increasing road accidents

Increasing Road Accidents

ByJustpaste.in

Through the pages of your newspaper, I would like to draw attention to the increasing number of road accidents in our area. Road accidents have become a serious problem, causing injuries, deaths and suffering for many families.

Overspeeding, careless driving, dangerous overtaking and ignoring traffic rules are some of the major causes of these accidents. Poor road conditions and the lack of proper traffic control make the situation even worse.

The authorities should take strict action against those who violate traffic rules. Speed limits should be enforced, roads should be repaired, and traffic awareness campaigns should be organized in schools and communities.

Every life is precious. Drivers must understand that a few minutes saved through reckless driving are never worth risking a human life. I hope the concerned authorities will take immediate steps to reduce road accidents and make our roads safer

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  • Online Harassment and Cybercrime in Pakistan: High Court Strengthens Protection of Digital Rights

    ByJustpaste.in

    By Syeda Shehar Bano Bukhari Introduction: The rapid growth of social media and digital communication has transformed how people interact, work, and share information. Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, and other online services have become an important part of everyday life. However, the expansion of digital spaces has also created new forms of crime, including cyber harassment, online blackmail, identity theft, unauthorized sharing of private information, and the misuse of digital content. In Pakistan, cybercrime has become an increasingly important legal issue. Courts are now required to balance the protection of individuals from online abuse with fundamental rights such as freedom of expression and privacy. Recent judicial rulings have highlighted the need for effective investigation, proper use of digital evidence, and protection of victims of online harassment. Background of the Legal Issue: Online harassment can take many forms. It may involve sending threatening messages, repeatedly contacting a person against their wishes, creating fake social media accounts, spreading private photographs, or publishing false information to damage someone’s reputation.  Women are particularly vulnerable to certain forms of online harassment. In some cases, social media platforms are used to threaten women with the publication of private photographs or videos. Such conduct can cause serious psychological distress and may affect a person’s family relationships, education, employment, and social reputation. The problem becomes more complicated when victims hesitate to report such incidents because of social pressure or fear of further harassment. As a result, many cases of online abuse may remain unreported. Role of the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act: Pakistan’s main legal framework for dealing with cybercrime is the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, 2016 (PECA). The law provides criminal penalties for several forms of unlawful activity carried out through information technology and electronic communication. The law covers offences relating to unauthorized access, interference with information systems, cyberstalking, harassment, identity-related offences, and the misuse of electronic information. Under the legal framework, victims of cyber harassment can approach the relevant authorities and provide evidence such as screenshots, messages, emails, social media links, recordings, and other digital material. Such evidence may assist investigators in identifying the accused and establishing the circumstances of the alleged offence. Importance of Digital Evidence: One of the most important aspects of cybercrime cases is the collection and preservation of digital evidence. Unlike traditional crimes, online offences often leave electronic traces. For example, if an individual repeatedly threatens another person through WhatsApp messages, the victim may preserve screenshots, message records, telephone numbers, and other relevant information. Similarly, if a fake social media account is created to impersonate someone, the account link and associated digital information may become important evidence. However, digital evidence must be properly collected and authenticated. Courts must ensure that evidence presented before them is reliable and has not been manipulated by the offenders in connivance with the authorities. This makes forensic investigation an important part of modern criminal justice. Freedom of Expression and Online Abuse: The regulation of online content also raises questions concerning freedom of expression. Freedom of expression is a fundamental right, provided by the Constitution of Pakistan, 1973, but it is not unlimited and is also restricted. The law may impose reasonable restrictions in certain circumstances, including where speech involves threats, harassment, incitement to violence, or other unlawful conduct. The challenge for courts and law-enforcement authorities is to distinguish between legitimate criticism and unlawful online abuse. For example, a person criticizing a public official’s policies may be exercising freedom of expression. However, repeatedly threatening that official with violence or publishing private information with the intention of causing harm may cross the boundary between protected expression and unlawful conduct. Therefore, effective cybercrime laws must protect both individual safety and legitimate freedom of expression. A Real-Life Example: Consider a situation in which a woman receives repeated threatening messages from an unknown social media account. The person behind the account threatens to publish her private photographs unless she follows certain demands. Such conduct may create fear and psychological pressure. The victim can preserve the messages, take screenshots, record relevant account information, and report the matter to the appropriate authorities. The case demonstrates why awareness of digital rights and legal remedies is important. Victims should know that online harassment is not simply a personal disagreement; depending on the circumstances, it may constitute a criminal offence. Challenges in Cybercrime Investigations: Despite the existence of cybercrime laws, several challenges can affect the investigation and prosecution of online offences. First, offenders may use fake identities or anonymous accounts. Second, digital evidence can be deleted or altered quickly. Third, cybercrime investigations often require specialized technical expertise.  Another challenge is the international nature of the internet. An offender may operate from another country while targeting a victim in Pakistan. In such circumstances, obtaining evidence and identifying the person responsible may require international cooperation. These challenges demonstrate the need for trained investigators, modern forensic laboratories, effective cooperation between institutions, and public awareness. Protection of Victims: Victim protection is an important part of the response to cybercrime. Victims of online harassment may experience anxiety, fear, depression, and social pressure. In cases involving private images or blackmail, the psychological consequences can be particularly severe and damaging. Legal institutions should therefore ensure that victims can report complaints safely and confidentially. Investigations should be conducted professionally, and unnecessary exposure of victims’ private information should be avoided. The justice system should also recognize that victims of cyber harassment may require psychological and social support in addition to legal remedies. Broader Legal Significance: The increasing number of cybercrime cases demonstrates that traditional concepts of criminal law must adapt to technological developments. Crimes committed through digital platforms can cause real-world harm, even when the offender and victim never meet physically. The legal system must therefore develop effective methods for dealing with electronic evidence, online anonymity, cross-border offences, and rapidly changing technology. At the same time, laws should be applied carefully so that legitimate criticism, journalism, and freedom of expression are not unnecessarily restricted. A balanced legal approach is necessary to

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    Why young minds internalize being a burden

    ByJustpaste.in

    When a child begins to internalize the belief that their presence is an obstacle, the transformation rarely happens in an explosive moment. Instead, it is a gradual, quiet erosion of their sense of self-worth. Recent reports surrounding youth mental health have drawn urgent attention to how children absorb socio-economic pressure, domestic tension, and emotional distress. The youth has convinced themselves that their families would simply be better off without them. Psychological research identifies a specific mindset known as perceived burdensomeness. It’s the distorted cognitive belief that one’s existence imposes an unmanageable drain on loved ones.  Adults often process household stress out loud through financial worries or fatigue. However, children are acute observers but poor interpreters of these adult struggles. When young minds witness prolonged arguments over money, household strain, or family burnout, they frequently externalize the blame onto themselves. Rather than recognizing systemic or situational issues, a child’s natural self-referential worldview leads to a heartbreaking conclusion. If I weren’t here, my parents wouldn’t be so stressed. Triggers for Emotional Withdrawal in Children  Hearing constant worry over basic living costs or healthcare expenses. Feeling as though love or acceptance is tied strictly to high achievement or complete emotional compliance. When overwhelmed caregivers unintentionally treat basic parenting duties as exhausting chores. Receiving persistent feedback that their emotional or physical needs are too much to handle. How Burden Beliefs Manifest in Everyday Behavior Unlike adults, who might voice feelings of worthlessness directly, children express this weight through shifts in conduct. Identifying these subtle indicators early can make the difference between early intervention and severe psychological crisis. From Obligation to Belonging Addressing this internal crisis requires shifting household culture from transactional survival to unconditional emotional safety. Child mental health advocates emphasize that reassurance must go beyond simple verbal praise. It requires active, structural validation within the home. A child needs to know that their value isn’t dependent on their convenience to adults. Love is not a debt they owe back to the family, but a foundation they stand upon. Explicitly reassure children that adult challenges such as bills, jobs, or adult relationships are strictly the responsibility of grown-ups. Validate their requests for help, space, or care as healthy and welcome parts of growing up. Spend unhurried, non-evaluative time together where no performance or chore is expected. Rebuilding a child’s foundational sense of belonging takes consistency, but by recognizing the early signals of perceived burdensomeness, parents and educators can intervene before silence turns into deep-seated trauma.  

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    Tradition, impersonality and mythic structure in “The Waste Land”

    ByJustpaste.in

    Eliot’s masterpiece The Waste Land is published in 1922 just three years after “Tradition and the Individual Talent“. The poem serves as the ultimate practical demonstration of his theoretical ideas. Rather than describing tradition abstractly, Eliot uses allusion, polyphony, structural juxtaposing, and mythic framing to explain how a modern poem can absorb European history to process post-WWI disillusionment. Eliot argued that a poet must possess a historical sense. It is an awareness of the past’s presence alongside the contemporary moment. In The Waste Land, centuries of literary tradition exist on a single plane. In Section I (The Burial of the Dead), the speaker encounters acquaintance in modern London named Stetson and asks:    That corpse you planted last year in your garden, Has it begun to sprout?  In the very next line, Eliot links this modern London scene directly to the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage. You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!   Modern industrial London and ancient Rome are collapsed into the same spiritual wasteland. The historical sense allows Eliot to treat human trauma across millennia as simultaneous rather than sequential. In his Impersonal Theory, Eliot argued that the poet’s mind acts as a catalytic medium. It’s  fusing disparate feelings and literary artifacts into a new substance without injecting personal bias. Throughout the 433 lines of The Waste Land, Eliot incorporates over 35 distinct literary references, 6 foreign languages, and references to sacred texts across Eastern and Western traditions. Eliot quotes Edmund Spenser’s Renaissance poem Prothalamion: Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. He juxtaposes Spenser’s idyllic, nymph-filled river with the industrial Thames of 1920s London, scattered with silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends. As commuters cross London Bridge, Eliot echoes Dante’s Inferno (Canto III): I had not thought death had undone so many. The modern office workers are literally mapped onto the souls trapped in Hell’s vestibule. He isn’t relying on a traditional narrative arc or a subjective personal narrative. Eliot uses what he famously called the Mythic Method (a technique he also praised in James Joyce’s Ulysses)..Eliot grounds the entire poem in two scholarly texts on mythology and ritual. From Ritual to Romance (the Grail Legend and the sterile Fisher King). The Golden Bough (ancient fertility cults, dying-and-rising gods). The underlying archetype, a sterile land awaiting a spiritual rain to restore fertility, unifies the fragmented scenes of modern decay (mechanized sex, empty conversations, spiritual apathy). Therefore, the individual talent grounds chaos in timeless mythic order. In order to achieve the extinction of personality, Eliot abandons a central I persona. Instead, he speaks through a chorus of shifting voices. A Marie in Munich, a hyacinth girl, a cockney woman in a pub, and Saint Augustine. In his famous explanatory notes to line 218, Eliot exposes he unifying center of the poem:  Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a ‘character’, is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest… What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem. Tiresias: the blind, bisexual prophet of Greek myth (from Sophocles and Ovid). It has lived as both man and woman and seen the depths of classical tragedy. Eliot submerges his own biographical ego into an ancient, collective consciousness by adopting Tiresias as the central perspective Eliot’s concept of tradition is not narrowly provincial. His concept relates to the broader heritage of human thought. In the final section “What the Thunder Said”, the modern mind seeks a cure for its spiritual dryness not in the West, but in the Upanishads. The thunder speaks the Sanskrit syllables: Datta (give), Dayadhvam (sympathize) and Damyata (control). The poem concludes with the solemn formal chant: Shantih shantih shantih The Peace which passeth understanding. The final line: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” summarizes Eliot’s entire philosophy of tradition. Modern civilization may be in ruins, but the individual poet reconstructs meaning by gathering and rearranging the enduring fragments of global tradition.  

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    World’s tallest bridge features 300-meter artificial waterfall

    ByJustpaste.in

    China has completed several remarkable engineering projects in recent years but the Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge stands out as one of the most extraordinary. Often described as an engineering marvel, the bridge is not for the faint-hearted. Anyone with a fear of heights may find crossing it a nerve-racking experience. The bridge is situated 625 meters (2,051 feet) above the ground and was opened to the public in September 2025 making it the world’s tallest bridge. However, its height is not the only feature that makes it unique. The bridge also includes a spectacular artificial waterfall making it a major tourist attraction rather than just a transportation route. Chinese authorities designed the bridge as both an infrastructure project and a tourist destination. Visitors can enjoy glass walkways, cafes inside the bridge towers and adventure activities such as bungee jumping. The bridge’s most eye-catching attraction is its 300-meter-long artificial waterfall which creates a dramatic curtain of water. A laser lighting system has also been installed allowing the waterfall to put on a dazzling display at night. According to local authorities, thousands of tourists visit the site every day. The bridge gained further recognition when Time magazine ranked it as the No. 1 destination in its list of the World’s Greatest Places for 2026. Located in Guizhou Province in southwestern China, the Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge was primarily built to reduce travel time across the mountainous region. Guizhou’s rugged terrain previously made travel between many locations slow and difficult. Thanks to the new bridge, a journey that once took two hours can now be completed in about one minute. Constructed from 20,000 tons of steel roughly equivalent to the amount used in three Eiffel Towers, the bridge stretches 9,482 feet (about 2,890 meters) in length. Construction began in January 2022 and the bridge officially opened to the public in September 2025.

  • Man returns book He stole 40 years ago

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    A US bookstore staff was left surprised when a package arrived containing a book that had been stolen from the store nearly 40 years ago. The package also included an apology letter and $100 in cash as compensation. The package was recently delivered to Bookleggers, a bookstore in Old Town Eureka, California. When the staff opened it, they found a copy of The Unstrung Harp. The letter explained that the sender had stolen the book from the store about four decades ago.  He said he was a student at the time and was struggling with alcohol addiction and financial problems. He also wrote that he found the book recently while cleaning out his garage. After discovering that the bookstore was still operating he decided to return the book and apologize for what he had done. The man included $100 with the book and told the store owners they could contact him if they wanted to take any further action. Bookstore owner Jennifer McPhaiden said she and her staff were deeply touched by the letter. She said it was surprising to see someone return after so many years to admit their mistake and try to make things right.

  • The hallucination trap – information convincing but factually incorrect

    ByJustpaste.in

    By Syeda Samar Zahra Zaidi When you ask an AI chatbot a question it does not know the answer to, an odd thing can happen: instead of hesitating or saying, “I am not sure!” it confidently delivers a tidy, well-structured, completely fabricated response—often with fake citations, fictional figures, and an authoritative tone. This phenomenon is known as the ‘hallucination trap ’, and it may be the most significant barrier between trust and artificial intelligence. I was introduced to the term “AI hallucination” for the first time in the workshop under the project titled “Digital Trust and Free Expression in the AI Era” at Department of Media and Development Communication, University of the Punjab, supported by the U.S. Mission to Pakistan in partnership with the Pakistan-U.S. Alumni Network (PUAN). I learned that a “hallucination” occurs when a language model produces information that sounds convincing but is factually incorrect or completely made up. Examples include inventing a legal case that never existed, citing a research paper that doesn’t exist or boldly misrepresenting a historical date. What is disturbing is not merely that AI can be wrong-humans make mistake too- but rather the way it presents that incorrect information with clearly, confidence and without a trace of doubt. Large language models are essentially highly complex pattern predictors trained to produce the most likely next word in a sequence. As a result, when a model has encountered a topic thousands of times in its training data, the predictors are typically accurate. However, when it comes across a gap, an unidentified fact or a question at the outer edge of its knowledge, it doesn’t shift into a hesitant mode. Instead, it continues doing exactly what it was trained to do: generate a logical, fluent piece of writing, producing a response that is structurally sound and grammatically correct but based on nothing. In human communication, confidence is generally perceived as a sign of strength which is important. We naturally prefer to trust a calm, reliable voice over a hesitant one. AI systems unintentionally exploit the tendency because their language remains confident whether they are right or wrong. The risks increase with the use of AI, as students may unintentionally include false information into their work and journalists have published articles citing artificially created sources and quotes, negatively affecting the credibility of their publications. Such inaccuracies influence what millions of people see, believe or share, thereby amplifying fabricated content. The reason AI does not simply say “I don’t know” is partly due to the way these systems are trained. Many models are designed to provide helpful, comprehensive-sounding answers and are rarely rewarded for expressing doubt during training. This means that a model that frequently acknowledges uncertainty may be judged as less helpful than one that consistently provides an answer, even when that confidence is occasionally misplaced. Such incorrectly aligned incentives arise when the training process gradually teaches the model that sounding confident is more valuable than being accuracy. Retrieval-augmented generation, which relies on responses in actual, verifiable records rather than internal memory alone, improved training techniques that explicitly account for uncertainty; and systems built to simply cite sources. So, users can independently verify claims are just a few of the ways developers are using to addresses this problem. While none of these solutions fully eliminate hallucination yet, taken together they represent a major shift from blind confidence toward earned trust. The most dangerous outcome is not an AI that makes mistakes but a culture of users who stop questioning because the system always sounds so sure of itself.   Therefore, until AI becomes more reliably aware of it own limitation, part of the responsibility falls on the people who use it: treating AI-generated output as a starting point rather than an endpoint, cross checking important facts against credible sources. In the end, the hallucination trap serves as a reminder that illusion is not the same as truth. As AI becomes increasingly common in education, digital media and everyday life, understanding why it occasionally lies with confidence is not only a technical curiosity but also a fundamental aspect of digital literacy. We must strengthen our ability to verify the information provided by AI as they become more persuasive. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Mission to Pakistan or USEFP. The writer, Syeda Samar Zahra Zaidi, is a student of Media and Development Communication at  University of the Punjab, Lahore and can be reached at samarzahra456@gmail.com.  

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