Social media is poison - I should not be here.
PK
Joined March 2010
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Hopelessnesstan retweeted
Day 40.
On 28 October, my aunt @Noreen_KhanPK was moved from Kot Lakhpat Jail to the Punjab Institute of Cardiology. No one told the family.
Today she was moved back to jail. Again, no one told us.
We don’t know why she was taken to a cardiac hospital.
We don’t know what tests were done.
No family consent was sought.
We don’t know how much danger she is in.
What we do know: there were armed police every few feet at PIC.
What are they so afraid of?
My mother @DrUzma_KhanPK and my aunts @Aleema_KhanPK and @Noreen_KhanPK have been held in Kot Lakhpat Jail since 21 September under Section 3 of the Punjab Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance, 1960. No charge. No trial.
Their only “crime” is standing up for their brother, @ImranKhanPTI.
@HRCP87 has condemned the misuse of the MPO against political workers before. We ask you to speak now.
Charge them or release them.
#FreeImranKhanAndFamily
Hopelessnesstan retweeted
I have just returned from the Punjab Institute of Cardiology. Noreen Niazi's entire family, including her daughters, has been waiting outside the ICU for the last three days, yet not a single family member has been allowed to see her. Even more disturbing is that the family has not been informed about her medical condition. They have not been told what happened to her, what diagnosis has been made, what tests have been conducted, what the reports reveal, what treatment or medication has been prescribed or even what symptoms she is experiencing. The family is left waiting outside the ICU, completely in the dark about their mother's health. Meanwhile, approximately 25–30 policemen are deployed at the hospital. This complete lack of transparency and communication is unacceptable. Her daughters and family deserve to know about their mother's health, diagnosis, medical reports and treatment. They deserve answers
Hopelessnesstan retweeted
Hasan Mahmud thought he was in trouble… but things took an unexpected turn! 👀🎂 What really happened?
#Bangladesh #Tigers #HasanMahmud #BirthdaySurprise
Hopelessnesstan retweeted
This answer from Kimi... sat next to Lewis and Max 🥹
#F1 #BahrainGP
Hopelessnesstan retweeted
Remember the iron rule of reporting on the Middle East:
Nothing justified Oct 7th.
Oct 7th justified everything.
Hopelessnesstan retweeted
The Defence Minister is right. It’s why I have never been considered Jewish by the Jewish community. My mother was a Church of England Protestant. And by this logic, my father was not Jewish either. His mother was a French Catholic. As ever, in attempting to undermine my sons, Pakistan’s Defence Minister has scored an embarrassing own goal.
Hopelessnesstan retweeted
Amid yet another Pakistan crisis, it’s Aaqib Javed who again emerges unscathed... #SwitchHit
Hopelessnesstan retweeted
𝐒𝐈𝐌𝐏𝐋𝐘 𝐒𝐄𝐍𝐒𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐀𝐋 🔥
You won't see many better catches than this 👏
#ENGvPAK | #PakistanCricket
Hopelessnesstan retweeted
Prime Minister @andyburnham and Foreign Secretary @Ed_Miliband : how much longer will Britain remain silent?
For three years the father of my two sons, and Pakistan’s former Prime Minister, Imran Khan, has been brutally penalised by his political opponents, in a personal vendetta by Army Chief, Asim Munir, which according to the UN, amounts to torture and which is now taking a potentially fatal toll on his physical and mental health.
He has endured 3 years of solitary confinement. For nearly ten months now his family has been denied contact with him. He has been deprived of the most basic human contact, denied access to books, lawyers and doctors.
The international human-rights standards are unequivocal. Under the UN’s Nelson Mandela Rules, solitary confinement lasting more than 15 consecutive days is prohibited and amounts to torture.
He has endured this treatment not for 15 days, but for three years.
Pakistan’s own Supreme Court has now intervened: ordering comprehensive medical treatment, access to his personal doctor, regular family visits and twice-weekly calls with his sons.
Yet those orders are being defied.
This is no longer simply a Pakistani political matter. It is a human-rights emergency.
He has deep and lifelong ties to Britain. He studied at Oxford University, captained Oxford University cricket and spent years playing county cricket in England. His relationship with this country stretches back more than half a century. His charitable activities were internationally recognised, and include building the only free cancer hospital in Pakistan as well as a university.
His sons, my two boys, Sulaiman and Kasim, are British citizens. They have been forced to watch their father’s health decline from thousands of miles away, prevented from visiting him, denied visas, publicly threatened by government officials with arrest themselves, and even denied court-mandated regular phone calls.
I have repeatedly appealed to the UK government to intervene. Purported attempts at back channelling have evidently failed. The previous Foreign Secretary @DavidLammy informed me in writing that Britain would not intervene if my sons, British citizens, are arrested when they travel to Pakistan to visit their father.
@FCDOGovUK: Britain must now speak out publicly and unequivocally. Demand that Pakistan comply with its own Supreme Court; restore Imran Khan’s medical access, his right to see his family, end his prolonged isolation and uphold his fundamental human rights.
Pakistan is a Commonwealth country. Britain has a long and proud tradition of standing against arbitrary detention, inhumane treatment and the denial of fundamental rights. Those principles mean very little if we invoke them only selectively and neglect them when inconvenient.
This an appeal to the new Burnham government to please now do the right thing.
Hopelessnesstan retweeted
A year earlier, India's batsmen had surrendered a Test match rather than keep facing this bowling attack. Wasim Raja faced the same bowlers without a helmet and hit them for 14 sixes, more than any batter had ever hit in a Test series.
Twenty years ago today, Wasim Raja passed away, and he left in the most Wasim Raja way possible ..in the middle of a cricket match.
any tribute to him has to begin in the Caribbean of 1977. It was the most dangerous place in cricket. Roberts and Croft at their most frightening, batsmen everywhere flinching, and no helmets yet in the game. Raja walked out bareheaded and hit them for 14 sixes across the series, scoring 517 runs at 57.44. Over five Tests, Wasim Raja scored 517 runs and topped the series averages at 57.44, with five fifties and a hundred, and took seven wickets at 18.71 with his leg-spin for good measure. The 14 sixes set a record for any Test series that has since been equalled but never beaten, and that half a century later no batter has ever matched away from home. Nor was it slogging born of fear. West Indies remained his favourite opponent for an entire career: his first two Test hundreds came against them, and he finished averaging 57.43 against the best team of his era.
Then came Bridgetown . This says everything about his nerve. Pakistan were 158 for 9 and finished, and Raja stitched 133 for the last wicket with Wasim Bari to save a Test nobody believed could be saved.
On this day in 2006, Wasim Raja was fielding for Surrey Over-50s at Marlow when he felt dizzy, told the slips he needed to go off, and collapsed on the boundary edge. The man who never wore a helmet went with his whites still on, and twenty years later that still reads less like a tragedy than like the last line he chose for himself.
Hopelessnesstan retweeted
The accusation that I am antisemitic is appalling and fundamentally dishonest. Criticizing the actions of the Israeli prime minister, a military technology contract, or the executives who supply it is not the same as criticizing Jewish people. This critical and necessary dialogue is then dishonestly framed as being anti-Israel. To be clear, my views come from my own political convictions and should never be interpreted as hostility toward Jewish people, for whom I have deep love and respect. Everything I know about acting, activism, and humanism has been profoundly shaped by the Jewish friends, colleagues, and loved ones who have been integral and family throughout every point of my life.
This merger has real consequences for real people, and for the entire country. Scrutinizing the Ellisons, including Oracle’s business built on data, surveillance technology and government contracts, and the serious threat to editorial freedom and the loss of a livelihood for thousands of families, is fair and necessary. The $111 billion deal would hand one family control over CNN, HBO and Warner Bros., backed in part by foreign money whose influence on editorial decisions has never been fully explained to the public.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have called for serious national security review, and regulators still haven’t given the public a real answer. Until they do, the merger shouldn’t move forward. Now is the time to dive boldly into all these issues, not step back or concede.
Hopelessnesstan retweeted
Khan sb came out, saw the scorecard from Headingly and ordered to be taken back to Adiyala.
Hopelessnesstan retweeted
The hype is not a strategy to be executed but the natural popularity of a politician that cannot be dismissed with English verbosity.
If there is one thing Imran Khan has always loved it is HYPE. If there is one thing that defines PTI's politics it is HYPE. If there is one thing the Establishment has tried to take away from both the PTI and Imran it is HYPE. Today as he moves out of jail and to Shifa Hospital there is total HYPE. Domestic HYPE. International HYPE. Imran is a subject that refuses to go away. He is a news cycle that continues to unfold.
Hopelessnesstan retweeted
Imran Khan's medical reports are alarming. I have gone through them with several specialists, and I am writing this in plain language so every Pakistani can understand exactly what is happening.
In order of priority, this is what worries me most: his anxiety and stress levels, his palpitations, and his high blood pressure. Sleeplessness is not mentioned in the report, but looking at the medications, it is almost certainly there too.
I have known Imran Khan for more than 35 years. Stress was never his weakness. That it is now at peak levels tells you everything about what three years of imprisonment and total isolation have done to him.
The causes are not hard to understand: the state of the country, his colleagues in jail, those sentenced, the killed, and their grieving families. His own isolation, no newspapers, no books, no knowledge of what is happening outside. And yes, his anxiety over Bushra Bibi, his sisters, his workers and his party.
Look at the medications, as there is no diagnosis. He is on Citanil and Lexotanil, three times a day. That is not sleeplessness being treated. That is daytime anxiety being treated. Read that twice.
His heart rate is 54 bpm. Doctors will call that "normal." It is not normal for him. His resting heart rate has been in the low 40s his whole adult life, the mark of a lifelong elite athlete. A jump to 54 is a real shift.
He has reported heart palpitations. That is not something to note and move on from. It needs a 24-hour Holter monitor immediately, to catch the frequency and get him on the right medication. Even an Apple Watch linked to an Apple ID outside Pakistan (as that function is disabled in Pakistan) can flag Atrial Fibrillation and palpitations in real time.
He is on three separate BP medications now. That requires proper daily AM/PM monitoring to titrate correctly, not once-a-week guesswork. He is also on a cholesterol-lowering drug. Raised cholesterol at his age is both genetic and stress-driven, and needs diet, exercise, and medication working together, as does his blood pressure. Less salt. More movement. Real monitoring.
And the following tests that must happen now, without further delay:
1) A Stress Test
2) An Echocardiogram
3) Cardiac MRI
4) Cardiac Artery Calcium (CAC) scan, because of raised cholesterol to check for calcified deposits that block arteries and lead directly to heart attacks or the need for stents.
5) Cardiac CT Angiogram and other tests if indicated.
I am deeply worried. Isolation is taking a physical toll on his body. If this is not addressed immediately, the damage may become irreversible with more complications to follow.
@ImranKhanPTI definitely needs to be moved to a hospital environment now, under an independent panel of doctors. Neither his family nor the people of Pakistan trust government-appointed doctors alone. We have already seen reports manipulated before, numbers exaggerated or suppressed, platelets among them.
The next three months will decide whether his condition is reversed or becomes permanent.
We all are alarmed.
The country needs him more than ever before. May Allah keep him healthy. Ameen. 🤲
Hopelessnesstan retweeted
Op-Ed: "The gravest damage was done not by generals or bureaucrats but by judges. The judiciary was meant to be the citizen’s shield — the one institution whose purpose is to say no to power on the authority of law. But it too was a colonial inheritance, and carried the reflex in its bones: under the Raj it had served the sovereign, not the subject, and at independence it transferred that loyalty from the departed Crown to the new establishment, not the people. So when the tanks rolled, the courts, again and again, said yes."
dawn.com/news/2022714
Hopelessnesstan retweeted
Today I mourn the loss of Professor Amin Mughal in London. Since my days as a student at Cambridge in the 1980s he was a mentor and a guide. Whether it was reading political philosophy or poetry and literature he was the kind spirit holding my hand.
I last met him last summer. Nadir Cheema, his loving care-giver and contact with us for decades, and I walked him to his favourite watering hole near his retirement home. His mind was buzzing with new thoughts about the elusiveness of democracy. I told him we would succeed.
The summer of 1989 that I spent working for him in London in the newspaper section he was editing has remained a period etched in magic in my mind. After work we would sit with other friends for hours dreaming. His group consisted of poets and philanderers _ free spirits _ who like himself had suffered the brutality of the Zia martial law. They rarely talked about the dungeons of the Lahore Fort where many of them had suffered the stripping away of their dignity.
He had been involved in the quest for human liberation since own college days in Sialkot in the early 1950s. He would talk about his mentors in journalism: giants like Faiz Sahib, Mazhar Ali Khan, IA Rehman. His intellectual kindred spirit was Professor Manzoor. He would recall his work with trade unions during the Ayub martial law and his arrest and later expulsion from his teaching position. Undeterred, he got together with colleagues similarly ousted to form the Sangat Shah Husain, an educational institute that upheld human values and the unrestrained joy of the mother tongue of the Punjab.
After facing the Zia dungeons he had came to England in the mid 1980s and never once went back. I asked him why he wouldnt ever go back. He said he couldn’t. I put it down to self-respect. As his friends and comrades passed he mourned each loss with dignity and continued to make time for the company of those to whom he meant so much. Rest in peace dear Amin Sahib.
Hopelessnesstan retweeted
مظہر عباس اسٹیبلشمنٹ کے چودہ طبق روشن کرتے ہوئے
کم سے کم صحافت کا کچھ حق تو ادا کیا!
جو کچھ محسن نقوی نے کہا وہ انکی ذاتی رائے نہیں تھی۔
محسن نقوی تو کاکروچ بھی اپنی مرضی کے لانا چاہتے ہیں۔
اس ملک میں نظام عوامی نمائندوں کا مسئلہ ہے ۔ ان لوگوں کا مسئلہ نہیں ہے جنکو سیاست میں حصہ لینے کی آئینی اور خود انکے کوڈ میں اجازت نہیں ہے۔
جس ملک میں وزیراعظم کو اختیار نہیں، عدالت معزول، سیاست معزول، سیاست دان معزول ہو۔ چیف جسٹس اپنی مرضی سے عدالت نہیں جا سکتا۔ میڈیا آزاد نہیں ہے،
وہاں بااختیار بلدیاتی اداروں کی بات ہو رہی ہے۔ پہلے آپ خود طے کریں کہ آپ اس ملک میں کونسا نظام چاہتے ہیں ۔
چند سال پہلے آپ ہائبرڈ سسٹم لائے اب وہ بھی آپکو اچھا نہیں لگ رہا۔ کیا ہم غیر جماعتی فارمولے کی طرف جا رہے ہیں۔
جب تک آپ آئین کی سپرمیسی کو نہیں مانیں گے۔ جس عدلیہ نے ملک کا آئین توڑا اسکو آپ نے نہ صرف لیگل پروٹیکشن دی بلکہ کہا آپ چاہیں تو آئین میں مزید ترامیم بھی کر لیں۔
79 میں بھٹو کی پھانسی کے بعد غیر جماعتی انتخابات کروائے آپ نے تو انھیں بھی پاور نہیں دی۔آپ نے سیاسی نظام کو برادریوں میں تقسیم کیا۔ پھر آپ برملا کہتے ہیں کہ یہ اتحاد آپ بنواتے ہیں ۔ مہران بینک کا اسکینڈل سب کے سامنے ہے چار بینکوں سے پیسے جمع کر کے نمائندے منتخب کروائے گئے یہ سب سیاسی جماعتیں نہیں کرتیں ۔
غیریقینی کی صورتحال ہی پاکستان کا مسئلہ ہے۔آپ ملک میں استحکام آنے ہی نہیں دیتے ۔سیاست کو گالی بنا دیا ہے۔ سیاسی جماعتیں اپنا کوئی فیصلہ خود نہیں کر سکتی ۔ کسی کے لیے آپ بارہ مئی چھوڑا ہوا ہے کسی کے لئے نو مئی ۔ مقدمات سے آپ کنٹرول کر رہے ہیں۔ آپ بلوچستان اور آزاد کشمیر کے معامالات سے توجہ ہٹانے کے لیے ایسی بحث چھیڑ تے ہیں ۔
Hopelessnesstan retweeted
I will not use the gratuitously rude language you have employed. Your age alone forces me treat you with some courtesy, otherwise you are little more than a bits and pieces dilettante pretending to be an economist with deep insight into what enables economies to grow. Most see you as a wannabe advisor to tyranny. Human flourishing as a holistic project is clearly beyond you. All I said was that the fact that (some, not all) authoritarian East Asian development states achieved rapid growth over time is no guarantee that other authoritarian states will achieve similar growth. I never entered into an argument over what might have fuelled East Asian growth. In fact I implicitly accepted, as a working hypothesis, the premise that authoritarian rule might have aided growth in those countries, though there was clearly much more at play. From Studwell’s How Asia Works to Atul Kohli’s State led Development to Yuen Ang’s How China Escaped the Poverty Trap we are reminded of the complexity that led to growth in East Asia. Key factors, such as the quality of the human capital as well as the depth of state capacity, that were available to the successful East Asians are clearly non-existent in Pakistan. Many a dictatorship in Africa and South America, and Pakistan itself, have been left battered by authoritarian rule. To ease your understanding of my remark kindly note that not every bout of authoritarian rule will be led by a Lee Kuan Yew. Most are likely to be led by a Mobuto or a Pinochet, hugged by superficial number-crunchers like yourself. Of course I am a lawyer and not a development practitioner. Unlike you I don’t pretend to be one. For me economic growth and human dignity are neither binaries nor trade-offs. Certain human rights are non-negotiable. They say war is too important a matter to be left to generals. Likewise human flourishing is too important a matter to be left to economists, much less retired bankers. You have consistently failed to critique, much less condemn, the assault on basic human values underway in Pakistan. This is not surprising. This is the norm for wannabe intellectuals who play it safe: offer technical advice that abstracts from the reality of the tyranny underway and declare periods of oppression to be opportunities to reset the ‘system’. I hope to never run into you.
