ISLAMABAD: The timid batting of Pakistan’s cricket team has left the country’s former cricketers and fans furious after rival India snatched a thrilling six-run win in the marquee game at the Twenty20 World Cup in New York.
A second successive loss in Group A on Sunday left Pakistan in danger of not advancing to the Super 8 stage of the tournament being jointly hosted by the US and the West Indies.
The United States, playing at the World Cup for first time, already made history last Thursday when it beat Pakistan in a Super Over after both teams were locked at 159 during the regulation 20-overs game.
Only two teams from each of the four groups advance to the second stage. So Pakistan needs to win its remaining games against Canada and Ireland and also hope results of other group games go in its favor to progress.
“I think I should have a template text ‘disappointed and hurt’ automatically set to be posted,” wrote former Pakistan fast bowler Shoaib Akhtar on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“We should give credit to Pakistan, they tried their best to lose this game, I could not think any other way,” Akhtar said on national television’s sports channel PTV Sports. “It was run-a-ball, nobody asked you to hit and do anything stupid. Shocking, surprised, disappointed, but that was expected.”
Akhtar said the Pakistan team is made up of ordinary cricketers and he has no hope the team will get better in the future.
“They won’t change,” he said. “You are demanding extraordinary things from average people, you won’t get it. When mediocrity comes in you can’t get beyond that. That’s what you are getting from your investment (in cricket) for the last 20 years.”
Akhtar also criticized the International Cricket Council for the drop-in pitches in New York where all the five games have been low-scoring ones.
“Who makes that kind of tracks?” he questioned. “You had one year to prepare yourself. Hello ICC, wake up.”
Pakistan blew an ideal opportunity after its fast bowlers had bowled out India for 119 in 19 overs on another tricky surface where batters continued to struggle. It was cruising along at 80-3 in 13 overs when set batter Mohammad Rizwan played a reckless shot against Jasprit Bumrah and eventually Pakistan got restricted at 113-7.
“Batsmen throw it away as Pakistan lose to India in low-scoring nailbiter,” read the headline on the front page of English daily newspaper Dawn. The newspaper also splashed the picture of Rizwan on his knee after getting clean bowled and Bumrah celebrating the dismissal with Virat Kohli.
“Pakistan squander solid start as India claim T20 thriller,” headlined The News, another English daily.
Pakistan’s former fast bowling greats Waqar Younis and Wasim Akram, who commentated on the game from New York, also vented their anger after the defeat against India.
“They have been playing cricket for 10 years and I can’t teach them,” Akram said. “Rizwan has no game awareness. He should have known Bumrah was given the ball to take wickets and that the wise thing would have been to play his deliveries cautiously, but Rizwan went for the big shot and lost his wicket.”
Younis said it was a horrible performance from the batters.
“Pakistan, if you can’t win this game, what should I say?,” he said. “This was given to you on a plate and Pakistan really spilled it. It was horrible performance by the Pakistan batters. There were a few partnerships in the beginning but they couldn’t really finish the game.
Thousands of cricket-mad fans had gathered in front of large screens in major cities in Pakistan to watch the blockbuster contest between the two nuclear-armed nations that have not played in any bilateral cricket matches for over a decade, but regularly play against each other in the ICC tournaments.
At least 17,000 people watched the game live on screens at the Pindi Cricket Stadium ‘fan park’, specifically set up by the ICC.
“I can’t believe it,” said 20-year-old university student Ibrahim Irfan after he walked out of the stadium in disbelief with his four friends. “It’s disgusting to say the least. How can they lose a game while chasing such a small target? We need a major overhaul. We are sick and tired of watching the same useless batters like Iftikhar Ahmed, Shadab Khan and Imad Wasim.”
Ahmed Awan, another fan who watched the game on giant screen in Karachi, said Pakistan players play for personal milestones.
“They bowled well but the batting was disappointing. They are playing for personal milestones … they should open the batting with tailenders and also in the middle order. The openers should come in the latter half of the game, be it (captain) Babar (Azam) or Rizwan.”
Loss to rival India at T20 World Cup leaves former Pakistan cricket greats and fans furious
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Loss to rival India at T20 World Cup leaves former Pakistan cricket greats and fans furious
- A second successive loss in Group A on Sunday left Pakistan in danger of not advancing to the Super 8 stage of the tournament
- The United States, playing at the World Cup for first time, already made history last Thursday when it beat Pakistan in Super Over
Pakistan dispatches another relief consignment to Myanmar as quake death toll rises to 3,455
- The 7.7-magnitude quake hit a wide swath of the country, causing significant damage to six regions and states including the capital Naypyitaw
- It also worsened an already dire humanitarian crisis triggered by the country’s civil war that has internally displaced more than 3 million people
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) on Saturday dispatched another consignment of humanitarian aid to Myanmar, the Pakistani government said, as death toll from last week’s massive earthquake in Myanmar rose to 3,455.
The 7.7-magnitude quake hit a wide swath of the country, causing significant damage to six regions and states including the capital Naypyitaw. The earthquake left many areas without power, telephone or cell connections and damaged roads and bridges, making the full extent of the devastation hard to assess.
It also worsened an already dire humanitarian crisis triggered by the country’s civil war that has internally displaced more than 3 million people and left nearly 20 million in need, according to the United Nations.
Pakistan dispatched the second aid consignment through an air cargo flight from Islamabad to Yangon, Myanmar that carried 35 tons of essential relief goods, according to Pakistan’s Press Information Department (PID).
“Upon arrival, the consignment will be handed over to Ministry of Social Welfare & Resettlement of Myanmar by Pakistan’s Ambassador & Defense Attache in Myanmar,” the PID said in a statement.
“This consignment included tents, tarpaulins, blankets, water modules, medicines and packets of meal ready-to-eat.”
Myanmar military government’s leader, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, has said the earthquake was the second most powerful in the country’s recorded history after a magnitude 8 quake east of Mandalay in May 1912.
He said 4,840 people were injured and 214 missing, according to a report on state television MRTV. Min Aung Hlaing said 5,223 buildings, 1,824 schools, 2,752 Buddhist monasterial living quarters, 4,817 pagodas and temples, 167 hospitals and clinics, 169 bridges, 198 dams and 184 sections of the country’s main highway were damaged by the earthquake.
Earlier, Pakistan’s mission in Myanmar handed over the first consignment of 35 tons of humanitarian assistance to chief minister of Yangon region for onward distribution among those impacted by the disaster.
Islamabad said the critical supplies sent on Saturday were meant to provide immediate relief to the affected population in Myanmar.
“The Government of Pakistan and National Disaster Management Authority of Pakistan reaffirms its unwavering commitment to humanitarian relief efforts and standing in solidarity with the people of Myanmar in their time of need,” the PID added.
Pakistan Navy ship conducts counter-piracy patrols in Arabian Sea
- The patrols were conducted off the east coast of Somalia in support of Combined Task Force-151
- The CTF-151’s mission is to disrupt piracy at sea in order to protect the global maritime commerce
KARACHI: Pakistan Navy Ship (PNS) Aslat has conducted counter-piracy patrols in the Arabian Sea, its Directorate General of Public Relations (DGPR) said on Saturday.
The patrols were conducted off the east coast of Somalia in support of the Combined Task Force-151 (CTF-151), one of the five task forces operated by 46-nation Combined Maritime Forces (CMF), which is currently being led by Pakistan Navy.
Pakistan Navy-led CTF-151 is taking proactive measures to enhance its presence in the region, remaining vigilant of the piracy threat in the Gulf of Aden, the vicinity of Socotra Gap, and off the east coast of Somalia, according to the DGPR.
“These efforts aim to deter piracy, armed robbery, and other illicit activities to ensure the safety of vital Sea Lines of Communication (SLOCs),” it said in a statement.
Pakistan Navy took over the command of the CTF-151, a multinational body set up in 2009 as a response to piracy attacks in the Gulf of Aden and off the eastern coast of Somalia, in January for a record 11th time.
The CTF-151’s mission is to disrupt piracy at sea and engage with regional and other partners to build capacity and improve relevant capabilities in order to protect global maritime commerce and secure freedom of navigation. It operates in conjunction with the EU’s Operation Atalanta and NATO’s Operation Ocean Shield.
“The deployment of PNS Aslat reflects Pakistan Navy’s firm resolve to combat piracy and armed robbery, while also protecting global maritime commons and ensuring the free flow of maritime trade in the region,” the DGPR added.
The CTF-151 command is rotated between participating nations on a three-to-six-monthly basis. Prior to Pakistan Navy’s takeover, the CTF-151 command was held by the Turkish Navy.
Other nations that have led the CTF-151 include Bahrain, Brazil, Denmark, Japan, Jordan, Kuwait, Pakistan, the Philippines, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Türkiye, the UK, and the US. A variety of countries assign vessels, aircraft, and personnel to the task force.
Pakistan president, who tested positive for coronavirus, likely to be discharged in next two days — physician
- Asif Ali Zardari was brought to a hospital on Tuesday after he complained of suffering from fever, breathing problems
- Dr. Asim Hussain refutes rumors about President Zardari’s ‘serious’ health condition and says it is gradually improving
KARACHI: Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari, who tested positive for coronavirus this week, is likely to be discharged from hospital in next two days, his personal physician said on Saturday.
Zardari was brought to a private hospital in Karachi from Sindh’s Nawabshah city on Tuesday after he complained about suffering from fever and breathing problems, local media outlets reported.
On Wednesday, his personal physician, Dr. Asim Hussain, confirmed the president had tested positive for coronavirus and a team of medical experts was looking after him.
Speaking at a press conference on Saturday, Hussain refutes rumors about President Zardari’s ‘serious’ health condition and said it was gradually improving.
“At present, a low-risk variant of the coronavirus is still spreading in Pakistan. No matter what political opponents say or exaggerate anything, the health of the president is very good,” Hussain said.
“Asif Zardari’s meetings are restricted, only doctors have access to him. A panel of expert doctors is monitoring his health.”
Zardari, the widower of Pakistan’s slain first woman prime minister Benazir Bhutto, was appointed president for a second term in March last year. He previously served on the same post from 2008-2013.
Zardari, a landowner from Sindh and co-chairman of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), a key member of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s ruling coalition, rose to prominence after his marriage to Bhutto in 1987.
He was widely criticized for corruption scandals that led to the collapse of Bhutto’s government in 1990.
Pakistan resolves to raise voice against Israeli oppression in Gaza, support Palestinians
- The statement came after Israeli forces launched a ground offensive in Gaza City, expanding their operations as rescuers reported at least 30 killed
- Pakistan does not recognize Israel and calls for an independent Palestinian state based on ‘internationally agreed parameters’ and pre-1967 borders
ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Saturday resolved to raise his voice against Israeli oppression in Gaza and continue Pakistan’s support of the Palestinian people, Sharif’s office said.
The statement came after Sharif’s telephonic conversation with Hafiz Naeem-ur-Rehman, chief of the Jamaat-e-Islami religious party, in which the two figures expressed concern over Israel’s unprovoked bombing of unarmed Palestinians in Gaza and the silence of international powers on the strikes.
Israeli forces have launched a ground offensive in Gaza City, the military said on Friday, expanding their operations as rescuers reported at least 30 killed across the Palestinian territory since dawn.
Since renewed military operations last month ended a short-lived truce in its war with Hamas, Israel has pushed to seize territory in the Gaza Strip in what it said was a strategy to force militants to free hostages still in captivity.
“The Prime Minister reiterated his resolve to raise his voice at every international forum against the ongoing Zionist oppression of Palestinians in Gaza and to continue Pakistan’s support of [the Palestinian cause],” Sharif’s office said.
“Pakistan’s position is clear regarding its support for the unarmed Palestinian brothers and sisters who are victims of Zionist oppression.”
Pakistan does not recognize Israel and has consistently called for an independent Palestinian state based on “internationally agreed parameters” and pre-1967 borders.
The South Asian country has consistently called for a cessation of Israeli military campaign in Gaza and strongly condemned the resumption of Israeli strikes in the territory, saying they could fully reignite the 17-month-old war. Islamabad has also dispatched more than two dozen aid consignments for the Palestinian people since Israel began pounding Gaza in Oct. 2023.
The latest bloodshed in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict was triggered in October 2023, when Palestinian group Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
Israel’s subsequent assault on Hamas-governed Gaza has killed over 50,000 Palestinians, according to Gazan health officials, while also triggering accusations of genocide and war crimes that Israel denies. The assault has internally displaced nearly Gaza’s entire 2.3 million population and caused a hunger crisis.
Young Pakistani introduces smart tools to bridge AI gap for millions of Sindhis worldwide
- Sindhi, an Indo-Aryan language with a history that spans approximately 2,400 years, is spoken in Pakistan and India, and by diaspora in several regions
- Fahad Maqsood Qazi has developed previously unavailable Sindhi text-to-speech and speech-to-text AI models and shared on open-source platforms
KARACHI: Fahad Maqsood Qazi was performing a seemingly straightforward task of developing an automated artificial intelligence (AI) dubbing system for his software firm in Pakistan’s southern city of Hyderabad last year, when he hit the wall: the fundamental text-to-speech (TTS) and speech-to-text (STT) models simply didn’t exist for his native Sindhi language.
This unexpected hurdle while working at Flis Technologies ignited a passion in the 23-year-old IT professional to bridge the AI gap for a language spoken by around 40 million people globally, including a significant diaspora whose children risk losing their linguistic heritage, and soon he started working on his Sindhi-language TTS and STT systems.
In August last year, he began manually transcribing hours of Sindhi audio content from YouTube, stories, audiobooks, vlogs and news reports to form a training dataset. Qazi took a sigh of relief when he discovered that a Google employee, Asad Memon, had recently added Sindhi to Mozilla’s Common Voice project, a global effort to crowdsource voice data for underrepresented languages.
Qazi merged the Common Voice data with his own and began training the AI models. By January this year, he had built functioning Sindhi TTS and STT systems. Sindhi also lacked a tokenizer, a crucial component to process text in AI models, so Qazi built his own. Months of rigorous work, training and refining various models led the 23-year-old to a significant breakthrough that can help future generations of his community to connect with their roots — Sindhi, an Indo-Aryan language with a history that spans approximately 2,400 years and its origins dating back to the 3rd century BCE.
“Since Sindhi isn’t formally taught in most diaspora communities, many young Sindhis grow up without the ability to read or write the language,” said Qazi, who graduated in computer science, explaining a lack of exposure to Sindhi could lead to a gradual loss of identity.
“My tools aim to change that. By allowing people to communicate in Sindhi through speech and text, my tools would help them stay connected to their roots.”
In March, Qazi publicly shared these models on LinkedIn and uploaded them to HuggingFace, an open-source platform for machine learning models, making them freely available to developers and researchers worldwide, which marked a pivotal moment for Sindhi in the digital age.
Recalling the days when he started working on these tools, Qazi said he realized that Sindhi was missing from the AI revolution and without publicly available speech datasets, tokenizers or linguistic tools, the language had virtually been excluded from the digital future.
“This was shocking for us,” he told Arab News. “Imagine, 40 million Sindhis in the world, yet no one had built these essential AI systems for their language.”
Qazi says his work will have a “profound impact,” particularly on Sindhi-speaking children growing up in countries such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the United States and the United Kingdom.
For the diaspora communities wherein the language isn’t formally taught, these Sindhi AI tools offer a vital link to their cultural identity, according to the IT professional.
These models can be integrated with mobile keyboards for Sindhi voice-to-text (VTT) messaging, while the TTS model can be used to listen to written Sindhi content, according to Qazi.
They have the potential to empower uneducated adults and the elderly within the Sindhi community, both at home and abroad.
“This means everyday conversations with family and friends, even over messaging apps, can happen in Sindhi. That kind of natural, daily use can help preserve the language and keep it alive across generations,” he said.
“A parent who doesn’t know how to read Sindhi will be able to read stories out loud to their children through my text to speech model. Elderly people who never learned to read or write Sindhi can now speak to search for information and listen to responses.”
Qazi hopes his AI tools will play a significant role in long-term growth and integration of the Sindhi language on global digital platforms.
“This technology can play a key role in ensuring that Sindhi doesn’t just survive, it thrives in the digital age,” he said.
“By giving Sindhi a presence in AI systems like TTS and STT, I am ensuring it to be part of global platforms such as voice assistants, educational apps, audiobooks, and translation tools. That kind of integration was impossible before.”
