Tag: social media

  • Couple celebrates valima with street children

    Couple celebrates valima with street children

    A Pakistani couple celebrated their valima with street children.

    Bannu Assistant Commissioner Usman Ashraf and wife Dr Natasha Rizwan tied the knot a few days ago and decided to celebrate their valima in an unconventional way.

    Speaking to UrduPoint, Ashraf recalled that due to the Covid-19 pandemic, gatherings are not a good idea so it seemed appropriate to hold a small celebration with children who deserved it.

    The groom added that family members and all the loved ones should be invited to the wedding ceremony, however, it is also important to keep in mind those who are usually neglected by society – like street children.

    Read More: Groom arrested for arranging valima ceremony amid coronavirus outbreak

    The guests at the couple’s valima were from Each One Teach One Foundation’s street school. It is an NGO that provides education and grooming for out-of-school children.

    Social media users lauded the couple for remembering and involving street children in their happiness.

    The couple says simple weddings should be normalised and extravagant expenses avoided.

  • VIDEO: Hundreds of monkeys fight on road, bring traffic to halt

    VIDEO: Hundreds of monkeys fight on road, bring traffic to halt

    Two rival monkey gangs clashed on a street in Thailand’s Lopburi in a fight over the food near a traffic junction.

    The video of the incident went viral on social media. Hundreds of monkeys on the street brought the traffic to a halt as people on motorbikes and cars waited to get a clear way out of there while being frightened.

    The man who recorded the fight, Pong Muangthong, said motorists also tried honking their horns to scatter the monkeys but that only made them angrier.

    As a result of this incident, several monkeys were injured. There was blood on the road.

    Read More: Massive spider webs blanket Australian state

    “Monkey battles in Lopburi occur frequently. It’s not strange. It’s about the power struggle, the food fight, the fertilization of the females,” a spokesperson for the Department of National Parks told Matichon.

    According to Daily Mail, Covid-19 might be the reason behind the gang war.

  • Did President Alvi call Noor Mukadam’s murder an ‘isolated incident’?

    President of Pakistan Dr Arif Alvi took to Twitter yesterday to condemn the video of a man who forced a Hindu worker of the Thar coal project to mock and hurl abuse at his religious deities.

    Three tweets were sent from the official handle of the President of Pakistan to condemn the act, but one of his tweets was taken out of context by many social media users.

    “Our society should remain alert. Such isolated ugly incidents are used to give a bad name to the country. I condemn it and I assure all citizens that we in Riasat-e-Madina cannot and will not allow this to happen.”

    This tweet was widely shared by social media users in the context of Noor Mukadam’s case and in the context of rising violence against women in the country.

    Have a look at some of the tweets:

    https://twitter.com/sunstrawberryy/status/1420156234376826883
    https://twitter.com/icarusdress/status/1420130497854943236
    https://twitter.com/peshuntzero/status/1420103357725880320
    https://twitter.com/its_AN1/status/1420133764680851457

    President Alvi then took to his personal Twitter account to clarify the context of the tweet.

    The man was arrested by the Sindh police from District Badin.

    Spokesperson Sindh government Murtaza Wahab tweeted that he had been arrested:

    President of Pakistan’s Twitter handle tweeted that the man was arrested after President Alvi took notice of the incident.

  • VIDEO: Wedding horse runs away with groom

    VIDEO: Wedding horse runs away with groom

    A wedding horse ran away with the groom in India’s Rajasthan.

    As per reports, the groom was waiting outside the wedding venue when crackers alarmed the horse and it ran off with the groom sitting on its back. The groom tried to get off the horse but failed.

    The video of the incident has gone viral on social media.

    Read More: ‘No mutton, no marriage’: Groom calls off wedding

    The wedding guests and relatives followed the groom for four kilometers in their cars and bikes. The groom was not injured luckily and was taken back to the wedding site safely.

  • ‘Never let others dictate, you only get one life, Enjoy it’: Ahsan Mohsin hits back at Shaniera Wasim

    ‘Never let others dictate, you only get one life, Enjoy it’: Ahsan Mohsin hits back at Shaniera Wasim

    Activist and Wasim Akram’s better half, Shaneira Akram recently schooled actress Minal Khan for not wearing a seat belt. Shaneira shared a screenshot from Minal Khan’s recent video in which she can be seen travelling without wearing a seat belt wrote with her beau Ahsan Mohsin Ikram, the Australian diva captioned her post as, “Come on guys you are famous, and have millions of followers, is it too hard to be a little more responsible?”

    She added, “Put your seat belt and eyes on the road, I’m sorry to say but that song won’t be as cute if she is singing it in hospital.

    The Pyar Ke Sadqay actor posted a picture of himself with a cryptic caption on Instagram stating, ‘Live the life you want to live and never let others dictate how you should live your life. You only get one life. Enjoy it, cherish it because the most expensive thing in this world is time and the time you lose will never come back to you”.

    On the work front, Minal is currently featuring in ARY’s Ishq Hai opposite Danish Taimoor.

  • Fact Check: Is this picture from Bilawal’s recent trip to the US?

    Fact Check: Is this picture from Bilawal’s recent trip to the US?

    Claim: During a recent trip to the US, Bilawal Bhutto followed the queue in New York city airport but not in Pakistan

    Fact: These pictures were from his 2018 election campaign

    Recently a picture the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) chairperson Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, went viral on social media on Wednesday. Bilawal was seen wearing a blue shalwar kameez, standing in a queue while using his cell phone.

    Many people criticised him, stating that this picture was from his recent trip to New York, asking that why the chairman was standing in line in the US but wasn’t standing in line in Pakistan.

    The Current has confirmed from its sources that the photographs circulating were from the election campaign in 2018 and that the PPP chairperson was taking a flight from Lahore and so it is false to say that these pictures show Bilawal Bhutto at the New York city airport.

    VERDICT: [OUT OF CONTEXT]

  • ‘Why do we want the models to be white and sultry,’ Zara Shahjahan on fake beauty standards

    ‘Why do we want the models to be white and sultry,’ Zara Shahjahan on fake beauty standards

    Pakistani fashion designer, Zara Shahjahan, called out social media users over demeaning comments related to beauty standards.

    The designer explained how she and her team were left with no choice but to hire models from Turkey. “Let’s talk about these pictures. So I had a shoot in Turkey. My team left a day earlier and the day me and the model had to leave, Turkey announced 15 days of quarantine. We were left with no choice but to hire models from there,” she wrote in a social media post.

    Sharing a picture of a model from her recent campaign, she wrote, “I tried to find girls who look South Asian and finally found these two very stunning Mexican models who flew from LA for the campaign. We were very happy, the campaign look really beautiful and we launched, but what happened after is quite disturbing.”

    Read More: Generation joins Ali Xeeshan’s campaign to raise breast cancer awareness

    “These pictures started getting a lot of hate. ‘They look like maids’ is one comment which disturbed me the most,” the designer added.

    “Are we these people? Why do we want the models to be white and sultry?” Zara questioned.

     She concluded her post by thanking God for her loyal customers, “Thankgod for my loyal customers who know my brand and the collection was sold out but I don’t seem to get the irritation of a lot of women to these two pictures.”

  • Burger King workers write ‘we all quit’ on signboard, quit jobs

    Burger King workers write ‘we all quit’ on signboard, quit jobs

    Employees and a general manager at a Burger King outlet in Nebraska, United States, quit their jobs amid worsening work conditions and used the restaurant’s sign to let customers know.

    “We all quit,” the sign at the Lincoln Burger King read. “Sorry for the inconvenience.”

    Rachael Flores, who had worked as a general manager there since January, had put in her two weeks notice and eight other employees also resigned before deciding to post the message on the sign, KLKN reported.

    “They have gone through so many district managers since I’ve been GM,” Flores said. “No one has come to the store to help me out. They’re so in and out.”

    Flores said the restaurant is short-staffed and she would end up working 50 to 60 hours a week. She said at one point they did not have working air-conditioning in the kitchen, where temperatures reached 90 degrees. Flores had to go to the hospital as she was dehydrated.

    Employees had joked on Friday about putting up the message. On Saturday, they put it up on one side of the sign.

    Read More: Restaurant makes ‘world’s most expensive burger’ for $6,000

    “They wanted to put up a sign to say, you know sorry there’s really not going to be anyone here,” Flores said.

     “Just kind of a laugh to upper management. That was put up (Saturday) before we opened, and I didn’t think anybody was going to notice it, because we did just one sign, and then it went pretty crazy on Facebook. I got a call from my upper management and they told me I needed to take it down.”

    Flores’ boss fired her later that day and the location is still open. Burger King did not responed to the incident.

  • Usman Mirza case: Stop blaming the victim

    Usman Mirza case: Stop blaming the victim

    A harrowing video recently went viral on social media in which a man, Usman Mirza, was seen harassing and assaulting a young couple. He had a few male accomplices with him, and he was also armed. Mirza beat up the couple, stripped them, and subjected them to sexual assault. Pakistani women on social media came out in support of the young couple and also voiced how unsafe and insecure they feel in a society full of misogyny and violence.

    Following an uproar on social media, the police arrested Usman Mirza and his accomplices. The police also reached out to the couple to record their statement. According to media reports, the couple recorded their statements separately under Section 161 of the Criminal Code. The incident took place last year in November and the couple was blackmailed by the culprit; they ended up paying more than a million rupees to Mirza. This was clearly not an isolated incident as more videos have been found from the mobile phones of the arrested men. It shows that this gang of criminals has been indulging in such nefarious activities for quite some time now.

    Prime Minister Imran Khan has taken notice of the case. The Islamabad police chief briefed PM Khan on the case yesterday. Thankfully, the police have so far been extremely responsible and have not indulged in any victim-blaming, unlike the Motorway gang rape case where CCPO Lahore’s comments about the rape survivor were atrocious, to say the least. SSP (Investigations) Atta-ur-Rehman appeared on a few TV talk shows and actually talked about why such incidents are not reported by victims and survivors due to social taboos. Unfortunately, we still have people in our society who think the victims are somehow at fault instead of holding the culprits solely responsible for their crime. Just last month, PM Khan made a controversial statement in an interview where he said that if women wear very few clothes, it will have an impact on the men unless they are robots. And today, in a now-deleted tweet, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) lawmaker Hina Butt said that while beasts Usman Mirza should be condemned but is it not necessary that we teach our boys and girls why they become targets of such beasts. “Our youth should also introspect their own behaviour.”

    One wonders why the young couple should introspect when they were the victims and not the perpetrators of a despicable crime. In fact, those who are busy blaming and shaming innocent victims should be introspecting instead. Such attitudes do not just make victims and survivors more insecure but are extremely triggering for those who have faced sexual harassment, assault, and rape. Why is it that ‘honour’ is always linked to a woman in our society? Why is it that instead of empowering women, even empowered women end up blaming the victims of abuse? Why is it that everything depends on how a woman was dressed or where she was or who she was with or at what time she went out? Why? We need to uproot this deeply embedded misogyny from our minds. We need to make our women feel secure. We need to make our laws stronger and implement them so that these survivors have trust in the justice system and also in our society so that they do report such harrowing incidents instead of staying quiet due to expected backlash. When we start pointing fingers at the victim, we end up empowering the criminals, the perpetrators of violent crimes. Stop this trend. Enough is enough.

  • Twitter calls out PML-N’s Hina Butt for blaming the victims

    Twitter calls out PML-N’s Hina Butt for blaming the victims

    Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz’s (PML-N) Hina Pervaiz Butt took to Twitter to comment on the Usman Mirza case. She ended up blaming the victims instead in a now-deleted tweet. In a harrowing video that went viral on social media, Mirza was seen torturing, harassing, and assaulting a young couple in Islamabad along with his accomplices.

    Hina Butt tweeted, “Why do young people go out and become victims of people like Usman Mirza?” She added that we also need to educate our children on why they become targets when they go out.

    Twitterati reacted to Butt’s tweet and called her out for blaming the victim.

    Natasha Kundi, a writer wrote, “According to her [Hina] young people go out and deliberately become victims …. so basically young people shouldn’t go out!”

    Lawyer Reema Omer said Butt’s take was no different from CCPO Lahore’s comments. She tweeted, “Why can’t we focus on criminal acts of the perpetrators instead of lecturing victims?”

    Singer and UNODC Goodwill Ambassador, Shehzad Roy, tweeted, “It is true that the oppressor should be severely punished, but it is very inappropriate to criticise the oppressed.” Roy further said that it is akin to blaming victims of a robbery by saying that the locks were not strong enough so it is their fault.

    A Twitter user showing his disapproval with PML-N’s leader’s statement compared her stance with CCPO Lahore Umar Sheikh’s comments in the Motorway rape case where he had blamed the victim.

    Journalist Zeb Aslam tweeted, “There is next-to-no difference between this and IK’s statement linking “modesty” and rape…a point that I hope both PMLN and PTI supporters can appreciate before leaping to defend their chosen leader.”

    After the backlash, Hina Butt deleted her tweet.