Dawn
Source:
https://www.dawn.com
Found 12392 news
-
Dawn - 14:10 Jul 28, 2026
ISLAMABAD: After six years of deadlock, the government on Tuesday approved the Brownfield Refining Policy to modernise the country’s petroleum refineries, with an estimated investment of about $6bn, to improve product quality and increase production. The Brownfield Refining Policy is a regulatory framework aimed at upgrading existing oil refineries, modernising their operations and improving their financial viability. The policy — approved by the Cabinet Committee on Energy (CCoE), led by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif — provides stability clauses to protect investment, offers tax incentives and foreign exchange accounts for the import of machinery against the export of furnace oil, besides enhancing offshore and onshore storage capacity for greater energy security. The policy, revised by amending the original 2023 legislation, now supersedes all previous refining policies. Under the Brownfield Refining Policy, the five existing refineries will improve product quality, quantity and product mix through upgradat... -
Dawn - 13:34 Jul 28, 2026
ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Tuesday directed the relevant authorities to eliminate unnecessary posts and positions in government departments to improve performance, the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) said. In a statement, the PMO said PM Shehbaz chaired a review meeting on the federal government’s right-sizing initiatives and measures to enhance public sector efficiency. “Modern technology and improved training should be utilised to significantly enhance the performance of government institutions,” the PMO stated. During the meeting, the prime minister was apprised that under the right-sizing initiative, the Utility Stores Corporation, Pakistan Public Works Department, and Pakistan Agriculture Storage and Services Corporation had already been closed, resulting in savings for the national exchequer, the statement said. “The prime minister directed that a third-party audit be conducted of the posts and institutions abolished under the right-sizing initiative, instructing the Right-Sizing Committe... -
Dawn - 13:09 Jul 28, 2026
India’s Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered the release of under-18s arrested during the youth protests over exam leaks and said authorities must ensure surveillance footage is preserved after petitioners alleged police brutality against demonstrators. Indian media reports said Chief Justice Surya Kant also directed authorities to preserve the digital and personal data of people who participated in the demonstrations and barred any coercive action against them. The reports said Kant took interim steps in response to petitions filed by student protesters and activists seeking action against police and paramilitary forces for what they said was the use of excess force and pellet guns during the weeks-long demonstrations in the national capital and other cities. He called for the preservation of all footage, including from drones, body cameras, and CCTV footage, and directed authorities to ensure protesters’ data was not made public. Police officers injured, solicitor general says “Whoever has committed excess … at... -
Dawn - 12:21 Jul 28, 2026
ISLAMABAD: With an unprecedented 97pc increase, the federal government on Tuesday set the value of blood money (diyat) at more than Rs19 million for the fiscal year 2026-27. According to a notification issued by the Ministry of Finance, the government set the value of diyat at Rs19,352,390, as required under the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC), 1860. Diyat is compensation for murder payable by the offender to the heirs of the victim. The amount reflects the value of 30,630 grams of silver under subsection (2) of Section 323 of the PPC. The notified value of blood money marks an increase of around 97pc from the FY2025-26 value of Rs9,828,670, mainly because of an increase in the value of silver. The notified value of diyat stood at Rs6,757,902 for FY2023-24, which also marked a phenomenal 56pc increase over Rs4,318,524 in FY2022-23. Section 323 of the PPC requires that the court, subject to the injunctions of Islam as laid down in the Holy Quran and Sunnah and keeping in view the financial position of the convict an... -
Dawn - 11:56 Jul 28, 2026
PPP Chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari on Tuesday demanded that the government and the “protesters” agree to the formation of a truth and reconciliation commission to resolve ongoing tensions in Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK). The PPP has repeatedly called for the establishment of a truth and reconciliation commission amid protests in AJK. Over the past month, the regional administration and the JAAC have been at odds over various issues, most notably the committee’s demand to abolish the 12 seats in the region’s Legislative Assembly, which has resulted in protests across the region. Addressing an event in Muzaffarabad, the PPP chairman said, “It is necessary that during these historic elections, we restore peace and maintain fairness and transparency. To honour the future of Kashmir and Pakistan’s stance on Kashmir, this is not about anyone’s victory or defeat. The state and the protestors will have to accept this recommendation from the PPP.” Bilawal said he had been campaigning for the formation of the commissi... -
Dawn - 11:56 Jul 28, 2026
A 7.1-magnitude earthquake hit Japan’s southern Kumamoto prefecture on Tuesday, knocking out power to thousands of homes, rupturing roads and leaving some trapped and others presumed dead inside a partially collapsed shopping mall. Speaking to reporters at her office in Tokyo, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said authorities were still assessing the full extent of the damage in the area, which was devastated by a deadly quake a decade ago. “We have already been informed that people have been injured. Power outages and fires have occurred in some areas, and there has also been damage to roads and bridges and the collapse of buildings,” Takaichi said. “I ask everyone to take action to protect themselves, including evacuating to a safe location.” Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi speaks to the media at the Prime Minister’s Office, in Tokyo after a 7.1-magnitude earthquake hit southern Japan on July 28, 2026. — AFP Around 300,000 people have been instructed to go to evacuation centres, the disaster ma... -
Dawn - 11:38 Jul 28, 2026
Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar on Tuesday said the government was “confident” that trade between Pakistan and the United States could double to $20 billion over the next five years. Dar made the remarks while addressing a delegation of US congressmen and businessmen in Islamabad. The gathering included US congressmen Ryan Zinke and Michael James Baumgartner, who are on a visit to Pakistan. Addressing the event, Dar called strong and mutually beneficial economic ties “the true measure of a mature strategic partnership and friendship”. Noting that the US is Pakistan’s largest single-country export destination, he said that goods trade between the two countries in the last fiscal year reached $9.4bn. “While encouraging this figure … we are confident that we can double bilateral trade to $20bn over the next five years by fully harnessing the complementarity of our economies,” the deputy premier said. He said the Pak-US partnership was “mutually rewarding”, as Pakistan remained among the larg... -
Dawn - 11:11 Jul 28, 2026
Firefighters raced on Tuesday to subdue huge wildfires that have forced unprecedented evacuations of tens of thousands of people across France and Spain, as western Europe braced for another heatwave. The fires have torn through a region already battered by a blisteringly hot and dry summer. Crews were seeking to capitalise on more favourable weather before a new wave of higher temperatures settled in from Wednesday. In the Bordeaux region of France, firefighters contained the forest blaze overnight, while in Spain, authorities allowed people from nine out of 11 towns in the central Toledo province to return to their homes. However, fires still raged out of control in Madrid and nearby provinces, prompting heightened vigilance. One Spanish evacuee described a “red hell” of fire, portraying intense scenes as residents fled with little more than clothes on their backs. Europe, the world’s fastest warming continent, has endured record-breaking heatwaves this year. Scientists say human-driven climate change is in... -
Dawn - 11:02 Jul 28, 2026
The PML-N grabbed nine out of the 13 constituencies of Azad Jammu and Kashmir’s (AJK) Mirpur division in yesterday’s elections, preliminary results issued by the Election Commission showed on Tuesday. Polls in AJK are being held in three phases over security concerns, with the first set of polls held in Mirpur division on Monday. Scuffles, violence and allegations of rigging had marred the polling process, with the PML-N and PPP accusing each other of electoral malpractice. According to preliminary results issued by the AJK Election Commission (Forms-26 and Forms-27), the PML-N emerged as the winner in nine constituencies, while the PPP could secure only four seats. Form-27 lists cumulative results based on votes cast on the polling day and by the election staff in advance polling. Form-26 comprises only the ballots cast on the main polling day, July 27, in this case. Results breakdown Following an intense election campaign by both parties in the lead-up to the polls, the PML-N emerged victorious in Mirpur di... -
Dawn - 10:18 Jul 28, 2026
A fresh spell of rainfall is expected in the country from July 29 to August 5, the Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) said on Tuesday as several parts of the country reeled from a preceding spell and subsequent flooding. “Monsoon currents from the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal are likely to penetrate upper and central parts of the country from July 29,” the Met Office said in its forecast, adding that a westerly wave currently affecting northern areas would likely strengthen from August 1 and affect most of the upper and central parts of the country. PMD warned that heavy rainfall may cause urban flooding in low-lying areas of Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Peshawar, Nowshera, Gujranwala, Gujrat, Sialkot, Lahore, Multan and Faisalabad from July 30 to August 4. It also warned of landslides in KP, particularly in Dir, Chitral, Swat, Kohistan, Buner, Battagram, Mansehra, Haripur and Abbottabad, as well as in GB, Murree, Galliyat and AJK from July 30 to August 5. According to the advisory, heavy rainfall may also p... -
Dawn - 09:55 Jul 28, 2026
Pakistan’s passport ranking has slipped by one position to the 101st spot globally and remains the fourth worst in the world, according to the Henley Passport Index, it emerged on Tuesday. The Henley Passport Index compares 199 different passports across 227 different travel destinations, and calculates the score based on the number of destinations that can be accessed without a prior visa, or with a visa on arrival. With visa-free access declining from 30 countries in May to 29 countries in July, the Pakistani passport’s rank slipped by one rank to 101st. The travel document has been declared the world’s fourth worst since at least January 2021 on the Henley Index, based on multiple reports issued each year. A graph showing Pakistan’s ranking on the Henley Passport Index over the years since 2006. — screengrab via henleyglobal.com According to the Henley Index, Pakistani passport holders have free visa access to Barbados, Cook Islands, Dominica, Haiti, Micronesia, Montserrat, Rwanda, St. Vincent and the Gren... -
Dawn - 09:32 Jul 28, 2026
LAHORE: A National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA) official on Tuesday informed a sessions court that PML-N MPA Saqib Chadhar had been found guilty of harassing actor Momina Iqbal after investigation. NCCIA Lahore Station House Officer (SHO) Najam Bajwa shared this as Additional District and Sessions Judge Nusrat Ali Siddiqui took up pre-arrest bail petitions of the MPA and his wife, who was also named in the first information report registered after Iqbal’s harassment allegations. Chadhar and his wife appeared before the court upon the expiry of their previous pre-arrest interim bail. During the hearing, SHO Najam Bajwa informed the court that the investigation against Chadhar had been completed and he had been found guilty of the allegations levelled by Iqbal. He further told the court that Chadhar’s wife had surrendered her mobile phone to NCCIA two days ago and the device had been sent for forensic examination. For his part, the counsel for Iqbal urged the court to dismiss the suspects’ bail plea... -
Dawn - 08:56 Jul 28, 2026
On paper, Pakistan is a recycling success story. On plastic, not so much. Bad puns aside, the World Bank has said we beat all of South Asia with the lowest marine plastic pollution rates. Those in the business will tell you Pakistan is flipping trash so well that it now imports used gallon milk jugs from Ohio, and may teach Saudi Arabia how to turn it into street pavers. Why bother with cloth bags and paper straws if we are already recycling kings? Because of biscuit and chips packet wrappers and the question of what happens to them. And what I discovered in Shershah. Karachi’s Shershah market is a byword for recycling, but over the years, fussy power supplies have hemmed business into a corner of the neighbourhood called Paracha, named after a textile mill. What I saw at these small setups here is the part of Pakistan’s success story that no recycler brings up. You know how it works. Labourers sort household trash by colour, discard what can’t be recycled, and feed the rest into a crusher. A black oozing sau... -
Dawn - 08:50 Jul 28, 2026
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 war. I came to that question... -
Dawn - 08:36 Jul 28, 2026
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Tuesday directed authorities to increase the country’s strategic petroleum reserves as a cabinet committee approved amendments to the oil refining policy. Pakistan has been planning to boost domestic storage for crude oil and refined products to increase its energy security, it emerged in May. With no strategic petroleum reserves, the country has been left exposed to oil supply shocks resulting from the US-Iran war that has choked supplies through the Strait of Hormuz. On Tuesday, PM Shehbaz chaired a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Energy (CCoE) during which amendments to the Pakistan Oil Refining Policy 2023 were approved, according to a statement issued by the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). The meeting was given a detailed briefing on the progress of upgradation of oil refineries in the country, reforms in the energy sector, and implementation of the policy. “The upgradation of oil refineries is an important need of the time and is a key pillar of Pakistan’s comprehensi... -
Dawn - 06:23 Jul 28, 2026
The world risks a resurgence of the HIV epidemic after global funding fell by nearly a fifth last year, the UN body fighting AIDS said on Monday. Washington previously accounted for 75 per cent of international HIV funding before President Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025. That month, he ordered a temporary halt to all HIV-related funding before restoring life-saving HIV work days later, although most prevention efforts were curtailed. “The international community has entered a period of profound political and financial upheaval that threatens decades of hard-won gains against HIV,“ UNAIDS said in its 60-page report released at the start of an International AIDS conference in Brazil. “Without renewed commitment and action, the world risks a resurgence of the HIV epidemic.” Funding fell by 18pc to $7.3 billion in 2025, which was the lowest level in nearly two decades, the report said. That risks reversing progress that has driven down new HIV infections and AIDS-related deaths t... -
Dawn - 05:24 Jul 28, 2026
There is a silence smothering the landscape of Pakistan and it is a silence borne from fear. The state grows more authoritarian each day, its mistrust for the voice of its people multiplying. The views of the masses, the printing presses, the online spaces, are met with charge sheets and FIRs. Silence has become the only guarantee of safety from the wrath of a system bent on gagging criticism. As the EU GSP+ assessment for Pakistan puts it: “limitations to the freedom of expression and access to information remain serious and persistent.” It is tempting to label this problem as regime specific. After all, the coalition government demonstrates open contempt for dissent: the Law Minister warns of uttering anything against foreign policy, 27 YouTube channels of journalists are asked to be permanently blocked, and the National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA) is the latest innovation given free rein to label any opposition as anti-state. You are counted lucky if you get a sliver of due process rather than... -
Dawn - 03:35 Jul 28, 2026
IN post-colonial societies, police are averse to innovation. Conversely, militants opt for innovation and cultivate their following, using cyberspace, AI and information warfare innovatively. Is innovative policing (IP) viable under outdated laws, weak capacity, poor accountability and ill-equipped LEAs? Post-colonial police chiefs limit innovation to technology when it should be interpreted elastically. Often, militants get ahead of LEAs; they use drones, night vision goggles, thermal imaging, cyberspace, etc. IP merges tech-driven, community-oriented, problem-oriented and e-policing. Combining traditional police values with modern, evidence-based policing to analyse crime patterns improves public safety and wins community trust, reducing the burden on courts and jails. Policing that doesn’t factor in local needs can be a waste of resources. For IP to succeed, police chiefs and political executives must combine numerical models with technology-led ones rather than rely just on the former. Solutions like dron... -
Dawn - 03:31 Jul 28, 2026
AT first look, it struck one as a politically conjured Woodstock, its unhurried gait like a cloud walk along a gurgling brook of piercing humour, cackling laughter and tuneful parodies, with Faiz and Fahmida Riaz making their mandatory appearance as they often do in youthful Indian protests. The event kindled muzzled memories of what the idea of India was conceived as. In a word, the event was magical, too good to be true. An Urdu verse comes to mind that nicely captures the disbelief of joy with a habit of apprehension. Yet, it was the news one had been aching to hear for more than 12 years, probably more. “Wo ghareeb dil ko sabaq miley ki khushi ke naam se dar gaya/ Kabhi tumne hans ke jo baat ki, to hamara chehra utar gaya” (‘parched by a drought of joyous tidings the heart is scared of happiness/ If you smile at me perchance, I feel a creeping wariness’). The songs and memes from the Jantar Mantar protest rang across the country’s myriad regions. A lasting image lingers in the form of a hijab-wrapped woma... -
Dawn - 03:26 Jul 28, 2026
AT least 624 US military service members have been wounded since President Donald Trump ordered strikes against Iran in February, according to the Pentagon’s most recent update on 25 July, BBC News reported. Among those wounded, 417 are attributed to Operation Epic Fury, while 207 are attributed to “Overseas Operations”. The US and Iran agreed to a ceasefire in April and signed a Memorandum of Understanding in June, but attacks by both sides have continued throughout. Revised casualty figures, unexplained changes to official records draw criticism over transparency Last week, the Pentagon revised its figures on those injured and killed in the war, removing the names of four personnel who died in Operation Epic Fury and adding them to the death toll for Overseas Operations. On the Pentagon’s Defence Analysis Casualty System, the death toll for Operation Epic Fury — the name given to the initial attack — was listed at 18 as late as Tuesday, along with 482 wounded, according to BBC News. At some point, four of ...
12392 items