Time over for APC on floods: Nawaz

LAHORE – Terrorist activities being perpetrated in various parts of the country are part of enemy’s plan to destabilise Pakistan, PML-N Chief Nawaz Sharif said here on Monday.
He maintained that the nation was determined to frustrate the enemy designs through concerted efforts.

The two-time prime minister said this while talking to reporters in the Emergency section of a local hospital where he inquired after the health of those injured in Wednesday’s three back-to-back blasts near Karbala Gamay Shah, which killed more than 40 people and injured some 300 others.
Security at the hospital had been tightened and traffic diverted.
“

The nation will not give in to the terrorists,” said the PML-N leader.
Replying to a question, Nawaz said the enemy could harbour the desire to consign Pakistan to yet another military rule. He, however, made it clear that the country could not afford such an eventuality yet again.
He said the National Assembly had already addressed in detail the speech made by MQM Chief Altaf Hussain on the subject.
When it was pointed out to him that the NAB prosecutor-general, whose sacking had been ordered by none else but the Supreme Court, was still there on the job, Nawaz said it was regrettable to find that the Apex Court’s decision had not been implemented.
He called upon the government to enforce the verdict.
The former prime minister said the judiciary had been restored not with a hope that it would provide a chance to the government to flout its verdicts.


He said if President Asif Ali Zardari was obstructing the judicial verdict, the Prime Minister should stop him. Otherwise, he said, both the President and the Prime Minister would be held responsible for defiance
He told a questioner that an all-party conference being considered by the government on the issue of flood situation had lost its utility as the time to hold it was already over.

APC to hammer out anti-terror policy: Gilani

ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani told the Senate on Thursday that consensus on a “national policy against terrorism” would be the aim of an all-parties conference (APC) he plans to convene on a suggestion from PML-N leader Nawaz Sharif.

But he did not indicate when he would call the conference for which he said “we will first do homework” and talk to each party separately, in remarks after the upper house unanimously adopted a flagship pro-poor government bill named after the assassinated PPP leader Benazir Bhutto.

“That will be a national policy against terrorism,” the prime minister said about the possible outcome of the APC, without clarifying whether it would mean altering or advancing what the government calls its policy of “three-Ds” – dialogue, development and deterrence – applied so far in tackling Taliban militants in the Malakand division of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the adjacent Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata).

It was in a telephone talk between them early this month that Mr Sharif made the APC proposal, which Mr Gilani said he had “accepted readily” to take the country’s political leadership into confidence on issues such as violence in Balochistan, target killings in Karachi and what he called the “scenario in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab”.

The prime minister’s remarks came when a senior PML-N senator, Raja Zafarul Haq, suggested that Mr Gilani should have an “exchange of views” with parliamentary leaders on the government’s anti-terrorism strategy that he said needed to be reviewed.

The Senate vote, without any opposition, on the Benazir Income

Support Programme (BISP) Bill, which was passed by the National Assembly on June 28, now leaves only a formal signature by President Asif Ali Zardari to make the 25-clause draft into a permanent law with his wife’s name inscribed on it.

The programme which the bill said sought “to provide financial assistance and other social protection and safety net measures to economically distressed persons and families has already been in operation under a presidential ordinance.

The PML-N had sought to rename the BISP in the National Assembly as Qaumi (national) Income Support Programme but withdrew its amendment after loud protests from PPP members.

No such move was made in the Senate although PML-N’s Pervaiz

Rashid objected to what he saw as a waste of money in frequent media advertisements of the programme, to which the prime minister agreed in his remarks later while assuring the house that there would be no political discrimination in the distribution of funds.