By Salman Siddiqui in The Express Tribune, April 13th, 2017. KARACHI: China has approved additional financing for infrastructure projects in Pakistan under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), taking the investment volume to $62 billion from $55 billion, announced Sindh Governor Mohammad Zubair on Wednesday. “New investment has been approved for projects in various sectors including [establishment of] industrial zones,” said Zubair while speaking at a conference on “Infrastructure demand and financing” organised by credit rating…
Posts published in April 2017
As recently as October of last year, Pakistan’s foreign exchange reserves stood at an all-time record high of $24 billion. Since then, however, a combination of the rapidly increasing international price of oil and an uptick in our import bill have caused our reserves to plunge, with the State Bank of Pakistan now holding at $16.5 billion with another $5 billion held by commercial banks. In response, the SBP is now borrowing dollars from local…
This article is the final part of the ‘Before CPEC’ series by the writer: published on March 28, 2017 and April 3, 2017.Poet Muhammad Iqbal visited Spain and prayed in the old mosque of Cordoba in 1933 where he wrote his famous poem ‘Majid-e-Qartaba’. Gen Ziaul Haq visited Kashghar in 1984. He requested the local Chinese authorities to unlock the big Friday Mosque in the city – it had been sealed for a long time…
By Shezad Baloch in The Express Tribune, April 13th, 2017. (The writer is a research student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication) It is hard to imagine going without clean drinking water for 15 to 20 days consecutively, but for the citizens of Gwadar, it is a fact of life. Residents of this coastal city get clean drinking water for just one hour, every two to three weeks. For poor…
Report in Dhaka Tribune, April 12, 2017 Bangladesh maintains that the Rampal plant will not harm the biodiversity of the Unesco World Heritage Site.File photo of Rampal power plant design Unesco has raised concerns over the possible impact of the coal-fired power plant on the Sundarbans The government took another major step in moving forward with the construction of the mega coal power plant at Rampal, near the Sundarbans, after Bangladesh signed during Prime Minister…
By Nectar Gan in South China Morning Post, APR 7, 2017 The Communist Party in China’s restive Xinjiang region has punished 97 cadres in its rural south for failing to do a proper job monitoring local residents, providing a rare glimpse into the extent of surveillance imposed in the ethnic-Uygur heartland. The cadres in Hotan prefecture in southern Xinjiang, including seven village police officers, were punished for a wide range of derelictions of duty, such…
Dhaka: Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina yesterday called upon Muslim countries to join hands to launch a concerted campaign to eliminate terrorism. “Everybody who believes in peace should be united against terrorism,” she told a mammoth rally of Islamic religious leaders and scholars in the city’s Suhrawardy Udyan. The programme was organised marking the 42nd founding anniversary of Islamic Foundation. The PM said Bangladesh will be on Saudi Arabia’s side as it took the initiative to…
by Arifur Rahman Rabbi in Dhaka Tribune, Apr 7, 2017 Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) has detained eight suspected members of a new faction of banned militant outfit Jama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (New JMB) from Narayanganj and Comilla. The elite force did not disclose the identities of the detainees. RAB Legal and Media Wing’s Senior Assistant Director Mizanur Rahman Bhuiyan confirmed the matter to the Dhaka Tribune Friday morning. He said: “They were detained from different areas…