RjNews

• ISPR chief rejects reports regarding US drone operations • Warns India against ‘false flag operation’ in deep waters • Says decision to join Gaza peacekeeping force will be made by govt ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Army on Monday adopted a tougher stance toward the Taliban regime ahead of the next round of talks in Istanbul , declaring that Pakistan’s only and non-negotiable demand is an end to terrorism emanating from Afghan territory. “The conditions that Afghan Taliban keep putting forward are meaningless, what matters is the end of terrorism,” said Lt Gen Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, the military’s spokesman, while briefing a group of journalists at Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR). “Pakistan has a one-point agenda: Afghan soil must not be used against us,” he asserted. Gen Chaudhry’s remarks came as Islamabad prepares for the Nov 6 meeting in Turkiye, the next phase of negotiations following last month’s six-day talks in Istanbul between Pakistan and the Taliban regime. Tho...

Traders and experts in Pakistan see little chance of stability in the gold market — which has witnessed sharp volatility amid an overall rising price trend — anytime soon. They attribute the price swings to a rare mix of global and local factors; fluctuations in international gold prices, escalating armed conflicts that threaten to widen war zones, US tariff pressures under President Trump, dollar volatility, geopolitical tensions, and abrupt shifts in domestic economic policies. Ultimately, market decisions rest with individual investors, as projections for Pakistan’s gold sector are shaped by traders/experts’ intuition rather than fact-based evidence. Comprehensive data on the country’s gold market remains unavailable, though, various institutions hold partial information on financial transactions and the inward and outward movements of precious metals in this largely self-regulated, informal sector. Yet none, including the State Bank, the ministries of finance and commerce, or t...

Tehran’s main source of drinking water is at risk of running dry within two weeks, state media warned on Sunday, owing to a historic drought. The Amir Kabir dam, one of five which provide drinking water for the capital, “holds just 14 million cubic metres of water, which is 8 per cent of its capacity,” the director of the capital’s water company, Behzad Parsa, was quoted as saying by the IRNA news agency. At that level, it can only continue to supply Tehran with water “for two weeks”, he said. The megacity of more than 10 million people is nestled against the southern slopes of the often snow-capped Alborz mountains, which soar as high as 5,600 metres and whose rivers feed multiple reservoirs. But the country is in the midst of its worst drought in decades. The level of rainfall in Tehran province was “nearly without precedent for a century,” a local official declared last month. A year ago, the Amir Kabir dam held back 86 million cubic metres of water, Parsa said, but there had ...

CAIRO: Prime ministers, presidents and royalty descended on Cairo on Saturday to attend the spectacle-laden inauguration of a sprawling new billion-dollar museum built near the Pyramids to house one of the world’s richest collections of antiquities. The inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum , or GEM, marks the end of a two-decade construction effort hampered by the Arab Spring uprisings, pandemic and wars in neighbouring countries. “We’ve all dreamed of this project and whether it would really come true,” Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly told a press conference, calling the museum a “gift from Egypt to the whole world from a country whose history goes back more than 7,000 years”. Spectators including President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi gathered late on Saturday before an enormous screen outside the museum, which projected images of the country’s most famous cultural sites as dancers in glittering pharaonic-style garb waved glowing orbs and sceptres. ‘New chapter’ for Egypt They were...

Defence Minister Khawaja Asif sidestepped answering a question on whether Pakistan had conducted a test of a hypersonic ballistic missile, saying such matters should not be asked about publicly. “Now don’t ask all these questions. Ask such things in private,” he said while responding in an interview on Samaa TV show ‘Mere Sawal’ on Friday, when asked to confirm whether Pakistan had conducted the missile test or not. The question came in the wake of a “rare lenticular cloud formation” observed over Quetta in the early hours of Tuesday had left the public puzzled over the phenomenon and its origins. Citizens had reported sighting the phenomenon around morning prayers from many parts of Balochistan and speculation was rife about the likely cause. Many social media accounts had hinted that the cloud formation was the result of a missile test or a new technology tested by the military. In a post on X later in the day, the Pakistan Meteorological Department said the sight was a “len...