Today, freelance professionals are highly valued, and they are well aware of this. They understand their importance, and it’s time for businesses to establish fresh engagement standards. With more top-tier professionals, such as myself, opting for freelance roles instead of traditional in-house positions engaged in a nine-to-five schedule for networking purposes, businesses are finding it challenging to attract and keep the talent required to innovate their products, procedures, and systems. A new approach to accomplishing tasks is emerging, combining in-house employees and freelance talent. Notably, the roles in organisations are evolving, requiring new skills to address these two groups’ distinct…
Author: Hasnain Abid Khanzada
LAHORE: New cotton ginning season has started in the country, though partially, as one ginning unit each has become operational in Sindh and Punjab, while more are to come on line in the next few days. Reports say partial picking of cotton has started in some coastal areas of Sindh and in southern Punjab and arrival of raw cotton in the market is gaining momentum with each passing day. The volume is quite lower than that of last year during the same days. One ginning unit has become operational in Hyderabad and one in Burewala (Punjab) as the farmers are…
As budget makers in Pakistan grapple with demands, possibilities and public aspirations, the business community, aware of the government’s limitations, holds low expectations. However, this hasn’t stopped them from inundating policymakers with their own proposals that project their priorities as national interest. “With limited flexibility in national accounts [high expenditure demand and low resource mobilisation], and keen donor’s oversight, the budget has become more of an annual ritual, lacking innovation or intent to challenge the status quo. “Addressing the key parasitic elements is not even on the agenda, as the current crop of politicians fear unmanageable chain reactions. They prefer…
Sindh is trying to improve its governance and public service delivery through interactive sessions of provincial cabinet members and senior officials with PPP workers and local council (UC) representatives chaired by the chief minister. The usual pre-budget consultations with various stakeholders such as trade, industry, and big farmers’ organisations have been extended to the grassroots level. Efforts are being made to secure local inputs for next year’s budget and development plan, as well as to implement decisions clogged in the bureaucratic web in a timely manner. The need for such a bottom-up approach to resolving problems agitating the people appears…
One of the drawbacks of the modern economic system is how it rewards certain professions over others, completely detached from the underlying utility; for example, school teachers earn a fraction of what treasury bankers do. One of them commits their entire lives to building the future of coming generations while the other sits at a desk all day putting public money in ‘risk-free’ government securities and pretends to be part of the high-finance community. On a completely unrelated note, the advances-to-deposits of full-fledged Islamic banks in Pakistan fell to just 48.7 per cent by the end of 2023, while that…
LONDON: International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan justified his decision to request arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defence minister, saying Israel’s actions were not how war is supposed to be fought. Khan said on Monday that he was seeking warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, as well as top Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh and Mohamed Deif, on suspicions of war crimes and crimes against humanity. His announcement sparked the ire of Israel and its allies, the United States and the United Kingdom, all of which criticised Khan for putting together Hamas, which attacked Israel on October 7, and Israel,…
KARACHI: The leadership of the banned Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), based in Afghanistan, and hostile foreign intelligence agencies were behind the March 26 suicide attack on Chinese engineers in Bisham, the country’s security czar said on Sunday. At a press conference in Lahore, Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said the attack, in which five Chinese engineers and their Pakistani driver were killed, was planned in Afghanistan and executed with the help of handlers and facilitators based in Pakistan. He added that the attack was “completely operated” from Afghanistan and planned to specifically target Chinese personnel in Pakistan. “TTP leadership planned this attack as a flagship project,…
DUBLIN: Nearly a week after a Singapore Airlines flight from Heathrow airport hit severe turbulence over the Indian Ocean leaving at least one British passenger dead and 20 others injured, six crew members and six passengers travelling on a Qatar Airways flight from Doha to Ireland suffered injuries during a bout of turbulence on Sunday. However, the flight (QR017), a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, landed shortly before 1pm, Dublin Airport said, adding that the plane landed safely and as scheduled. “Upon landing, the aircraft was met by emergency services, including airport police and our fire and rescue department, due to six passengers and…
CAIRO: Hamas said it launched a “large rocket barrage” at Tel Aviv on Sunday, prompting sirens to sound in the Israeli city for the first time in four months as the Palestinian group sought to show military strength despite Israel’s Gaza offensive. On the other hand, Israeli strikes killed at least five Palestinians in Rafah, as tanks probed around the edges of the city, close to the main southern crossing point into Egypt. The Israeli military claimed eight projectiles were identified crossing from the area of Rafah, about 100km south of Tel Aviv, where Israel kept up operations despite a ruling…
BERLIN: Emmanuel Macron arrived on Sunday in Berlin on the first state visit to Germany by a French president in a quarter century, bringing a plea to defend democracy against nationalism at upcoming European elections. Macron made an appearance at a democracy festival his first stop, where, accompanied by German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, he warned of a “form of fascination for authoritarianism which is growing” in the two major EU nations. “We forget too often that it’s a fight” to protect democracy, Macron said. If the nationalists had been in power in Europe in the last years, “history would not…
