Pakistan

Novacare Hospital is set to open in Islamabad's DHA by 2026

London’s Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust has entered its first-ever partnership with a Pakistani hospital, providing expert support to the upcoming Novacare facility in Islamabad.

Six people were killed and seven were injured after a passenger bus caught fire after colliding with a loader rickshaw carrying petrol on the Western Bypass in Quetta, police said on Monday. Fatal road accidents on highways occur frequently in Pakistan, mainly due to overspeeding, hazardous overtaking and disregard for traffic rules. According to Shalkot Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Athar Rashid, “In the tragic incident, five passengers on the bus were killed and seven others were injured.” He said that the bodies of the deceased had become unrecognisable due to the burns. “The injured were taken to the Bolan Medical Complex and Civil Hospital, and two of them are in critical condition,” he said. DSP Rashid added that the local bus was going from Nawan area to Hazarganji when the accident occurred at the Raisani area on the Western Bypass, adding that the bus caught fire after colliding with a petrol-laden loader rickshaw. In a statement, Balochistan government spokesperson Shahid Rind expressed sorr...

Pakistan and Iran have agreed on the importance of unity among the Ummah during this most challenging time.

Minister for Railways Hanif Abbasi announced that Pakistan Railways has successfully reclaimed land worth billions of rupees and is actively working to modernize stations nationwide.

Peshawar - Governor of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Faisal Karim Kundi, on Monday expressed deep concern over the termination of employees from the Social Welfare Department and the closure of drug rehabilitation centres operated under the department.

Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk on Tuesday launched its blockbuster weight-loss drug Wegovy in India, three months after Eli Lilly began marketing its rival product Mounjaro in the world’s most populous nation. Wegovy is already under distribution and is expected to be in pharmacies by the end of the month, Novo Nordisk India Managing Director Vikrant Shrotriya said at a briefing. Lilly and Novo have been part of obesity awareness programs in India in the lead-up to their drug launches there. The market potential in India, a nation of more than 1.4 billion, is significant, with obesity and diabetes rates steadily climbing. Sales of Lilly’s weight-loss drug Mounjaro jumped 60 per cent between April and May, industry experts said. Analysts said Wegovy, a once-a-week injection, had been priced competitively to Mounjaro in India, and that is likely to encourage wider adoption of those drugs. Global demand for both Mounjaro and Wegovy has skyrocketed in recent years, with supply limited, leading to shortages in coun...

Defence Minister Khawaja Asif has welcomed the ceasefire between Iran and Israel, lauding Iran's resilience and determination in the face of adversity.

Waqar Baloch, based in the bordering town of Jaheen in Balochistan’s Panjgur, was all set for his wedding next week. But for a groom, his anxiety was of a different kind— half of his family was in Iran, where Israel is waging a war. The ongoing standoff between Tehran and Tel Aviv has sent ripples across the Middle East, with both sides refusing to drop their guns. But while the global attention is fixated on the Mashriq, the conflict — which is feared to spiral into a third world war — has disrupted daily life in Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest and most underdeveloped province. The province, which shares a 909-kilometre border with Iran, has been reeling from food shortages, a surge in fuel prices, the risk of unemployment, and heightened security concerns ever since the Iran-Israel war broke out. Families like Waqar’s are bearing the brunt of these tensions. “One of my paternal uncles is a resident of Iran, and many of our family members live across the border,” he told Dawn.com. “They won’t be able to atte...

Defence Minister Khawaja Asif has strongly condemned the Israeli aggression towards Iran and criticised the Western world’s “double standard”, saying that the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) performance was “tainted with hypocrisy and a selective approach”. Asif earlier stressed that Pakistan stood in “complete solidarity” with Iran amid Israel’s unprovoked and “unjustified aggression” against Tehran, which began on June 13 and escalated over 12 days. The conflict intensified after the US intervened by striking three of Iran’s nuclear sites. Tehran first responded by launching missiles at Tel Aviv, then targeted US bases in Qatar following the American strikes. On Tuesday morning, US President Donald Trump announced that Iran and Israel had reached a “ceasefire”. Israel, without evidence, claimed that its initial strike on Iran was “preventive”, meant to address an immediate, inevitable threat from the Islamic Republic’s part to construct a nuclear bomb. Tel Aviv also suggested that the IAEA repor...

India’s aviation regulator said on Tuesday it had found multiple instances of aircraft defects reappearing “many times” at Mumbai and Delhi airports, two of the country’s busiest, indicating what it said were inadequate checks on jetliners. The findings were part of a special audit being carried out by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) to strengthen safety in the wake of a deadly Air India crash that killed 271 people earlier this month. The regulator did not name the airlines where the defects were found or detail the type of defects. The two airports in the world’s third-largest aviation market serve major Indian airlines such as IndiGo, Air India and Air India Express, as well as many international carriers. The repeated instances of defects indicated “ineffective monitoring and inadequate rectification action”, the DGCA said. The government body also found other violations such as an aircraft maintenance engineer not taking prescribed safety precautions, not addressing defects in some place...

Meta Platforms’ WhatsApp messaging service has been banned from all United States House of Representatives devices, according to a memo sent to all House staff on Monday. The notice said the “Office of Cybersecurity has deemed WhatsApp a high risk to users due to the lack of transparency in how it protects user data, absence of stored data encryption, and potential security risks involved with its use.” The memo, from the chief administrative officer, recommended using other messaging apps, including Microsoft Corp’s Teams platform, Amazon.com’s Wickr, Signal, and Apple’s iMessage and FaceTime. Meta disagreed with the move “in the strongest possible terms”, a company spokesperson said, noting that the platform provides a higher level of security than the other approved apps. In January, a WhatsApp official said Israeli spyware company Paragon Solutions had targeted scores of its users, including journalists and members of civil society. The House has banned other apps from staff devices in the past, including...

The Gates Foundation said on Tuesday it will commit $1.6 billion over the next five years to support Gavi, a public-private partnership that helps buy vaccines for the world’s poorest children. The number of kids dying around the world will likely go up this year because of the massive cuts to foreign aid, foundation chair Bill Gates said in a statement, adding that funding Gavi was the single most powerful step to stop it. “The legacy of our generation cannot be that we looked away as millions of poor children died of preventable causes,” said Gates. “The world now has affordable, effective, proven tools that save lives. Wealthy nations should fully fund Gavi and the Global Fund, the organisations created to get those products to the people who need them.” The vaccine alliance is looking to raise $9bn for its work from 2026 to 2030 at a pledging event to be held in Brussels on Wednesday. It is co-hosted by the European Union and the Gates Foundation. The Trump administration had previously indicated that it ...

A Russian missile attack on Ukraine’s southeastern Dnipropetrovsk region on Tuesday killed at least nine people, damaged civilian infrastructure and wounded dozens of train passengers, officials said. The two-wave strike killed seven in the regional capital of Dnipro, said governor Serhiy Lysak, where the blast wave also shattered train carriage windows and showered passengers with broken glass. Nearly 70 people, including 10 children, were injured, he said, adding the numbers could still rise. Two people were also killed in the town of Samar, around 10 kilometres from Dnipro, the state emergencies service said. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha called on Kyiv’s Western partners to respond to the attack. Nato leaders are currently in The Hague for an alliance summit, where President Volodymyr Zelenskiy hopes to secure more military support against Russia’s full-scale invasion, launched in 2022. “It is a matter of credibility for allies to step up pressure on Moscow,” Sybiha wrote on X. He added that sc...

A tragic road accident on Quetta’s Western Bypass claimed six lives after a passenger bus was engulfed in flames, leaving ten others injured.

Chairperson of the Parliamentary Forum on Population, Senator Sherry Rehman, delivered a compelling call to action at the 13th meeting of the Forum titled “From Consensus to Action: Leveraging Parliamentary Support to Achieve Sustainable Population Growth.

A devastating forest fire that erupted on June 15 continues to rage uncontrollably in the Hudur village and Thor Valley regions of Chilas, located in Pakistan’s Gilgit-Baltistan.

An anti-terrorism court (ATC) in Islamabad has extended pre-arrest bail for several Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) leaders until July 22, barring police from arresting them in the meantime.

Rights organisation Amnesty International on Tuesday criticised Pakistani authorities for “failing to protect the lives and property of civilians” in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa amid a surge in suspected quadcopter and drone attacks. The statement came in response to reports of multiple such attacks in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan over the past year. In March, at least 11 people were killed in Mardan in what locals insisted was a drone strike, while in May, a suspected quadcopter munitions drop claimed the lives of four children and injured five others in North Waziristan District’s Mir Ali tehsil. The military clarified that security forces were “falsely implicated” in the incident and that it was carried out by the banned Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Last Friday, a child was killed and five others were injured after a suspected drone hit South Waziristan District, prompting condemnations from KP politicians. “Pakistani authorities have failed to take action to protect the lives and property of civilians i...

Shares at the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) climbed by 5759.16 points after an earlier halt in trading on Tuesday, in the wake of US President Donald Trump announcing a complete ceasefire between Israel and Iran to end a 12-day war. The KSE-100 index climbed by 6079.16 points, or 5.23 per cent, to close at 122,246.63 points. Earlier in the day, shares at the PSX had climbed by 5,878 points a few hours after it opened. It reached an earlier intraday high of 122,045.62 from the last close of 116,167.47 yesterday, before a market halt was initiated. Yousuf M. Farooq, director of research at Chase Securities, attributed the rise to the overnight announcement of a ceasefire, with broad-based gains across sectors. Farooq said, “The Pakistan market rallied earlier today following the overnight announcement of a ceasefire. “However, reports during the day of Israeli claims that Iran has violated the ceasefire dampened sentiment, pulling the market down from an intraday high of 122,045.62 to 121,926.63 currently. Desp...