Free Republic

Bush dinner tastes sour for Obama - PMO decision to entertain former President causes hurt in Washington K.P. NAYAR Washington, Oct. 24: Preparations for Manmohan Singh’s visit to Washington on November 24 have begun on a negative signal to the Obama administration with a decision by the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) to host former President George W. Bush for dinner at Singh’s residence at the end of this month. Bush is visiting New Delhi on October 30 and 31 at the invitation of an Indian newspaper and will speak at a conference organised in New Delhi on October 31 on...

As the situation turned chaotic in Islamabad after PTI Chairman Imran Khan and his convoy entered the federal capital and started marching towards the city's D-Chowk, the government decided to seek the help of the army to control the situation and protect the government's offices located in the Red Zone. The government, in a notification, said that the army was summoned to control the situation under article 245 of the Constitution. The decision comes after the protests staged by PTI workers took a violent turn as they clashed with law enforcement agencies (LEAs) in the federal capital and injured multiple...

<p>ISLAMABAD: A mob attacked a police station in the capital on Monday night in an attempt to lynch a man detained on a charge of blasphemy.</p><p>Senior police officers told Dawn that dozens of villagers wielding batons and iron rods attacked the Golra police station, asking the police for the custody of the suspect held for investigation into a complaint lodged against him on a blasphemy charge.</p>

Pakistan’s foreign policy has been incoherent and inconsistent since its inception. It has suffered from a chasm between policy and strategy, xenophobic tendencies, domestic politics interfering negatively with the foreign policy process, and vice versa – including the unsettling influence of the military on civilian politics and the outsize impact of religious groups. Policy-makers, rather than focusing on the policy process and the outcomes, serially succumb to socio-religious pressures, intensifying policy volatility, and that volatility, read as vulnerability, opens Pakistan up to manipulation by stronger world powers. The result is that on the issues that Pakistan flags as central to...

Tens of thousands of Pakistanis protested on Sunday against the normalisation deal signed between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Israel, Anadolu reported. Mass rallies were held across Pakistan, including the capital, Islamabad, the port city of Karachi, northeastern city of Lahore, Rawalpindi, Peshawar, Quetta, Faisalabad, Multan and Hyderabad. The protests were organised by the Milli Yakjehti Council, a political-religious alliance which called on the Pakistani people to join the protests and denounce “the controversial deal between Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv”. In the city of Rawalpindi, thousands of citizens marched through the city streets led by Senator Sirajul...

Former national security advisor Susan Rice called a Chinese diplomat a "racist disgrace" in a tweet Monday. "You are a racist disgrace. And shockingly ignorant too. In normal times, you would be PNGed for this, Ambassador Cui, I expect better of you and your team. Please do the right thing and send him home. " Rice tweeted in reference to Lijian Zhao, a diplomat posted in Islamabad. In a now-deleted tweet, Zhao said that if “you’re in Washington, D.C., you know the white never go” to the southeastern part of the U.S. capital. "PNGed" refers to being designated as a...

In the shifting narratives of the Trump-Russia probe, a Maltese academic named Joseph Mifsud has remained a linchpin regarding claims of collusion. He is the professor who allegedly told Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos that the Russians had emails related to the Clinton campaign. The FBI says it opened its investigation in late July 2016 after Papadopoulos relayed that information to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, and the Australians tipped off U.S. authorities. While some news accounts describe Mifsud as an accomplice to Russian clandestine operations or a “cut-out” (intermediary), others contend he is a full-fledged Russian spy. In an official...

The woman who took part in the ISIS-inspired San Bernardino massacre is linked to her native country's most notorious radical mosque, American officials believe. Sources have told Daily Mail Online that US officials handed over information to their Pakistani counterparts about links between Tashfeen Malik and the Red Mosque in Islamabad. The mosque is infamous for its links to violence and authorities in Pakistan are now considering taking action against its preacher, Maulana Abdul Aziz, after the disclosures by US officials. It is unclear currently how law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the US have connected Malik to the mosque.

Ten police dead in Pakistan blast July 6, 2008 At least 10 policemen have been killed in an apparent suicide bomb attack in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, officials have said. The attack came on the first anniversary of a deadly siege at the city's Red Mosque, in which more than 100 people were killed during fighting. The mosque was stormed by Pakistani troops to evict militants who had taken sanctuary within its complex. Police had been deployed at a rally being held near the mosque on Sunday. "The blast happened 15 minutes after the meeting dispersed. A heavy contingent of...

ISLAMABAD - Tashfeen Malik - who the FBI says pledged allegiance on Facebook to the Islamic State before helping her husband kill 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif. - was born in Saudi Arabia to a middle-class Pakistani family mainly associated with agriculture or private businesses. Her father, Gulzak Malik, previously lived in the Karor Lal Esan locality of District Layyah in Pakistan's tumultuous Southern Punjab province. Tashfeen Malik, 27 years old when she was killed Wednesday in a rented SUV in a shootout with law enforcement, went to that province several years ago to study pharmacy in Multan city...

As I walked into the department this bright brisk morning, coffee cheerily in hand, the live global seismogram display in the atrium caught my eye with an alarming event that had just happened during my bike ride into work. *gasp* that looks bad *gasp* that looks bad BIG earthquake, somewhere in the vicinity of Central/Southern Asia. Indeed, an earthquake deep (>200 km) beneath the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan had shaken a huge swath of Central and South Asia. The great depth of the earthquake meant less extreme shaking at the epicenter (nobody lives closer than 212 km from the...

Richard Hoagland, the acting U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, discussed with Code Pink and anti-Israel activists what he said was classified information, during an October 3 meeting with the groups in Islamabad. Code Pink, a liberal anti-war organization known for disrupting Republican and conservative public events, uploaded a video of the meeting to an Internet video sharing website on Oct. 5. Realizing what he had said, Hoagland told the activist gathering: “I probably just, you know, got into big trouble with what I just said.”

It’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll:...

ISLAMABAD: Maria Golovnina, the Pakistan and Afghanistan bureau chief of Reuters who was based in Islamabad, was found dead at her office in the capital’s F-8 sector, sources in the police told Dawn. Golovnina had reportedly gone to the toilet, and had not stepped out for a long time when people who were present barged in. Maria Golovnina - Twitter. She was reportedly lying on the floor covered in vomit. The bureau chief was rushed to Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (Pims) where she was pronounced dead. Doctors at Pims told Dawn Maria had passed away before she could be...

Lower Dir, 27 January 2014, Militants have changed their getups and they move to different residential areas after the operation in Fata and Baluchistan. Some of them start using shirts, paint to show him as modern. Some of militants also remove the hair and beard to hide their self in local communities. According to the source, militants left the tribal areas and use Bannu, DI khan and Hangu move other parts of Pakistan, they used unknown and unfamiliar ways of escaping the area. Some of them move also explosive vehicle for targeting government official. The source confirmed that the decision...

Previously, many people hunted the animal, some as a sport and others for its meat.For Senator Sughra Imam, a walk in the city after sunset has become increasingly terrifying because of the ubiquitous wild boars. “Over the years, the population of this wild beast has multiplied, but complaints in this regard could not move the Capital Development Authority (CDA),” she said while talking to Dawn. “In a recent meeting of the Senate Standing Committee on Cabinet, I also lodged a complaint with the CDA chairman,” the senator added. Like a seasoned bureaucrat, the CDA chairman, Nadeem Hassan Asif, readily promised...

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Shiite Muslims staging a religious procession near Pakistan’s capital Friday killed seven Sunnis from an Islamic seminary for insulting them as they passed, officials said. ... The Shiites were observing Ashoura, which commemorates the 7th century death of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson. The schism between Sunnis and Shiites dates back to that time.

Washington (CNN) -- The State Department has evacuated most of its diplomats from Lahore, Pakistan in response to a terrorist threat against the U.S. consulate, senior State Department and other senior U.S. officials told CNN. "We have picked up what we regard as a threat worthy of taking this action," one senior U.S. official told CNN. The State Department issued an "orderged departure" for all of its diplomats in Lahore Thursday, except for a handful of emergency personnel. The diplomats were moved to Islamabad, the nation's capital, officials said. A travel warning issued by the State Department said the department...

WASHINGTON: The famous African explorer Dr David Livingstone might have been impressed, even if the agenda was suspect. Pakistan’s disgraced nuclear proliferator-hero Abdul Qadeer Khan traversed the breadth of Africa in his hey day as a nuclear salesman , going to as romantic a getaway as Casablanca in Morocco and as remote an outpost as Timbuktu in Mali.   US officials might dearly like to get hold of Khan’s travel agent, or simply his itinerary, since he seems to have pretty much charted his own course during his profligate proliferating days. According to accounts now surfacing in the Pakistani media,...

The London accountant who accompanied Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan to Timbuktu on three occasions in 1998, 1999 and 2000 says the 'father' of the Pakistani bomb witnessed the digging of a well, toured an ancient Islamic library and enjoyed the views of the desert. A remote outpost in the middle of the West African desert, Timbuktu usually attracts explorers associated in the popular mind with the adventures of the comic character Tin Tin. And Pakistani dissidents told rediff.com the reason for Khan's visit to Timbuktu, part of landlocked West African state of Mali, was to prospect for uranium. They say...