Old Is Gold

Shams Akbar Chitrali Song

mansoor shabab

Gilani sees conspiracy to scuttle Senate election

Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani. - File Photo.

LAHORE: Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has said the Senate elections will be held on schedule even though conspiracies are being hatched to get them stopped.
Talking to reporters before inaugurating the Business Express at Lahore railway station on Friday, he said the possibility of early general elections could be discussed after the presentation of the fifth budget by his government.
“So far, I am the longest serving, consensus prime minister and presentation of fifth awami budget by a government will be an unprecedented event.
“Six months ago, I had pointed out that conspiracies were being hatched to delay Senate elections. Be patient and wait for some days, all these conspiracies will be exposed.
Senate elections will be held according to schedule. Any person or party interested in snap polls should talk to me after presentation of the budget,” he said.
Replying to a question about contempt proceedings in the Supreme Court, the prime minister said he had all the respect for the apex court. “I will appear before the court as and when summoned.” He said confrontation had neither been on the agenda of the government in the past nor any such move was planned.
The prime minister said it was the responsibility of a regulatory authority to adjust prices of petroleum products in accordance with the international market rates.
However, the government supported a resolution against increase in the prices, arranged a meeting of the finance minister with leader of the opposition and requested the National Assembly speaker to constitute a committee to discuss the issue.
The decision of the committee will be implemented.
Replying to a question, he said he had facilitated the Punjab government in combating the dengue outbreak and had also sought the help of the World Health Organisation’s representatives in Davos for curbing the disease in future.
He refused to comment on the scandal relating to the medicines which caused the deaths of cardiac patients and said an inquiry was already under way.
APP adds: Addressing the ceremony held to mark the introduction of Business express, Railway Minister Ghulam Ahmad Bilour appealed to the prime minister to help resolve the crisis faced by his department.
He praised the Four Brothers company for introducing modern facilities in the train.
The minister said 100 locomotives could have been repaired if Rs11.1 billion of a bailout package approved by the federal cabinet had been released.
He said railway was not a profitable business organisation but a welfare department which provided economical means of transport to poor people.

PPP, PML-N move closer on polls law

The government informed the NA on Friday the two sides were discussing ways to ensure the next elections were free and fair. — File Photo

ISLAMABAD: In pursuing an apparent new peace with the opposition, the government informed the National Assembly on Friday the two sides were discussing ways to ensure the next elections were free and fair, for which a constitution amendment bill saw a potentially gainful delay for the third day running.

The chief whip of the ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), Khursheed Ahmed Shah, talked only about the independence of the Election Commission when he referred to unspecified measures being negotiated mainly with the opposition Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N), which had on Thursday cited stronger guarantees for free elections as a condition to support the government bill whose original draft seeks only to validate over 20 post-Eighteenth Amendment by-elections.
He said the Constitution (Twentieth Amendment) Bill, which had been on the house agenda for all three days of the present session since Wednesday, was being put off again until Monday for the sake of a consensus with the opposition on likely new amendments, adding: “We want to have an election commission that should hold free, fair and impartial elections.”
But in his speech to the house on Thursday, opposition leader Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan had said his PML-N party also wanted categorical assurances about the independence of a caretaker set-up stipulated by the constitution to oversee a general election, to which Mr Shah made no reference in his brief remarks.
Neither side disclosed the contents of the amendments proposed by the PML-N, which possibly could be about the unspecified tenure of four members of the Election Commission, whose chief has a five-year term.
The coalition government has repeatedly said it has the support of two-thirds majorities in both the 342-seat National Assembly and the 100-seat Senate required for the passage of an amendment to the constitution, though the claim has not yet been put to open test as the previous two constitution amendments of its tenure — the Eighteenth and Nineteenth — were passed unanimously in a landmark agreement of all parties to restore a genuine parliamentary democracy and give more autonomy to provinces.
The government’s original plans for Friday were to begin a debate on the new bill during the day’s morning sitting and take a vote on Saturday. But Mr Shah said the bill, already adopted by a house standing committee, would now be taken up on Monday — when the house meets at 5pm — after Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani announced a parliamentary holiday on Saturday in connection with Eid Miladun Nabi, which actually falls on Sunday.
Earlier, the minister of state for human resource development, Sheikh Waqas Akram of coalition partner Pakistan Muslim League-Q, created a stir in the house when he described the government’s commitments to the so-called war on terrorism as mere ‘drama’ as he blamed Interior Minister Rehman Malik for what he called a public rally organised on Friday in Islamabad by an unspecified banned organisation.
“I record my strong protest against this,” he said, calling the claimed event as a negation of a letter of assurances he received from the interior minister about projected actions against banned groups.
Mr Malik assured the house that he would inquire into Mr Akram’s complaint and take action against people responsible if the meeting of a proscribed organisation was allowed to take place in Islamabad’s Karachi Company area.
The issue was then picked up by a PML-N member, Sahibzada Fazal Karim, who seemed blaming his own party’s government in the Punjab province for allowing a public rally of Defence of Pakistan Council, which allegedly includes banned religious groups, at Minar-i-Pakistan in Lahore but denying the same venue to Sunni Tehrik, and later by a victim of a terrorist attack and PPP’s former religious affairs minister, Hamid Saeed Kazmi, who talked of threats received by the families of judges trying cases against alleged terrorists and called for amendments in the defamation law to protect victims of slander.
The interior minister regretted that a government bill seeking to strengthen anti-terrorism laws had been pending before a standing committee of the Senate for the past two years and said parliament must give a strong message against the menace by providing a better law.

Seven soldiers, 25 militants killed in Kurram clashes

Independent confirmation of the death toll was not immediately possible as the lawless tribal region is barred for journalists. — File Photo by Reuters

PESHAWAR: Dozens of heavily armed Taliban militants attacked a Pakistani military post on Tuesday, sparking clashes that killed seven soldiers and wounded another 10, the military said.

Helicopter gunships were mobilised when the fighting broke out in the same Jogi area as clashes that killed six soldiers on Jan 25 in the Kurram tribal region.
At the time, security forces claimed to have taken control of Jogi, which is strategically located near the Orakzai tribal region, birthplace of Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud.
A senior military official told AFP that “more than 300 Taliban militants attacked” the checkpost at around midnight in central Kurram, which is on the Taliban route into North Waziristan and onto the Afghan border.
Security forces retaliated and killed around 25 militants, but seven soldiers were also killed and 10 others wounded, the official said.
Independent confirmation of death tolls is largely impossible in the tribal belt, a Taliban and Al-Qaeda stronghold barred to journalists and aid workers.
“Heavy fighting continued until this morning,” the military official said.
Local administration official Sher Bahadur confirmed the military deaths but put the number of wounded paramilitary at 12.
Last July, Pakistan launched an offensive to evict militants from Kurram, mirroring operations that it has carried out — with limited success — across much of the rest of the tribal belt, only for militants to regroup and return.