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Tag: PML-N

  • Sindh health official suspended after out-of-turn vaccination of PML-N leader’s daughter

    The Sindh government has suspended a senior health official over out-of-turn vaccination of Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leader and former Sindh governor Muhammad Zubair’s daughter and son-in-law against COVID-19.

    As per the details, Sindh Health Minister Dr Azra Pechuho took notice of the incident after the couple posted on social media pictures of them receiving the vaccination shots.

    Reports quoted provincial government sources as saying that Karachi East Deputy District Health Officer Dr Anila was suspended as coronavirus vaccines were administered to acquaintances at other centres as well.

    A three-member committee has been formed to report its findings to the Sindh health minister within 72 hours.

    “If Mohammad Zubair had his family administered the vaccines privately then there is nothing wrong in it,” Information Minister Shibli Faraz told SAMAA TV.

    “But if it were the government-procured vaccines, then this was not the right thing to do,” he added.

    Earlier, a team of the National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) led by Dr Faisal Sultan also met Sindh health officials and Planning Minister Asad Umar on Sunday.

    It directed the Sindh government to only vaccinate frontline health workers for now.

    The Sindh government on Friday had announced launching COVID-19 vaccination programme in 10 districts of the province and unveiled a detailed phase-wise plan to inoculate people, beginning with 170,000 frontline health workers.

    According to Dawn, In addition to the 82,359 doses to be received from the Centre, the provincial government also shared its plan for the procurement of the vaccine on its own though federal authorities are yet to respond to its request for permission for the procurement.

    “We are starting the vaccination from Wednesday [next],” Sindh Information Minister Syed Nasir Hussain Shah at a press conference. He was accompanied by a member of the Sindh vaccination taskforce and provincial lawmaker Qasim Soomro.

    Shah said 10 districts had been identified in Sindh where COVID-19 jabs would be provided. “This programme will be initiated in all the seven districts of Karachi along with Hyderabad, Jamshoro and Shaheed Benazirabad.

  • Arabic teaching compulsory in Islamabad schools after Senate okays bill

    Arabic teaching compulsory in Islamabad schools after Senate okays bill

    All primary and secondary schools in Islamabad are required to introduce the Arabic language as a compulsory subject after the Senate approved the Compulsory Teaching of the Arabic Language Bill 2020 on Monday.

    The bill presented by Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) Senator Javed Abbasi was endorsed by all members of the upper house, except Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Senator Raza Rabbani who wrote a dissenting note. The bill will be implemented within six months.

    As per the bill, Arabic will be taught in schools in Islamabad from grades 1-5, while Arabic grammar will be taught in grades 6-12.

    Senator Abbasi said Arabia is “the fifth most spoken language in the world”, adding that it would also open up more job opportunities for Pakistanis in the Middle East. According to the senator, the Holy Quran is in Arabic and “we would not go through the problems we are currently facing had we understood the Holy Quran”.

    Parliamentary Minister and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) leader Ali Muhammad Khan also agreed with Abbasi. He said the bill was in line with Article 31 of the Constitution that says: “Measures should be taken to spend our lives according to the Holy Quran and Sunnah.”

    According to Khan, learning Arabic was crucial to “become a good Muslim […] and understand God’s message”.

    However, PPP’s Rabbani said that legislation to make Arabic a mandatory language in schools was an attempt to “use Islamic for political purposes”. He further termed this an attempt to erase the diversity of Pakistan by imposing the foreign Arabic culture.

    “The Arab culture is not mine, [the] Indus Valley [Civilisation] is my culture,” he said, adding the Arabic language has nothing to do with Islam or Quran beyond being the language it was revealed in.

    In a response to The Current’s story on Instagram, PPP Senator Sherry Rehman said that contrary to the media reports, the PPP opposed the said bill.

  • ‘You call yourself professor… mind your tone’: Ahsan Iqbal gets a scolding from NA speaker

    Ruckus on Friday marred yet another session of the National Assembly as Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) senior leader Ahsan Iqbal got a scolding from speaker of the House, Asad Qaiser.

    “Please follow rules. I am doing so too […] mind your tone,” the speaker told the opposition lawmaker.

    While the reason behind the war of words has not yet been confirmed by any, a video of the episode showed Iqbal repeatedly interrupting the speaker, demanding what appeared to be more time on the floor of the House.

    “Please mind your tone. You have been a minister, and you call yourself ‘professor’… is this the way to talk?” a visibly displeased Qaiser was seen asking Iqbal who kept talking back at the speaker.

    WATCH VIDEO:

    Earlier, rumpus also erupted after PML-N MNA Afzal Khokhar tabled a privilege motion.

    During the session, while talking about the operation to demolish his Lahore residence, the Khokhar Palace, the PML-N leader told the House that the administration had stormed his place late at night and destroyed furniture among other things.

    “This type of attitude of Punjab authorities will not be tolerated,” he said.

    The House has been adjourned to meet again on Monday.

  • PM thinks election every five years is a ‘tragedy’

    PM thinks election every five years is a ‘tragedy’

    Prime Minister (PM) Imran Khan has said that no nation could move forward without long-term planning and it was tragic that governments in Pakistan could not do so due to the general election being held every five years.

    According to The News, the premier, while addressing a function in connection with documentary-drama ‘Paani Ke Pankh‘ on Thursday, termed the 10 years of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) governments from 2008 through 2018 the “decade of darkness, marred by massive corruption, political expediency and inefficiency”.

    “When criminals become country heads, then no country can develop. So, one has to have faith in oneself. There are talented Pakistanis in every field outside Pakistan. The country’s system has to be fixed,” he said.

    “It takes a little time; people should not worry that the change has not come yet. It takes time to change the mindset. It’s tragic that in our country elections are held every five years due to which we do not have a long-term plan,” he continued.

    He said dams were built with a long-term plan and cited China as a country that is becoming the world’s fastest growing economic power and superpower because of long-term planning.

    “When we visited China, they told us what they were going to do in the next 10 to 20 years. No nation can move forward unless it has a long-term plan and thinks ahead. Unfortunately, we have a period of five years. We try to accomplish everything in five years, spend billions of rupees on advertisements and then fight elections on it,” he pointed out.

    Imran believed that this handicap had done a lot of damage to Pakistan.

  • PTI’s Pakistan more corrupt than PML-N’s Pakistan for second consecutive year: Transparency International

    PTI’s Pakistan more corrupt than PML-N’s Pakistan for second consecutive year: Transparency International

    Transparency International (TI) — a Berlin-based international non-governmental organisation combating global corruption — on Thursday released a new report, according to which, the country under the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government, for the second consecutive year, has witnessed more corruption than it did in the outgoing year of the former ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N).

    According to TI’s global report on the 2020 Corruption Perception Index (CPI), while Pakistan’s ranking and CPI score in 2019 dropped from 117 to 120 and from 33 to 32, respectively, the ranking has now fallen down to 123 and CPI score to 31 in 2020.

    The report comes at a time when the Prime Minister (PM) Imran Khan-led government boasts of the success of its promised accountability drive against opposition lawmakers and government officials. The same has time and again been termed as “political victimisation” by those on the radar of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB).

    Before the second consecutive drop, Pakistan witnessed a slight improvement in the 2018 CPI, scoring a point higher than in 2017 but remaining unchanged in the rankings. The country scored 33 out of 100 on the index — one point better than its score of 32 in 2017 and 2016. Its ranking, however, remained unchanged at 117 out of 180 countries, in 2018.

    TI’s annual report on CPI is formulated on the basis of input from 13 international agencies. In the case of Pakistan, however, the assessment of eight agencies is taken into account. These include the World Economic Forum Executive Opinion Survey; the World Bank Country Policy and Institutional Assessment; the World Justice Project Rule of Law Index; the Bertelsmann Stiftung Transformation Index; the Economist Intelligence Unit Country Risk Service; the Global Insight Country Risk Ratings; the IMD World Competitiveness Center World Competitiveness Yearbook Executive Opinion Survey; and the Varieties of Democracy project’s findings.

    Pakistan in the last 11 years had improved its index score from 23 in 2010 to 33 in 2018. However, never in the said time period had Pakistan been assessed to have performed negatively when compared to the previous year, which has now happened twice.

  • PTI’s Khattak approached Ayaz Sadiq for talks, says PML-N leader

    Pakistan Muslim League-Nawa (PML-N) leader Attaullah Tarar has said that Defence Minister Pervaiz Khattak approached PML-N leader Ayaz Sadiq with an offer for a dialogue between the government and opposition.

    In a TV show, Tarar claimed the government had approached the PML-N with a dialogue offer. But his claim was contested by Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) minister Zartaj Gul, who challenged him to name the minister who approached the opposition leader.

    At this, Tarar said that PTI’s Khattak approached Sadiq with a reconciliation offer. Zartaj, however, said that PTI government doesn’t believe in backdoor talks with the “criminals” and added that it would hold talks with the opposition on the floor of parliament only.

    On Monday, a meeting between the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), PTI, and PML-N to be held with NA Speaker Asad Qaiser in the chair was cancelled after the PML-N leader skipped it.

    Subsequently, the PML-N vice president, Maryam Nawaz, said there would be no talks with the government. Maryam Nawaz had claimed that the government was “begging” before the opposition for a dialogue, but the opposition had decided against it.

    “You will be surprised if I tell you the details as to how they [the government people] are begging before the opposition for talks,” she said, adding that long march and mass resignations will take place when the time will come.

  • ‘That’s why he prayed for Modi’s victory’: Imran accused of receiving funding from India’s BJP, Israel

    The Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) leadership has accused Prime Minister (PM) Imran Khan of receiving funding from India and Israel, as Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) Vice President Maryam Nawaz has also drawn a link between the claim and the premier hoping Narendra Modi won the 2019 election to become his Indian counterpart.

    Ahead of the Indian general election, Imran had expressed his wish for Indian hardliner Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to win the election as “they were more prone to holding dialogue with Pakistan”.

    Addressing a protest demonstration in front of the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) on Tuesday, Maryam demanded that PM Imran came clean if there were no skeletons in his closet.

    “Imran Khan received funding from India and Israel in his own and in the bank accounts of his friends, and through ‘Hundi’ also,” she added.

    Maryam further said that one of the BJP leaders, Andarjeet Dosal, and an Israeli person transferred funds to Imran’s accounts that he used to operate with his own signatures.

    She said that having received funds from the BJP, Imran prayed for victory of Narendra Modi in 2019 elections and was hopeful of his success.

    Now, she maintained, Imran was saying that he had no knowledge of transfer of funds and the same was done by some agents. “Either he is foolish or trying to make a fool out of the people.”

    The PML-N leader said that the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) disclosed 23 secret accounts of Imran he used to operate with his signatures, and the same were kept secret from the ECP as well.

    PM Imran should also tell as to who were the agents who brought him in power and imposed him on 220 million people of Pakistan, Maryam said, alleging that the ECP scrutiny committee denied releasing facts about the case because Imran did not permit it. “The one who called us thieves turned out to be the biggest thief himself,” she added.

    She said that a long list of Imran’s crimes came to light before the ECP’s scrutiny committee, but it had been instructed to go slow on him and that was why the scrutiny committee had been investigating the matter for three years.

    Maryam said the shocking revelations should have prompted a decision within three days. “During the 80 hearings of the case, Imran sought a stay of proceedings 30 times, requested four times to keep the proceedings secret, and also moved the high court six times while challenging authority of the ECP,” she said.

    Maryam said the public knew who imposed him on the people. “Pakistan has changed now and you cannot commit dacoity on the votes of its people anymore,” she added.

    She said now that Imran had confessed to his crime, ECP should announce the punishment for him.

    PDM President Maulana Fazlur Rehman also severely criticised the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) leadership, and repeated the allegations levelled by the PML-N leader. “Imran Khan is an agent of Jews and he contested elections while using funding from India and Israel,” he claimed.

    Fazl said he had always told the people of Pakistan that Imran Khan was a Jew agent.

    Maulana Fazlur Rehman said the Imams of mosques in Islamabad had refused to receive Rs10,000 per month stipend from the government, adding those might be Indian and Israeli funds. “Those are Hindus and Jews who are supporting the Imran government,” he added.

    The PDM president said some institutions had brought the country to such a bad state of affairs, saying the ECP was facing severe pressure and was serving its own interests.”

    “Those powerful selected a fool person so that they should actually rule while sitting behind the scenes,” he added.

    Other leaders of the anti-government alliance also delivered fiery speeches against the current government setup.

  • Due to zero political interference, NAB recovered Rs389bn in two years: PM

    Due to zero political interference, NAB recovered Rs389bn in two years: PM

    Prime Minister Imran Khan said the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) managed to recover more money in the first two years of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government as compared to the entire tenures of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N).

    In a tweet, PM Imran said that the reason NAB was able to recover money during his government was the fact that it was functioning “independently” and without any sort of “political interference”.

    “Total recoveries by NAB in 2019 & 2020 amount to Rs.389 bn in comparison to previous 10 yrs (2008-2018) recoveries of Rs.104 bn,” the prime minister said.

    Imran also appreciated the performance of Punjab’s Anti-Corruption Establishment, saying it recovered Rs206bn in 27 months of Buzdar-led government, whereas it had only managed to recover Rs3bn during the two tenures of PML-N chief Shehbaz Sharif.

    He said the money recovered by the two accountability watchdogs show that accountability worked best when institutions are independent. Imran went on dub the tenures of the PPP and PML-N as “dark ages under corrupt rulers”.

    The opposition leaders, on the other hand, accuse NAB of political victimisation. They claim that NAB is working to target the rivals of PM Imran Khan. Similar remarks were also made by the Islamabad High Court in a graft case against PML-N leader Saad Rafique and Salman Rafique.

  • Cuteness overloaded: Maryam’s toy shopping on video call with granddaughter goes viral

    Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) Vice President Maryam Nawaz has been spotted speaking to her granddaughter while looking for toys, a video of which has gone viral over the internet.

    In the video, reportedly shot at a rest-stop on the Bahawalpur-Lahore route, the PML-N leader was seen speaking to granddaughter Serena, telling her what she had bought for her and asking what else did she want.

    “I got red chips for you,” Maryam was seen telling the kid on a video call. “You want to see?” She is then seen heading over to a wall where a toy doctor set is hanging. “Look… look at this doctor’s set Serena. You want this one?” “You want the doctor’s set or do you want the bus?” she asks before reciting the nursery rhyme “Wheels on the Bus”.

    “Maryam Nawaz specially stopped at a rest area on her way back to Lahore from Bwp to get things for her granddaughter Serena… Showing her toys on a video call,” PML-N’s Sania Ashiq wrote while tweeting the video.

    “The pleasures and joy of being a Nano,” Maryam said while reacting to it. On May 6, 2018, Mehrunisa, Maryam’s daughter and the granddaughter of former prime minister (PM) Nawaz Sharif, gave birth to the baby girl. A picture of the baby in Maryam’s arms had also gone viral later.

  • Khawaja Asif arrested; ‘had a bag packed already’

    Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leader and former foreign minister Khawaja Asif was on Tuesday arrested by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) from Islamabad, a spokesperson for the bureau and PML-N spokesperson Marriyum Aurangzeb confirmed.

    As per the details, Asif was taken into custody in the backdrop of an ongoing investigation into allegations of him possessing assets beyond known sources of income to the tune of whopping Rs260 million.

    Aurangzeb said he was arrested from near PML-N general secretary Ahsan Iqbal’s house.

    He has been taken to the NAB Rawalpindi office, Geo News reported citing sources. Reports said that a consultative session of the party is currently underway to debate whether PML-N will take part in senate elections.

    Asif left the meeting and was moments later arrested near Iqbal’s residence. Aurangzeb said Asif will be presented before an accountability court tomorrow for remand.

    While PML-N Vice President Maryam Nawaz among other party leaders are lauding Asif for his “undeterred support for Nawaz Sharif”, senior journalist and analyst Hamid Mir on his show Capital Talk said that the former foreign minister knew he would be arrested and had even made preparations beforehand for what he considered an “eventuality”.

    “He had prepared a bag as well and would say that the NAB would arrest him soon,” said Mir.

    When prompted by the anchor to comment whether Asif’s arrest was a “reactionary move” to Maryam Nawaz’s speech in Larkana on Sunday, Muhammad Zubair, who had also left the meeting to appear on the show, said, “Of course. When the popularity and impact [of the PDM] is on the rise, we knew that they would react in some way. And today, we have seen that reaction.”