ARTICLE (February 09, 2010): Have you seen, in real life or in a film a fight between two bulls standing head to head, straining to push each other out of the field in the opposite direction? Did you notice how the end came? Well you may have noticed that the bull to first loose his rear-feet grip on the earth starts retreating and once the first few inches of retreat are ceded, a total, unstoppable rout results.

ARTICLE (February 09, 2010): Business Recorder's 1st February, 2010 issue ran the preamble on the captioned article. Its thrust was that our economic managers have mindlessly persisted with a manifestly bankrupt trickle-down theory of economic development promoted by Washington institutions (WB/IMF).

ARTICLE (February 09, 2010): Somalia's fearsome pirates don't have many friends among the Indian Ocean's seafaring community. But Kenya's fleet of modest Swahili fishermen think the region's most-wanted are a godsend. The sight of two fishing boats emerging from the horizon and bobbing towards the shore stirs a real commotion in Aziz Suleiman's ramshackle observation spot in the Kenyan port of Mombasa.

ARTICLE (February 08, 2010): I love criticism just so long as it is unqualified praise, so stated Noel Coward. The same thought was expressed by Somerset Maugham, "people ask you for criticism; but they only want praise." There are an equal if not more proverbs that highlight deficiencies in the one who criticises. One of the major English Romantic poets Percy Bysshe Shelley said "that as a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic."

ARTICLE (February 08, 2010): In his article (Challenges and prospects) published in these columns on January 3, Finance Minister Shaukat Tarin summed up what critics had been saying for years about the deceptive economic progress during 2003-08. Surely, Tarin could clearly see where we were headed but there is hardly any evidence to suggest that he warned his Citibank colleague Shaukat Aziz about it.

ARTICLE (February 08, 2010): The return of two young pandas from the United States to their ancestral home in China this week was filled with warm gestures at a time when relations between the two powers could use a little goodwill. The US State Department used the symbolic moment to brush aside increasingly difficult ties with Beijing, calling it a "tangible and furry manifestation of co-operation."

TEXT (February 08, 2010): The following is the text of an interview of Imran Khalid Mahmood, Country General Manager Nokia Pakistan, given to Business Recorder here in Karachi.

ARTICLE (February 07, 2010): Capital Value Tax ("CVT") - a tax on the capital value of assets - levied through the Finance Act, 1989, as amended from time to time, is payable by every individual, association of persons, firm or company acquiring inter alia immovable property by purchase, gift, exchange, surrender, relinquishment of rights or grant of a power of attorney relating thereto.

ARTICLE (February 07, 2010): The creation of a new occupational group: The government has taken a number of important actions in support of the integration process. Most significantly, the Inland Revenue Service (IRS) was created by the Establishment Division, in accordance with the terms of the July 2009 Agreement between the Government of Pakistan (GoP) and the World Bank (Istanbul Agreements).

ARTICLE (February 07, 2010): Both the people and jurists of Pakistan take pride in the fact that the Founder of the Nation, Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was a lawyer by profession. And what made the nation more proud was the fact that Quaid-e-Azam proved his mettle as a first-class jurist who knew the power of the word and rule of law more than any other human being, dwelling in this part of the globe.