ISLAMABAD: The situation arising out of the Sept 18 terrorist attack at Uri in held Kashmir showed further signs of gravity on Monday when a number of senators asked the government to convene a joint sitting of parliament to discuss Pakistan-India relations. At one point during the discussion on a motion regarding Pakistan-India ties on the opening day of the current session of the upper house of parliament, Senate Chairman Raza Rabbani expressed the hope…
Posts published in “Day: September 28, 2016”
HONG KONG — A court in southern China has sentenced three prominent labor organizers to suspended prison terms, human rights groups and a lawyer for one of them said on Monday, more than nine months after they were arrested amid a crackdown on civic organizations that work outside the Communist Party. The activists, who live in the southern province of Guangdong, could still be imprisoned if found guilty of any further offenses, the lawyer, Lai…
The United States’ Justice Department on Monday unsealed criminal charges against a China-based company and four of its executives for conspiring to evade US economic sanctions that target North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles programmes. Also on Monday, the US Treasury Department blacklisted the same firm, Dandong Hongxiang Industrial Development Company, and the individuals. The department alleged in a statement that Hongxiang provided financial services to a North Korean firm that was already sanctioned,…
LHASA, China — In the contest for Tibetan hearts and minds, a 26-year-old Buddhist monk is emerging into the spotlight. He is the Chinese-appointed Panchen Lama, and he is being groomed by the Communist Party to fill an important political and religious role in Tibet. Obedient to the party and loyal to the Chinese state, the “Chinese Panchen” is being pushed forward as an alternative to the Dalai Lama, a man widely loved by Tibetans…
China and Russia completed an eight-day joint naval exercise in the South China Sea last week, and this time the location was also the message. The two autocracies are expanding cooperation and offering each other support in their territorial disputes, a trend that could fuel instability from East Asia to Central Europe. Days before the drill, which focused on antisubmarine warfare and what a Xinhua dispatch called “island-seizing,” Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping held their…
ISLAMABAD: When chief military spokesman Lt-Gen Asim Bajwa tweeted the arrival of Russian troops in Rawalpindi on Friday for the first-ever military exercise between the two Cold War era foes, it was clear that the seismic event would upset geo-strategic balance in the region and beyond — forever. This was good news for Pakistan — both diplomatically and militarily. Diplomatically, because the two-week-long ‘Druzhba 2016’ (Friendship 2016) military drill is being conducted at the High…