Have heard a very shocking story from a very reliable friend. So my friend who recently travelled to Turkey as part of a delegation told me that his travel agent told him before travel that his PCR test had already been done. He said he was flabbergasted. Turns out the travel...>
...agent had got fake negative PCR results from a well known lab to satisfy the paperwork requirement. “You can still get your own if you want,” the agent said, “but for our purposes it’s done.” The agent justified this by arguing that getting the paperwork done for the whole...>
...delegation would have been too cumbersome otherwise. But the story does not end here. On the return trip, he was again informed that the PCR test results were already done. Apparently the Turk agent had a lab in Turkey too providing fake results.
Consider what this implies.
My friend had recovered from Covid only a month or so ago and had had his antibodies checked, which were quite high. He still went ahead and got PCR tests done himself. But nobody knows anything about the others in the delegation. How many such people are travelling with...>
...fake test results and potentially infecting others en route. This is a total scandal. The government needs to clamp down on such fraud immediately. This is literally playing with lives.
Btw although I don’t know which lab was involved in Turkey, my friend told me the name of the Pak lab that issued the fake results. Only reason I am not naming it here is because this requires investigation and proof that I don’t have in my hands. I have absolutely no reason...>
...to doubt what my friend has told me. He was as outraged as anyone should be.
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Shaukat Tarin who is coming in as convenor of new Economic Advisory Council says on @GeoASKKS “nobody can tell which direction economy is going.” Strong words from someone coming in to government, which undercut the hifalutin claims of the government itself.
He also says the government has destroyed the economy by its earlier wrong decisions.
Says he feels we need to renegotiate with the IMF because common person is crushed.
According to media reports Imran Khan has rejected putting up Islamabad’s F-9 Park as collateral for the Sukuk bond. Finally, some sense.
Also according to media reports he said it would be better to put up elite clubs like Islamabad Club as collateral instead. Now everyone’s trying to link it to the omelette. 😂
This is what is known as a half-truth. Journos should understand bureaucratic nuance. #Churails was taken down by Zee5 on threats by PTA that it would ban the entire website/app in Pak.
The ethics of public hangings and castration have been called out quite adequately I think. But in this thread I want to focus on the other red herring thrown up by Imran Khan in his interview yesterday, mainly because I have heard this too often from poorly educated people: ...>
...That films with ‘vulgar content’ cause rapes. Imran Khan went to the extent of saying that Delhi had become the “rape capital of the world” because of Bollywood films.
There is a lot to unpack in this assertion but the first thing to understand is that there is ZERO...>
...I repeat, ZERO/ ZILCH/ NADA cogent evidence for it. Literally.
1. It may be the desire of some - esp filmmakers - to believe that films can lead to direct action and change, but unfortunately (or fortunately, as the case may be), the incidence of films making a causal...>
Some uplifting news: Remember this @eosmagazine cover story back in March? Fahim Zaman had argued that the Karachi Circular Railway could be revived for under Rs 30b rather than the Rs 300b being projected by the govt. dawn.com/news/1540874
The huge cost was the main reason the KCR plan has been in the doldrums for so long. Well, it looks like someone finally took notice. A number of federal and provincial govt officials called and listened to Fahim’s pov. And now this news brecorder.com/news/1003327
The new plan brings down the cost (minus the trains) to Rs. 8.31b. Add in the cost of locally manufactured trains and cost still stays below Rs 15b. The financing will now be done from Pak’s own resources rather than from expensive foreign loans, which make such projects too...>
If any further proof were needed of this PTI government’s economic incompetence, it was brought out in @GeoASKKS - which ran the claimed vs actual growth figures for the last 7 years.
Whereas since 2013, the claimed vs actual growth figures varied at most by 3-5% - sometimes actual were in fact more than the initial govt claims - in PTI’s first year (2018-2019), the actual figures have turned out to be 42% (!!!) less than what the govt had claimed.
Not only has the National Accounts Committee revised the growth figures for 2018-19 from the 3.3% claimed earlier by the govt to 1.9%, it has also endorsed the PMLN’s claims of growth being 5.5% in 2017.