ISLAMABAD: The health minister called for eliminating permanent civil-service positions at government hospitals, proposing instead that a chief executive recruited from the private sector be given full hiring and firing authority — a sweeping restructuring plan floated just days after a fire killed 14 newborns at a hospital in the capital.
Lifestyle
Kashmir’s new prime minister pledges to lift internet blackout, reopen roads within days
The newly elected prime minister of Azad Jammu and Kashmir told business leaders and students on Saturday that his government would restore internet access at schools and lift road restrictions with Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa within days, an attempt to calm a region shaken by months of deadly protests and a communications blackout that has choked commerce and closed classrooms.
25 Pakistani fishermen freed from Indian jails, cross home through Wagah border
LAHORE: Twenty-five Pakistani fishermen walked back into their home country on Saturday afternoon, released from Indian prisons and escorted across the Wagah-Attari border crossing in a repatriation, the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi confirmed later in the day.
Despite war’s shadow in Mideast, climbers flock to Pakistan’s highest peaks
GILGIT: In the high valleys of northern Pakistan, where five of the world’s 14 peaks above 8,000 meters rise within a few hundred miles of each other, more than 2,200 foreign climbers and trekkers arrived this summer to test themselves against some of the most punishing terrain on Earth — a number tourism officials say marks a clear rebound from a difficult year before, even as the broader region absorbed the shock of a war between the United States, Israel, and Iran.
Gilgit-Baltistan presses ahead with trophy hunt auction after a season upended by unrest
GILGIT: The mountainous northern territory of Gilgit-Baltistan will put hunting permits for three markhor, the national animal of Pakistan, up for auction next month, part of a wildlife program that generates millions of dollars a year for remote Himalayan communities but that has struggled to recover from a wave of unrest tied to the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader.
Police widen inquiry into Rawalpindi woman’s death as husband, servant remain in custody
RAWALPINDI: A duty magistrate here ordered the husband and household servant of a young woman found dead in her apartment last week held in police custody for three additional days, as investigators press forward on a case that has drawn condemnation from the country’s first lady and members of its Parliament.
A year on, India still can’t sell the world its version of a four-day war
Discovery timed its release carefully. Declassified: Operation Sindoor, a two-part documentary on the India-Pakistan May 2025 conflict, went out over the Indian Independence Day weekend, with its security adviser Ajit Doval speaking on camera for the first time and Bollywood’s Mumbai skyline lit sindoor-red as part of the promotional push.
Carriage ride through Islamabad parade draws cries of ‘colonial’ excess
The horses arrived first. The applause never did.
That is the image Pakistanis have been passing around since Saturday: two of the country’s senior bureaucrats, riding into an Independence Day parade in a carriage built for heads of state, to a crowd that would not clap.
Hunza bids farewell to Sohail Sakhi as avalanche-hit climber laid to rest
HUNZA: The body of Pakistani mountaineer Sohail Sakhi was laid to rest on Sunday in his home village of Aliabad, in the Hunza district of Gilgit-Baltistan, following funeral prayers attended by hundreds of mourners, more than a fortnight after he was killed in an avalanche on one of the world’s highest peaks.
Rain, gusty winds to sweep Pakistan for five days as authorities warn of urban flooding
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan is bracing for another bout of heavy monsoon weather, with the Meteorological Department forecasting rain, gusty winds and thundershowers across the upper and central parts of the country from August 17 to 21, alongside warnings of urban flooding and landslides in vulnerable districts.