Chairman Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) Ehsan Mani has resigned from the post according to reports and the new Chairman will be former cricketer Ramiz Raja.
As per reports, Mani has told Prime Minister and PCB Patron-in-chief Imran Khan to appoint someone else as he cannot work anymore.
It must be noted that PM Khan was satisfied with Mani’s performance and insisted that he continues as chairman. They both met for two consecutive days — Monday and Tuesday.
Ramiz also met the premier on Monday where the two former cricketers discussed the possible candidate for chairmanship and options to improve Pakistan’s cricket.
As per latest updates, Raja has been given an important post, but there is no official announcement from the board or Raja yet.
Prime Minister Imran Khan spoke about the assault of a female TikToker by hundreds of men near Minar-e-Pakistan earlier this month. He said that he was “ashamed and pained” by what happened, citing the lack of proper upbringing as a vital reason for the destruction we are seeing in society.
While addressing the Punjab Education Convention 2021 in Lahore, the premier said the incidents of harassment and the sex crimes that were taking place now were “not a part of our culture or religion”.
“When I was growing up, nobody could have thought that acts like this would happen [in Pakistan]. I have been to the entire world; the respect for women I saw while growing up existed in Muslim countries but not in the West. A big reason for the destruction we’re seeing is that our children are not being brought up properly,” he added.
PM Khan praised the Punjab government for doing what no other province is doing. He termed the provincial government’s work in the education sector very important, saying education had not been a priority for previous governments.
Recalling his educational journey, from the time when he graduated from Aitchison College and went to England for higher studies, he remarked, “I was made an English public-school boy, not a Pakistani. I was distanced from my culture and my religion through that educational system.”
“The English medium [system] evolved in such a way that there was less emphasis on education and more emphasis on creating desi vilayati (local foreigners). The attitudes and mental slavery of another culture were absorbed.”
Criticising the use of English in functions, the premier said, “An entire function was held in English because of two ambassadors and it was being aired on TV, which was being watched by the common man. How big of an insult it is to our people who don’t know English.”
English should not be a “status symbol”, the premier stressed.
Prime Minister Imran Khan received a telephone call from Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday (August 25).
The two leaders exchanged views on the evolving situation in Afghanistan and bilateral relations.
PM Khan stressed that a peaceful, secure, and stable Afghanistan was vitally important for Pakistan and regional stability. Besides ensuring safety, security, and protection of rights of Afghans, an inclusive political settlement was the best way forward.
PM Khan also underscored that the international community must stay positively engaged in support of the people of Afghanistan, to help address humanitarian needs and ensure economic sustenance.
PM Khan said highlighted the importance of coordinated approaches in addressing the evolving situation and noted that Pakistan attached high importance to the role of the Troika Plus format.
PM Khan expressed satisfaction at the upward trajectory of Pakistan-Russia relations, with increased high-level exchanges and growing cooperation in diverse fields.
He reiterated Pakistan’s resolve to strengthen trade relations as well as bilateral collaboration in the energy sector, including the early realisation of the Pakistan Stream Gas Pipeline Project.
The two leaders agreed to closely cooperate within the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) for promoting regional peace and security.
PM Khan reiterated his invitation to President Putin to visit Pakistan.
Pakistani Twitterati is congratulating former cricketer-turned commentator Ramiz Raja on becoming Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) Chairman. Raja is in the running for PCB’s top slot but there is no confirmation yet if he will indeed be appointed or not.
Journalist Ejaz Wasim Bakhri turned to Twitter and shared a video of Raja’s car entering Prime Minister Imran Khan’s office to meet him.
In another tweet, Shahid Hashmi said: “As per PCB constitution Mani’s second tenure will be three years but since he doesn’t want to serve the full term a new chairman can come next year.”
As per PCB constitution Mani’s second tenure will be three years but since he doesn’t want to serve the full term a new chairman can come next year #PCBchairman
Meanwhile, it has been reported that members of the PCB’s Board of Governors (BoG) will give votes to the nominated members and the new chairman will be elected. Raja will serve as a board member and then the Chairman will be selected after re-election.
Ex-Pakistan wicketkeeper-batsman Kamran Akmal has backed Ramiz Raja. Here’s what he said: “He hasn’t been going for commentary duties in the last couple of series and that gave us some signals for the future. A cricketer coming in as a chairman would benefit domestic cricket. It will bring in money.”
People also shared jokes and memes after this news.
On Friday, Prime Minister Imran Khan welcomed the latest $85 million foreign investment in the quick commerce startup, Airlift, by leading Venture Capitals of the world.
“Pakistan has huge potential and we are open for business,” PM Imran Khan stated in a tweet. The prime minister further guaranteed his government’s commitment towards creating such investment opportunities in Pakistan.
Airlift is a Lahore-based online shopping delivery service, has successfully raised $85 million foreign investment in Series B funding round, the largest single private funding round in Pakistan’s history.
Apart from PM Imran Khan, Punjab Chief Minister Usman Buzdar also commented on the success of the private firm. He said he was “glad” to share that international investors were showing confidence in Pakistan’s evolving technology ecosystem.
Glad to share that global investors are showing complete confidence in the evolving technology space in Punjab and Pakistan. @airlift_tech, a completely home-grown start up of Pakistan has successfully raised 85 Million USD in their series B financing!
The company has set a new model for bringing world-class financers to invest in Pakistan. This will collect confidence that great technology and user products can be developed in Pakistan, and this area of the world has some of the best expertise for producing practical and innovative tech advancement. Furthermore, Airlift Express alone, with its series B funding of $85 million, has added 5 per cent to the country’s FDI for the monetary year 2021.
Airlift runs a quick commerce service in eight cities covering Lahore, Karachi, and Islamabad in Pakistan. Customers can order groceries, farm-fresh produce, other necessary items including medicines as well as sports gear from the company’s website or app and have the articles delivered within 30 minutes.
In addition to this, using the latest foreign investment, the quick commerce startup, Airlift expects to place more offerings to its services in the near future and create nearly a quarter-million more jobs in Pakistan within the next five years.
Prime Minister Imran Khan received telephone calls from world leaders this past week and PTI Official tweeted about the phone calls he received. World leaders called him to discuss the ongoing situation in Afghanistan.
Pakistani Twitter started making memes of the official PTI tweets, some making jibes that it was to lessen the blow that US President Biden had not called PM Khan yet.
ویسے تھینک یو یار، اتنا بہترین میم مواد مہیا کرنے کا، بڑے عرصے بعد اتنی ہنسی آئی ہے، یہ ٹیم جو بھی چلا رہا ہے اسکی حس مزاح کو سلام۔۔ دنیا بہت انجوائے کررہی ہے، #callmebebepic.twitter.com/lDsxraJz2S
Earlier on the night of August 13, PM Khan, in a wide-ranging talk with foreign journalists at his residence, said he was not really “waiting” for a phone call from US President Joe Biden.
“I keep hearing that President Biden hasn’t called me. It’s his business. It’s not like I am waiting for any phone call,” he said in response to a question from a Reuters journalist.
A meeting of the National Security Committee (NSC) was held on Monday to deliberate on the emerging situation in Afghanistan. The NSC meeting was chaired by Prime Minister Imran Khan and attended by senior cabinet members and services chiefs.
The participants were briefed on the latest developments in Afghanistan and their possible impact on Pakistan and the region.
“The NSC noted that Pakistan was a victim of the decades-long conflict in Afghanistan and therefore desired peace and stability. Participants reiterated that Pakistan remains committed to an inclusive political settlement as the way forward representing all Afghan ethnic groups. It was reaffirmed that Pakistan would continue to work with the international community and all Afghan stakeholders to facilitate an inclusive political settlement in the country,” read a press release issued after the meeting.
A meeting of the National Security Committee was convened on Monday, the 16th of August, 2021 to deliberate on the emerging situation in Afghanistan. The NSC meeting was chaired by Prime Minister @ImranKhanPTI and attended by senior cabinet members and services chiefs. pic.twitter.com/hQ0xOvE9y0
“The NSC called on all parties in Afghanistan to respect the rule of law, protect the fundamental human rights of all Afghans, and ensure that Afghan soil is not used by any terrorist organisation/group against any country.”
PM Khan said all possible facilities be made available to repatriate Pakistanis, diplomats, journalists, and staff of international organisations seeking to leave Afghanistan. The committee reiterated Pakistan’s stance that the conflict in Afghanistan never had a military solution.
“The ideal time to end the conflict through negotiations might have been when the United States (US)/ North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) troops were at maximum military strength in Afghanistan. Continuation of foreign military presence for a longer duration now would not have yielded a different outcome. Therefore, endorsement by the Biden administration of the previous US administration’s decision of troops withdrawal is indeed a logical conclusion to this conflict,” added the press release.
“It is now time for the international community to work together to ensure an inclusive political settlement for long-term peace, security, and development of Afghanistan/ the region.”
A report released by the Digital Media Wing (DMW) of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting titled, ‘Anti-State Trends: Deep Analytics Report’ is deeply misleading and based on assumptions instead of facts, The Current has discovered after analysing the report.
Glaring errors and almost comical additions, the report makes a correlation between analysing hashtags on Twitter to determine if someone is anti-state and is responsible for starting trends against Pakistan.
Before analysing the report, The Current researched and spoke with analysts who are well-versed with digital analysis. There is no record of any report on hashtag analysis to determine trends at a government level in any country at any time. Pakistan is the only country that has created a report based on hashtag analysis. Worldwide, hashtag analysis is considered to be deeply unreliable since it cannot understand what is written in the tweet – it is just able to see what is being discussed.
WHAT IS THE REPORT?
The report is a compilation of hashtags that created trends that the government deems anti-state. The report shows information collected about hashtag trends and then lists pages of screenshots that show different Twitter handles sharing tweets that have the ‘anti-state’ hashtag. They do not differentiate between users and also label ‘influencers’ – people with a following who have tweeted or retweeted/replied to the hashtag.
In effect, the report seems to declare all the users in the report as anti-state, until one prominent journalist got them to add a disclaimer last night.
HOW WAS THE INFORMATION COLLECTED?
Since the whole report is based on hashtag analysis, it will be considered to be unreliable data collection and cannot be considering as a legitimate report in any institution.
When The Current reached out to General Manager of the Digital Media Wing (DMW), Imran Ghazali, he responded to the question of faulty analysis of hashtags by saying, “The purpose of this report was to ascertain factual data and to analyze social media trends that were anti-state, Data was collected after analysing Pakistan Twitter Panel from June 2019- August 2021. Those hashtags were marked for data collection where the content of tweets were planned and propagated through a network to spread anti-state trends.”
According to a source in the government, the information used is public. “Publicly released data is accurate. It’s no rocket science, anybody with a credit card can get this data. Hence made public.”
From The Current’s analysis, the data was collected by using a web application called, ‘Tweeps Map’, which is open to the public.
From our findings, the 134-page report has 85 pages that have screenshots of tweets, which means that 63.4 per cent of the report is based on screenshots of people who are using a certain hashtag that the government has identified as being anti-state. The number of tweets that are in these 85 pages amount to 666 tweets out of which 142 tweets are from three accounts, which means that 21.3 per cent of the tweets used in this study came from three people.
After further analysis of the three accounts, The Current discovered that all three accounts had a combined following of less than 11,000.
We discovered that the hashtag #SanctionPakistan was ‘analysed’ for 41 days, Pakhtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) hashtags were clubbed together as “PTM Trends Tantamount to National Security” (the report doesn’t list which hashtags were used within this topic) and were ‘analysed’ for 22 months, #AbAwamSmashNahiHogi was ‘analysed’ for one day, and #StateKilledUsmanKakar, #IsraeliJetinPakistan, ‘JUIF Anti State Trend’, was ‘analysed’ but no time duration is given.
WHY AND WHEN WAS THE ‘DISCLAIMER’ ADDED?
The report was released Wednesday evening around 5:30PM and a few hours later a disclaimer was added to the report. According to journalist Fereeha Idrees, the disclaimer was added after she raised the issue with the DMW for being highlighted in the report as a ‘replies with the most followers’ account.
“I have always raised my voice against any propaganda against our state but the way the report was compiled, it made me look as one of the culprits and suddenly social media was rife with messages calling me anti-state,” Fereeha told The Current, “When I made the query, I was given the following explanation.”
The explanation given to Fereeha by the DMW stated, “All the accounts in the report doesn’t mean they took part in the anti-state activity…It shows the whole journey of the trends/hashtags, so in this case Fareeha Idrees replied/rebutted on the Israeli related trend and that’s why it mentions ‘Replies with most mentions’ in the report.”
After the DMW response, Fereeha demanded that they add a disclaimer to the report. A disclaimer was added which stated, “If an account is listed in a report – it doesn’t always imply that the content of the tweet is Anti-State. Some accounts have engaged/replied with an anti-state hashtag to rebut. But since they used the hashtag their accounts got listed in the report.”
Imran Ghazali admitted to adding the disclaimer after Fereeha raised an objection about the fairness of the report.
The Current asked Ghazali about how they have divided the report to show which people mentioned were anti-state and which ones were considered pro-state. Ghazali refused to directly answer the question and stated, “We have not given any number for pro-state or anti-state accounts but showed below the hashtags we highlighted the accounts which contributed to a certain hashtag – tweets, top contributors, replies etc.”
When we pressed him to answer the question about how the people selected were separated into anti-state and pro-state, he said, “If an account is listed in a report – it doesn’t always imply that the content of the tweet is Anti-State. Some accounts have engaged/replied with an anti-state hashtag to rebut. But since they used the hashtag their accounts got listed in the report.”
The implication of his answers show that the report does not – and cannot- differentiate people’s points of view on a tweet, which means that someone who has posted a ‘pro-state’ tweet condemning the hashtag will also be added into the list of someone who is considered anti-state.
WAS THE GOVERNMENT ALLOWED TO USE THE APP ‘TWEEPSMAP’?
The Current reached out to TweepsMap, which was the primary analysis app used by the government for this report. The maps and information all have the Tweepsmap link on the maps and all charts in the report. We asked the CEO of TweepsMap Samir Al-Battran if they considered the analysis of the report to be authentic since it used their app service. Samir told us, “The government of Pakistan is not authorised to use our service. We will investigate how they got access to our analysis and get back to you on this.”
We asked him for further details, asking if an individual used their service for analysis for a government funded report, would that be against their rules, to which Samir replied and said, “…Government agencies go through a vetting process before we allow them to use our service. We were never in communication with the government of Pakistan…Yes, [using the app without informing us what it is for] would be a misrepresentation and is definitely against our rules.”
The Current asked Ghazali if they used the application and if they had authorisation to which he said, “We used different tools/APIs including our internal tools to analyse data”. We asked him since TweepsMap is the only one that is being listed in the report, if they had gotten a subscription for the government of Pakistan to which we got no response.
WHAT ELSE IS IN THE REPORT?
We analysed the tweets used in the 85 screenshots present in the report and found some comical discrepancies. One retweet had the #SajalAly hashtag along with the ‘anti-state’ hashtag ‘#AccountabilityofZarbeAzb’. We went through the Twitter account to find that the tweet mentioned in the report was a meme of Dr Firdous Ashiq Awan.
A tweet by former Interior Minister Rehman Malik is included in the #SanctionPakistan list in which he is criticising Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the US.
The tweet Rehman Malik retweeted
The report also includes references to “a group of Wikipedia Admins most of whom are based in India,” giving state level credibility to an online encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone. With glaring spelling mistakes and analysis based on unauthorised data, the summary of the Digital Media Wing Deep Analysis report has been summed up by one senior data analyst based in Singapore, “That just goes to show… they don’t understand how it works.”
A Turkish news channel ‘Hürriyet Daily News’ shared a picture of the Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Qamar Javed Bajwa in a meeting with Turkish Defence Minister Hulusi Akar, with the caption: “#Defense Minister Akar, #Pakistani premier discuss bilateral issues.”
Another user wrote, “Na koi phone karta hai, na koi milnay aata hai… [Neither does anyone call nor does any once come to meet] The #SedLyf of #ImranKhan”
Actor Anoushey Ashraf has called out senior anchor Imran Khan for his insensitive remarks on the Noor murder case. The Chinaar Ghaati actor shared the clip of Imran’s statement on her Instagram story and wrote: “I have five messages to my dad and 45 voice note to my driver over the last five months.”
She continued further by expressing her anger over Khan’s statement, “Take up Bollywood gossip if you want viewership, leave Noor and her honour alone.”
A video clip of Imran is making rounds across social media platforms for the last two days in which Imran can be heard drawing parallels between Noor Mukadam’s murder and her lack of telephonic conversation with her father. His comments have been scrutinized by netizens on social media.
Jawani Phir Nahi Aani star Sarwat Gillani also expressed her stance on the problematic statements of the senior journalist, with a comment, “When ‘educated’ people make such statements you know the state of affairs and state of mind both are in the wrong place.”
“What about the murderer, follow some rules and do not kill people,” she stated in another comment.
