Author Archives: Editors

PAKISTAN IS A REFORM STORY LIKE INDIA’S-ONLY BETTER

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Shared by, Syed Ehtisham

Construction and infrastructural development have been cited as the primary drivers behind Pakistan’s emergence as a frontier market by a Bloomberg report.

The construction sector grew at 11.3 per cent through FY14-15, nearly double the 5.7pc target, according to State Bank of Pakistan data.

London-based chief economist at Renaissance Capital Ltd Charlie Robertson said of Pakistan: “It is the best, undiscovered investment opportunity in emerging or frontier markets,” adding, “What’s changed is the delivery of reforms ─ privatisation, an improved fiscal picture and good relations with the IMF.”

Nawaz’s government has boosted infrastructure expenditure by 27pc to Rs1.5 trillion for fiscal year 2015-2016 (FY15-16), as interest rates are the lowest they have been in 42 years and the economy is expanding at its quickest since 2008.

Pakistan is a reform story like neighbouring India’s, but only better, said Renaissance’s Robertson.

Read more: Ishaq Dar eyes 7pc growth by tenure end

Cement producers DG Khan Cement Co. and Cherat Cement Co. have announced plans to expand, while steelmakers Amreli Steels Ltd. and Mughal Iron and Steel Industries Ltd. are raising equity capital.

APP OF FOOD FOR POOR AND HOMELESS

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Shared by,Tahir Mahmood

It was 2011. She had just come back from Navy summer training and was attending the University of California at Berkeley to start work on her undergraduate degree.

While she was walking near campus one fall day, a homeless man approached her, asking for money to buy food because he was hungry. Instead of giving him cash, Ahmad invited the man to lunch. As they ate, he told her his story. He was a soldier recently returned from Iraq and had a bad turn of luck.

“He’d already gone on two deployments and now he’s come back, he’s 26 and on the side of the road begging for food,” Ahmad said. “It just blew my mind.”

It bothered her so much that she decided to do something about it. Within a few months, Ahmad set up a program at UC Berkeley that allowed the school’s dining halls to donate excess food to local homeless shelters. That program then expanded to 140 college campuses across the US in about three years.

Ahmad, now 25 years old and CEO of a nonprofit service called Feeding Forward, is looking to expand even more into what she calls on-demand food recovery.

Through a website and mobile app, Feeding Forward matches businesses that have surplus food with nearby homeless shelters. Here’s how it works: when companies or event planners have surplus food, they tap the Feeding Forward app and provide details of their donation. A driver is dispatched to quickly pick up the leftovers and deliver them to food banks.

“Imagine a football stadium filled to its brim,” Ahmad said. “That’s how much food goes wasted every single day in America.”

Excess food is a serious issue in the US. After paper, food scraps are the nation’s second largest source of waste, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. Leftovers fill 18 percent of landfills and make up over 30 million tons of what is sent to dumps each year. When cut off from oxygen, the organic matter creates methane gas and contributes to global warming.

At the same time, the EPA says that roughly 50 million people in the US don’t have access to enough food. That’s more than 15 percent of the population — or nearly one in six people.

“In the US, about 40 percent of the food we grow never gets eaten,” said JoAnne Berkenkamp, a senior advocate in the Food and Agriculture Program at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council. “We have a lot of people in the US who don’t know where their next meal is coming from. That’s a travesty. We have such an abundance, and people are in a state of scarcity.”

http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2015/07/01/foreign/surplus-food-for-the-homeless-is-just-an-app-away-thanks-to-komal-ahmed/

“Religious Bigotry” is equivalent to “Personal Threat”

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“Religious Bigotry” is equivalent to “Personal Threat”

 

What is religious bigotry?

In order to answer this question, I will quote one paragraph from the book:

“The MEANING of HUMAN EXISTENCE”

By EDWARD O. WILSON

EDWARD O. WILSON is widely recognized as one of the world’s preeminent biologists and naturalists. The author of more than twenty books, including The Creation, The Social Conquest of Earth, and Letters to a Young Scientist. Wilson is a professor emeritus at Harvard University. The winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, he lives in Lexington, Massachusetts USA.

Religious Bigotry is a sensitive and important concept for all TF USA affiliates, hence I will quote one full paragraph from the book The MEANING of HUMAN EXISTENCE. This will be helpful for TF USA affiliate’s discussion of this concept.

Section VI

IDOLS OF THE MIND

HUMANITY’S INTELLECTUAL FRAILITIES

IDENTIFIED BY FRANCIS BACON,

IN ONE OF THE PRINCIPAL ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE FIRST ENLIGHTENMENTS,

CAN NOW BE REDEFINED BY SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION.

Topic RELIGION [from page 147 to 158]

Page 154 last paragraph:

Religious warriors are not an anomaly. It is a mistake to classify believers of particular religious and dogmatic religion like ideologies into two groups, moderate versus extremist. The true cause of hatred and violence is faith versus faith, an outward expression of the ancient instinct of tribalism. Faith is the one thing that makes otherwise good people do bad things. Nowhere do people tolerate attacks on their person, their family, their country —– or their creation myth. In America, for example, it is possible in most places to openly debate different views on religious spirituality – including the nature and even the existence of God, providing it is in the context of theology and philosophy. But it is forbidden to question closely, if at all, the creation myth — the faith – of another person or group, no matter how absurd. To disparage anything in someone else’s sacred creation myth is “religious bigotry.” It is taken as the equivalent of a personal threat.

Posted by nSalik [Noor Salik]

What Would Thucydides Say About the Crisis in Greece? By ROBERT ZARETSKY

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History repeats itself. 2500 years ago Athens demanded a small island Melos to join its Delian League.It is worth reading account of history and its parallels to today’s Greece crisis, only this time Greece is the victim and not the aggressor.(f .sheikh)

“During their war against Sparta, the Athenians demanded that Melos join the Delian League. Originally a defensive alliance that Greek city-states had created following the second Persian invasion, the league had become a tool of Athenian imperialism. Member states, unable to secede, were subject to Athenian dictate and forced to pay annual tribute. Their complaints were met with Athens’s reply that the alliance, whether or not the members agreed, was for their own good. The democracy Athens practiced at home, in short, did not extend to the governance of its league.

What historians call the Melian Dialogue is Thucydides’s depiction of the endgame to this policy — what Victor Davis Hanson has called Athens’s “reign of terror.” The war between Athens and Sparta was already nearly two decades old, yet no end was in sight. With its citizens weary and restless, Athens adopted a brutal political calculus, declaring that those city-states not with them were, quite simply, against them. They threatened a neutral Melos with physical destruction if it refused to join the Delian League.

Of course, the parallel falls short in many ways. Melos was a neutral state, while modern Greece not only joined the European Union but over the years merrily plundered its treasury. And Melos did not invite an unprecedented sovereign debt crisis or engage in unsustainable social policies as Greece did over the last decade and more.

But what was at stake then and now is, first of all, the issue of national sovereignty versus supranational organizations. “Europe” was born, in part, of the fear of Stalin’s Russia, no less threatening and grim than Xerxes’ Persia. But, like the Delian League after the evaporation of the Persian threat, the original basis for unthinking allegiance to Europe disappeared with the Soviet Union’s disintegration. (The Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras’s recent fruitless meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin echoes the Melian hope that Sparta would fly to their rescue.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/01/opinion/what-would-thucydides-say-about-the-crisis-in-greece.html?ref=international