Money matters: K-P govt launches online budget system

K-P Finance Minister Sirajul Haq PHOTO: INP

PESHAWAR: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government has shown initiative by making the details of the provincial budget available online, making it the first system of its kind in Pakistan. 

The provincial finance department launched the online system featuring details of all uplift schemes across the province that will benefit a cross-section of society.

The website was launched during a meeting chaired by Finance Minister Sirajul Haq on Monday. The minister termed the launch a milestone in the country’s history and called it a good omen.

“The website itself is clear proof of the fact that the government officials are now accountable to the public in terms of budget and expenditures,” he said, adding the move will ensure more transparency in financial matters of the provincial government.

“This is one of the major steps towards the E-governance policy in KP that will also help end corruption to a great extent,” he added.

The minister said that the website will also help strengthen the performance of the government departments and promote accountability of the government officials. Haq also said that online complaint system will be launched soon.

Minister for IT Shahram Khan Tarakai congratulated the team over the launch. Earlier, PTI’s central committee member Captain (Retd.) Mian Shahid also called on the finance minister wherein the minister said that the remedy for national issues was not privatisation but that the government needs to take steps to make national institutions result-oriented and functional.

For this purpose, the provincial government has formed working groups in various department for their capacity-building

Choorian, not Waar retains title as Pakistan’s highest-grossing film

So far Waar has collected Rs170 million, compared to Syed Noor's Choorian which grossed a total of Rs200 million. PHOTO: FILE

KARACHI: According to the box office stats collection on Monday, Waar has grossed a whopping Rs168.3 million rupees in its three-week run. But the Bilal Lashari hit is still not the highest-grossing Pakistani film – that title remains with Syed Noor’s Choorian!

Since the release of Waar, there has been much talk of box office collection. Having bagged arecord first day opening, followed by a record-breaking Eid collection and then the biggest first week opening for any film in Pakistan, the Shaan-starrer went on to beat Chennai Express’ records and caused Boss to flop at the local box office. Compared with Choorian, however, Waar is still behind in the box office race.

Syed Noor’s 1998 film Choorian gathered a grand total of Rs200 million and that, too, merely on 20 to 22 screens, whereas Waar was released on 52 screens. Choorian was a well-executed family drama bolstered by excessive marketing done by Shalimar Television Network. The result was a box office sensation.

With the onset of Muharram and Krrish 3 as competition, it is still uncertain whether Waar will become Pakistan’s all-time highest-grossing film by surpassing the Rs200 million mark. However, back-to-back houseful shows on weekdays suggest that there is hope for the Shaan-starrer to surpass Chooriyan.

Troubled project: Iran urges Pakistan to finance own gas pipeline, speed up work

Construction on the Iranian side of the border is almost complete. PHOTO: AFP/FILE

TEHRAN: 

Iran’s deputy oil minister, Ali Majedi, said on Monday that Pakistan must finance its own section of the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline which would enable it to buy gas from the Iran.

Majedi’s remarks come after Petroleum and Natural Resources Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi asked Iran to stump up $2 billion to finish the construction of the pipeline.

The $7.5-billion project launched in 2010 has drawn threats of US sanctions and run into repeated problems, including major financing issues.

“We did not make such a commitment to help Pakistan with $2 billion for the construction of the pipeline,” Majedi said, quoted by Fars news agency.

He argued that based on initial agreements each side “must bring its own share” in financing the project, adding the “Pakistanis need Iran’s gas and they should accelerate their work.”

Construction on the Iranian side of the border is almost complete, but Islamabad has run into repeated problems financing the 780-kilometre section to be built on its side.

Once completed, the project which aims to ease the chronic gas and electricity shortages in Pakistan would allow Iran to export 21 million cubic metres of gas per day.

Last week, Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Zangeneh said he had ‘no hope’ for the gas supply deal with Pakistan because of financial problems. Zangeneh’s comments prompted Abbasi to insist the project would be completed and there was ‘no chance to abandon the pipeline project, because we need it’.

Pakistan successfully test fires Hatf IX: ISPR

File photo of NASR, Hatf IX missile. PHOTO: ISPR

Pakistan conducted a successful test fire of the Hatf IX (NASR) missile on Tuesday,Express News reported.

The missile has a range of 60 kilometers and can carry any type of warhead.

Chief of Army Staff Ashfaq Pervez Kayani was present at the test fire, which was confirmed by the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR).

Pakistan had conducted a successful test fire of Hatf IX on February 11 this year, according to the ISPR.

The test fire in February was conducted with successive launches of two missiles from a state of the art multi-tube launcher.

NASR, with an in-flight manoeuvre capability can carry nuclear warheads of appropriate yield, with high accuracy, said the ISPR’s press release.

NASR has also been specially designed to defeat all known Anti-Tactical Missile Defence Systems.

The first successful test of the short range surface to surface multi tube ballistic missile Hatf IX was conducted in April 2011

China paper blames blind faith of "uncultured" youth for Xinjiang unrest

A file photo of panicked people at the Tiananmen Square. PHOTO: AFP/FILE

BEIJING: Uncultured youth who have been misled by religious forces are a main source of unrest in China’s heavily Muslim region of Xinjiang, its top newspaper said on Tuesday, after the government blamed militants for an attack in central Beijing.

A car ploughed through bystanders on the edge of Tiananmen Square and burst into flames on Monday last week, killing three people in the car and two bystanders. The government called the incident a terrorist attack carried out by militants from the far western region of Xinjiang.

More than 40 people were hurt, and the police have detained five people in connection with the attack for plotting what it said was a holy war.

A front-page commentary in the official Xinjiang Daily accused ethnic “splittists” of ignoring the great changes the ruling Communist Party has brought to the region, saying religious fanatics were distorting Islamic teachings.

“In recent decades, you can see that most people who blindly follow religious  forces are elementary-school, secondary-school or uncultured young people,” said the commentary, signed by a person the paper identified as an ethnic Uighur member of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles in Xinjiang.

“We loathe this kind of ignorant behaviour, and detest these evil spirits.”

Many of the Turkic-speaking Uighurs who call Xinjiang home chafe at restrictions on their culture, language and religion, though the government insists it grants them broad freedoms.

Xinjiang has been the scene of numerous incidents of unrest in recent years, which Beijing blames on the separatist East Turkestan Islamic Movement, even as many experts and rights groups cast doubt on its existence as a cohesive group.

“The authorities really need to take a step back and look at the results of their policies, and whether those are effective, in obtaining what we assume they want to obtain, which is less violence and more harmony,” said Corinna-Barbara Francis, China researcher for Amnesty International.

China has not taken kindly to suggestions that its policies may be more to blame for the unrest than any terror group.

Prominent Beijing-based Uighur economist Ilham Tohti, a longstanding critic of Chinese policies in Xinjiang, told Reuters on Tuesday that state security agents had physically threatened him on Saturday for speaking to foreign reporters.

“I want to kill you,” Tohti said an agent told him in a calm voice, after ramming his car from behind. “I want to kill your whole family.”

Security has been stepped up in Beijing and Xinjiang following the incident on Tiananmen Square.

The main Uighur exile group, the World Uyghur Congress, said that a further 24 Uighurs had been detained recently, warning China risked provoking a backlash.

“The authorities have been stepping up their repression in Uighur areas … using armed men to check them,” the group’s spokesman, Dilxat Raxit, said in an emailed statement.

“If the international community does not take emergency measures to stop China’s provocations and repression, the Uighurs who have no hope will resist and fight back as a matter of survival.

N Korea progressing on ICBM to strike US: Think-tank

N.Korea progressing on ICBM to strike US. PHOTO: REUTERS.

SEOUL: North Korea is making progress on an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of delivering a first-generation nuclear warhead to the continental United States, a leading US think-tank said Tuesday.

The closely followed 38 North website of the Johns Hopkins University’s US-Korea Institute argued that ICBM mock-ups seen at recent military parades in Pyongyang were “less fake” than originally believed.

Numerous experts had widely ridiculed the models of the North’s road-mobile KN-08 ICBM seen in 2012 and July this year, with at least one respected aerospace engineer labelling them technically preposterous and a “big hoax”.

An analysis posted by 38 North disagreed, saying they were consistent with the ongoing development of a missile with a limited intercontinental ability using only existing North Korean technology.

“Elegant or not,” the mockups suggest an ability to assemble components and technologies to produce missiles with theoretical ranges of 5,500 kilometres to more than 11,000 km.

“Almost all of the configurations examined would be able to deliver a light, first-generation nuclear warhead at least as far as Seattle,” it said.

The analysis was co-written by non-proliferation expert Jeffrey Lewis and aerospace engineer John Schilling.

The authors noted that glaring discrepancies in KN-08 mock-ups displayed in 2012 had largely disappeared by the time of the July parade.

And the new arrangement of welds and rivets was similar to that seen on recovered debris from the North’s Unha-3 carrier, which successfully placed a satellite in orbit in December last year.

In a separate, technical paper published in Science and Global Security, Schilling stressed that the KN-08 was still very much a missile in development.

“The lack of flight testing strongly suggests that operational deployment is still months or years in the future,” the engineer said.

And even with a successful test programme, it would likely be unreliable, limited in mobility and performance, and available only in small numbers, he added.

Lewis and Schilling’s paper referenced recent analysis of satellite imagery indicating that North Korea was upgrading its main missile launch site, possibly to cater to larger, mobile weapons.

South Korea’s Defence Intelligence Agency told parliament on Tuesday that North Korea had conducted five tests of long-range rocket engines this year.

An initial test of the KN-08 could come “at any time”, Schilling said.

Missile delivery has often been cited as the main weakness of the North’s nuclear weapons programme which, after three tests, is believed to be close to mastering the key technology of warhead miniaturisation.

December’s satellite launch caused serious concern, but experts stressed that it lacked the re-entry technology needed to bring an ICBM down onto a target.

Nevertheless, Lewis and Schiller said dismissing the mock-ups paraded in Pyongyang would be dangerous.

“The simplest explanation here is that the (KN-08) is exactly what it appears to be: A developmental road-mobile ICBM of limited capability but still able to threaten the continental United States,” they said

Iran looking for 'content' in new nuclear talks

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Despite the positive atmosphere, substantial differences remain as Iran seeks relief from international sanctions. PHOTO: REUTERS.

TEHRAN: Talks to resolve a protracted row over Iran’s nuclear ambitions resume this week in Geneva, with Tehran’s negotiator saying he hopes to begin discussing the “content” of an accord.

The so-called P5+1 group of major powers will meet with Iran’s nuclear team on Thursday and Friday for the latest round of negotiations revived after the election of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, a reputed moderate who has vowed a new approach.

Both sides hope to build on a meeting last month hailed as “substantive” by all sides, at which the Iranian delegation outlined a new proposal and met bilaterally with its US counterpart for the first time since 2009.

The United States is part of the P5+1, which also includes Britain, China, France, Russia, and Germany.

According to Iranian officials, the proposal- whose details have been kept secret- envisages a first and a last step which Tehran hopes can be implemented within three months and a year, respectively.

Iran’s lead negotiator in Geneva, Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi, said Monday that a “negotiation framework” had been agreed.

“Our expectation now is to begin discussions on content and then move towards an agreement on content,” Araqchi told the ISNA news agency.

Despite the positive atmosphere in the talks, conducted in English for the first time, substantial differences remain as Iran seeks relief from crippling international sanctions.

A senior Western diplomat speaking on condition of anonymity said after the last round of talks in Geneva that an immediate solution was not in sight.

“The differences remain very large in terms of what the steps should include,” the source said.

Technical discussions were held last week in Vienna at the level of experts to prepare for the political meeting this week.

Ali Vaez, the senior Iran analyst for the International Crisis Group, told AFP that more such meetings are necessary “to narrow the gap and hammer out a mutually acceptable agreement”.

Iran hopes to bring about the lifting of sanctions, while Western powers and Israel are seeking to curb its uranium enrichment programme, which they say is aimed at developing a nuclear weapon, allegations vehemently denied by Tehran.

In an interview with Israel’s Channel 10 News this weekend, lead US negotiator Wendy Sherman defined “progress” as stopping the nuclear programme from advancing further while negotiators try to reach a comprehensive agreement.

She said Washington was prepared to offer “very limited, temporary, reversible sanctions relief” while maintaining the “fundamental architecture of the oil and banking sanctions- which we will need for a comprehensive agreement, not for a first step”.

Khamenei says negotiators are not ‘compromisers’

Vaez meanwhile cautioned that negotiators still have a long way to go in resolving the decade-long dispute, pointing out that each side will have to hold its hardliners in check.

“Although the P5+1 has- for the first time- agreed to define the broad contours of an end-game, spelling it out will be groundbreaking and will require more discussion with Iran and within the P5+1,” he said.

The meeting this week will be the second such gathering since Rouhani took office in August with a pledge to resolve the nuclear issue and lift the sanctions through constructive engagement.

However the conduct of his nuclear team, overseen by Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, has come under fire from hardliners at home wary of compromise on what Iran sees as its right to nuclear enrichment.

But the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final word on all major policy issues in the Islamic republic, including the nuclear dossier, threw his weight behind the nuclear team on Sunday.

“No one should see our negotiating team as compromisers,” Khamenei said, adding that they needed national support in their “difficult mission”.

But he also said a breakthrough in the talks was unlikely.

“I do not think the negotiations will produce the results expected by Iran,” he said, adding that he is “not optimistic” about the negotiations.

Should the talks fail to deliver, it could strengthen sceptics in the US Congress and Israel, as well as hardliners in Iran, all of whom have pushed for a more confrontational approach.

“Both the US and Iran have been able to successfully push back against their respective hardliners, but this will only increase the price of potential failure,” Vaez said.