MUZAFFARABAD: The government of Azad Jammu and Kashmir formally banned the region’s most prominent protest movement on Friday, designating it a terrorist organisation and deploying thousands of paramilitary and police reinforcements as tensions mounted ahead of a planned mass demonstration and the region’s first general elections in years.
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Govt cuts petrol price for fourth straight week as global oil slump deepens
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan cut petrol prices by Rs4 per litre on Friday while holding diesel rates unchanged, extending a run of consecutive weekly reductions as a slide in global crude prices filters through to consumers still reeling from the inflationary shock of earlier this year.
Pakistan dismisses India’s objections to Gilgit-Baltistan vote as ‘fake narratives’ ahead of Sunday elections
ISLAMABAD: The Foreign Office on Friday delivered a sharp rebuke to New Delhi, dismissing India’s objections to scheduled elections in Gilgit-Baltistan as “baseless” propaganda and accusing India of mounting a “carefully choreographed attempt to conflate fact with fiction” — all while election workers in the remote mountain territory were finalising security deployments for Sunday’s vote.
AJK schedules July 27 vote, amid protest clouds and a swelling electorate
ISLAMABAD: The election commission governing Azad Jammu and Kashmir announced on Friday that voters in the Pakistan-administered territory would go to the polls on July 27, formally launching the region’s first general elections in four years and setting off a compressed, seven-week campaign cycle in one of South Asia’s most politically contested pieces of land.
Pakistan pushes SCO partners for unified front against terror, cybercrime
ISLAMABAD: Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi arrived at a gathering of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s security ministers in Oslo on Friday carrying two distinct, and increasingly urgent, messages: that the region’s governments must forge a unified front against a new generation of technologically sophisticated threats — and that the diplomatic window for ending a dangerous escalation between the United States and Iran was narrowing fast.
Telenor taps Citi for Easypaisa Bank sale, marking full Pakistan exit
KARACHI: Norway’s Telenor is working with Citigroup to sell its controlling stake in Pakistani digital lender Easypaisa Bank, Bloomberg reported on Friday, a move that would complete the telecom group’s withdrawal from Pakistan after two decades.
Azad Kashmir orders tourists out as security forces mass ahead of protest strike
MUZAFFARABAD: The government of Azad Jammu and Kashmir told tourists to leave its mountain valleys immediately on Friday, as convoys of paramilitary troops rolled into the regional capital and authorities quietly braced for what officials feared could become the territory’s most destabilizing unrest in months.
Six militants killed in Panjgur raid as Pakistan steps up campaign against India-linked terror group
ISLAMABAD: The security forces killed six militants in an overnight intelligence-led operation in the southwestern district of Panjgur, the military said Friday, the latest strike in an accelerating counterterrorism campaign that Islamabad has increasingly cast as a proxy war with neighboring India.
Pakistan rolls out one percent fixed tax for small retailers in bid to widen net ahead of IMF-guided budget
ISLAMABAD: The government unveiled a flat-rate tax scheme for small retailers on Friday, offering shopkeepers a simplified one-page filing process and exemption from audit in an effort to drag millions of informal traders into a revenue base long derided as narrow, inequitable and politically resistant to reform.
Security forces kill four militants in two nighttime raids in northwest, as counterterrorism campaign intensifies
ISLAMABAD: Security forces killed four terrorists in two separate intelligence-based operations in the volatile northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the military’s media wing said on Thursday.