allegations.
Ramadan would enter private conversations with women who were “especially fragile, with tumultuous life stories, looking for love, validation and spirituality”.
The discussions would quickly take an intimate and then sexual turn, prosecutors said, leading to an in-person meeting.
Psychiatric experts told the investigation that the women had been fervent admirers of Ramadan as a public figure with religious and academic credentials.
But when it came to the meetings, several women described a complete change of character, with Ramadan becoming violent, ranging from slaps to blows and non-consensual penetration.
Ramadan said he had not carried out “a single act, behaviour or sex act that was not discussed beforehand” with the women.
Famous actress Hira Khan warned new artists of casting fraud by sharing her own experiences.
Recently, she gave an interview to Fuschia Magazine, which has gone viral on various social media platforms.
In the interview, the actress narrated what happened in the audition without naming anyone, explaining how an experienced artist from the industry suggested she attend a fake audition, and how another director from the industry tricked her.
She said, “When I was shooting for the drama serial Mere Humsafar, a fellow artist, whom I met on the sets, gave me the number of a director and said that he wanted a girl for a new project. Contact him.”
She added, “Following the advice of the fellow artist, I called the said director and instead of asking me about my work, he asked for my photos and called me for an audition.”
She continued, “When I asked him to fix the time in the afternoon, he called me at 11 pm.”
Hira Khan said that the director told her, “You will have a screen test and will be selected based on that. You will have to wear bold clothes for the screen test,” and added that “your audition should be kept secret, which will only be seen by the producers.”
The actress explained that after hearing the director’s words, she became suspicious and called another director from the industry to ask if auditions were conducted in such a manner.
Many of the cases she documented followed the same pattern: schoolboys steal innocuous selfies from private Instagram accounts and create explicit images to share in the chat rooms, specifically to humiliate female classmates — or even teachers.
Super-wired South Korea, with the world’s fastest average internet speeds, has long battled sexual cyber violence, but experts say a toxic combination of Telegram, AI tech, and lax laws has supercharged the issue — and it is tearing through the country’s schools.
“It’s not just the harm caused by the deepfake itself, but the spread of those videos among acquaintances that is even more humiliating and painful,” Bang, 18, told AFP.
She has received thousands of reports from devastated victims since authorities in August found the first such Telegram chatrooms, typically set up within a school or university to prey on female students and staff.
Deepfake prevalence is increasing exponentially globally, industry data shows, up 500 percent on year in 2023, cybersecurity startup Security Hero estimates, with 99 percent of victims women — typically famous singers and actresses.
But while celebrities have powerful backers to protect them — the K-pop agency behind girlband NewJeans recently took legal action against deepfake porn — many ordinary victims are struggling to get justice, activists say.
‘Live in fear’
Prosecution rates are woeful: between 2021 and July this year, 793 deepfake crimes were reported but only 16 people were arrested and prosecuted, according to police data obtained by a lawmaker.
After news of the chat rooms spread, complaints surged, with 118 cases reported in just five days in late August and seven people arrested amid a police crackdown.
But six out of seven alleged perpetrators were teenagers, police say, which complicates prosecutions as South Korean courts rarely issue arrest warrants for minors.
The chatrooms, multiple of which AFP attempted to join before being removed by moderators, have lewd names such as “the lonely masturbator” and rules requiring members to post photos of women they wish to see “punished”.
Victims find themselves “sexually insulted and mocked by their classmates in online spaces”, Kang Myeong-suk, head of victim support at the Women’s Human Rights Institute of Korea told AFP.
“But the perpetrators often face no consequences,” she said, adding that victims now “live in fear of where their manipulated images might be distributed by those around them”.
“Some online comments say the victims should ‘get over it’ as these deepfake images are not even real,” Kang said.
“But just because manipulated images aren’t real doesn’t mean the pain the victims endure is any less genuine.”
Victim blaming
While overall crime rates in South Korea are generally low, the country has long suffered from an epidemic of spy-cam crimes, which led to major protests in 2018 inspired by the global #MeToo movement, eventually forcing lawmakers to strengthen laws.
Even so “the penalties issued are often trivial, like fines or probation, which are disproportionate to the gravity of the offenses”, professor Yoon Kim Ji-young told AFP.
There have also been Telegram porn scandals before, most notably in 2020, when a group blackmailing women and girls to make sexual content for paid chatrooms was uncovered. The ringleader was jailed.
But things have not improved.
President Yoon Suk Yeol’s dismissive views on feminism — which he has blamed for the country’s low birthrate — have signalled to men it is “okay to be hostile or discriminatory towards women”, Yoon Kim said.
South Korean police blame low prosecution rates on Telegram, which is famed for its reluctance to cooperate with authorities. Its founder was recently arrested in France for failing to curb illegal content on the app.
But one victim of a 2021 deepfake porn incident told AFP that this was no excuse — many victims manage to identify their attackers themselves simply by determined sleuthing.
The victim, who requested anonymity, said it had been a “huge trauma” to bring her assailant to justice after she was attacked in 2021 with a barrage of Telegram messages containing deepfake images showing her being sexually assaulted.
Her attacker was a fellow student at the prestigious Seoul National University, who she had rarely interacted with but always thought was “gentle”.
“It was hard to accept,” she said, adding police required her to collect all the evidence herself, then she had to lobby hard for a trial, which is now ongoing.
“The world I thought I knew completely collapsed,” she said in a letter she plans to submit to the court on September 26.
“No one should be treated as an object or used as a means to compensate for the inferiority complexes of individuals like the defendant, simply because they are women.”
Federal capital police arrested Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) leadership after the approval of the Speaker of the National Assembly (NA), Ayaz Sadiq, ARY NEWS has claimed.
The Islamabad police showed the First Information Report (FIR) to Speaker NA Ayaz Sadiq. Upon his approval, PTI lawmakers were arrested outside the parliament.
The capital police registered multiple cases against 25 leaders, resulting in the arrest of prominent PTI figures, including Sher Afzal Marwat, Advocate Shoaib Shaheen, Chief Sunni Ittehad Council (SIC) Sahibzada Hamid Raza, and Chairman PTI Barrister Gohar Ali Khan, from outside the parliament.
