Thursday, November 12, 2020

Video Report - #Name_Of_Honour Why are women murdered in the name of ‘honour’?

Video - Trump is bashing Fox News on Twitter as pandemic rages

Video Report - More Republicans signal support for Biden to receive security briefings

Opinion: When Trump Vandalizes Our Country

 

By 

The president should grit his teeth and repeat Hillary Clinton’s line from 2016: “We must accept this result.”

As it became clear that she would lose the 2016 election and news organizations called the race for Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton spoke to her supporters.

“We must accept this result,” she declared. “Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.”

She did not boast that she had won 2.9 million more votes than Trump. She did not file lawsuits to try to reverse thin margins. And she did not offer evidence-free allegations of voter fraud — as Trump did, even though he had won. Rather, she buttressed the norm in American electoral politics of the loser acknowledging the winner.
This norm is as traditional as it is wrenching for the losers. In conceding the presidential race in 1952 and sharing how he felt, Adlai Stevenson recalled what Lincoln supposedly said after losing an election: “He said he felt like a little boy who had stubbed his toe in the dark. He was too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh.” Still, Stevenson resolutely called on his backers to support Dwight Eisenhower in the presidency.
In 2000, after the Supreme Court effectively ended Al Gore’s quest for the presidency, Gore likewise admitted his heartache but urged voters: “I call on all Americans — I particularly urge all who stood with us — to unite behind our next president.”
Trump might study the particularly eloquent speech by John McCain as he conceded to Barack Obama in 2008. McCain said: “I urge all Americans who supported me to join me in not just congratulating him but offering our next president our good will and earnest effort to find ways to come together.”
President Trump’s pattern instead has been to scrape the wounds opened during campaigns, for he has been a sore loser as well as a sore winner. In 2016, when Trump lost the Iowa caucuses, he claimed that “Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it.” Today Trump is not simply saying that we should wait for every vote to be counted in the 2020 election. Rather, he is fabricating election fraud and falsely claiming that he won, sowing doubts within his base about American democracy itself. A Politico/Morning Consult poll found that 70 percent of Republicans don’t believe the election was free and fair.
Republican officials have, with some noble exceptions, joined Trump in this dangerous charade, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo asserting — perhaps jokingly — that “there will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.”
The blunt truth is that there is zero evidence of widespread fraud or impropriety, and in any case, the average statewide recount over 20 years has resulted in a shift of just 430 votes. There is no realistic chance for recounts to shift enough votes for Trump to win a second term. Yet Trump is denying reality and impeding a lawful transition in ways that diminish the United States before the world, that make our country less governable and that risk inciting violence. This is presidential vandalism.
Can America heal?
The most likely course ahead, I believe, is that reality will gradually take hold: Trump’s litigation will fail, voting results will be certified and the Trump administration will grumpily accept the inevitable and cooperate with a transition.But I may be wrong. If Republicans egg Trump on, rather than try to rein him in, might he try to block the transition in ways that would be comparable to an attempted coup d’état?Sean Wilentz, the historian, told my colleague Thomas B. Edsall that if Trump were to deny the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s election, “It would be an act of disloyalty unsurpassed in American history except by the Southern secession in 1860-61.”
One impediment to healing is that we now all have our own news ecosystems to feed our selection bias, reinforce our prejudices and dial up our outrage. In recent days I’ve been tuning to the conservative outlet One America News, and it’s the simplest way to travel to another planet: On that planet, Democrats are engaging in massive election fraud and trying to steal the election. If you live on that planet, with Facebook feeds that reinforce that fiction, you’re not inclined to sing “Kumbaya.”
Yet we have to try to heal and reassert norms of civility that are the lubricant that make democracy work. Biden has modeled those norms in his outreach to Trump voters, in empathizing with their disappointment, in quoting the Bible in his call for Americans to unite and heal. But it will take all of us, on both sides of this divide, to join him.
Republicans scoff that Democrats, after delegitimizing Trump for four years, now preach harmony. I take their point. But for the most part Democrats protested that Trump was a bad president, not that he wasn’t president at all. It is possible, imperfectly, to uphold norms both of acknowledging losses and of pushing accountability.
The day after the 2016 election I wrote a column saying that “having lost, we owe it to our nation to grit our teeth and give President-elect Trump a chance.” I now invite Republicans, having lost, to grit their teeth and give President-elect Biden a chance.

#elections - Department of Homeland Security calls #election "the most secure in American history"

A top committee made up of officials from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and its election partners refuted President Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud and irregularities in a statement Thursday, calling the election "the most secure in American history."
The big picture: Trump has refused to concede to President-elect Joe Biden and is pursuing lawsuits in a number of states with baseless claims of voter fraud. The public statement from the president's own Department of Homeland Security undermines his narrative and is sure to infuriate him.
What they’re saying: “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised," members of the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council (GCC) Executive Committee said in a statement.
Voting systems were made secure through pre-election testing, state certification of voting equipment and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s certification of equipment.The joint statement acknowledged “opportunities for misinformation” and urged voters to seek out election officials as “trusted voices.”
Between the lines: This government statement about the election being secure should be unremarkable, Axios' Jonathan Swan notes.
But the sad reality is it’s a dangerous document for the officials who wrote it. Every person who had a hand in writing it will almost certainly face the wrath of Trump and his inner circle in the White House. Driving the news: CISA director Christopher Krebs has told associates he expects to be fired after he angered the White House by debunking election misinformation promoted by Trump online, Reuters first reported Thursday.
The White House also asked Bryan Ware, assistant director for cybersecurity at CISA, to hand in his resignation, which he did on Thursday, according to Reuters.

https://www.axios.com/cisa-election-security-trump-a385868b-512a-4449-addd-4591829a4aef.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic&utm_content=1100

افغانستان سره مالي مرستې او فساد سره مبارزې لپاره د افغان دولت هڅې

Video Report - Rise in Covid-19 cases in Pakistan lGNN l 12 Nov 2020

Video - Chairman PPP Bilawal Bhutto Zardari addresses a rally in Shaheen Hotel, Gilgit.

#Pakistan - Journalists under threat


I.A. Rehman
THIS year’s report on impunity against journalists facing trial by law in Pakistan, issued the other day by Freedom Network, a widely respected media watchdog, will cause much distress to all those who consider the existence of a strong and independent media essential to good governance and social progress.
The report begins by recalling the regrettable fact that Pakistan continues to be ranked as one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists, as more than 140 journalists and media assistants have been killed in the country since 2000. After this introduction the report notes the emergence of a relatively new form of persecution of the media, namely, institution of legal cases against journalists and entangling them in legal battles.
During 2018-2019, the Freedom Network documented 17 cases against journalists for which it could secure complete data. Cases started in 2020 were not taken into consideration as it was thought advisable to allow a one-year period to lapse before determining the seriousness of the challenge. The authors of the report have found the result of analysis not only startling but also shocking. The more significant findings are:
The humanitarian dimensions of the media’s economic crisis are much too evident to be discounted.
— Journalists working for the print media are twice more likely to be targets of legal action than their colleagues in the electronic media.

— Sindh is a three times riskier region for journalists than any other province or the capital territory.

— Most journalists (over one-third of them) are charged with offences under the Penal Code while another one-third are likely to be charged with terrorism, while some others may be tried under electronic crimes or defamation laws.

— The most common allegation against journalists is “acting against state institutions” or “defaming state institutions”. Other allegations can be “illegal possession of arms /explosives”, “drug running”, “keeping proscribed literature”, or “harassing citizens”

— In 15 out of the 17 cases (88.2 per cent) analysed action was initiated by the state or its functionaries.

— Those initiating cases often demanded more than one remedy from journalists. The most common demand was proof of journalists’ assertion in their reports, followed by a demand for an apology.

— In the two-thirds of the cases in which investigations were completed by the police, only half of them were declared fit for trial. The trial in 60pc of the cases was never concluded, leaving most journalists without a chance to prove their innocence. In over 80pc of the cases in which the trial did conclude, the journalists-accused were found innocent and acquitted. However, 10 out of the 17 cases never reached a conclusion and thus most of the journalists concerned did not receive justice at all.

This study leads to the conclusion that during 2018-2019, the law was used more often than not to harass working journalists with a view to preventing them from offering the people truthful accounts of happenings around them.

This year’s report should be read along with last year’s findings that there was 100pc impunity for killers and zero per cent justice for 33 murdered journalists. There are no signs that the situation has changed for the better.

Both of these reports’, however, cover only part of the journalists’ concerns. They do not extend to the crisis confronting the media houses that has been caused by a shrinking of their revenues, discrimination in the distribution of state-controlled advertisements, unlawful restrictions on the circulation of some newspapers in certain areas, and other insidious campaigns against the dissidents or vehicles of independent opinion.

The bitter struggle for survival that has been for­c­ed on the media as a whole is gravely undermining its capacity to help the rulers govern justly and gui­de the people to fulfil their unexceptionable responsibilities of responsible citizenship. Unfortun­a­tely, the traditions of civil discourse have been undermined to an extent that the expression ‘the fourth estate’ itself has gone out of currency. If there are any people in authority or who have access to it who believe that a responsible and pro-people dispensation is possible without a healthy and independent media, the sooner their minds can be disabused of such outlandish ideas the better for all concerned.

The humanitarian dimensions of the media’s economic crisis are much too evident to be discounted. More than 15,000 journalists and support workers have been rendered jobless, and the process has picked up speed over the past few weeks. Many more journalists have been compelled to accept unbearable cuts in their wages thereby causing a sharp decline and deterioration in their services and lifestyles both.

That this should cause serious concern to the powers that be is self-evident. Like other industries, the media industry deserves a rehabilitation package. But media is much more than an industry, for it plays a significant role in the dissemination of information, promotion of knowledge, advancement of democratic values and refinement of culture. To ignore it amounts to disregarding a vehicle of political development and sociocultural flowering. A holistic view of the trials and tribulations of the media will clearly bring out the urgency of a full-scale debate in parliament on the need for a high-powered parliamentary commission to examine the media crisis in all of its dimensions, identify the causes and suggest both short-term and long-term remedies.

Tailpiece: The method of crowd management adopted by the Punjab government has obviously been copied from the textbooks of Italian and German dictators of the 20th century. These European dictators used state employees and their so-called volunteer forces to harass and manhandle opponents and dissidents and used methods that were eventually condemned across the globe. The kisan demonstrators were subjected to impermissible violence at Lahore’s points of entry. They were dispersed by force and at least two of the injured have died. Afterwards, a mockery of negotiations was staged and an enforced settlement announced. Such unwarranted and indefensible tactics will shorten the life of the regime faster than all the labours of the opposition. All those advising the government to use such tactics or keeping quiet about these matters can hardly be counted as its friends.

Headline of the month: Pakistan’s economic difficulties caused by the Pakistan Democratic Movement.

Chairman PPP Bilawal Bhutto Zardari takes strong notice of a brutal incident in which a woman and her 4-year-old girl were gang-raped in Kashmore.

Chairman Pakistan Peoples Party Bilawal Bhutto Zardari has taken strong notice of a brutal incident in which a woman and her 4-year-old girl were gang-raped in Kashmore.
In a statement issued here, the PPP Chairman said that the incident has shocked him personally and beasts involved in this gruesome crime have shamed humanity.
Bilawal Bhutto Zardari said that the tormented mother and the girl will get justice at any cost and asked Sindh government that the culprits meet the exemplary punishment under the law.
He also asked Sindh government to ensure adequate medical treatment to both the victims besides taking care of them.
https://www.ppp.org.pk/pr/24073/