Pakistan is better known for bombs than bombshells, militant compounds than opulent estates. A few enterprising Pakistanis hope to alter that perception with the launch of a local version of the well-known celebrity magazine Hello!
They plan to profile Pakistan’s rich and famous: the dashing cricket players, voluptuous Bollywood stars and powerful politicians who dominate conversation in the country’s ritziest private clubs and lowliest tea stalls. They also hope to discover musicians, fashion designers and other new talents who have yet to become household names.
“The side of Pakistan that is projected time and time again is negative,” said Zahraa Saifullah, CEO of Hello! Pakistan. “There is a glamorous side of Pakistan, and we want to tap into that.”
But celebrating the lives of Pakistan’s most prosperous citizens is not without its critics in a country where much of the population lives in poverty. Advertising one’s prosperity could be risky as well since kidnappings for ransom are on the rise and attracting attention from Islamist militants can mean death.
Wajahat Khan, a consulting editor at Hello! Pakistan, said they were cognizant of the sensitivity of publishing a glamour magazine in a conservative Muslim country where many people are struggling and planned to be “socially responsible and culturally aware.”
“We are trying to be happy in a war zone,” Khan said Saturday at a news conference with Saifullah and other members of the magazine’s editorial staff. “We are trying to celebrate what is still alive in a difficult country.”
Khan said they would do everything they could to protect the security of the people they profile, but he wasn’t overly concerned.
“I don’t think terrorist networks are going to be reading Hello! anytime soon,” he said.
Pakistan already has a series of local publications that chronicle the lives of the wellheeled in major cities like Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi, especially as they hop between lavish parties guaranteed payday loans. But the producers of Hello! Pakistan hope the magazine’s international brand and greater depth will attract followers.
Hello! was launched in 1988 by the publisher of Spain’s Hola! magazine and is now published in 150 countries. It’s well-known for its extensive coverage of Britain’s royal family and once paid $14 million in a joint deal with People magazine for exclusive pictures of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s newborn twins.
The market for English-language publications in Pakistan is fairly small. Most monthly and weekly magazines sell no more than 3,000 copies, said Khan, the consulting editor. But they hope to tap into the large Pakistani expatriate markets in the United Kingdom and the Middle East as well.
Hello! Pakistan will be published once a month and will cost about $5.50, twice as much as what many poor Pakistanis earn in a day. The first issue will be published in mid-April and will focus on the Pakistani fashion scene.
Saifullah, who grew up watching her mother and grandmother read Hello! as she hopped between London and Karachi, said it took her two years to convince the magazine to publish a local version in Pakistan.
“They were concerned about whether Pakistan was ready for a magazine like this,” she said.
But Saifullah thinks the timing is perfect to showcase Pakistan’s too often hidden treasures, citing Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, who recently became the first Pakistani filmmaker to win an Oscar for a documentary about the plight of female victims of acid attacks in the country.
“We want to tap into the aesthetically beautiful, the athletic, the fashionable,” said Saifullah. “There is so much going on on a daily basis that nobody ever covers. It’s totally unexplored.”
Fast and Secure application for cash advance lenders and payday loans. We offer cash advance loans with a low cost guarantee.
Britain is proposing to revive
As with fast payday loans, this recently used to be the case, but competitive lenders and higher demand has taken this loan type to mainstay levels.
The good news is Greece won
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said business conditions may be
Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy announced 14.9 billion euros ($19.3 billion) of deficit cuts, with the government
White Castle, a 90-year-old hamburger chain known for its square “slider” burgers, is sipping on the idea of offering alcoholic beverages as it tests beer and wine sales at a restaurant in Indiana.
The food famously craved by stoners in the 2004 movie “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” can be had with a glass of wine or a domestic or seasonal beer at a Lafayette, Ind., restaurant that fuses a conventional White Castle with a new concept for the company called Blaze Modern BBQ. Wine costs $4.50 and beers start at $3.
“This was something that customers had been suggesting,” said Jamie Richardson, a spokesman for Columbus-based White Castle System Inc. “They thought that beer and wine might go nicely with the barbecue that was available at Blaze. We’re certain that we might have some customers who might enjoy some sliders and a beer or wine as well.”
White Castle’s test with those beverages was first reported in Wednesday’s editions of The Columbus Dispatch.
Other fast-food restaurants also are dabbling with alcohol. Earlier this year, Burger King opened the Whopper Bar South Beach, a restaurant in Miami Beach offering beer, and Starbucks Corp. has been testing beer and wine at a few sites.
The companies see alcoholic beverages as a growth opportunity after years of flat sales, said David Henkes, a vice president with the Chicago-based food research firm Technomic. “Alcohol is one of those things that is extremely profitable to the operator,” he said.
White Castle’s beer and wine tryout is part of a broader experiment with three new concepts that the company has been studying for a little over a year, Richardson said Wednesday. Besides Blaze Modern BBQ, there’s also an Asian food brand, Laughing Noodle, at a White Castle in Springfield, Ohio, and a triple-decker sandwich concept, Deckers, in Lebanon, Tenn.
Customers have had a “very positive” reaction to the alcoholic beverages offered in Indiana, but for now, White Castle is considering only whether to expand them to the two other co-branded restaurants, Richardson said.
White Castle would face challenges trying to roll out beer and wine on a wider scale, Henkes said.
“What we find with fast-food places is, there’s very strict regulations around training. Typically, a lot of the employees in fast food are under 21, so you get into some service issues,” he said. “You get into some inventory issues. You get into whether distributors are willing to deliver to you because you’re generally not doing a whole lot of volume in these categories.”
Adding beer and wine to the menu sounds fine to lifelong White Castle fan Jim Kreml of Elk River, Minn. _ even though he’s a teetotaler. “I know my wife would love that because she is a wine drinker,” said Kreml, 47, the operator of a chimney-cleaning business who acknowledged he eats at the restaurants “a couple of times a week.”
Kreml, named in 2009 to White Castle’s Cravers Hall of Fame, said Wednesday that he would expect alcoholic beverage options to be popular with many slider aficionados. “If they’re of age and they drink that already, I think they’d be happy with that. As long as they’re responsible and don’t sit in there, and that’s not party time,” he said.
Peruvian Cabinet chief Salomon Lerner resigned Saturday after less than five months in the post and was replaced by the interior minister, who inherits an unresolved dispute over the country’s biggest mining investment.
The reason for Lerner’s resignation was not explained, but he was recently involved in failed attempts to negotiate an end to protests that stalled the $4.8 billion Conga gold mining project, which has been plagued by increasingly violent protests.
His resignation letter, posted online by the newspaper La Republica, does not make direct reference to the conflict but hints Lerner was unhappy with the government’s handling of it.
As Cabinet chief, Lerner wrote in the 1 1/2-page resignation letter, “our direct mandate has been dialogue and the seeking of consensus to avoid confrontation between Peruvians.”
After just one day of talks that Lerner led with local officials who fear the Conga project could taint and diminish water supplies affecting thousands, President Ollanta Humala on Dec. 5 called a state of emergency in four affected northern provinces for 60 days.
Lerner’s replacement, Interior Minister Oscar Valdes, is a 62-year-old former army officer who quit the military as a lieutenant in 1991 and became a successful executive at various businesses in the southern coastal city of Tacna, most recently a trucking company and pasta producer.
Humala, 49, was a student of Valdes in the 1980s at Peru’s military academy.
Humala, who canceled a trip to Argentina for the Saturday inauguration of President Cristina Fernandez, had no immediate comment on the change.
A successful businessman of Jewish descent, Lerner was twice campaign manager for the center-left Humala, a former army officer who lost the 2006 race and then won election last June.
The fate of the Conga project, whose principal owner is U.S.-based Newmont Mining Corp., is considered key to prospects for other mining investments in Peru, which gets 61 percent of export income from the sector.
A windfall tax that the industry agreed to, and that Lerner played a key role in brokering, is helping to underwrite social welfare programs that Humala promised during the election campaign.
O’FALLON, MO.
Premier Mario Monti urged lawmakers Tuesday to accept his financial rescue package, including new and higher taxes, saying Italy had risked running out of money to pay state salaries and pensions.
Lawmakers on the right and left have been grumbling over his 2-day-old rescue plan, including pension reforms to make Italians work far longer and a revived home property tax.
Monti’s rescue plan, approved by his Cabinet on Sunday aims to pull Italy back from the brink of default on its staggering sovereign debt, a scenario that could doom the eurozone and worsen economic crises across the globe.
“Parliament is sovereign, time is short, the room to maneuver is very little,” Monti said on a state TV talk show when asked about political leaders’ insistence in Italy that the austerity plan be softened.
He said it is “premature” to decide if his 3-week-old government would resort to a confidence vote in a bid to get his rescue recipe approved by Parliament quickly and intact.
With no political base in Parliament _ Monti and his ministers are all technocrats asked to save Italy’s finances _ the government would topple if it loses a confidence vote, a prospect that could trigger catastrophe in global markets.
Monti, an economist and former EU commissioner, announced emergency measures on Sunday that seek to save euro30 billion through austerity measures and reinvest euro10 billion of savings from those measures to enhance growth, which has been stuck at zero for a decade.
Much of the austerity strategy hinges on new or higher taxes, such as the higher excise tax on gasoline and diesel fuel, which already took effect Tuesday. News reports said it would mean it would cost consumers an extra euro5 or euro6 (nearly $7-8) every time they fill up their car.
Monti called the hike in fuel taxes “indispensable” and needed to help keep local public transport functioning.
“We didn’t have to look far. Greece represented what could have happened to Italy,” Monti said, evoking the drastic situation of its fellow eurozone member across the Adriatic.
“We lived well, consuming the wealth produced by past generations instead of producing more,” he said. Under existing pension system reforms over the last decade or so, many Italians could retire at as much as 80 percent of pay in their mid-50s. With Italians enjoying exceptional longevity, the pension payments are becoming nearly unsustainable.
Italy’s public debt is amounting to a staggering euro1.9 trillion, or 120 percent of its GDP.
Asked if Italy had risked being unable to pay its public servants, Monti replied, grimly: “It was certainly possible” that salaries as well as pensions ran that risk.
On Tuesday, the government approved the release of euro4.8 billion ($6.4 billion) from state coffers to fund strategic infrastructure projects aimed at stimulating economic growth. The funds will pay for highway projects, high-speed railways and retractable underwater barriers to help protect Venice from flooding.
Economists have mixed views on how effective infrastructure programs are for spurring economic growth, with most favoring privately funded projects for better stimulus. Still, longer-term projects such as railways usually require state funding because the investment period is too long for many investors.
Sunday’s Cabinet emergency decree allows the funds to be released immediately, but Parliament must still convert the measures into law.
The new funding includes euro2 billion to upgrade the Treviglio-Brescia and Milan-Genoa railway lines, both in the north, to high-speed, euro598 million for highways, and euro600 million for the Venetian lagoon mobile barriers, a project already more than two years behind schedule due to financial problems and designed to protect Venice from periodic high tides. The projects are expected to stimulate growth by putting unemployed people to work and to keep construction contracts flowing.
Unicredit economic analyst Chiara Corsa said the measures appear “sufficiently bold” to allow Italy to balance its budget by 2013,” even with recession looming.
Tropical Storm Sean continues to strengthen as it moves to the northeast toward Bermuda.
The U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said Thursday afternoon that Sean’s maximum sustained winds are 65 mph (100 kph). It is located about 285 miles (459 kilometers) west-southwest of Bermuda and is moving northeast at 13 mph (21 kph). The storm’s center should pass to the northwest of Bermuda on Friday morning.
A tropical storm warning is in effect for Bermuda, where storm conditions are expected to begin Thursday night online payday loan lenders. Sean is expected to produce 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) to 3 inches (8 centimeters) of rainfall there. Swells generated by Sean are affecting the southeastern U.S. coast and Bermuda, with life-threatening surf and rip currents.
The Atlantic hurricane season lasts from June to the end of November.
Powered by WordPress -- XHTML 1.0