ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s interior minister landed in Tehran on Saturday carrying personal messages from the country’s prime minister and its most powerful general, as Islamabad scrambled to hold together a ceasefire between the United States and Iran that appeared increasingly at risk of unraveling.
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On eve of Gilgit-Baltistan vote, Imran Khan’s PTI cries rigging as police pour in from across Pakistan
SKARDU: At a busy road cutting through this northern district, cars pass draped in the banners of rival political parties. Election symbols flicker from storefronts and party flags snap in the mountain wind. Gilgit-Baltistan, a dramatic swath of glacier and granite that borders China, Afghanistan, and Indian-administered Kashmir, is preparing to go to the polls for the first time in six years.
Pakistan’s largest data centre project takes shape with $230 mln Huawei tie-up
KARACHI: A Pakistani data centre venture backed by the Gul Ahmed Energy Group said it had signed a partnership agreement with Huawei’s local unit to build the country’s largest Tier III data centre, with an initial investment of $230 million that could climb to $600 million within four years.
Pakistan pitches Saudi investors on long-delayed motorway projects
ISLAMABAD: The communications minister invited Saudi Arabia’s leading business council on Friday to take a financial stake in three major highway projects, including a 306-kilometer motorway through Sindh that has languished in planning documents for the better part of three decades, as Islamabad pressed to close a persistent gap in its national road network and draw Gulf capital into an infrastructure push central to its economic recovery.
Days before budget, ECC hands out billions — including lawmakers’ pet projects
ISLAMABAD: Less than a week before the federal budget is set to be unveiled, the government’s top economic decision-making body approved more than Rs40 billion in supplementary spending grants on Friday, extended a Rs100 billion sovereign-backed borrowing facility to the cash-starved national oil company, and quietly expanded a lucrative bonus program — worth up to six months of additional salary — to several more government ministries.
AJK government brands leading protest group a terrorist organisation days before planned strike
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.
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.