Pakistan denies sharing Iran nuclear intelligence with Rubio, calls claims ‘baseless’
ISLAMABAD: The Foreign Office on Thursday issued a sharp denial of reports that Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar had passed sensitive intelligence to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio about Iran’s nuclear program, calling the claims fabricated and potentially designed to sabotage fragile diplomatic efforts across a region already bristling with tensions.
No more appeals: Top court upholds death sentence for killer Zahir Jaffer who murdered and beheaded Noor Mukadam
The Supreme Court rejected the last legal appeal filed by Zahir Jaffer, the Pakistani-American heir to an industrial fortune who was convicted of the July 2021 killing of Noor Mukadam, 27, and has now exhausted nearly every avenue of appeal available to him under Pakistani law. The three-member bench, led by Justice Muhammad Hashim Khan Kakar, announced the decision after nearly four hours of oral argument, cementing a death sentence that has survived review at every level of the country’s judiciary.
Roads, rights, and roti: party leaders woo voters in the shadow of the Karakoram
GILGIT: He stepped off the plane and onto broken roads, and Nawaz Sharif could not hide his dismay.
The three-time former prime minister of Pakistan had not visited Gilgit-Baltistan in years, and what greeted him on Tuesday upon leaving the airport was a testament to the benign neglect that has defined Islamabad’s relationship with one of its most spectacular, and most overlooked, territories. Crumbling pavement. Potholed streets. An airport frozen in time, unchanged since his own tenure in power.
BITES
- Mobile broadband services restored
- LPG prices rise by 29.2pc for February
- Cabinet swells to 75 members
- Govt allows TCP to import wheat via all ports
- World Bank approves $200 million in loan for Punjab’s farm development project
- PM Sharif’s party decides to get tough on hecklers
- Apex court overturns PHC ban on poultry exports
- Shahbaz Gill declined bail
- IHC disposes of PTI employees petition against FIA notices
- Rupee plumbs new lows against dollar
- Punjab gets new policy chief
- Loans under Mera Ghar scheme to continue
- Senior army official shot dead in Balochistan rescue operation
- Bani Gala Firing: Man shot, wounded by PTI leader’s gunman
- Turkish commander calls on CJCSC
- Inquiry commission to probe reasons of energy crisis
- ANP set to fly Sharif’s coop
- Member Communist Party of China calls on COAS
- CHE to be renamed, HQ shifted to Karachi
- Pakistan to import high-quality Afghan coal in rupees
- IHC chucks plea to interfere with legislation
- Saudi Arabia confers King Abdulaziz medal on General Bajwa
- Interior Minister no-show at drugs case hearing
- Pakistan hopes early, successful visit by FATF team
- Pakistan commiserates with Afghanistan over quake, flood destruction
Pakistan’s trade gap widens to $34.76 billion as exports slide for most of fiscal year
KARACHI: Pakistan’s trade deficit swelled 17.5% to $34.76 billion in the first eleven months of fiscal year 2025-26, as a persistent slide in export earnings collided with rising import costs, deepening strains on an economy still navigating a fragile external-sector recovery.
Pakistan braces for a punishing summer as El Niño tightens its grip
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan is heading into a summer of dangerous heat and diminished rains, the country’s national weather service warned Wednesday, painting a picture of a nation caught between two gathering climate threats: the creeping warmth of El Niño in the Pacific and the accelerating melt of its own glaciers in the north.