A local court in Islamabad on Saturday directed the capital police to submit its response by July 9 on US blogger Cynthia D Ritchie’s application for registration of first information report (FIR) against former interior minister Rehman Malik over rape and harassment allegations. The US blogger on Tuesday had submitted her application to an additional district and sessions judge under…
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Facebook said Friday it would ban a “wider category of hateful content” in ads as the embattled social media giant moved to respond to growing protests over its handling of inflammatory posts. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook also would add tags to posts that are “newsworthy” but violate platform rules following the lead of Twitter, which has used such labels on tweets…
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Pakistan International Airlines has written to foreign missions and global regulatory and safety bodies, assuring them it has grounded all 141 pilots suspected of obtaining licenses through unfair means, the carrier’s spokesman said on Saturday. The move looks to assuage safety concerns after Aviation Minister Ghulam Sarwar Khan said on Friday that the government had asked various commercial airlines, flying…
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The annual capacity payment for not utilising surplus power plants is projected to soar to an unsustainable level of Rs1.5 trillion over the next two years as Pakistan continues to add more dirty and expensive capacity, mostly under the Thar coal and CPEC projects. “Capacity payment to power generators can reach to an unsustainable level of Rs1.5 trillion ($9 billion)…
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China is now holding most of the cards in the oil price game as far as Riyadh and Moscow are concerned–and Beijing is right where it wants to be. The other two have overplayed their hands. And the U.S. has–once again–been caught napping. There’s a ton of geopolitical leverage to be had for China. The king of ‘soft power’, can…
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According to a report by the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), Pakistan is faced with the increasing financial burden of power capacity payments and overcapacity risk at a time when renewables are the cheapest source of energy available. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, Pakistan’s electricity demand was decreasing. Two more Chinese-financed coal-fired plants have reached financial close…
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ISLAMABAD: The National Electric Power Regulatory (Nepra) has decided to expose all those power Distribution Companies (Discos) which are unleashing load shedding despite receiving due allocated quota of electricity. On Friday, the regulator took serious notice of various media reports regarding unscheduled load shedding of up to 12 hours by all the Discos, due to which the public is suffering…
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Pakistan’s Energas is set to start LNG import from July 2020. In an interview with Bloomberg, Energas CEO Anser Ahmed Khan revealed that the group is in talks with the government for a marketing license in order to start the import of LNG in July. According to available details, Energas wants to use Pakistan government’s idle capacity until the construction…
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June 26, 2020 (MLN): The approval from SECP for requested extension of 90 days for making Public Announcement of Offer by Shanghai Electric Company (Acquirer) to acquire 66.4 percent shares of K-Electric Limited will lapse as of June 26, 2020, on the basis that certain regulatory and other approvals for the Transaction remain outstanding. Arif Habib Limited, the Manager to the…
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The energy ministry on Friday dismissed K-Electric’s (KE) claims attributing prolonged power outages in Karachi to a shortage of furnace oil in the market, saying the power utility’s system constraints were a major hurdle in resolving the issue. It is unfortunate to note that KE didn’t invest in upgrading their systems due to which it is facing difficulties at a time of…
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