Pakistan

ISLAMABAD (AP) — Calls mounted Wednesday for the Taliban to free a girls’ education activist arrested earlier this week in Kabul, as a government minister defended the detention.

Matiullah Wesa, founder and president of Pen Path — a local nongovernmental group that travels across Afghanistan with a mobile school and library — was arrested in the Afghan capital on Monday.

Islamabad, Mar 28 (PTI) Pakistan's government on Tuesday night introduced a bill in the parliament to curtail the discretionary powers of the chief justice, hours after Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said that "history would not forgive us" if parliament did not enact laws to curtail the powers of the country's top judge.

Law Minister Azam Nazeer Tarar presented 'The Supreme Court (Practice and Procedure) Act, 2023', which was approved by the Cabinet earlier in the evening.

ISLAMABAD (AP) — An Afghan rights activist who has campaigned for girls’ education has been arrested in Kabul, the United Nations said on Tuesday.

The U.N. mission in Afghanistan said Matiullah Wesa, founder and president of Pen Path — a local nongovernmental group that travels across Afghanistan with a mobile school and library — was arrested in the Afghan capital on Monday.

Local reports said Taliban security forces detained Wesa after his return from a trip to Europe.

ISLAMABAD, Mar 25 (NNN-APP) – The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP), said that, its foreign exchange reserves have increased by 280 million U.S. dollars.

During the week ending on Mar 17, the total foreign exchange reserves of the SBP rose to around 4.6 billion dollars, the SBP said in a statement.

Last week, “the SBP received 500 million dollars, as the government of Pakistan’s commercial loan disbursement,” the statement said, adding that, “after accounting for external debt repayments, the central bank’s reserves” had recorded this increase.

ISLAMABAD, March 24 (Xinhua) -- The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) said on Thursday that its foreign exchange reserves have increased by 280 million U.S. dollars.

During the week ending on March 17, the total foreign exchange reserves of the SBP rose to around 4.6 billion dollars, the SBP said in a statement.

Last week, "the SBP received 500 million dollars as the government of Pakistan's commercial loan disbursement," the statement said, adding that "after accounting for external debt repayments, the central bank's reserves" had recorded this increase.

LAHORE, Islamabad (AP) — Pakistani police stormed former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s residence in the eastern city of Lahore on Saturday and arrested 61 people amid tear gas and clashes between Khan’s supporters and police, officials said.

Senior police officer Suhail Sukhera, who led the operation in an upscale Lahore neighborhood, said police acted to remove a barricade erected by members of Khan’s Tehreek-e-Insaf party and his defiant supporters. He said they blocked the lanes around Khan’s residence with concrete blocks, felled trees, tents and a parked truck.

LAHORE, Pakistan (AP) — A Pakistani court on Thursday rejected a petition from former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s lawyers to suspend a warrant for him to appear in court in a graft case linked to his term in office — a development that increases the likelihood of another police attempt to arrest the ousted premier.

Khan has been holed up in his home in the eastern city of Lahore, where clashes erupted earlier this week when police tried to detain him after he failed to show up at an earlier cour hearing in the case.

LAHORE, Pakistan (AP) — Clashes between Pakistan’s police and supporters of former Prime Minister Imran Khan persisted outside his home in the eastern city of Lahore on Wednesday, a day after officers went to arrest him for failing to appear in court on graft charges.

The police operation triggered clashes between Khan’s supporters and police in the country’s major cities, including Karachi, Islamabad, the garrison city of Rawalpindi, Peshawar, Quetta and elsewhere in Pakistan.

ISLAMABAD, Mar 13 (APP): President Jammu and Kashmir Democratic Freedom Party, Shabir Ahmed Shah said on Monday that the Indian bid to host the G-20 summit in Srinagar territory was an attempt to deflect world attention away from the real issue of Kashmir.

In a letter addressed to the Secretary Generals UN and OIC, Shah said that the Modi government’s plan to hold the summit in the disputed territory was part of its disinformation campaign aimed at creating a smokescreen to hide ground realities in Kashmir and to hoodwink the international community.

ISLAMABAD, March 12 (Xinhua) -- A polio vaccination campaign to immunize more than 21.54 million children under the age of five will kick off in Pakistan's southern Sindh province and eastern Punjab province on Monday, the Pakistani Health Ministry said.

In the first phase of the drive, more than 17 million children during the five-day campaign from March 13 to March 17 would be vaccinated in 13 districts of Punjab, 16 districts of Sindh and the federal capital Islamabad, the ministry said in a statement on Sunday.