Telenor Pakistan Wins Two International Architecture Awards


The state-of-the-art Telenor Pakistan headquarters ‘345’ is making headlines in the global architectural community as it has bagged two prestigious awards: the 2A Continental Architectural Award 2018 in the ‘Commercial – Office & Business – Asia’ category, and the World Architecture Community Award 2018 in the ‘Realised’ category.

These two awards are on top of the HQ being shortlisted in ‘completed office building’ category at the World Architecture Festival held in Amsterdam this year where it competed with 17 other global architectural marvels.

The 2A Continental Architectural Awards were held in Barcelona, Spain where Telenor Pakistan’s Headquarter, 345, secured the first place & won the coveted award.

The second award, The World Architecture Community Award, recognizes the best projects & buildings across the globe.

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Punjab Govt to Provide Scooties & Bikes to Students on Easy Installments



Punjab government is giving away bikes and scooties on easy installments to female students from the start of 2019.

The announcement has come in a bid to provide transport facilities to females. Chairman Punjab Education Foundation, Wasiq Qayyum Abbasi, said that the scheme will kickstart in the advent of 2019.

He said that the government will provide cycles to the male students while giving traveling vouchers to the female students. Moreover, it will provide scooties to degree and university students.

To provide relief to the students, the government will provide these vehicles on easy installments, said the Chairman.

Abbasi further told that the traveling vouchers will be for the metric and intermediate female students. This initiative is to ensure that the students reach school on time without spending much on pick and drop.

He said that there are around 50 million students studying in 53,000 schools and 550 colleges across the province. Moreover, the use of scooties among women is becoming popular as it is economical and an easy way of transportation.

The PEF Chairman further said that the working women also require a cheaper and easier mode of transportation.

It is pertinent to mention here that former chief minister, Shehbaz Sharif, had launched a scheme named Women on Wheels under Punjab government’s ‘Subsidized Motorcycle Scheme for Women’. The scheme aimed at empowering the women and enabling them to claim back control of the public places.

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Iranian Students in UK Choose Bitcoin to Circumvent US Sanctions


The US sanctions against Iran have cut the global economic corridors for the Western Asian country. And the latest victims of this ongoing political mishap are students.

According to the Guardian, hundreds of Iranians students in the United Kingdom have been denied banking services. As a result, they are falling behind their payment dues, including their tuition fees. 23-year old Parsa Sadat, a law student at the University of Reading, for instance, has been told to either go to Iran and bring money in cash or face expulsion from his course.

“Even if the funds for the flight and fees can be raised, requiring Parsa to transport large amounts of cash within and from a country classified by the Foreign Office as a high-risk country, exposes the university to justifiable criticism,” said Mai Sato, an Associate Professor at Reading. “Parsa himself feels that carrying several thousand pounds in cash is dangerous.”

Students Opting Bitcoin
With no solution appearing from the global sphere, students are now forced to take active measures to bypass the US President Trump’s sanctions on Iran.

IranWire.com’s chief editor Maziar Bahari told the Guardian that many Iranian students had started using cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, a digital currency that many considers as a useful payment tool to bypass global economic resistances. The protocol underpinning the bitcoin payment tool is decentralized, which means that no central authority can control its functionality. The end-to-end encryption integrated into the bitcoin protocol also makes it semi-anonymous.

An average Iranian parent, therefore, can purchase some units of bitcoin from local exchanges and send them across to the bitcoin wallets of his/her families residing anywhere in the world. The receiver upon receiving the bitcoin funds can again trade them for fiats via a local exchange – over-the-counter or online.

The entire procedure can be done without needing the permission of central authorities. However, some governments require bitcoin users to report their transactions while fearing a rise in money laundering and terrorist financing issues. Iran mainly is against cryptocurrencies and has imposed an outright ban on its use.

Ban on Bitcoin
CCN in July had found that Iranians were nevertheless purchasing bitcoin on prime rates to bypass the US sanctions, right under the nose of the Iranian government.

“I started purchasing Bitcoin, and even Ethereum, thinking Iranian central bank will not be able to resolve the poor economic situation,” a trader, whose identity was kept a secret on her request, told CCN. “I had read many reports about Chinese and Venezuelan people doing the same at the time of their economic crisis.”

It appears that Iranian parents will be risking themselves if they decided to fund their children’s education using bitcoin unless Iran agrees to reconsider its stance on cryptocurrencies.

Images from Shutterstock.

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