Punjab Assembly took up the issue of the elite club Lahore Gymkhana paying only Rs 417 per month as a lease for over 1,000 Kanals of state land, with the assembly speaker calling it “exploitation.”
The Punjab Assembly speaker, Malik Muhammad Ahmad Khan, referred the matter to a special committee, which will submit a report within two weeks.
Interestingly, it was also announced that the Gymkhana proceedings will not be in-camera.
Geo Fact Check’s investigations in May this year revealed that the lease agreement, signed in 1996, between the then deputy commissioner of Lahore and the secretary of Lahore Gymkhana Club allowed over a thousand kanals of public land in the centre of Lahore to the club for 50 years at the rate of Rs 5,000 per year.
The lease, effective from 2000, remains valid until 2050, reported Geo Fact Check.
The prestigious club is known for having top post bureaucrats, politicians, businessmen, and armed forces personnel as members, and it has over ten years of waiting lists for those who wish to join.
This development comes as the country goes through one of the most difficult economic periods. With high rates of inflation and increasing debts, the government is trying to reduce its bloated expenditures through an apparent austerity drive.
Famous actress Hira Khan warned new artists of casting fraud by sharing her own experiences.
Recently, she gave an interview to Fuschia Magazine, which has gone viral on various social media platforms.
In the interview, the actress narrated what happened in the audition without naming anyone, explaining how an experienced artist from the industry suggested she attend a fake audition, and how another director from the industry tricked her.
She said, “When I was shooting for the drama serial Mere Humsafar, a fellow artist, whom I met on the sets, gave me the number of a director and said that he wanted a girl for a new project. Contact him.”
She added, “Following the advice of the fellow artist, I called the said director and instead of asking me about my work, he asked for my photos and called me for an audition.”
She continued, “When I asked him to fix the time in the afternoon, he called me at 11 pm.”
Hira Khan said that the director told her, “You will have a screen test and will be selected based on that. You will have to wear bold clothes for the screen test,” and added that “your audition should be kept secret, which will only be seen by the producers.”
The actress explained that after hearing the director’s words, she became suspicious and called another director from the industry to ask if auditions were conducted in such a manner.
Many of the cases she documented followed the same pattern: schoolboys steal innocuous selfies from private Instagram accounts and create explicit images to share in the chat rooms, specifically to humiliate female classmates — or even teachers.
Super-wired South Korea, with the world’s fastest average internet speeds, has long battled sexual cyber violence, but experts say a toxic combination of Telegram, AI tech, and lax laws has supercharged the issue — and it is tearing through the country’s schools.
“It’s not just the harm caused by the deepfake itself, but the spread of those videos among acquaintances that is even more humiliating and painful,” Bang, 18, told AFP.
She has received thousands of reports from devastated victims since authorities in August found the first such Telegram chatrooms, typically set up within a school or university to prey on female students and staff.
Deepfake prevalence is increasing exponentially globally, industry data shows, up 500 percent on year in 2023, cybersecurity startup Security Hero estimates, with 99 percent of victims women — typically famous singers and actresses.
But while celebrities have powerful backers to protect them — the K-pop agency behind girlband NewJeans recently took legal action against deepfake porn — many ordinary victims are struggling to get justice, activists say.
‘Live in fear’
Prosecution rates are woeful: between 2021 and July this year, 793 deepfake crimes were reported but only 16 people were arrested and prosecuted, according to police data obtained by a lawmaker.
After news of the chat rooms spread, complaints surged, with 118 cases reported in just five days in late August and seven people arrested amid a police crackdown.
But six out of seven alleged perpetrators were teenagers, police say, which complicates prosecutions as South Korean courts rarely issue arrest warrants for minors.
The chatrooms, multiple of which AFP attempted to join before being removed by moderators, have lewd names such as “the lonely masturbator” and rules requiring members to post photos of women they wish to see “punished”.
Victims find themselves “sexually insulted and mocked by their classmates in online spaces”, Kang Myeong-suk, head of victim support at the Women’s Human Rights Institute of Korea told AFP.
“But the perpetrators often face no consequences,” she said, adding that victims now “live in fear of where their manipulated images might be distributed by those around them”.
“Some online comments say the victims should ‘get over it’ as these deepfake images are not even real,” Kang said.
“But just because manipulated images aren’t real doesn’t mean the pain the victims endure is any less genuine.”
Victim blaming
While overall crime rates in South Korea are generally low, the country has long suffered from an epidemic of spy-cam crimes, which led to major protests in 2018 inspired by the global #MeToo movement, eventually forcing lawmakers to strengthen laws.
Even so “the penalties issued are often trivial, like fines or probation, which are disproportionate to the gravity of the offenses”, professor Yoon Kim Ji-young told AFP.
There have also been Telegram porn scandals before, most notably in 2020, when a group blackmailing women and girls to make sexual content for paid chatrooms was uncovered. The ringleader was jailed.
But things have not improved.
President Yoon Suk Yeol’s dismissive views on feminism — which he has blamed for the country’s low birthrate — have signalled to men it is “okay to be hostile or discriminatory towards women”, Yoon Kim said.
South Korean police blame low prosecution rates on Telegram, which is famed for its reluctance to cooperate with authorities. Its founder was recently arrested in France for failing to curb illegal content on the app.
But one victim of a 2021 deepfake porn incident told AFP that this was no excuse — many victims manage to identify their attackers themselves simply by determined sleuthing.
The victim, who requested anonymity, said it had been a “huge trauma” to bring her assailant to justice after she was attacked in 2021 with a barrage of Telegram messages containing deepfake images showing her being sexually assaulted.
Her attacker was a fellow student at the prestigious Seoul National University, who she had rarely interacted with but always thought was “gentle”.
“It was hard to accept,” she said, adding police required her to collect all the evidence herself, then she had to lobby hard for a trial, which is now ongoing.
“The world I thought I knew completely collapsed,” she said in a letter she plans to submit to the court on September 26.
“No one should be treated as an object or used as a means to compensate for the inferiority complexes of individuals like the defendant, simply because they are women.”
Federal capital police arrested Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) leadership after the approval of the Speaker of the National Assembly (NA), Ayaz Sadiq, ARY NEWS has claimed.
The Islamabad police showed the First Information Report (FIR) to Speaker NA Ayaz Sadiq. Upon his approval, PTI lawmakers were arrested outside the parliament.
The capital police registered multiple cases against 25 leaders, resulting in the arrest of prominent PTI figures, including Sher Afzal Marwat, Advocate Shoaib Shaheen, Chief Sunni Ittehad Council (SIC) Sahibzada Hamid Raza, and Chairman PTI Barrister Gohar Ali Khan, from outside the parliament.
Famous actress Sana Nawaz has revealed that she has been receiving threats since several weeks, her car was chased at least twice, and her ex-husband may also be involved.
In a short video message released to the media, Sana Nawaz spoke about the threats and harassment she is faxing, reiterating her determination to take legal action.
“I have been associated with showbiz for many years, and many people know that strange things have been happening in my life for some time,” she revealed, going on to elaborate: “I have been receiving strange, threatening phone calls for some time now, leaving me worried and unsure of how to resolve the matter.”
According to the actress, she and her children are being threatened, and pressured, and their car was chased twice, causing her great concern. She said, “I do not understand who is responsible for these threats and why I am being followed.”
She also mentioned that before the current threats and blackmailing, she had been pressured by her ex-husband and ex-father-in-law. “I feel that my ex-husband and ex-father-in-law may be behind these threats,” she added.
The actress reiterated her resolve to take action, stating that she is recording the video so that her message reaches everyone. According to Sana Nawaz, “There have been problems with many actresses before. Every time, actresses are targeted and oppressed.”
She added, “Some actresses have a big name on the screen, but they also face incidents like harassment, and their fate is also troubled.”
She married Fakhar Imam Jafri in 2008, and they have two children together.
After the divorce, although she spoke about her ex-husband many times, she never made serious allegations against him, only vaguely accusing him of violence and cheating.
More than 26.2 million children are out of school in the country, says a report submitted in the National Assembly by the Education department.
The Ministry of Education report stated that two crore, sixty-two lac, six thousand and five hundred and twenty children are out of schools across the country.
Details of the report state that one crore, seven lac, seventy-four thousand, eight hundred and ninety boys and girls from five to nine years are out of school, including forty nine lac, seventy-two thousand, nine hundred and forty-nine boys and fifty-eight lac, one thousand, nine hundred and forty-one girls.
The report also delineates that forty-nine lac, thirty-five thousand, four hundred and eighty-four boys and girls between the age of 10 to 12 years are deprived of middle education, in which twenty-one lac, six thousand, six hundred and seventy-two boys and twenty-eight lac, twenty-eight thousand eight hundred and twelve girls are deprived of middle education.
Additionally, Pak Alliance for Maths and Science (PAMS) has also published a research based report on the huge number of out-of-school children in Pakistan. The report is titled The Missing Third of Pakistan.
Pakistan is home to 71 million children aged five to 16. The report’s analysis, based on data from the 2023 population and housing census, estimates that an estimated 36 per cent, or 25.3 million, of these children are out of school.
Among the out-of-school children, 53 per cent are girls, and 47pc are boys, it stresses.
The report highlights a breakdown of out-of-school children in different districts of the country, out of which 45 tehsils contribute to 26pc of Pakistan’s out-of-school children crisis: 30 are in Punjab, 12 in Sindh, two in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and one in Balochistan.
Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan’s film Pathaan whose box office collection record broken by Shraddha Kapoor and Rajkummar Rao Stree 2.
A day after breaking the record of Hindi version of ‘Baahubali 2’, Amar Kaushik’s horror-comedy has now become second highest-grossing Hindi film in India with a total gross collection higher than that of forthcoming Shah Rukh Khan release Pathan.
According to Indian media reports, Stree 2 grossed INR 527 crore at the box office within one week of its release.
After earning INR 10 crore on Sunday, September 8th, the film has added a total of INR 527 crores so far and is now India’s second-highest-grossing Hindi release.
The sequel to the 2018 film Stree2 is called Stree and it follows what happens after a great evil returns from her grave leading an entire village of men into war.
The only Test match between Afghanistan and New Zealand in Noida, India, has been delayed amid poor facilities, with the Afghanistan Cricket Board (ACB) criticising the venue.
The only Test match between Afghanistan and New Zealand was supposed to start yesterday, but the first day was wasted due to wet outfield and even though it did not rain all day in Noida, the toss could not take place on the first day.
The toss is also delayed on the second day of the Test match.
The drainage system in the Noida Stadium is poor, and there are no proper and modern facilities to cover the outfield. Standing water in the stadium could not be dried throughout the day.
The Afghan Board officials said, “There is a lot of confusion, we will not come to this Indian venue again. The players are also unhappy with the facilities here.”
The Test match is a part of the International Cricket Council (ICC) World Test Championship.
Punjab’s Information Minister Azma Bukhari has denied rumours suggesting that Mufti Qavi has been appointed ambassador of the vanity number plate scheme, which was initially reported by different media outlets.
In her post on the social media website, X Azma Bukhari denied the news of the appointment.
“No such appointment has taken place,” Azma stated. “If any person in the department has done such an act without permission, action will be taken against him,” she added while further announcing that Chief Minister Punjab Maryam Nawaz has taken notice, implying that strict action will be taken against the concerned person.
Notably, Geo News reported that the Punjab Excise Department had announced to start a vanity number plates scheme from the next week.
Director Excise Muhammad Asif had asserted that citizens will be able to make their number plates with the name of their own choice. Three categories were introduced of which Mufti Qavi was appointed as the ambassador of the vanity number plates scheme.
This was a part of coordinated strategy that was formulated to catch fake number plates owners.The data of those having vanity number plates will be made available with the department.
A crackdown has been launched against Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) top leadership for allegedly violating the new Public Order law during the September 8 rally at Sangjani.
The capital police registered multiple cases against 25 leaders, resulting in the arrest of prominent PTI figures, including Sher Afzal Marwat, Advocate Shoaib Shaheen, Chief Sunni Ittehad Council (SIC) Sahibzada Hamid Raza, and Chairman PTI Barrister Gohar Ali Khan, from outside the parliament.
Law enforcement agencies have also conducted raids to arrest Opposition Leader in the National Assembly, Omar Ayub Khan.
PTI’s bigwigs Hammad Azhar, Kanwal Shauzab, Naeem Haider Panjotha, Amir Mughal, Khalid Khursheed and Zartaj Gul Wazir are also nominated on the raid list.
The development came after Chief Minister (CM) Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) passed sexist and controversial remarks at the Islamabad rally.
However, Chairman PTI barrister Gohar Ali Khan offered a “conditional apology”.
Speaking to Geo News, barrister Khan said that he had not heard Gandapur’s speech but contacted him immediately, upon which CM KP apologised for his recent remarks.
Earlier, the Federal Capital Administration allotted a three-hour time slot from 4 PM to 7 PM for the rally at Sangjani, which was violated by PTI leadership, resulting in a crackdown.
