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Iran war creates new must-have for summer holidays — the plan B

Greg Abbott was planning his summer holiday with half an eye on the Iran war. He intended to stay closer to home in Europe and was lining up a plan B, wary of rising air fares and cancellations. The 54-year-old Britain-based Australian was planning a cycling trip with friends in Austria, a festival in Barcelona and possibly a yoga retreat in France. But he did not want to go too far and was keeping travel options open. “We’ll almost certainly be doing short-haul Europe, and almost certainly be doing trains, because they run on electricity,” said Abbott, head of operations for a broadcasting company, adding cost was a key factor against longer trips. “The prices are just crazy at the moment.” Across Europe and beyond, tourists are reshaping plans in a world of $100 oil, tight jet fuel supply, higher costs and Middle East conflict disrupting popular routes. Many are booking later and building in flexibility. “We observe travellers becoming more cautious and deliberate,” said Susanne...
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Justice Aurangzeb calls for encouraging alternative dispute resolution, says SC to establish mediation centre

Justice Miangul Hassan Aurangzeb has called on the judiciary to encourage alternative dispute resolution (ADR) and detailed the Supreme Court’s ongoing efforts to establish a mediation centre. In remarks aired on television on Monday, the SC judge stressed the need for mediators to be referred more cases, saying, “For that, the courts have to be willing to refer cases to mediation and must never think that by doing so, they are shying away from their primary responsibility of adjudication.” He noted that, having already paid lawyers, parties were reluctant to pay a fee for mediators and, therefore, some mediation centres had a policy of pro-bono mediations. “To encourage parties to go into mediation, what we have decided now is to train as many judges as mediators, and also officials in the high court and the Supreme Court who are law graduates, who will be willing to conduct mediation in their own pay scale,” the judge said. Justice Aurangzeb, along with Lahore High Court’s Justic...
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Police say 25 sacrificial goats worth Rs1.9m stolen from Karachi's Gulistan-i-Jauhar

KARACHI: Twenty-five sacrificial goats worth Rs1.9 million were stolen from Gulistan-i-Jauhar, police said on Monday. Malir Cantt Station House Officer (SHO) Agha Abdul Rasheed told Dawn that a man had bought 25 goats and housed them at an empty plot in Block 8. The police official said that the man had also hired a watchman to watch the animals. However, on Saturday night, around three to four suspects arrived at the location in a Suzuki van and took away all the goats, the SHO said. According to SHO Rasheed, the watchman told police that he was awake at the time of the incident, but the suspects tied a cloth over his face and forcibly took away the goats. The official said that police had obtained CCTV footage from the area and asked the owner to lodge a first information report (FIR) to initiate legal proceedings. However, so far, the owner appeared reluctant to pursue the case, the official said. In 2024, a truck containing a consignment of sacrificial goats was hijacked by...
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SMOKERS’ CORNER: THE AGE OF HYPERPOLITICS

In the early 2020s, the Belgian political theorist Anton Jäger coined the term “hyperpolitics”. He noticed that, in this day and age, politics seemed to be everywhere and in everything but was not catalysing any real change. At least not the way politics used to in the 20th century. The last century was an era of mass political activity (‘mass politics’) driven by large political parties, unions and macro-ideologies. According to Jäger, until the 1980s, political life was anchored by “thick institutions” that acted as a bridge between the individual and the state. But by the 1990s, “post-politics” had set in and replaced mass politics. In the era of post-politics, the polity became increasingly consumerist in nature and governance was left in the hands of technocrats. Conflict was suppressed and political parties became hollow after delegating important economic and social tasks to ‘experts’ serving the interests of large banks and multinational corporatio...
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Nuclear disaster can unfold any moment, experts fear

KARACHI: “When I think of Gaza and what happened there, I think of international efforts. Would all this have happened if international efforts worked properly. I also think about the United Nations and wonder if it has become weak in front of Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel? But it was strong when imposing sanctions on Iraq, Iran, Libya and other small ‘Third World’ countries,” said Governor of Sindh Syed Nehal Hashmi. He was speaking at the inaugural session of the two-day conference on ‘Living on the Threshold of Global Crises’ organised by the Pakistan Institute of International Affairs (PIIA) at a local hotel here on Saturday. “What is war? What is genocide?” The Governor asked aloud. “Our neighbouring country also tried playing with us a similar game as what Netanyahu is playing these days, but grace to Allah, the brave soldiers of Pakistan, under the leadership of Field Marshal Asim Munir, and the Government of Pakistan, under the leadership of Shehbaz Sharif, who taught th...
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