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Dawn - 19:07 Sep 23, 2025
The government is set to hold a signing ceremony today for a financing facility agreement to reduce the circular debt in the power sector, according to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). A letter from the Central Power Purchasing Agency to all banks and power sector entities invited their chief executive officers and heads to attend the event. It said the event will be held at the PMO and PM Shehbaz Sharif will also virtually address the event as he is currently in New York for the UN General Assembly session. Pakistan’s debt burden has become the defining constraint of its fiscal and economic future. According to data released by the State Bank of Pakistan, the total government debt (excluding the International Monetary Fund) increased from Rs69 trillion in June 2024 to Rs78tr by June 2025. The public debt (including the IMF debt) increased to Rs80.5tr from Rs71.2tr in June 2024. Both the numbers understate the full level of the government’s indebtedness. Developments suggest that the government is negotiati... -
Dawn - 17:24 Sep 23, 2025
Punjab Information Minister Azma Bokhari said on Tuesday that the provincial government would use issue relief cards to the flood victims on their personal names using its own resources instead of using the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) to assist them. Addressing a press conference at the Directorate General Public Relations, the provincial minister emphasised that disaster relief should not be politicised. “The relief cards will ensure that help reaches the right people without making them suffer further. We are focused on serving, not politicising,” she said. “Should we take advice from those who have turned Sindh into archaeological ruins?” she added, taking a jibe at the Sindh government. The provincial minister criticised those who she claimed were using the crisis to “advance their political agendas”. “Our focus is on relief and rehabilitation. Not everything should be turned into politics,” she said. “These relief buses and programmes are for the people, not for headlines.” The Punjab governm... -
Dawn - 15:35 Sep 23, 2025
The Trump administration released a proposal on Tuesday that would rework the H-1B visa selection process to favour higher-skilled and better-paid workers, according to a related Federal Register notice, a move that follows a White House proclamation on Friday introducing a $100,000 fee for the visas. The new process, if finalised, would give heavier weight to applications by employers who pay high wages if annual requests for the visas exceed the statutory limit of 85,000, the notice said. The move aims to better protect Americans from unfair wage competition from foreign workers, it said. President Donald Trump launched a wide-ranging immigration crackdown after taking office in January, including a push for mass deportations and trying to block citizenship for children of immigrants in the United States illegally. In recent days, his administration intensified its focus on the H-1B programme, popular with tech and outsourcing companies for hiring skilled foreign workers. The Trump administration said on Fr... -
Dawn - 15:30 Sep 23, 2025
Former Test umpire Harold “Dickie” Bird has died at the age of 92, Yorkshire County Cricket Club announced on Tuesday. Bird was one of the best-known and most respected officials in the game, standing in 66 Tests and 69 one-day internationals, including three World Cup finals. Yorkshire issued a statement on their website saying Bird, “one of cricket’s most beloved figures”, had died peacefully at home. “Dickie Bird enjoyed an illustrious career as an international umpire, writing his name into history as the most famous and popular official in the game’s history,” the club said. “He is synonymous with Yorkshire Cricket, where he has been one of the most loyal supporters. In 2014, he was named president of The Yorkshire County Cricket Club, a role he held with pride and distinction.” Bird played for English counties Yorkshire and Leicestershire but made his name as an international umpire. “Over a distinguished career, he officiated in 66 Test matches and 69 one-day internationals, including three World Cup f... -
Dawn - 14:40 Sep 23, 2025
Massive floods in Pakistan have struck both the rural heartland and industrial centres for the first time in decades, causing billions of dollars in damage while straining food supplies, exports and a fragile economic recovery. The government had been optimistic about 2026, pencilling in 4.2% growth on the back of a rebound in farming and manufacturing after the economy was stabilised under a $7 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout. Instead, record monsoon rains since late June, amplified by dam releases from India, have submerged large swathes of Punjab and Sindh. While waters have yet to recede in many districts, officials and analysts warn the hit could be deeper than in 2022, when a third of the country lay under water, due to dual shocks to agriculture and manufacturing. Out on the plains, satellite images have traced the scale. A report from agricultural monitoring initiative GEOGLAM estimates at least 220,000 hectares of rice fields flooded between August 1 and September 16. In Punjab, 1.8... -
Dawn - 14:05 Sep 23, 2025
Three people died and one was injured on Tuesday in two separate road accidents in Karachi, according to police. According to a handout by Malir traffic police, a dumper truck crashed into a motorcycle coming from the opposite direction in Dur Muhammad Goth around 7.30am. “As a result, one of the men on the motorcycle died on the spot, while the other was injured,” the handout said. The injured was shifted to Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre, it said, adding that the accident was caused by the dumper truck driver’s negligence and reckless driving. “The driver was arrested on the spot and taken to Memon Goth police station,” the handout said. It added that both vehicles involved in the accident were also taken to the police station for legal procedure. Police said further investigation of the incident was underway. Meanwhile, a young man was injured in a traffic accident in Karachi’s Nazimabad area. Karachi’s Edhi Information Centre reported that the man was injured while one-wheeling. He died during treatme... -
Dawn - 13:39 Sep 23, 2025
Islamabad High Court’s (IHC) Justice Tariq Mehmood Jahangiri has approached the Supreme Court for an early hearing of his plea challenging the September 16 restraining order that barred him from performing judicial functions after a divisional IHC bench raised serious questions about the validity of his law degree from Karachi University (KU), it emerged on Tuesday. A complaint pertaining to Justice Jahangiri’s allegedly fake degree was submitted to the Supreme Judicial Council last year in July while a petition challenging his appointment was filed in the IHC earlier this year. The matter centres on a letter that began circulating last year on social media, purportedly from KU’s controller of examinations, regarding the judge’s law degree. In an extraordinary development last week, the IHC had restrained Justice Jahangiri from exercising his judicial powers as a two-judge bench, headed by Chief Justice Mohammad Sarfraz Dogar and comprising Justice Mohammad Azam Khan, issued the interim order while hearing a ... -
Dawn - 13:10 Sep 23, 2025
Saudi Arabia on Tuesday announced the death of Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz Al al-Sheikh, the Saudi Press Agency (SPA) reported. “The Royal Court announced today the passing of Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Abdullah bin Mohammed Al Al-Sheikh, who also served as the head of the Council of Senior Scholars, the General Presidency of Scholarly Research and Ifta, and the Supreme Council of the Muslim World League,” SPA reported, adding that the funeral prayers would be him at Riyadh’s Imam Turki bin Abdullah Mosque today. The report said King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud also ordered that funeral prayers in absentia also be performed at Makkah’s Grand Mosque, Madina’s Masjid-i-Nabvi and in all mosques across the kingdom. The Saudi Gazette said in a post on X that he was 82. “The Royal Court stated that with his passing, the kingdom and the Islamic world have lost a distinguished scholar who made significant contributions to the service of Islam and Muslims,” SPA said. It added that King Salman a... -
Dawn - 12:13 Sep 23, 2025
PTI founder Imran Khan’s lawyers boycotted the proceedings of a Rawalpindi anti-terrorism court (ATC) on Tuesday after connectivity issues appeared to affect communication with the incarcerated former prime minister, who briefly joined the hearing via a WhatsApp call. An ATC in Rawalpindi was hearing a case against Imran pertaining to an attack on the army’s General Headquarters GHQ) on May 9, 2023, when the PTI founder’s arrest had sparked violent protests across the country, during which state buildings and military installations were torched and vandalised. During today’s hearing, Imran was included via a WhatsApp call, following the court’s dismissal of a plea for his in-person appearance last week. His lawyers, Salman Akram Raja and Faisal Malik, sought Judge Amjad Ali Shah’s permission to talk to the ex-premier. But during the call, Imran’s voice was disrupted and his face appeared blurred on screen, leading his lawyers to boycott the court proceedings. They stated that such a trial was “unfair”. The co... -
Dawn - 11:08 Sep 23, 2025
China’s top internet regulator said Tuesday it would take action against ByteDance-owned news app Jinri Toutiao and Alibaba’s internet browser company UCWeb for allegedly displaying harmful content, a day after announcing a two-month social media crackdown. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) vowed on Monday to combat content containing “malicious incitement of conflict” and “negative outlooks on life such as world-weariness”. Beijing requires social media companies to moderate content on their platforms, with posts strictly controlled to avoid anything deemed to be too subversive, vulgar, pornographic or generally harmful. The CAC had already announced penalties this month against three popular digital platforms — micro-blogging platform Weibo, short video app Kuaishou and Instagram-like Xiaohongshu — for allegedly neglecting content management duties. Authorities have not specified what punitive actions are being taken against those platforms. The CAC said Tuesday that measures taken against news a... -
Dawn - 10:37 Sep 23, 2025
A new report published by the World Bank (WB) on Tuesday called attention to the rising national poverty rate in Pakistan, highlighting the need for sustained and people-centred reforms to protect vulnerable populations. The report, titled “Reclaiming Momentum Towards Prosperity: Pakistan’s Poverty, Equity and Resilience Assessment”, marks the first comprehensive evaluation of poverty and welfare trends in the country since the early 2000s, according to a WB press release today. According to the release, the national poverty rate has begun to rise again since 2020, after a steady decline from 64.3 per cent in 2001-02 to 21.9pc in 2018-19. “This is largely owing to compounding shocks — including COVID-19, inflation, floods, and macroeconomic stress — but also because the consumption-driven growth model that delivered early gains has reached its limits,” it said. The report explored data from 25 years of household surveys, now casted projections, and geospatial analysis, as well as unique sources of administrat... -
Dawn - 10:19 Sep 23, 2025
The Peshawar High Court (PHC) on Tuesday granted rights activist Advocate Imaan Zainab Mazari-Hazir and her husband Hadi Ali Chattha transit bail, three days after the couple was booked following a clash with the president of the Islamabad High Court Bar Association (IHCBA). The police had registered a case against Mazari, her spouse, Zainab Janjua and several PTI-linked lawyers, including Naeem Panjhuta and Fateullah Barkiunder, under anti-terror laws after the IHCBA alleged that the bar leadership was “assaulted” by the lawyers, the suspects had also raised slogans against state institutions. Mazari and the other booked lawyers had staged a protest on the premises of the IHC to oppose the suspension of Justice Tariq Mahmood Jahangiri from judicial work. The hearing was presided over by PHC judge Justice Syed Mohammad Attique Shah, who granted a protective bail to the couple and asked them to appear before a relevant court by October 9. Mazari and her spouse appeared in the court today along with their lawye... -
Dawn - 09:13 Sep 23, 2025
Three people were injured after a grenade exploded at a scrap shop in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Mardan district, police said on Tuesday. Confirming these details to Dawn.com, District Police Officer (DPO) Zahoor Babar Afridi said, “The police had collected evidence from the site of the explosion, and they were further investigating the matter.” According to a statement from Mardan Rescue 1122, the injured have been identified as 40-year-old Abbas, 17-year-old Saeed and 24-year-old Amrad. “The injured were immediately given first aid and rushed to Mardan Medical Complex,” the statement said. Mardan Rescue 1122 spokesperson Syed Abbas Shah separately told Dawn.com that the “injured are in stable condition and most of the injuries are on their legs.” Earlier this month, three people were injured in a grenade attack in the Hazarganji area of Quetta in Balochistan. Police said unidentified motorcyclists hurled a hand grenade at an office of a private company in the Hazarganji area and sped away. In March, three policem... -
Dawn - 08:59 Sep 23, 2025
Eleven of the world’s leading economists, including two Nobel laureates, urge govts to recognise and uphold the economic value of public interest media in the age of AI Expert Opinion by High-Level Panel on Public Interest Media Governments around the world are chasing the AI dream, pinning their hopes on these technologies to drive economic prosperity. And yet, they are not investing in the foundational resource that underpins all our 21st century economies — independent, verifiable information. Well-functioning economies rely on widely accessible, verified, and trustworthy information. Public interest journalism provides a vital supply of such information: it exposes corruption, fraud, and market manipulation, brings stability to financial markets, checks misinformation, and it empowers economic actors to make informed investments. Without it, national economies, international trade, and capital flows between countries cannot function properly, with wide-ranging and negative impacts on social welfare. But t... -
Dawn - 08:11 Sep 23, 2025
In September last year, militants attacked a police station in Swat district, martyring one policeman and injuring two others. The attack itself wasn’t out of the ordinary — after all, Swat is no stranger to terrorist attacks. What was different about this attack was the modus operandi adopted by the militants. Over the course of the next several days, investigators pieced together clues on the attack, which they later confirmed was carried out using an improvised explosive device (IED). “They had used an improvised explosive device, made of a power bank, which is mostly used for charging mobile phones,” District Police Officer Dr Zahidullah later told Dawn. The investigators, said Dr Zahidullah, pored over hours of CCTV footage to identify one of the militants, who in turn gave up the names of two other suspects. But the biggest breakthrough came during the course of the investigation when the militants admitted that they never used common means of communication to contact each other. Rather, they would comm... -
Dawn - 07:42 Sep 23, 2025
US President Donald Trump on Monday linked autism to childhood vaccine use and the taking of popular pain medication Tylenol by women when pregnant, elevating claims not backed by scientific evidence to the forefront of US health policy. In an extraordinary news conference at the White House, the Republican president delivered medical advice to pregnant women and parents of young children, repeatedly telling them not to use or administer the painkiller and suggesting that common vaccines not be taken together or so early in a child’s life. The advice from Trump, who acknowledged he is not a doctor, goes against that of medical societies, which cite data from numerous studies showing that acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, plays a safe role in the well-being of pregnant women. View this post on Instagram “I want to say it like it is, don’t take Tylenol. Don’t take it,” Trump said. “Other things that we recommend, or certainly I do anyway, is … don’t let them pump your baby up with the largest pil... -
Dawn - 07:11 Sep 23, 2025
Airports in Copenhagen and Oslo reopened on Tuesday, police said, hours after unidentified drones in their airspace caused flight diversions and other travel disruption. In the Danish capital Copenhagen, police said several large drones seen over the airport for several hours late on Monday eventually flew away on their own. “The drones have disappeared and the airport is open again,” Deputy Police Inspector Jakob Hansen told reporters. “We didn’t take the drones down,” he added. Hansen said police were cooperating with the Danish military and intelligence service to find out where the drones had come from. He said police were also working with colleagues in Oslo after drone sightings in the Norwegian capital also caused the airport to close for several hours. “We had two different drone sightings,” Oslo airport spokeswoman Monica Fasting told AFP. “We reopened the airport around 3:15 am (6:15 am PKT),” she said. Flights were diverted to nearby destinations during the closures, and officials at both airports ... -
Dawn - 07:05 Sep 23, 2025
QUETTA: The Balochistan High Court (BHC) on Monday granted bail to tribal elder Sardar Sherbaz Khan Satakzai, who was arrested in July this year after the murder of a man and woman in the name of ‘honour’ in the Degari mining area of Quetta district. A single-judge bench, headed by Justice Muhammad Iqbal Kasi, after hearing arguments from both sides, granted bail to Sardar Sherbaz Satakzai against surety bonds of Rs500,000. He was released following the court’s approval of the bail application. Earlier, police had arrested Sardar Satakzai on the allegation that, as a tribal chief, he had endorsed through a jirga the killing of the woman and the man. Acting on the jirga’s order, the woman’s brother opened fire on his 40-year-old sister, Bano Bibi, in the presence of a large number of people from the area. At the same time, the man, Ehsanullah, was also killed at the same place. The incident came to light after a video of the firing went viral on social media more than a month after the killings had taken place... -
Dawn - 04:12 Sep 23, 2025
ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court’s registrar office on Monday raised administrative objections to the petitions separately filed by five sitting judges of the Islamabad High Court (IHC) before the apex court. Justices Mohsin Akhtar Kayani, Tariq Mehmood Jahangiri, Babar Sattar, Sardar Ejaz Ishaq Khan and Saman Raffat Imtiaz had appeared in person before the Supreme Court last Friday to institute constitutional petitions challenging the exercise of administrative powers by the IHC chief justice. According to the objections, the petitioners invoked the apex court’s original jurisdiction under Article 184(3) of the Constitution for the enforcement of fundamental rights, but the grievances raised were of an individual nature and thus not maintainable in view of the 1998 Zulfiqar Mehdi case. In that judgement, the SC had held that Article 184(3) could not be pressed into service for redress of personal grievances. Incidentally, the same case law was cited by the SC registrar while returning Mustafa Nawaz Khokhar’s pet... -
Dawn - 03:09 Sep 23, 2025
• PA President Abbas calls on all states to follow suit • Dar attends, but doesn’t address high-level moot • PM due to meet Trump alongside Muslim leaders • Palestine flag unfurled at London mission NEW YORK: France and Monaco extended formal recognition to the State of Palestine at a high-level conference on Monday. “We must do everything within our power to preserve the very possibility of a two-state solution, Israel and Palestine living side by side in peace and security,” French President Emmanuel Macron said before announcing the diplomatic move, drawing lengthy applause from the audience. Macron outlined a framework for a “renewed Palestinian Authority” under which France would open an embassy subject to factors such as reforms, a ceasefire and the release of all remaining prisoners held in Gaza. Andorra, Belgium, Luxembourg and San Marino were also expected to recognise a Palestinian state ahead of this week’s UN General Assembly, after Australia, Britain, Canada, Portugal and Malta did so over the we...
7421 items