Month: June 2020

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 Section 22-A of the Criminal Procedure Code. Separately, the capital police in its report submitted in Islamabad High Court on Saturday said that allegations against Malik are “suspicious, unsubstantiated and…

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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 from President Donald Trump. The initiative comes with the leading social network facing a growing boycott by advertisers — with soft drink behemoth Coca-Cola and Anglo-Dutch giant Unilever joining Friday…

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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 clubs and charter companies to ground a total of 262 pilots until investigations into their qualifications are completed. The action was prompted by a preliminary report on the crash of a PIA aircraft in…

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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) over the next two years,” Australia-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis official Simon Nicholas said at the launch of a study titled “Thar Coal: Locking Pakistan into Unsustainable…

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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 simply turn the import taps off to make things extremely uncomfortable for Saudi Arabia and Russia, both vying for China oil sales and both with budgets that depend upon this…

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