Pakistan’s cricket chairman threatens to quit

KARACHI // Najam Sethi, caretaker chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB), said on Tuesday he would quit if the courts continued to interfere with his job.

Sethi has been stopped by the Islamabad High Court from carrying out his full duties and ordered to hold new board elections.

“I can’t pick the chief selector nor any of the selectors or take any decisions for Pakistan cricket,” he told the Geo News channel.

“No one is listening to us and we have a series against South Africa ahead of us,” he added in reference to next month’s matches in the UAE.

“We have challenged the court decision and it will be heard on the 23rd of this month. If for some reason the hearing is not held I will then go to the prime minister [Nawaz Sharif].

“I will give him my resignation because I can’t afford to carry on like this,” said Sethi.

In July, the court prevented Sethi from exercising his full duties after he was appointed acting chairman by the government.

The court had earlier declared as null and void the election of Zaka Ashraf as PCB chairman in May.

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Conflict, drought, famine

Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.

Band Aid

Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.

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