Pakistan News

QUETTA: The bodies of six of seven labourers who were kidnapped earlier this week in the Turbat city of Balochistan’s Kech district were found with bullet wounds on Thursday, an official told Dawn. On Tuesday, unidentified armed men had blocked Turbat-Mand Road in the Kalatak area of Kech district and taken away the seven labourers, who were travelling in a vehicle. The kidnappers had killed one of the labourers the same day and dumped his body on a highway. On Thursday, the bodies of the remaining six labourers were also found, Balochistan Home Department spokesperson Babar Yousafzai told Dawn . He said the kidnappers had taken the labourers to an undisclosed location, where one of them was killed shortly after the abduction and his body was dumped on the highway. They later also killed the six remaining labourers, whose bodies were found in Turbat’s Nasirabad area, he added. Yousafzai said the bodies bore torture marks and bullet wounds, and it seemed that the labourers had be...

New Zealand’s top diplomat Winston Peters drew the ire of Beijing’s ambassador in Wellington on Thursday after telling a lawmaker of Chinese descent to “go back to your own country”. During a debate about New Zealand’s response to the Covid pandemic on Wednesday, populist NZ First leader Peters was asked by China-born Green Party member Lawrence Xu-Nan: “Are you vaccinated?” In response, Peters said the lawmaker, who was born in the Chinese city of Tianjin but grew up in Auckland, had “come here five minutes ago”. “Go back to your own country. That’s where they lie like a flatfish, but they don’t lie like that here,” Peters said. “This is called a democracy, unlike what you’re used to. Go back to where you’ve come from, you loudmouth.” The comments sparked a rare intervention from Chinese ambassador to New Zealand Wang Xiaolong. Wang said on X on Thursday that while he preferred to stay out of domestic politics, “suffice it to say, sometimes, a statement says more about the perso...

The Foreign Office (FO) said on Thursday that Pakistan was doing its “utmost” to bring the United States and Iran back to the negotiating table under the Islamabad memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed last month. Addressing a weekly press briefing, FO spokesperson Tahir Andrabi said Pakistan noted with concern that the security situation in the Middle East “remains precarious despite the relative calm of the past few days, which had rekindled hopes that this positive development, this calm, would consolidate into a durable and fully respected ceasefire and pave the way for dialogue”. Andrabi reiterated Pakistan’s support for dialogue and diplomacy, maintaining that it remained the “only viable path forward”. “We welcome all efforts aimed at sustaining cessation of hostilities and resumption of dialogue between Iran and the US,” he said, adding that Pakistan remained engaged and will continue to do so. “Let me add that the negotiations between parties are ongoing to normalise t...

Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar on Wednesday welcomed Kuwait’s Foreign Minister Sheikh Jarrah Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah, who is on an official visit to the country, at the Foreign Office (FO). State-run Pakistan TV shared a picture of the two shaking hands on the social media platform X. The visiting dignitary arrived in Islamabad on Tuesday at the invitation of Deputy PM Dar. The FO said that upon arrival at the Islamabad International Airport, he was received by Zahid Hussain, additional secretary at the foreign ministry. “During the visit, the two sides will hold talks covering the full spectrum of bilateral relations and exchange views on regional and international issues of mutual interest,” it said. It added that the minister’s visit to Pakistan reflected the longstanding brotherly relations between the two countries, “anchored in shared history, mutual trust and close cooperation”....

Preliminary work on a vast hotel project linked to the Trump family has already caused irreparable damage to a once pristine stretch of Albania’s coast, scientists and activists say. Satellite images obtained by AFP show that during a 25-day period in May, a road was cleared, an entire zone deforested and a bridge built to span the channel connecting the Narta lagoon to the sea. “Bulldozers on the beaches have already damaged the nesting sites of loggerhead turtles, which are threatened with extinction,” Olsi Nika, a marine biologist who heads the NGO EcoAlbania, told AFP . In addition, the nesting grounds of numerous bird species have been disturbed by access roads through the dunes and the felling of trees, while construction on a vital channel between the lagoon and the sea has severely disrupted water flows essential to maintaining wetlands. “An absolute biodiversity massacre,” said Nika. Daily demonstrations against the project have led to the suspension of some work, but th...

I did not expect to leave Islamabad thinking about the future of international law. I went to speak. I came home with something harder to shake: a conviction that what is happening on the Indus river is not just a bilateral water dispute between two nuclear-armed neighbours. It is a test of whether the global architecture of treaty-based cooperation can survive the moment we are living in. On June 30, I had the honour of speaking at the Institute of Regional Studies seminar on the Indus Waters Treaty , held at the Jinnah Convention Centre in Islamabad. The high-level gathering brought together scholars, practitioners, diplomats, and policymakers from Pakistan and around the world. The expertise assembled in the room was formidable, and the sense of urgency surrounding the issue was unmistakable. My panel was asked to examine treaty-based conflict prevention, specifically, how the institutional mechanisms embedded in international river agreements keep water from becoming a cause of w...