Former Chief Justice Nasirul Mulk Named Pakistan's Caretaker PM

Agencies
May 29, 2018

Islamabad, May 29: Pakistan's former chief justice Nasirul Mulk named as the country's caretaker prime minister for a two-month period, ending the political wrangling between ruling PML-N and the Opposition ahead of the general elections on July 25.

The announcement was made by Leader of the Opposition Khursheed Shah at a press conference here which was also attended by incumbent Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and National Assembly Speaker Ayaz Sadiq.

Mulk, 67, is likely to be sworn in on Friday, June 1. The present government will complete the tenure on May 31 and the caretaker government will remain in office until a new government is set up through elections.

Shah expressed hope that Mulk will successfully conduct free, fair and impartial elections in Pakistan on July 25.

The announcement came after weeks of deadlock between the PML-N and the Opposition over the name of the caretaker prime minister.

It took the government and the opposition six meetings to decide on a name for the position.

Though, Abbasi spoke first but he let Shah announce the name of the caretaker leader.

Abbasi described the agreed-upon candidate for the caretaker prime minister as someone "who no one can object to".

"His role as a caretaker PM will be in favour of the country and the democratic process," he said.

Announcing the name, Shah said the NA speaker had played a major role in both parties reaching an agreement.

"We have made a democratic decision. I am thankful to the PM, to the speaker, for making this decision with patience, setting aside emotion. The name of the person I would like to present is very respectable," the veteran PPP leader said.

"The name is Nasirul Mulk, who has remained a chief justice. He has played a historic role... in the judiciary and when he was a lawyer," he said.

The job of the caretaker prime minister is to keep the country running between the dissolution of parliament and the new government being sworn in.

Earlier, several names including retired Justice Tassaduq Hussain Jillani, former State Bank governor Ishrat Hussian, former foreign secretary Jalil Abbas Jillani and former Pakistan Cricket Board chairman Zaka Ashraf were reportedly discusse by the two sides.

Mulk was born on August 17, 1950 in Mingora, Swat, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. He worked as lawyer and judge for several years before his appointment as the 22nd Chief Justice of Pakistan in 2014.

President Mamnoon Hussain on Saturday approved July 25 as the polling date for general and provincial elections.

Cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan's Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf is expected to be the main challenger to the ruling party in the general elections.

In its 70-year-long history, the country experienced its first democratic transition of power in 2013, when Pakistan Peoples Party handed over the power to Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), which had won the general elections.

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News Network
March 11,2020

Jaipur, Mar 11: A 85-year-old man in Jaipur, who had returned from Dubai on February 28, has tested positive for coronavirus, a state government official said on Wednesday.

He was found presumptive positive in the first test on Tuesday and hence, a second test was conducted with fresh samples, the reports of which arrived late Tuesday night, Additional Chief Secretary, Medical and Health, Rohit Kumar Singh, said.

“The man who travelled to Dubai has been tested positive for coronavirus. It has been confirmed now,” Singh said.

“We have also got the manifest of the Spicejet flight he took from Dubai to Jaipur and are doing due diligence on that,” the official said, adding that intense contact tracing was underway.

The man has been kept in isolation at the SMS Hospital here.

“The man came to the hospital on Monday with symptoms of the virus. After the first test, his wife and son too have been kept in isolation at the hospital. The two, however, do not have coronavirus affliction symptoms,” Singh said.

A total of 235 people who came in contact with the octogenarian and his family have already been traced and are being monitored, he said.

Other contacts are also being traced, Singh added.

An Italian couple, who tested positive for COVID-19 last week, are also admitted in the hospital but their condition is improving, he said.

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News Network
June 2,2020

Oakland, Jun 2: Facebook employees are using Twitter to register their frustration over CEO Mark Zuckerberg's decision to leave up posts by President Donald Trump that suggested protesters in Minneapolis could be shot.

While Twitter demoted and placed a warning on a tweet about the protests that read, in part, that “when the looting starts the shooting starts,” Facebook has let it stand, with Zuckerberg laying out his reasoning in a Facebook post Friday.

“I know many people are upset that we've left the President's posts up, but our position is that we should enable as much expression as possible unless it will cause imminent risk of specific harms or dangers spelled out in clear policies,” Zuckerberg wrote.

Trump's comment evoked the civil-rights era by borrowing a phrase used in 1967 by Miami's police chief to warn of an aggressive police response to unrest in black neighborhoods.

On Monday, Facebook employees staged a virtual “walkout” to protest the company's decision not to touch the Trump posts according to a report in the New York Times, which cited anonymous senior employees at Facebook.

The Times report says “dozens” of Facebook workers “took the day off by logging into Facebook's systems and requesting time off to support protesters across the country." “I work at Facebook and I am not proud of how we're showing up.

The majority of coworkers I've spoken to feel the same way. We are making our voice heard,” tweeted Jason Toff, a director of product management at Facebook who's been at the company for a year.

Toff, who has a verified Twitter account, had 131,400 “likes” and thousands of retweets of his comment. He did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment on Monday.

“I don't know what to do, but I know doing nothing is not acceptable. I'm a FB employee that completely disagrees with Mark's decision to do nothing about Trump's recent posts, which clearly incite violence. I'm not alone inside of FB.

There isn't a neutral position on racism,” tweeted another employee, design manager Jason Stirman.

Stirman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday. Sara Zhang, a product designer at the company, tweeted that Facebook's “decision to not act on posts that incite violence ignores other options to keep our community safe.

The policy pigeon holes us into addressing harmful user-facing content in two ways: keep content up or take it down.” “I believe that this is a self-imposed constraint and implore leadership to revisit the solution,” she continued. Zhang declined to comment to The Associated Press.

Representatives for Facebook did not immediately respond to messages for comment.

Twitter has historically taken stronger stances than its larger rival, including a complete ban on political advertisements that the company announced last November.

That's partly because Facebook, a much larger company with a broader audience,targeted by regulators over its size and power, has more to lose. And partly because the companies' CEOs don't always see eye to eye on their role in society.

Over the weekend, Twitter changed the background and logo if its main Twitter account to black from its usual blue in support of the Black Lives Matter protesters and added a #blacklivesmatter hashtag. Facebook did the same with its own logo on its site, though without the hashtag.

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Agencies
January 11,2020

New Delhi, Jan 11: The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear the curative petition of two death row convicts in 2012 Nirbhaya gang-rape case on January 14.

A five-judge Bench of Justices N V Ramana, Arun Mishra, R F Nariman, R Banumathi and Ashok Bhushan will hear the petition filed by Vinay Sharma and Mukesh.

The duo had moved a curative petition in the top court after a Delhi court issued a death warrant in their name and announced January 22 as the date of their execution.

Besides them, two other convicts named Pawan and Akshay are also slated to be executed on the same day at 7 am in Delhi's Tihar Jail premises.

They were convicted and sentenced to death for raping a 23-year-old woman on a moving bus in the national capital on the night of December 16, 2012.

The victim, who was later given the name Nirbhaya, died at a hospital in Singapore where she had been airlifted for medical treatment.

A curative petition is the last judicial resort available for redressal of grievances. It is decided by the judges in-chamber.

If it is rejected, they are legally bound to move a mercy petition. It is filed before the President who has the power to commute it to life imprisonment.

The court after issuing a black warrant in their name gave them two weeks' time to file both the curative and mercy petition.

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