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The PTI on Saturday issued specific instructions to its polling agents and workers for the by-election scheduled for tomorrow in Lahore’s NA-129 constituency. The by-election is being held after the seat fell vacant in July following the death of PTI MNA Mian Azhar, the father of party leader Hammad Azhar. Hammad issued “important instructions” for his party’s polling agents in a post on X today: “When the bags containing election materials are opened in the morning, make sure that the Forms 45 and Forms 46 in them are blank and shown to you. This is most important.” The PTI leader stressed the importance of the polling agents’ presence during the polling and the counting processes. “The polling boxes must not be out of sight at any moment.” Hammad further told the agents that it was their “right to obtain the Form-45 [filled] as per the count”, and that any staff who obstructed this would be liable to strict legal punishment. He directed all PTI workers at the party camps outside the polling stations to remain there after the polling had ended and “peacefully follow the presiding officer to the returning officer’s (RO) office”. A candidate or their election agent can appoint “as many polling agents as may be prescribed” for each polling station to observe the process on behalf of the candidate under the Elections Act 2017. In another post, Hammad also gave a message to the presiding officers and the polling staff, urging them not to indulge in any “illegal act”. “We are aware that you are being frightened and threatened,” the PTI leader claimed, adding that those who were allegedly doing so were “finding immunity for themselves, buying property abroad and moving their families there”. “They will push you into [carrying out] unconstitutional actions and flee themselves,” Hammad contended. “Be careful! Do not put yourself in difficulty by taking any serious and illegal action at the behest of any intruder,” the PTI leader said, urging them to fulfil their duty. The NA-129 seat is being contested by Mian Azhar’s nephew Chaudhry Arsalan Ahmad — nominated by Hammad, who himself is absconding as he is wanted by the state in different cases. Hafiz Mian Nauman, who was defeated by Mian Azhar by a margin of over 30,000 votes in the 2024 elections, is once again the PML-N’s candidate. The PTI has accused the PML-N’s Punjab government of employing rigging tactics in support of its candidate in the NA-129 by-poll. Yesterday, Hammad said officials of the Lahore Electric Supply Company (Lesco) were appointed as presiding officers for the polls contested by Nauman, who has served as chairman of the Lesco Board of Directors (BoD). Lesco Chief Executive Officer Ramzan Butt, however, rebutted Hammad’s post, stating that the appointments were the decision of the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) and not Lesco or any other government organisation. Before the election campaign could pick up, the local police officials, caught on video footage, were seen removing banners of the PTI candidate. Similar to the situation during the 2024 general elections, Ahmad is contesting as an independent candidate on the “geyser” symbol, instead of the “bat” due to the revocation of the party’s electoral symbol last year.

Significant progress was reported on Saturday in the ongoing litigation over the transfer of judges, as five judges of the Islamabad High Court (IHC) filed a miscellaneous petition before the Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) challenging the transfer of their intra-court appeal from the Supreme Court to the former. The application was filed by IHC’s Justice Mohsin Akhtar Kayani, Justice Babar Sattar, Justice Sardar Ejaz Ishaq Khan, Justice Saman Rafat Imtiaz and Justice Tariq Mehmood Jahangiri. The case pertains to the transfer of three judges from other high courts to the federal capital. In June, the SC’s Constitutional Bench had declared that their transfers were not unconstitutional. Subsequently, the five IHC judges had challenged the decision and filed an intra-court appeal. However, the intra-court appeal in the case has now been fixed before the FCC, which was established under the 27th Amendment, on November 24. In the miscellaneous petition, the IHC judges asked the FCC to return the intra-court appeal to the SC, arguing that the matter constitutionally falls within the jurisdiction of the apex court. The petition stated that the appeal was shifted to the FCC under the 27th Constitutional Amendment, but contended that the amendment itself contradicted the Constitution. In their application, the petitioners argued that the Constitution clearly outlined the legislature, executive, and judiciary as the three essential pillars of the state and delineated limits and powers for each. The judges maintained that while Parliament holds the authority to amend the Constitution, such powers could not be exercised to abolish, restructure, or fundamentally weaken the judiciary, which forms an integral component of the constitutional framework. They further asserted that several apex court judgments affirm the separation of powers and the protection of judicial independence, insisting that the appellate jurisdiction in such matters remained with the SC unless expressly provided otherwise without affecting the judiciary’s constitutional existence. The petition stressed that transferring the appeal to the FCC on the basis of the 27th Amendment was legally flawed since the amendment itself was under challenge for being inconsistent with the Constitution’s basic structure. With the new miscellaneous petition filed, the FCC is now expected to determine whether it can proceed with the appeal or whether the matter must be returned to the Supreme Court for adjudication. Four of the same five IHC judges, excluding Justice Jahangiri, who wanted to challenge the recently introduced 27th Amendment, were turned away by the SC earlier this week and told to approach the FCC. The judges had drafted a petition invoking the original jurisdiction of the top court under Article 184(3), and sent a representation to the apex court’s registry branch. According to the draft petition, the judges had also challenged the amendments to Article 200, which allowed the transfer of high court judges without their consent. They had argued that such provisions exposed judges to pressure, fear of retaliation, and manipulation of court composition.

On a lush cricket ground outside Colombo, the sharp jingling of a ball cuts through the afternoon air. Every rattle is a pushback against the stigma of disability. Sri Lanka and India are co-hosting the first T20 World Cup for visually impaired women. The semi-finals are on Saturday between India and Australia and Pakistan and Nepal, followed by the final on Sunday. India manager Shika Shetty told AFP that the sport has transformed lives and helped change attitudes. “I think this (world cup) is one of the biggest opportunities for our visually impaired girls,” said Shetty, who is not blind. India captain T.C. Deepika recalled the disbelief she faced when she first picked up the bat. “People were saying, ‘How do they do it? They must be lying,’” she said in a video posted by the Cricket Association for the Blind in India. “(Later) they realised I can do something. People began to see that I have ability,” Deepika added. Playing by the ear While able-bodied cricket requires players to keep an eye on the ball at all times, blind players must have sharp ears. The white plastic ball, the size of a tennis ball, is packed with ball bearings that rattle as it rolls. The bowler must ask the striker if he or she is ready and then yell “play” as the jingling ball is delivered underarm with at least one bounce. Like a regular cricket match, each side has 11 players, but at least four must be totally blind. They are required to wear blindfolds for fairness. Fielders clap once to reveal their positions. Others are partially sighted, classified by how far they can see — two metres for B2 players, six for B3. Each team can have up to eight B1, or totally blind, players. Any run scored by a B1 player is counted as two. ‘Liberating’ Chaminda Karunaratne says cricket has been both a refuge and a way to prove that blindness cannot impede his sporting ambitions. The blind 40-year-old Sri Lankan school teacher has represented his country in international tournaments and now wants women to share that space. “Cricket has done wonders, especially for my mental health,” Karunaratne said as the Indian and Pakistan women’s teams battled it out on the ground. Pakistan’s Noor Fatima (C) celebrates with teammates after taking the wicket of India’s Simu Das during the Women’s Blind Twenty20 World Cup 2025 match between India and Pakistan at the BOI Cricket Stadium in Katunayake on November 16, 2025. — AFP “When you get into a sport like this it boosts your self-confidence, you can move more freely and you tend to take part in community activities,” he said. “That is liberating.” Karunaratne, a key member of the Sri Lanka Cricket Association for the Visually Handicapped, added: “I appeal to parents to send their blind girls to take up cricket. It is an opportunity to interact with others.” “You can show that you are not helpless, not dependent,” he said. Association president Sudesh Tharanga admitted forming a women’s team had been a challenge, although nearly a million Sri Lankans are estimated to have some form of visual impediment. “We started assembling a team only after we were asked in September if we could co-host the T20 tournament in November,” Tharanga told AFP. Despite limited preparations Sri Lanka managed to field one of the tournament’s youngest squads.

I have spent the past few weeks staring at what seem to be digital ghosts; they look human, speak the way we do, and cause anger and despair. But they are not real. They are machines wearing human skin. Something is shifting in Pakistan’s social media landscape. It is not merely a rumour. It is not the old cycle of misinformation. It feels darker. Artificial intelligence is reshaping reality frame by frame until the internet resembles a hall of mirrors. For me, it began on November 8, when an account called ‘PakVocals’ posted a video on X that claimed to show journalist Benazir Shah dancing in a nightclub. The caption was cruel. It tried to mock her by using derogatory comments against her professional credibility. At the time of writing this piece, that video had garnered more than half a million views. It did exactly what it was designed to do: turn a journalist into a target. Mission accomplished! To most viewers, the clip probably passed as real, but for me, something felt off. When the mask slips I opened the clip in DaVinci Resolve — a video editing software that can be downloaded online — and watched it frame by frame because deepfakes are rarely perfect; they usually leave behind little crumbs of evidence. And at the 30th frame, I found it! For a split second, the skin tone flickered. The outline of the face rippled like water. The mask, it seems, had slipped — a clear sign of face manipulation had thus been identified. Screengrab from deepfake video showing clear signs of face manipulation. I then used Google Lens, another free online tool, to scan multiple screenshots of the deepfake video. The aim was to identify the source of the video, and success was clearly in sight when several search results popped up, one after the other. The body in the video didn’t belong to Benazir Shah but to Indian actress Jannat Zubair Rahmani — the clothes were the same, and so was the lighting. The only thing the fakers had changed was the face. A screengrab of the original video of Indian actress Jannat Zubair. On X, Shah called out the deepfake video and noted that the account was followed by the information minister of the incumbent government. That is when the story took a weird turn. ‘PakVocals’ issued an apology, citing religious fear of slander. But despite the pious language, the video is still there, which shows that their true intention was to damage someone’s reputation. On November 18, another X account by the name ‘Princess Hania Shah’ posted a new deepfake of Benazir Shah and accused her of being a “traitor”. This deepfake edit was a lazy attempt, I thought to myself. But the intent, again, was dangerous. This time, I didn’t even need editing software. I used Google Lens to put the fake video side-by-side with the original footage I found online. They were perfect mirrors — same moves, same lighting, just a different face. It took five minutes to prove it was a lie. Yet, more than 180,000 people had already watched it. A screengrab of the Nov 18 X post. Fact-checking — a necessity X, formerly Twitter, has a system called “Community Notes” designed to flag fake content. But it has failed too many times. Deepfake videos are still up on the social media platform without a warning label. What’s worse is that when users asked X’s own AI chatbot, Grok, to verify the videos, it failed to identify them as AI-generated content, revealing the limitations of billion-dollar algorithms. Simply put, we can’t rely on tech giants to protect us. If third-party fact-checkers fail to do their job, nobody will. With every passing day, fact-checking is becoming a necessity, especially during times of conflict and wars, because AI-manipulated content is not just consumed by ordinary people but also by mainstream news media. During the recent Israel-Iran conflict in mid-2025, a viral post on X allegedly showed analysts at an Israeli news channel fleeing their studio after a purported strike by Iran. While the footage initially seemed convincing, closer inspection revealed ghostly movements, immaculate camera panning and flat audio. But many Pakistani news outlets aired the clip as an authentic event. A screengrab of the AI video that went viral during the Israel-Iran war. After the Benazir Shah deepfakes, just a few hours later, I found another deepfake video. It claimed to show Pakistani soldiers abusing a Baloch woman in a desert setting. The account that posted the clip, namely ‘Yousuf Bahand’, added a taunt: “Some will say this is fake.” He was right. It is a fake! I went back to the frame-by-frame analysis. The clues were in plain sight. The name tags on the soldiers’ uniforms read “PRMRACCH” and “BAMY” — a classic AI mistake in writing text, hallucinating words while producing gibberish. Screengrab of visual inconsistencies in the video. The clip was crammed with other visual inconsistencies as well. For one, one of the hands of the supposed soldier in the video appeared to be merged into the hands of the woman. Not just the video, but the audio too gave it away. When the soldier yelled “damn it”, it came out in a clean American accent, nothing like what you’d expect in that setting. So I ran the clip through FFMPEG, a command-line tool that converts audio or video formats. The data showed something you never see in a real desert recording: 0.21 seconds of total silence at the very start. In a windy, open environment, the mic always picks up ambient noise the moment it switches on. That dead air only happens when someone pastes the audio track onto the video later. And this is not a one-off episode of playing on real issues. I remember, for instance, the wide circulation of clips showing cows drowning during the 2025 Punjab floods. Instead of authentic chaos, the videos presented a sterile calm: unnaturally still, perfectly framed, and entirely lacking the expected camera tremor or human sounds. Unfortunately, most viewers appeared to stop at the initial shock of the disaster, arguably failing to question the engineers behind the synthetic content. The ‘AI Slop’ A recent BBC investigation revealed that Pakistan has become a global hub for “AI Slop”. Creators appear to be mass-producing fake content, using real-world settings to spread lies, just to game algorithms and earn money. The incentive is simple: virality pays, truth does not. Until early 2024, AI videos were mostly a glitchy novelty shared by enthusiasts, but the landscape arguably shifted with Sora (OpenAI), which created a sense of competition in the market with heavy hitters such as X’s Grok and Google’s Veo. But to their credit, Google just stepped in with a partial remedy: its Gemini chatbot can now flag images created with Google’s own AI tools by detecting invisible SynthID watermarks, a technology that embeds invisible watermarks into AI-generated content like images, audio, and text to identify it as machine-created. The tools I used to expose these lies are free. Anyone can use them. But unfortunately, the tools to make these lies are just as accessible. That is the frightening symmetry: anyone with an ulterior motive, whether financial or otherwise, can fabricate a reality, but not everyone will have the incentive to break through such fabrications. AI isn’t a futuristic threat anymore. It is a street-level weapon. The next viral clip you see might not be real at all, yet the truth still sits there beneath the distortions. You only have to slow down long enough to find it. Sometimes it is a flicker on a cheek. Sometimes it is a melting hand. Sometimes there is a silence in the waveform. The ghosts can be unmasked, but only if we choose to look closely. Header image created with generative AI

After months of trading insults, US President Donald Trump and incoming New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani smiled at each other, swapped compliments and pledged to collaborate on tackling crime and affordability in the nation’s biggest city at an unexpectedly friendly meeting at the White House on Friday. The political opposites, a Republican billionaire and a young democratic socialist, have clashed over everything from immigration to economic policy. But it was clear the two forged a rapport in their first encounter. Mamdani, a 34-year-old state lawmaker, stood by Trump’s desk as the 79-year-old president smiled up at him and patted him warmly on the arm, having only recently falsely caricatured Mamdani as an anti-Semitic communist, among other jibes. “We agree on a lot more than I would have thought,” Trump said after letting journalists and cameras into the Oval Office at the end of a private meeting with the mayor-elect. “We have one thing in common: We want this city of ours that we love to do very well.” The meeting in the Oval Office, where Trump has sometimes embarrassed or chastised visiting heads of state, far exceeded Trump’s prediction earlier on Friday that it would be “quite cordial”. The men, two different generations of New Yorkers, announced nothing new on policy except what seemed to be the launch of an unexpected, politics-shifting professional friendship. “What I really appreciate about the president is that the meeting that we had focused not on places of disagreement, which there are many, and also focused on the shared purpose that we have in serving New Yorkers,” Mamdani said. Just 26 per cent of Americans say Trump is doing a good job at managing the cost of living, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll. Meanwhile, Mamdani, promising a freeze on rents and free buses and childcare, was one of a slew of Democratic victors around the country in elections earlier this month. It was among the most deflating nights endured by Republicans this year, and Trump had not been expected to enjoy the reminder through a visit by one of the most prominent Democratic winners. Yet the president, who found his fame as a New York real estate developer, brightened at Mamdani’s call for more housing in the city he will lead from January 1. Trump was cheered to hear a chunk of New Yorkers who voted for him in last year’s presidential election had gone on to vote for Mamdani. “When we spoke to those voters who voted for President Trump, we heard them speak of the cost of living,” Mamdani said. Trump, who says he is paying increasing attention to affordability and inflation, said this made sense to him. “Some of his ideas are the same ideas I have,” Trump explained. “The better he does, the happier I am.” Mamdani, Trump laugh off past insults As Mamdani surged in the polls to victory on November 4, Trump issued threats to strip federal funding from New York City. Mamdani has regularly criticised Trump’s promise to ramp up federal immigration enforcement efforts in a city where four in 10 residents are foreign-born. In the weeks before they met, Trump had labeled Mamdani a “radical left lunatic,” a communist and a “Jew hater”. Mamdani has espoused Nordic-style democratic socialism, not communism. While a staunch critic of Israel, he was endorsed by prominent Jewish politicians, is bringing Jewish staff into his new administration, notably New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, and has repeatedly condemned anti-Semitism. And yet, less than an hour after first meeting each other in person, Trump was repeatedly coming to Mamdani's aid to fend off pointed questions from the press. The pair laughed away some of their spicier insults as reporters reminded them of what they had said about each other. “I've been called much worse than a despot,” Trump said with a smile. “So it's not that insulting, but I think he'll change his mind after we get to working together.” Mamdani was asked if he still considered Trump a fascist. “That’s OK, you can just say ‘yes’,” Trump interjected, swapping grins with Mamdani and patting his arm twice. “It’s easier than explaining it.” Trump defends Mamdani as ‘very rational person’ Trump also defended the Uganda-born Mamdani, who will be New York City’s first Muslim mayor, from some of the Islamophobic slurs he has faced. One reporter asked Trump if he believed he had “a jihadist” standing by him. “No, I don’t,” Trump said as Mamdani looked on. “I met with a man who’s a very rational person.” Some politicians and commentators were discombobulated by the televised friendliness. At least a couple Republicans said they still did not trust Mamdani, Trump’s new approval notwithstanding. “What the heck just happened?” US Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat from Michigan, wrote on social media, sharing a clip of one of the meeting’s Trump-Mamdani buddy moments. Trump had repeatedly urged New Yorkers not to vote for Mamdani, warning it would be a disaster for a city that is already portrayed as a crime-ridden hellscape by conservative media, despite being among the safest big cities in the country. After his first term as president, Trump decamped from Manhattan to become a Florida resident. A reporter asked Trump if he would consider moving back to the city of his birth with Mamdani running it. “Yeah, I would,” Trump said, “especially after the meeting.”