ISLAMABAD: American warplanes fired a Hellfire missile into the engine room of an oil tanker in the Persian Gulf on Tuesday, the sixth vessel disabled since Washington imposed a naval blockade on Iran in April, touching off a cascade of retaliatory strikes and counter-strikes that laid bare the fragility of a ceasefire that has never truly held.
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As US-Iran talks teeter, Netanyahu defies pressure to stand down in Lebanon — and eight more die
ISLAMABAD: Israeli drone strikes killed eight people in southern Lebanon on Tuesday, hours after President Trump declared that Israel and Hezbollah had agreed to stop fighting — an announcement undercut almost immediately by renewed bloodshed and a torrent of conflicting statements from governments on both sides of the conflict.
Pakistan delays budget presentation as coalition fractures, IMF talks linger
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has postponed the unveiling of its federal budget for fiscal year 2026-27 by five days to June 10, as Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s administration grapples with mounting pressure from fractious coalition allies and unfinished negotiations with the International Monetary Fund over the spending plan’s architecture.
NAB returns Rs6 billion to northwestern province in first phase of sprawling public funds fraud case
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s national anti-corruption agency has returned more than six billion rupees — roughly $21.5 million — to the government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, authorities said on Tuesday, marking the first concrete recovery in a fraud case that investigators say drained more than 37 billion rupees, or approximately $133 million, from public coffers over nearly a decade.
Pakistan fuel demand hits 13-year May low as prices bite
KARACHI: Pakistan’s petroleum sales fell to their lowest level for any May in 13 years last month, as retail fuel prices above Rs400 per liter squeezed household budgets, curtailed transport activity, and compounded the demand hit from the Eid Al-Adha holiday, according to data compiled by Arif Habib Limited Research.
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.
Eight Muslim nations issue joint rebuke over Israeli settler incursions at Al-Aqsa mosque
ISLAMABAD: The foreign ministers of eight Muslim-majority nations issued a joint condemnation on Tuesday of the systematic desecration of Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem, holding Israeli authorities directly responsible for escalating incursions by far-right settlers and demanding an immediate halt to a deliberate campaign to upend decades of legal and religious precedent at one of the world’s most contested holy sites.
Security forces kill 17 militants in Balochistan raids following deadly train attack
ISLAMABAD: The military said on Tuesday it has killed 17 militants in a series of intelligence-based operations sweeping across Balochistan, the country’s restive southwestern province, in retaliation for a suicide bombing last month that struck a passenger train near Quetta and left at least 14 people dead.
Trump erupts at Netanyahu in profanity-laced call, halts Beirut strike plans as Lebanon crisis threatens Iran deal
ISLAMABAD: US President Trump called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “crazy,” told him he would be in jail without his protection, and shouted profanities at him during a phone call on Monday, media outlet Axios and others reported, quoting two US officials and a third source briefed on the conversation — a searing confrontation that halted a planned Israeli military assault on Beirut and exposed deepening fractures between two leaders who have long presented their alliance as unshakable.
Pakistan steps up diplomacy as Iran freezes talks with US, straining fragile ceasefire
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s foreign minister placed an urgent telephone call to his Iranian counterpart on Monday, urging Tehran to preserve a fragile regional ceasefire even as Iran announced it was halting indirect negotiations with the United States — a move that raised the specter of a broader collapse in the diplomatic architecture that has kept a wider Middle Eastern war at bay since April.