Bilawal Bhutto Zardari spent the weekend watching the internet marry him off. By Monday, the chairman of Pakistan Peoples Party had heard enough. In a video statement posted to social media, he said that he is not engaged, is not getting married, and has never met the Austrian noblewoman the rumors had already fitted him for a wedding suit alongside.
People
Zardari, son face fresh denial over engagement reports as speculation drags into a second week
KARACHI: For more than a week, a rumour has been moving through Pakistani media and social media: that President Asif Ali Zardari’s trip abroad was really about arranging a marriage for his son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the 38-year-old chairman of the Pakistan Peoples Party. The party has now denied it twice, in effect — once flatly, and once by staying silent as an even more detailed version of the story emerged anyway.
Health minister Kamal proposes ending permanent hospital jobs after fatal newborn fire
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.
Karachi mayor knocks down reports of Bhutto scion’s European wedding
KARACHI: The mayor of Karachi moved late on Saturday to shut down a wave of speculation that has consumed Pakistani social media for days: reports that Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, chairman of the Pakistan Peoples Party and son of President Asif Ali Zardari, was engaged to marry a woman from the tiny European principality of Liechtenstein.
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.
Eight officials suspended, face criminal charges over deadly Islamabad hospital fire
ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif ordered the suspension of eight hospital and government officials on Saturday and directed that criminal charges be filed against them, after an official inquiry into a nursery fire that killed 14 newborns found the hospital lacked basic fire alarms, a workable evacuation plan, and had ignored warnings from a nearly identical fire just weeks earlier.
Judge opens inquiry into Mir Raza Ali’s death as police file charges against protesters
KARACHI: A Sindh High Court justice opened the first hearing Friday in a judicial inquiry into the death of Mir Raza Ali, a 25-year-old businessman whose family has insisted for a month that he was murdered, even as police in a separate action filed charges against roughly 100 people accused of blocking one of the city’s main thoroughfares during a nightly vigil demanding answers in the case.
Minister Kamal calls health system ‘rotten’ after deadly Pims fire
ISLAMABAD: The health minister told lawmakers on Friday that “no one will be spared” in the aftermath of a nursery fire that killed 14 infants at a government hospital here, as members of parliament from across the political spectrum demanded an independent accounting of how flames were able to sweep through a neonatal ward at the country’s most prominent medical facility.