DEVELOPMENT-PAKISTAN: Flood Aid Exposes Distrust of Gov’t

Inundated by appeals through text messages, email and Twitter, as well as in print and broadcast media, that call for donations of dried rations, hygiene kits, buckets, tubs and cooking pots, and straw mats, Ambreen Siddiqui feels lost in trying to help her fellow Pakistanis amid the country’s worst floods in decades.

U.N. Steps Up Pressure to Raise Funds for Pakistan

The U.N. General Assembly met Thursday to express the world community's solidarity with the people of Pakistan and to urge member states to step up their aid commitment to the flood stricken country.

Funding Lags to Aid Pakistan’s Millions of Displaced

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon returned from Pakistan Monday calling the floods there the worst disaster he has ever witnessed and urging the world community to speed up assistance to the Pakistani people.

ENVIRONMENT: Climate Change Debate Rises with Pakistan Floods

"If this is not God’s wrath, what is?" 40-year-old taxi driver Bakht Zada said of the massive floods in Pakistan that have swept away his life earnings.

PAKISTAN: Flood Disaster Means Starting from Zero

"We swam the whole day to get hold of the elderly and women swept away by floodwaters," recalled 27-year-old Shahid Ali of Charsadda district, one of the areas in north-western Pakistan badly hit by devastating monsoon rains.

Pakistan Poll Finds Widespread Disillusionment

The recent Wikileaks dump of war-related documents has brought little new to the debate over Washington's ongoing military involvement in Afghanistan, but allegations that Pakistan's intelligence services are aiding the Taliban has brought renewed attention to U.S. concerns over its reliance on Islamabad in battling Taliban and al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan.

PAKISTAN: Life At A Time Of Suicide Bombings

Like any other Friday morning, hordes of people flocked at the shrine of 11th-century Sufi saint, Hazrat Ali Hajveri, that is near Bhaati Gate inside Lahore’s walled city on Jul. 2. By that afternoon, a much larger crowd had gathered at the site, this time for the usual Friday prayers.

Obama’s Afghanistan Strategy Increasingly Under Siege

Monday's release by WikiLeaks of tens of thousands of classified documents detailing the travails of the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Pakistan's secret support for the Taliban from 2004 through 2009 comes amid a growing crisis of confidence here in the nearly nine-year-old war.

Leaked Reports Make Afghan War Policy More Vulnerable

The 92,000 reports on the war in Afghanistan made public by the whistleblower organisation WikiLeaks, and reported Monday by the Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel, offer no major revelations that are entirely new, as did the Pentagon Papers to which they are inevitably being compared.

US-IRAN: Mosque Blasts Denounced by Obama, Clinton

Both U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Friday denounced Thursday’s suicide bomb attacks on a Shi'ite mosque in Sistan-va Baluchistan province in southeastern Iran by a Sunni extremist group that Tehran charges is being supported by Washington.

CIA Drone Operators Oppose Strikes as Helping al Qaeda

Some CIA officers involved in the agency's drone strikes programme in Pakistan and elsewhere are privately expressing their opposition to the programme within the agency, because it is helping al Qaeda and its allies recruit, according to a retired military officer in contact with them.

U.N. Expert Calls On U.S. To Halt CIA Targeted Killings

Targeted killings, including those using drones, are increasingly being applied in ways that violate international law, according to a report issued Wednesday by a United Nations expert on extrajudicial killings.

PAKISTAN: Furore Over Leaked Tape Cause for Media Soul Searching

The continuing debate on the purported audiotape implicating Pakistani television anchor Hamid Mir, popular and controversial in equal measure, has raised serious concerns about the media amid calls for an impartial investigation to uncover the truth behind the recording.

INDIA: Doubts Cloud Upcoming Amnesty Int’l Report on Kashmir

The human rights body Amnesty International (AI) has yet to release its report on the outcome of its unprecedented visit last week to the disputed Indian- administered Kashmir state, but already there are doubts over its ability to come up with fair and accurate findings.

INDIA: Hanging for Pakistani Sets Back Anti-Death Penalty Campaign

The death sentence awarded to Pakistani national Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, 22, for his role in the 2008 terror attack on the western port city of Mumbai that killed 166 people is being seen as a setback to a campaign to have the extreme punishment abolished in India.

Aborted Bomb Plot Tests US-Pakistan Ties

Amid mounting evidence that Saturday's aborted car-bombing in New York's Times Square was linked to violent Islamist groups in Pakistan, observers here are expressing concern that recently enhanced cooperation between Washington and Islamabad could be negatively affected.

RIGHTS-PAKISTAN: Children Undeterred by Attacks, Want Education

"I don’t feel any fear. My parents do. They instruct me almost every day to stay away from crowded places," said Afaq Ali, a Grade 1 student in this capital city of the militancy-wracked Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in Pakistan.

U.N. Bhutto Probe Charges Cover-Up by Musharraf Govt

Who killed Benazir Bhutto, the popular Pakistani leader and first female head of state in the Muslim world - al Qaeda or the Taliban or the country's military leadership, which has enjoyed the backing of the United States for the past several decades?

RIGHTS-US: Legality of Drone Strikes Still in Question

While welcoming an initial effort by the administration of President Barack Obama to offer a legal justification for drone strikes to kill suspected terrorists overseas, human rights groups say critical questions remain unanswered.

POLITICS: U.N. Panel Rejects Request to Reopen Bhutto Probe

A three-member U.N. commission, which has been investigating the 2007 assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, has flatly rejected a request to reopen the inquiry.

POLITICS: Defying U.S., Pakistan Keeps Custody of Baradar

The refusal of Pakistani intelligence to turn over Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar and as many as six other top Taliban figures to the United States or the Afghan government has dealt a serious blow to the Barack Obama administration's hopes for Pakistani cooperation in weakening the Taliban.