The provincial assembly in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was dissolved yesterday, the second regional government to be brought down by former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan in his drive to force early general elections.
Pakistan has been gripped by political turmoil since Khan was ousted in a no-confidence vote in April last year. He was replaced by a shaky alliance led by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. The South Asian nation is facing a severe economic downturn, with rocketing inflation, a major shortage of foreign reserves and lagging bailout talks with international lenders.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Governor Haji Ghulam Ali yesterday signed a letter dissolving the assembly “with immediate effect” at the request of the provincial chief minister, who is a senior figure in Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party.
Photo: Reuters
The PTI held a majority or was in a coalition government in two of Pakistan’s four provincial parliaments. The move in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa came after the assembly in the most populous province, Punjab, was dissolved late on Saturday by Khan’s coalition partners, on his orders. As per the constitution, fresh elections in both legislatures must be held within three months.
Historically, federal and provincial elections have always been held simultaneously, but the constitution does allow for separate polling dates.
General elections are due no later than the middle of October and Sharif’s government is holding out hope of engineering an economic turnaround to boost its faltering popularity.
“The current government has failed to govern so it’s time they realized their responsibility and go for elections to end this political instability,” PTI spokesman Fawad Chaudhry said.
“We are ready for elections, and we are ready for a street movement as well,” Chaudhry said. “If they don’t call the elections, we will have to go for a street movement.”
Khan still maintains a huge following and has held a series of anti-government demonstrations to rally support for his cause, a platform based mainly on fighting corruption.
The 70-year-old has repeatedly touted claims he was ousted by a US-led “conspiracy.”
His ouster from government came after analysts said he fell out of favor with Pakistan’s military, which has directly ruled the country for about half of its 76-year history, and maintains a strong influence on governance and policy.
In November, Khan was shot and wounded at a party rally. He blamed the assassination bid on Sharif and a senior army intelligence officer.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS