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As US releases tape of controversial call, Pakistan says time to move on

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Here’s what’s happening across the border: Gwadar’s first woman vlogger is going viral, and Punjab minister has banned ‘vulgar’ film posters.

Pakistan softens stand as US hands over tape of Mike Pompeo, Imran Khan call

Pakistan has emphasised the need to “move on” from the recent fiasco involving US secretary of state Mike Pompeo’s congratulatory call to Prime Minister Imran Khan, but only after Washington gave Islamabad a tape recording of the conversation, reported The News International.

The call kicked up a row last week as an ensuing US statement said Pompeo had raised the issue of terrorists operating on Pakistan soil, and Islamabad hit back with a denial, saying terrorism had not been a topic of conversation at all.

Speaking at a media briefing Thursday, Pakistan foreign office spokesperson Muhammad Faisal said, “We would want this episode to end. The foreign minister has already commented in detail. Politically, we need to move on.”

Foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi has reportedly told the US that Islamabad considered the long-standing bilateral relationship “very important” and the country was looking forward to welcoming Pompeo to the country.

Meanwhile, the combined opposition asked PM Khan to explain the whole episode on the floor of the senate, reported Dawn.

Pakistan Peoples Party senator Sherry Rehman, a former diplomat, said the call should have been between the US secretary of state and the foreign minister. “Tomorrow they will make you talk to the under-secretary of state,” she added.

Gwadar’s first woman video blogger is making waves

Anita Jalil, a 25-year-old from Pakistan’s conservative Balochistan province, stands out in the sea of vloggers flooding social media feeds today.

She is the first female video blogger in the port city of Gwadar, reports The News, dishing out popular videos in a region where even a woman’s photo is rarely shared outside the immediate family, and women are expected to stay at home.

Two months since she posted her first video on YouTube, Jalil has garnered 14,187 subscribers.

Speaking to The News, Jalil said her videos were her revolt against patriarchy.

Recalling the difficulties she faced, she added that it took her three years to convince her father to let her start her own video blog.

“Coming from a family that forbids women to foray beyond the confines of four walls, it took almost three long years to convince my father regarding what I aspired to pursue as a career option,” she was quoted as saying in the report.

“In these years, there came many instances where I felt I could go on no longer,” she added.

“I would show examples to my dad, of women who have done wonders in various fields despite odd circumstances, of empowered females who made a name for themselves irrespective of their backgrounds,” she said.

She added that she had received death threats for her videos, but was determined to achieve her dreams.

Interesting tweets of the day

Pakistani lawyer and activist Nighat Dad sought to highlight a survey conducted by Berlin-based nonprofit Democracy Reporting International about the words used most frequently in comments on reports about the country’s female and male politicians. According to the study, Pakistani women politicians are mostly addressed as “sexy” “cute” and “beautiful”, while the words “lion”, “thief” and “hero” abound for men.

An enquiry by the Federal Investigation Agency has found that more than a dozen retired military officials are involved in a corruption scandal involving the New Islamabad International Airport project.

Pakistan Media Watch, a media watchdog, has alleged that Dawn carried a job advertisement, issued by the Pakistan Rangers, this month that spelt out just a troublesome criterion: Those applying for the job of sweeper/sanitary workers have to be “NON-MUSLIM ONLY”.

The Pakistan navy Thursday started an afforestation campaign at Margalla hills in the Himalayan foothills.

The Supreme Court asked the National Accountability Bureau Thursday to bring former ambassador to the US Husain Haqqani back to Pakistan. Haqqani is accused of involvement in a 2011 scandal known as Memogate, which centres on an alleged memo prepared by the civilian administration to seek the US’ help against the military in the wake of al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden’s killing in Pakistan.

This minister is cracking down on ‘indecent’ film posters

Pakistan Punjab’s new information and culture minister Fayyazul Hassan Chohan has banned “vulgar” and “indecent” movie posters put up inside and outside cinema halls, reported Dawn.

The officer order, shared by Chohan on his Twitter account, did not define the terms “vulgar” and “indecent”.

The order comes days after a video circulated on social media showed him making “questionable remarks” about the media industry in the same context. “A strange youthfulness has taken over cinema houses. Is this civilised? That you print out pictures of half-naked women and put up huge posters of them? People watch porn for that (kind of entertainment),” he was quoted as having said.

How PML(N) foiled PTI bid to get Punjab govt Twitter account

The Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) was so reluctant to hand over the official verified Punjab government Twitter account, with its hundreds of thousands of followers, to their Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) successors, that they ended up changing the nature of the account, reported Creatiview.

The account now bears the name of the PML(N).

Rules mandate that all official accounts related to the administration should be handed over to victor candidates when a party is voted out.

Expressing “dismay” over the PML(N) move, Imran Ghazali, who headed the PTI’s digital campaign in 2013, announced on Twitter the formation of new handles for his party’s administration.

While the previous official account had 226k followers, the new one had 70 when last checked (Friday afternoon).

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