GILGIT: The Pakistan Peoples Party appeared on Sunday night to have won a commanding plurality in elections for the Gilgit-Baltistan Legislative Assembly, with unofficial returns from across the remote Himalayan territory showing the party leading in at least 10 of the 24 directly contested seats — even as its own leaders joined rival parties in accusing election officials of withholding the paperwork that stands between a result and a verified one.
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AJK Supreme Court rules refugee assembly seats can only be removed by elected parliament — not by protest
MUZAFFARABAD: The Supreme Court of Azad Jammu and Kashmir has delivered a pointed constitutional rebuke to a banned protest movement demanding the abolition of reserved seats for Kashmiri refugees, ruling that the twelve contested places in the region’s legislative assembly enjoy full constitutional protection and can be removed only through formal parliamentary amendment — not through street agitation or political pressure.
Bahria Town CEO’s overseas assets frozen in Pakistan money-laundering probe
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s premier anti-corruption agency said on Saturday it had frozen $4.5 million held in foreign bank accounts linked to the chief executive of Bahria Town, the country’s most prominent real estate developer, and his wife — the latest salvo in a sweeping money-laundering investigation that has ensnared one of Pakistan’s most powerful business dynasties.
Temperatures to hit 51°C as Pakistan faces severe heatwave through mid-June
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s national weather authority issued a sweeping heatwave warning Saturday covering most of the country, forecasting temperatures that in some districts of Sindh and Balochistan could climb as high as 51 degrees Celsius — a level of heat that poses acute risks to human life — and cautioning that the scorching conditions would persist through at least June 12.
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 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.
PTI leaders again turned away at prison gates for Imran Khan visit
RAWALPINDI: They arrived early, submitted their names, and waited in the heat outside Adiala jail for two hours. By the time 4 o’clock came and the window for visitation closed, not one of the six Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf leaders had been allowed past the gates to see their imprisoned party founder, Imran Khan.
Pakistan braces for a punishing summer as El Niño tightens its grip
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan is heading into a summer of dangerous heat and diminished rains, the country’s national weather service warned Wednesday, painting a picture of a nation caught between two gathering climate threats: the creeping warmth of El Niño in the Pacific and the accelerating melt of its own glaciers in the north.
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.