Latest news with #Ramzan
Business Recorder
28-05-2025
- Business
- Business Recorder
Taptap Send introduces direct donations to charities in Pakistan from abroad
For overseas Pakistanis looking for a more seamless way to give back to their communities, Taptap Send has launched a powerful new feature: direct charitable donations to registered nonprofits in Pakistan, accessible within the app. Fast, zero-free, and built for diaspora Since its founding in 2018, Taptap Send has built a strong reputation as one of the most efficient and affordable remittance platforms for Pakistanis abroad. With zero transfer fees*, great exchange rates, and 95% of transactions arriving within a minute**, it's no surprise that the app has become a top choice for users in the USA, the UK, Canada, Europe, Australia, and the UAE. Now, the app is going a step further: making it just as easy to support trusted charitable causes as it is to support loved ones. A simplified way to give Zakat, Sadqah, and Qurbani Traditionally, overseas Pakistanis looking to give Zakat during Ramzan, arrange Qurbani during Eid ul Adha, or offer Sadqah throughout the year would transfer funds to family members, who would then make the donation locally. This process was often inconvenient and lacked transparency. Taptap Send's new feature eliminates that hassle by enabling users in the USA, the UK, and Europe to contribute directly to vetted nonprofit organisations in Pakistan, all with a few taps. What the community asked for 'This launch is a reflection of what we've heard from the Pakistani community for years,' says Saim Chaudhary, Head of South Asia at Taptap Send. 'People want a more direct, trustworthy way to give — especially during meaningful times like Ramzan and Eid. We're proud to make that possible with just a few taps. It's about making giving easier, safer, and more impactful.' Saim Chaudhary, who has led Taptap Send's expansion into South Asian markets such as Pakistan and Bangladesh, believes this feature reflects the company's continued focus on understanding and addressing regional needs. Transparent, vetted giving — all in one place The donation platform within the app connects users with a growing list of pre-screened, registered charities operating in areas like education, health, poverty alleviation, and religious giving. By partnering only with vetted organisations, Taptap Send ensures that donations go directly where they're intended. As giving becomes increasingly digital, Taptap Send's latest update offers a safe, reliable, and efficient path for overseas Pakistanis to stay connected to their values — and to the causes that matter most. To learn more or to download the app, visit *FX rates apply ** 95% of transfers to Pakistan were delivered in 1 minute on April 20, 2025 TapTap Send Payments Co., licensed as a Money Transmitter by the Banking Department of the State of New York. NMLS ID: 2108069 Taptap Send (DIFC) Limited is authorized and regulated by the Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA) for the provision of money services. Address: Unit GA-00-SZ-L1-RT-195, Level 1, Gate Avenue, DIFC, UAE Taptap Send Australia Pty Ltd (ABN 21 675 932 386) Australian Financial Services Licence No. 559468.
India Today
28-05-2025
- Politics
- India Today
Why Yunus' election-by-June plan is raising suspicion and fears
Under immense pressure to hold elections by December, the Muhammad Yunus-led interim government has repeatedly reiterated that it plans to hold the national polls by June 2026. But the June timeline has few takers in Bangladesh. Citing the calendar of events and occurrences, they argue the election will have to be conducted in December or will get pushed to the winter of 2026. And there is a reason why Bangladesh's main political party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), smells a rat in Yunus' June poll vow, and views it as a ploy to delay polls the BNP, poised to capitalise on Sheikh Hasina's ouster, insists on elections by December 2025, aligning with Army Chief General Waker-Uz-Zaman's stern directive on the same, ousted Hasina's former ally, the Jatiya Party has demanded a clear electoral road BNP, which has threatened to launch a nationwide agitation demanding elections by December, fears that Yunus' extended timeline could be a tactic to manipulate outcomes or suppress public momentum. It argues that the first half of 2026 is packed with public exams, Ramzan, Eid, Kalboishakhi storms, monsoon disruptions, and Bakrid, all of which could complicate logistics and fuel concerns that delays may derail the democratic transition, which even to neutral observers looks SMELLS THE RAT IN YUNUS' JUNE 2026 POLL DIKTATFollowing marathon meetings with Chief Adviser Yunus over the weekend to resolve the deadlock over the election road map, the BNP delivered its official response at a press conference on Tuesday afternoon, saying it was disappointed and confused about why the interim head is hell-bent on holding the polls during harsh have said before that December is the right time for elections, and we stand by that. After December, Ramadan will fall in February, followed by the monsoon season. There are also major public examinations like the SSC and HSC. That's why we believe any time after December would not be suitable for holding elections," senor BNP leader Khandaker Mosharraf Hossain was quoted as saying by the Dhaka-based Prothom according to the report, pointed out that, apart from the June 1996 election which was held under exceptional circumstances, all other national elections in Bangladesh have traditionally taken place in December or Bangladesh, pre-monsoon Kalbaishakhi storms occur between March and April, followed by the monsoon season from May or June to September. During this time, cyclones often hit the country, disrupting life across vast swathes, from coastal belts to inland towns, damaging infrastructure and displacing a month of fasting and spiritual focus, also makes it logistically unfeasible to hold elections due to reduced working hours and limited public engagement. Additionally, during the public exam period (typically February to April), most school and college teachers are tied up with invigilation and evaluation duties, and result processing for several months, making them largely unavailable for crucial election had hoped for a positive response from the government on the election issue, but that didn't happen. The statement conveyed by the press secretary about the chief advisor's talks with political parties reflects the absence of a clear road map for the national elections," added Dhaka-based Daily Star quoted Hossain demanding a clear road map and the removal of "controversial advisers" from Yunus' cabinet, signalling distrust in the interim government's ALLY JATIYA PARTY WANTS CLEAR POLL ROAD MAPThe Jatiya Party, which was previously an ally of Hasina's Awami League and faced attacks following the regime's fall in August 2025, is also demanding a clear electoral Jatiya Party leader Masroor Mawla, while calling for free, fair, and inclusive elections on a level playing field, said that until the election schedule is announced, the country will not attract any new investments, reported news agency ANI in March."Unless the election is declared, no new investment will come in Bangladesh... Whenever we talk to the international community, they only talk about elections. They want to hear an election roadmap for Bangladesh. Unless the election is declared, no new investment is coming. The old investors, I mean the investors who have already invested huge amounts of money in Bangladesh, also feel insecure," Mawla was quoted as saying by the news the Yunus government, Mawla said, "For the past six or seven months, this interim government has been running the country, but we have seen no development, only a rising rate of everyday crimes. The economy has completely deteriorated as no new investors are coming to Bangladesh at the moment".ARMY CHIEF ZAMAN HAD WARNED YUNUS TO CONDUCT POLLS BY DECEMBER 2025Army Chief General Waker-Uz-Zaman had last week issued a stern warning to Yunus to ensure polls by December. He said, "the right to shape the nation's future belongs to an elected government".Muhammad Yunus, appointed interim chief adviser after a student-led uprising toppled Sheikh Hasina in August 2024, has repeatedly said that elections would be in June this timeline has drawn sharp criticism, more so after it warned of "public-backed action" against "unreasonable demands".Tune InMust Watch
Indian Express
25-05-2025
- Politics
- Indian Express
EC announces 5 Assembly bypolls in 4 states: What is at stake for key players
The Election Commission (EC) on Sunday announced Assembly elections for five seats in four states on June 19. The elections will be held in two seats in Gujarat and one each in Kerala, Punjab, and West Bengal, and the votes will be counted on June 23. The EC did not announce bypolls for the Nagrota and Budgam Assembly constituencies in Jammu and Kashmir, which have been vacant since October 2024. After he was elected from two seats on October 8, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah resigned from one, Budgam, on October 21. The Nagrota seat fell vacant upon the death of MLA Devender Singh Rana on October 31. As per Section 151A of the Representation of the People Act, 1951, the Election Commission is required to fill casual vacancies in Parliament and State Legislatures within six months. However, the EC, in consultation with the Central government, can go beyond this period if it is difficult to hold the by-election within the said period. According to EC sources, the commission had earlier certified that it would not be holding the by-elections in the UT within six months. While the cold weather and Ramzan and Eid were cited among reasons for not holding the bypolls in March and April, the April 22 Pahalgam terrorist attack and the subsequent military conflict with Pakistan led to further delay. Here are the five seats where bypolls will be held: Ludhiana West (Punjab) This is a high-stakes battle for the ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) as it comes close on the heels of its defeat in Delhi and on the back of a poor performance in the Ludhiana civic polls. In the civic body polls last year, the AAP managed to win only 41 of the 95 wards in the Ludhiana Municipal Corporation, falling short of the majority mark by seven, while the Congress and BJP won 30 and 18 seats respectively. Adding salt to the wounds was the defeat of the wives of AAP MLAs Ashok Parashar Pappi and Gurpreet Singh Gogi. The AAP has already announced Rajya Sabha MP Sanjeev Arora as its candidate and hit the ground running, with its two senior most leaders, Arvind Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia, holding meetings and inaugurating a slew of projects. While the BJP is likely to announce its pick in the next few days, the Congress has fielded former Punjab minister Bharat Bhushan Ashu and the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), which stayed away from the November 2024 bypolls in Gidderbaha, Dera Baba Nanak, Chabbewal and Barnala, has picked newcomer Parupkar Singh Ghuman. The bypoll was necessitated after Gogi 'accidentally' shot himself to death in January. Nilambur (Kerala) The bypoll in this constituency in Wayanad was necessitated by the resignation of two-time Left Democratic Front (LDF)-backed Independent MLA P V Anvar after he fell out with Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan. This bypoll will be a litmus test for the ruling party as well as the Congress. For the CPI(M), the bypoll is a test ahead of next year's Assembly elections and is a chance to prove that Anvar's exit has not dented its prospects in the constituency. For the Congress, the bypoll is an opportunity to wrest back its traditional seat that is part of the Wayanad Lok Sabha constituency held by Priyanka Gandhi Vadra. The party lost Nilambur in 2016 as well as in 2021 to Anvar. It will also be the first electoral test of the newly appointed Congress state chief, Sunny Joseph For the BJP, which has a negligible presence in the constituency, the bypoll will be a test of the organisational skills and grassroots poll management of its new chief Rajeev Chandrasekhar. For Anvar, who is now in the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and has extended support to the Congress-led United Democratic Front, a victory for the Congress will ensure his bargaining power stays intact. Kadi and Visavadar (Gujarat) The bypolls present an opportunity for the BJP to increase its tally in the Assembly and further dent the Congress, which has been out of power for three decades. For the Congress, which has chosen Gujarat to implement its pilot project of giving more powers to its district units, the bypoll is a chance at redemption. The Kadi bypoll was necessitated after the death of sitting BJP MLA Karsanbhai Solanki in February, while the resignation of sitting AAP MLA Bhupendra Bhayani necessitated the Visavadar by-election. Bhayani subsequently joined the BJP. For the AAP, which is seeking to expand its footprint in the state, the Visavadar bypoll is a prestige battle. The party has fielded firebrand leader Gopal Italia from the seat that was once represented by former CM Keshubhai Patel. Kaliaganj (West Bengal) The bypoll became necessary following the death of sitting TMC MLA Nasiruddin Ahmed in February. It comes at a time when the Trinamool Congress (TMC) government is facing controversies linked to the Supreme Court's order upholding a Calcutta High Court order terminating the appointment of over 25,000 teachers, and the violence in Murshidabad. The party will be keen to replicate its success in last year's bypolls in which it swept all six seats at stake, including Madarihat that it won back from the BJP. (With inputs from ENS Ahmedabad, Thiruvananthapuram, Ludhiana & Kolkata)
Scroll.in
22-05-2025
- Health
- Scroll.in
Memoir: Writer Andaleeb Wajid on losing her husband and mother-in-law to Covid-19 in the same week
It had all started with a swab up our nostrils. When my eldest, Saboor, developed a fever at the end of April, I told myself it couldn't be COVID. I was convinced he was going to be fine, but still, being cautious, I quarantined him in his room and reduced his contact with others. I told everyone it was probably a regular fever. But on the second day or so, I gave him some noodles to eat and he took it from me, then bent his head and sniffed the plate. He looked up at me. 'I can't smell anything,' he said. The thud I felt inside was so huge that it eclipsed everything else in that moment. I told Mansoor frantically that maybe Saboor had COVID. Mansoor dismissed my concerns saying there was no way he could have got the infection but I couldn't take such a laissez-faire attitude. I booked a home test and someone came home to take the swab for the COVID test. Our worst fears were confirmed in some hours. He had tested positive. I was beside myself with worry. As a baby, he'd already been in the NICU for fifteen days because his lungs weren't working when he was born. I focused on getting him better and making sure he was taking the medicines. This was during Ramzan, when the second wave was already raging around us. Then, as I felt the first telltale signs of a fever, and all kinds of exhaustion seeping into me, I couldn't believe this was happening. I got myself and the rest of the family tested. My mother-in-law and I both tested positive. I decided to have her quarantine with me in my room. I posted a jokey tweet saying that she constantly complained about everything in my room, right from the way I'd arranged the bed, to asking me questions about why the maid didn't clean the bathroom any better. I was even wary of opening my wardrobes within her sight because she would take one look at the mess and give me yet another lecture about keeping everything in order. Or she would offer to arrange my closet herself. Her wardrobe, after all, was nothing short of a work of art. Sarees arranged in neat rows, folded just right, petticoats on one shelf, blouses on another. Me? I didn't know which dupatta went with which salwar. I took her good-natured ribbing in my stride and told her that she was free to do up my wardrobes once she got well. The severity of the situation hadn't sunk into her. Once, I woke up in the middle of the night to see her emerging from the bathroom to make wuzu because she wanted to read the Quran. I told her that it was the middle of the night and she could do it the following morning. That's one thing everyone expects about quarantine but no one really knows until they're facing it – sitting in your room day in and day out gets old very soon. Thankfully, I had my laptop with me, but I found myself disinterested in doing anything. I didn't have the energy for it. When Mansoor developed a fever, I insisted he test himself and Azhaan again. When his results showed up as positive, I sent Azhaan away so all of us could walk around the house, since we were all infected. But it did little to ease the worry. We were all too exhausted, coughing constantly, and the loss of the sense of smell was making me feel strange and inept. On the advice from a relative who was a doctor, we decided to get our chest CT scans done. The CT scan would give us a better idea about the state of our lungs which were affected the most in the Delta variant of COVID that we all had. Mansoor drove us to the scanning centre one by one. The numbers that had stayed with me for so long elude me completely now, except that I remembered my score was the highest at 12 while Mansoor's and my mother-in-law's was 5 or so. A high score meant that the disease was more severe. This worried me, but with the foolish optimism of someone who constantly postpones worrying, I decided it was fine. The main thing was that both of them had lower scores, and given their health history, it was important that they be better sooner than me. When would this nightmare end, I thought. We all had to get better so we could look back on this period with a shudder and move on with our lives. This was not Mansoor's first stay in a hospital. In 2015, I was working as a marketing head at a software company, a job that let me work from home and I had to go into office twice a week. It was a Thursday, and it was exactly a week since my birthday. I was at work when Saboor called me and said that Abbu wasn't looking too good. He was complaining of chest pains and he was sweating excessively. Instinctively, I knew something was wrong. For years, I'd been telling Mansoor to take better care of his health but it was a joke in the family that he loved nothing more than good food. By the time I reached home from office, he'd been taken to the hospital in an ambulance. Thankfully, the doctors were able to treat him in time and he underwent an angioplasty. It had been a close call but the doctors were efficient and they got everything under control. I was surrounded by family and extended family who showed up and stayed close, offering support. Their presence alone helped me stay strong and not break down while I was in the hospital. When I returned home after his angioplasty, with my mother-in-law and the kids, while he remained in the ICU, I started crying while praying the Isha namaz. I was angry with Mansoor but at the same time grateful that he'd been spared. I was trying to hold onto the strength that came to me from being my mother's daughter. I was in my thirties, my kids were small, and our situation wasn't too different from what my family's had been when my father passed away. I told myself that I was different. I wasn't my mother. I didn't know why I thought that I was better than her. Education and worldliness give one a false sense of security and I felt I was better equipped to handle anything. When Mansoor returned from the hospital, he was a changed man. He stopped eating oily, fried food, switched to a healthier diet and lost much of the weight he'd been lugging around for years. I remember him checking himself out in the mirror, pleased that he could fit into the shirts he'd always buy in sizes that were smaller, saying they would motivate him to lose weight. Turned out, having a heart attack was the best motivation ever. Sadly, the motivation didn't last for too long. He went back to his old eating habits and started piling on the kilos like before, despite my continued efforts to make him stay on the course. The hospital visit in 2015 and the hospital visits in 2021 could have well been situated in two different universes. In 2015, no one had even dreamt of the word 'pandemic' and although worried people hung around outside ICUs, the situation was drastically different during the second wave. Everyone knows, everyone remembers what it was like then. And yet, each experience is different from the others. No one would know what it felt like for me to walk into the hospital, my face covered with a face shield, under which there were two masks. That's not right. I'm sure many people would have experienced this too.
Hindustan Times
18-05-2025
- Health
- Hindustan Times
AIIMS Rishikesh doctor booked for distributing sweets day after Pahalgam attack
Dehradun: The Uttarakhand Police booked an All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) Rishikesh doctor for allegedly distributing sweets at the hospital on April 23, a day after the Pahalgam terror attack that killed 26 people. The complainant said the 'doctor distributed sweets to celebrate the heinous killings of tourists' and 'hurt the sentiments of people'. The FIR was registered under sections 196 (1) (a), 196 (1) (b) (promoting enmity and disharmony between different religious on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, etc.), and 197 (1) (a) (Imputations, assertions prejudicial to national integration) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) at Rishikesh police station on May 6 on the complaint of Rishikesh president of Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), Rajendra Pandey. In the complaint, Pandey alleged, 'The doctor distributed sweets in the hospital premises on April 23 to celebrate the killing of Hindus. When asked by someone, the doctor claimed that he was distributing sweets to celebrate Eid. However, Ramzan was celebrated a month ago. He openly supported the terrorists who killed innocent people. He earlier too had posted anti-India comments on social media. There is outrage among the Hindu community due to his act.' Senior sub inspector Vinod Kumar of Rishikesh Police station said, 'We have registered the FIR and our investigation into the matter is underway.' Kumar declined to make any comment when asked if the doctor had been questioned. The junior resident doctor, who hails from West Bengal, rejected the allegations. He said, 'On the evening of April 23, I was posted in the emergency OT when some nursing officers requested sweets to celebrate the belated occasion of Eid. As a gesture of happiness and unity, I ordered sweets and food for them. Unfortunately, this simple act is now being misrepresented to spread communal hatred in my name. I am being mentally harassed.' He said, 'I returned home on the advice of my seniors. I have now come to know that a police complaint has been filed against me. I will take legal action against those who are mentally harassing me.'
