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Pakistan

A game of chance

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Punjab’s senate elections ended in a whimper. The lead up to the election was marked with plenty of hue and cry, angry statements, fears of votes being traded for money and a presidential reference that was sent to the Supreme Court.

Imran Yaqub Khan Profile Imran Yaqub Khan

Strange points were raised, such as a secret ballot that would be traceable and proportional representation was questioned. In the end, however, all members were elected unopposed. Not a single ballot paper was required. Enemies sorted out all matters between themselves.

A more pertinent lesson could not have been derived from the development. Political matters need not be taken to court. The wiliness and slyness that is a necessity in any political arena do not belong in the hallowed halls of law. In fact, they sully the sanctity of judicial houses.

Blots on our history, such as Justice Munir’s Doctrine of Necessity, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s death sentence and Musharaff’s LFO have left deep marks. Future judges tried their best to wash out the stains. They did fade, but did not disappear.

Political chances suit only politicians. If after all the bad blood and trash talk that the opposition and government indulged in before sitting down to settle Punjab’s senate polls, anyone believes that either would not give or take an NRO, is incredibly naïve.

What happened in Punjab can be summarized in one sentence i.e. acceptable names got through, unacceptable ones didn’t. Quetta’s Abdul Qadir is one of the lucky few who have been approved of. When PTI Balochistan members objected to his ticket, Qadir switched over to Bap and became a member overnight. Zahoor Agha was brought in as a salve to soothe bruises but had less longevity than a tissue paper. He recanted right after his papers were filed, abdicating the polls in favor of Abdul Qadir. The chosen one is not selected by party workers, after all.

If not a fluke of chance, then what else can we call the (re)rise of former Premier, Yousuf Raza Gillani. At the center of the political battle that will be waged in the capital, Gillani told Maryam Nawaz that he knew of PTI lawmakers who will give him a vote in return for assurances of PML-N tickets in 2023. Consider that the three parties at the center of this particular smorgasbord are the biggest three in the country. The seekers are from the ruling PTI, the givers are from PML-N and the brokers of the deal are the PPP.

And consider how the Punjab settlement, such as it is, was authored by the PML-Q. With an increased likelihood of both the vote and the note disrupting proceedings, Pervez Elahi took it upon himself to manage affairs and bring them to a conclusion acceptable to everyone. He contacted sympathizers in all the major parties, settled the issue and in the process, managed to get a seat for PML-Q’s Kamil Ali Agha.

As for the contest between Gillani and Hafeez Sheikh, well, it might not be of much surprise to anyone if a few pawns here and there switch sides. This is not unprecedented. Here, parties are broken up and formed anew over a period of just 24 hours. If Gillani wins then of course the doors to a no-confidence move will be opened. And that will end the impression of government and establishment being on the same page. The million dollar question is, will that day finally come to pass?

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Technology

Qualcomm quietly demos Baldur’s Gate 3 and Control on Snapdragon X Elite laptops

Qualcomm has apparently been showing influencers how well its Snapdragon X Elite can game, using Control, Baldur’s Gate 3, and a few other games.

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If you read my scoop last week, I bet you’ve been wondering — how well could a Snapdragon chip actually run Windows games? At the 2024 Game Developers Conference, the company claimed Arm could run those titles at close to x86/64 speed, but how fast is fast?

With medium-weight games like Control and Baldur’s Gate 3, it looks like the target might be: 30 frames per second at 1080p screen resolution, medium settings, possibly with AMD’s FSR 1.0 spatial upscaling enabled.

That’s what Qualcomm has apparently been showing influencers, according to numerous videos from YouTubers, TikTokers, and “Snapdragon Insiders,” many of which were uploaded over the past week after they flew down to Qualcomm’s San Diego headquarters for the company’s “eXperience Day.”

While some of the videos feel a little promotional — one influencer talks about how he’s seeing “Elden Ring playing really nicely at about 30 frames per second” while actually showing Baldur’s Gate 3 running at a mere 21-24fps — it’s admittedly pretty neat to see games like these running on Windows on Arm at all.

Enobong Etteh, aka BooredAtWork, has the video with the most uninterrupted gameplay footage; he apparently got to try Control, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Redout 2 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this February. In early scenes from Control that don’t demand as much horsepower, we’re seeing frame rates that dip as low as 26fps in a firefight or between 30fps and 40fps just running around.

Today’s gaming handhelds can do better than that, but this is an early demo.

Another video from JuanBagnell shows frame rates of 25 to 30fps in Baldur’s Gate 3 in the game’s very first fight, which takes place in a completely enclosed area, not the open world; BG3 also infamously demands a lot more of a computer’s CPU in the final third of the game, so calling the game “playable” might be a bit of a stretch.

BooredAtWork also suggests later in his video that Baldur’s Gate 3 may be playable on the laptop with AMD’s FSR 1.0 toggled to its “Performance” setting, which lets games render at a much lower render resolution than 1080p and try to make up the difference with upscaling.

Here’s a third video:

It’s worth remembering we’re looking at these games running on a Qualcomm reference design laptop, not final hardware, and we don’t know how much (or little) optimization these games have had. They might perform better!

We may also now have a hint at battery life, too: JuanBagnell says Qualcomm told him the entire laptop is “rated to operate at around 20-24 watts.” If that’s true, and you theoretically put that in a thin laptop with a typical 49.5 watt-hour battery (like the Qualcomm-powered Lenovo ThinkPad X13s), you can roughly divide 49.5 by 24 to get just over two hours of battery. That’d be on par with today’s Windows gaming handhelds, but not better.

BooredAtWork says Qualcomm told him these laptops already support 250 PC games and should have 500 by launch.

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Regional

Baltimore’s bridge collapse is global shipping’s smallest problem

From drought in the Panama Canal to the Houthis in the Suez to pirates off Somalia, we’re all paying the price.

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Baltimore woke up yesterday to horrific images of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsing into the harbor after the cargo ship Dali lost power and collided with a support column.

It’s a horrible tragedy — six construction workers who were on the bridge at the time are missing and presumed dead — and one that will likely take at least several billion dollars to repair.

In a small bright spot, the macroeconomic impact will likely be limited. (While Baltimore is the US’s 17th largest port and there will be some costs and delays, particularly around automobiles and coal, other ports will quickly handle rerouted container ships.)

There is a reason, however, that economic concerns immediately spiked: The global shipping industry is having a bit of a rough time right now.

International shipping traffic is being choked at two separate, vital points — the Panama Canal in the Western hemisphere and the Suez Canal in the Eastern — which combined account for more than half of the container shipping that links Asia and North America.

And as awful as this Baltimore incident was, it was, by all accounts, a rogue accident. The root causes of these other disruptions, though? They’re not quite as easily fixed.

Oh, plus pirates are back.

Global shipping’s current problems, briefly explained

The Baltimore incident encapsulates one thing really well: just how globalized the shipping industry is. The Dali was a Singapore-flagged ship, with an all Indian-nationality crew, operated by the Danish company Maersk and on its way to Sri Lanka. (Thankfully, there were no injuries reported among the crew of the ship.)

This degree of interconnectedness — and how fragile it all is — probably feels familiar by now. Remember the wide swath of consumer goods that were subjected to back orders and shortages in 2021 as the global supply chain fell victim to a series of interconnected problems, including (but definitely not limited to) issues with container ships and ports?

Or, more hilariously, remember the delays (and memes) the ship Ever Given spawned when it got stuck in the Suez Canal?

This year is shaping up to be another difficult one for global shipping.

Low water levels in Panama — the result of a prolonged drought that began in early 2023 — forced canal officials late last year to cut the number of ships that pass through each day from the normal 38 to just 24. That’s left some ships stranded for more than two weeks, and others taking costly roundabout routes; major shipping companies are even switching some freight to railroad “land bridges” across parts of the country.

And in the Red Sea, the Houthis, a Yemen-based rebel group that controls much of the country’s north, have been waging an increasingly serious campaign of attacks against shipping, purportedly in protest of Israel’s war in Gaza. Ships are rerouting here, too, this time around the Horn of Africa, or facing the risk at added cost. At the start of this month, the Houthis sank a ship. And while the group is reportedly allowing safe passage to some ships — those affiliated with Russia and China — that’s not necessarily a foolproof guarantee.

Between the two, prices for freight containers from Asia to the US have doubled over the last six months.

Low water levels outside the Miraflores locks of the Panama Canal near Panama City, Panama, last November.
Walter Hurtado/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Can’t we fix this?

It would be tempting to look at both of these issues and think, “Things will get better soon.”

And in some ways, they will. “The industry is going to find medium- to short-term solutions against these particular obstacles,” Nikos Nomikos, a professor of shipping finance and risk management at Bayes Business School in London, told me.

Take the Panama Canal problem: The cuts are, canal officials repeatedly say, a responsible adaptation to a particularly bad year. Droughts have happened before, and the weather phenomenon El Niño is exacerbating droughts throughout the Americas, with devastating consequences.

But this isn’t just a bad year. There are systemic issues at play with no quick answers. Climate change is worsening extreme weather events around the world, including droughts.

And that’s running up against another competing need. As Dulcidio De La Guardia, a director at the Morgan & Morgan Group in Panama, told the Latin American Advisor in February, “The lakes that provide water to the Canal are the same ones used to supply drinking water to the major cities of the country.”

“And water consumption has increased more rapidly than forecasted due to population growth, and poor management, waste, inefficiencies and corruption at the state-owned water company,” he said. There are potential solutions, but no easy or immediate ones.

And then in the Red Sea: While the Houthis might temporarily halt or reduce their attacks if a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas comes through, there’s no guarantee that they’ll stop altogether.

That’s because, as one Yemeni analyst told my colleague Josh Keating, the attacks serve a lot of the group’s other aims, allowing them to “disrupt economic activity, extract political concessions, and bolster their standing.” Having achieved that, they show no signs of backing down, even in the face of Western military strikes.

Moreover, this is part of a broader trend of increased geopolitical instability, all of which can impact — and increasingly is impacting — global shipping. See also: Russia blocking Ukrainian grain from transiting the Black Sea at times during that war, fears about how a war over Taiwan will affect the global economy, and more.

What’s happening in the Red Sea, in other words, is symptomatic of something fundamental.

The “principle of freedom of navigation is being challenged here,” Rahul Kapoor, the head of shipping analytics and research at S&P Global Commodity Insights, told Bloomberg in December about the Houthis’ attacks.

I’m not trying to be alarmist. Global shipping is a “resilient industry,” Nomikos told me.

But countries’ militaries and international shipping companies alike are thinking and planning for more maritime disruptions.

Customers, unfortunately, should too.

Any disruption’s net result “will be an increase in the freight cost, either because you have more fuel consumption and longer transit times, or because you require a premium to compensate you for the risks that you face,” Nomikos said.

This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

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Regional

Khalid Maqbool claims some people forcefully impose on Karachi 

He also said that if the Sindh government will not control street crime then MQM will protect itself.

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Karachi: Muttahida Qaumi Movement’s (MQM) convener Khalid Maqbool Siddique claimed that some people are enumerated by constituencies, voter list and census imposed on Karachi.

According to the details, Khalid Maqbool was addressing in the MQM iftar dinner regarding the imposed people in Karachi.

MQM’s leader warned those people by saying that after eid MQM will be free under its protection. He stated that both thieves and soldiers in Karachi do not belong here. 

He also said that if the Sindh government will not control street crime then MQM will protect itself.

 

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