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A once-in-a-generation inflation shock is rippling worldwide and has become a significant source of social and political instability in the weakest countries. Pakistan is the latest country to experience paralyzing inflation. Bloomberg reports almost a fifth of electricity generation capacity is offline in the South Asian country because some power plants struggle to purchase liquefied natural gas and coal due to record high prices. Pakistan’s energy costs have doubled to $15 billion in the last nine months ended February from a year earlier. The country has struggled with purchasing energy products to fuel its power plants since the conflict in...

NEW DELHI: Central security agencies have claimed that Pakistan´s ISI had plans to carry out terror attacks on two foreign consulates in India with evidence for this reportedly given by a Sri Lankan national, arrested from Chennai, during his interrogation. Official sources claimed on Sunday that Sakir Hussain, a Sri Lankan national, told his interrogators that he had been hired allegedly by an official in Pakistani high commission in Colombo as part of the ISI´s alleged plans to conduct reconnaissance of US consulate in Chennai and Israeli consulate in Bengaluru. Hussain was arrested on April 29 in a coordinated operation...

Pakistan's Islamic schools resist expulsion order · Ban on foreign students followed London bombs· Leaders claim Musharraf ruling is discriminatory Imtiaz Gul in Islamabad Friday December 30, 2005 The Guardian (UK) Leaders of Pakistan's 13,000 madrasas have vowed to defy a government deadline to expel foreign students by December 31, saying the regulations discriminate against religious schools. President Pervez Musharraf required Pakistan's madrasas to expel about 1,800 foreign students after the July 7 bombings in London highlighted the extremist links of some schools. Three of the London bombers were of Pakistani descent, and the Aldgate bomber, Shehzad Tanweer, attended a...

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VIENNA—When Libya ratted out the biggest global network in nuclear smuggling, among the thousands of black market items it turned over to U.N. inspectors were the blueprints for a nuclear warhead. Libyan officials handed over the stack of documents in the very same way they had received them — stuffed into two shopping bags from "Good Look" tailors in Islamabad. The U.N. inspectors were flabbergasted: the designs were for a bomb that could, if "properly" unleashed, devastate a city. The plans had arrived in Libya more than two years ago through a nuclear proliferation racket that spanned at least nine...

Tribes join Pakistan's campaign to root out bin Laden By Peter Foster, South Asia Correspondent (Filed: 08/03/2004) The tribes of Pakistan's lawless border areas agreed yesterday to assist a hunt for Taliban and al-Qa'eda militants being conducted along the rugged Afghan-Pakistani border. The decision to co-operate with US-backed Pakistani government troops in the region will give further impetus to the hunt for Osama bin Laden, which has intensified since January. At a jirga, or tribal council, attended by 10,000 tribesmen in Wana, about 190 miles south-west of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, elders agreed yesterday to to set up militia bands...

Is Pakistan's nuclear programme dying? By Paul Anderson BBC correspondent in Islamabad In all the heat generated by Pakistan's leading nuclear scientist, AQ Khan, confessing to nuclear proliferation, relatively little attention has been paid to the future of the country's nuclear weapons programme. AQ Khan dramatically confessed to leaking nuclear secrets in February. In the 1970s Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto famously declared that Pakistanis would go to any sacrifice to match India's nuclear weapons programme, even if it meant the people being reduced to eating grass. Now they have a nuclear programme, they are discovering that weapons technology is...

Pakistan's extremist religious schools 'in mourning' for Taliban's collapse David Blair (Filed: 18/02/2004) Nothing at the spartan madrassahs has been changed, reports David Blair in Charsadda Small boys wearing white caps and flowing robes played in the shadow of jagged snow-capped peaks lining the frontier with Afghanistan. Thoughts of turmoil on the far side of the mountains still trouble staff and pupils in the spartan, bare classrooms of the Dar ul-Uloom Islamia Madrassah in Pakistan. "We are in mourning for the collapse of the Taliban," said Maulana Gouhar Shah, the leader of the madrassah. "We are still weeping for them....

Living in fear of Pakistan's new 'Taliban' regime By David Blair in Peshawar (Filed: 17/02/2004) Fame was no protection for one of Pakistan's most celebrated pop stars when he indulged in the "un-Islamic" practice of singing in public. Gulzar Alam was beaten with rifle butts and fists when 20 policemen armed with AK47s raided a wedding party where he was performing. Gulzar Alam protested: 'Music is our tradition and it reflects our culture' "They are trying to be the Taliban," said Mr Alam. "They are trying to impose this Islamic system. But music is our tradition and it reflects our...

Bleak future for Pakistan's 'bomb hero' (Filed: 07/02/2004) David Blair traces the career of the scientist who became a national icon but is now virtually under house arrest in IslamabadThe call to prayer echoed over Islamabad from a mighty mosque yesterday but the sound of Islamic devotion brought no apparent response from the home of Pakistan's most decorated citizen - and one of the world's most dangerous men. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the self-styled "father" of Pakistan's nuclear bomb and the man now revealed to have sat at the centre of a conspiracy to arm the world's most radical anti-western states...

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) - One of Pakistan's top Islamic clerics called Tuesday for nationwide protests against the presence of U.S. forces in the country's deeply conservative tribal areas, where al-Qaida and Taliban fighters are believed to be hiding. Maulana Fazle ur-Rehman, chief of the fundamentalist Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam party and leader of pro-Taliban rallies last year against the U.S. attacks in Afghanistan, said he had called for anti-U.S. rallies across the country on Friday. "It's a shame for the nation that foreign forces are scouring mountains with the help of our troops in Pakistan's tribal regions," he told The Associated Press....