Daily Current Affairs

By: SALMAN RASHID Pakistanis have the greatest knack for making the worst possible choices insofar as the natural environment is concerned. In 2016, motoring north on M-2, I was very pleased to see large scale destruction of the non-native, water-guzzling eucalyptus underway. On another trip shortly afterwards I was aghast to notice that the stumps, about a metre in height, …

By: RAMSHA JAHANGIR A spectre is haunting Pakistan — the spectre of social media. For Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar, it is even “lethal for democracy” — no control, no censors, just pure, unadulterated rhetoric. A growing war of information has encapsulated the political landscape of Pakistan. Now, online discussions can quickly transcend into angry mobs and 140 characters can cost …

Finance Minister Ishaq Dar on Saturday said intra-regional trade and connectivity was crucial for sustainable economic development of Asia and the Pacific region. The finance minister also extended unequivocal support to One Belt and One Road — a giant initiative undertaken by China for economic progress and prosperity. “Pakistan fully supports the One Belt One Road Initiative,” said Dar while …

By: Shahid Javed Burki Colonialism brought Europe and the West to Asia and Africa. The tide has now turned. Demographic change and immigration are now bringing Asia and Africa to the West. The West prevailed in the first encounter that took place in the 18th and 19th centuries. The lands it conquered and ruled for centuries didn’t have the military …

A DIVISION bench of the Lahore High Court has suspended a directive passed by a single-member bench that called for the Central Superior Services examination to be held in Urdu beginning in 2018. The earlier LHC direction had come in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling in 2015 that called for having Urdu as the language for running the …

If the maladies of civil service are not properly identified any future reforms initiative would be meaningless. By:  Jahanzeb Awan ‘With every passing year of our career, we increasingly feel a steep decline in our morale and motivation. There is a disjunction between what we idealised to do for society and what the real life has offered’. This is what …

LAHORE: The Lahore High Court (LHC) on Friday struck down provisions of the Rules of Competitive Examination 2014 which barred the Central Superior Services (CSS) qualified persons with disability from joining the Foreign Service of Pakistan (FSP). Releasing a detailed judgment in an already decided matter, Chief Justice Syed Mansoor Ali Shah on Friday directed the federal government to allocate two …

Sakib Sherani INSTITUTIONS intersect our daily lives in myriad but mostly unnoticed or unseen ways. Ensuring public safety is one such domain. Among many different ways, public safety can be in the form of ensuring buildings that we live and work in are built to certain minimum standards, or that road traffic follows laid-down guidelines, or the food that we …

By Aijaz Zaka Syed No one expected Donald Trump to be all sweetness and light once he won the White House. But who turns his first press conference into a circus and slanging match with the media and virtually everyone else in the room? The man really nurses a grudge. It was probably the shallowest speech ever delivered by an …

By Jehangir Khattak As Donald Trump takes oath as the 45th President of the US, history seems to be going full circle in one part of the world. The enemies of yesteryear are cosying up to one another and allies of yesterday are embracing estrangement, if not outright hostility over Afghanistan. The display of shifting sands was witnessed in Moscow …