For a regime constantly flaunting its ‘over 90 per cent approval rate’, the sudden outbreak of protests across China is both embarrassing and perplexing. Three years of severe COVID restrictions have caused frustration and anger toward the government that transcend class and geography — a situation unseen since 1989 and one that strikes fear into the authorities. With the slogan […]

Within two months of the conclusion of the 19th National Party Congress in October 2017, China’s relationship with the United States was thrown into disarray. In December 2017, the Trump administration’s U.S. National Security Strategy labeled China a revisionist rival and formally re-opened the door to great power competition. In Spring 2018, tariffs were unilaterally imposed on China’s exports to […]

A four-member delegation of Pakistani Ulema will visit Afghanistan this week for talks in the hope of resolving cross-border hostility that has left a number of people dead and more than a dozen wounded. Two separate skirmishes have taken place at the Spin Boldak-Chaman border crossing this month. According to Pakistani media, the visiting delegation will meet with officials from […]

China has never concealed its hostility towards India in the last few decades. China initiated war against India in 1962 and is still occupying thousands of kilometres of Indian territory. Pakistan gifted some area in the Pakistan occupied Kashmir to China to spite India and China has gleefully accepted this region as its own, not bothering about India’s protest. After the 1962 war, there […]

After more than a decade of stalemate, China’s concessions have finally led to a breakthrough on the audit issue between China and the United States. On December 15, the U.S. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) announced that they had been allowed to thoroughly inspect the audit working papers of Chinese companies for the first time. This resets the three-year […]

On December 8, 2022, a cadre of the Tritiya Sammelan Prastuti Committee (TSPC), a splinter group of the Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-Maoist), identified as Raju Yadav alias Raju Ji, was arrested from Patratoli Forest near Nindir village in Latehar District. Yadav, a resident of Chetar village in the Chandwa area of the district, was the ‘area commander’ of the banned outfit […]

On December 8, two Baloch men were ‘forcibly disappeared’ by Security Forces (SFs) in two separate incidents in Kech District. While Sohail was ‘forcibly disappeared’ from the Dazen area of Tump, Chakar went ‘missing’ after being arrested from his house during a raid by SFs in the Kohar area. On November 22, four Baloch students were ‘forcibly disappeared’ around midnight […]

Nothing better illustrates the utter ineptitude of the Biden administration’s dealings with the Middle East than Saudi Arabia’s decision to forge a strategic alliance with China. Biden set the tone for his strained relationship with the Saudi royal family during the 2020 presidential election contest when he denounced the kingdom as a “pariah” state over its involvement in the murder […]

Pakistani army commandos on Tuesday stormed a counter-terrorism centre and killed militant detainees who had seized control of the facility, as well as rescuing their hostages, after talks failed to resolve a two-day standoff, the defence minister said. Khawaja Asif told parliament that all the hostages had been freed by the army in the operation, in which two Special Services […]

Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB) said on Tuesday that the new Afghani banknotes, which were printed in Poland and shipped to Afghanistan in early November, have not been put into circulation yet. A spokesman for DAB said they are working on a mechanism to put the new banknotes into circulation, while simultaneously recalling the old notes. “Printing and circulating banknotes is […]