Indian Sub-continent

ISLAMABAD, March 31 (Reuters) - Pakistani Finance Minister Ishaq Dar said on Friday China had rolled over a $2 billion loan that matured last week, providing relief during the South Asian nation's acute balance of payment crisis.

Locking in a rollover had been critical for Pakistan, where reserves have dipped to just four weeks' worth of imports and talks over an International Monetary Fund bailout tranche of $1.1 billion have hit a stalemate.

Kanpur: The fire broke out at about 2 am in the readymade clothes market, Bansmandi, and engulfed more than 500 shops, including AR Tower.

A fire broke out suddenly from a short circuit which later flared up and reached the shops on the upper floors.

The fire engulfed the surrounding buildings as well. Along with calling for a hydraulic fire brigade machine from Lucknow, the army has taken charge.

NEW DELHI (AP) — Thirty-five bodies have been found inside a well at a Hindu temple in central India after dozens of people fell into the muddy water when the well’s cover collapsed, officials said Friday.

Video of Thursday’s collapse at the temple complex in Indore in Madhya Pradesh state showed chaos afterward, with people rushing toward the exits. An excavator pulled down a wall of the decades-old temple to help people flee.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) — Taliban militants in a pair of attacks killed four police officers by targeting a police vehicle with a roadside bomb and wounded six in an attack on a police station in northwest Pakistan early Thursday, police and the insurgents said.

The bomb killed four officers in a police vehicle carrying reinforcements sent to respond to the attack on a police station in Lakki Marwat, a town in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province bordering Afghanistan. Six officers were wounded in the attack at the police station.

ISLAMABAD, Mar 29 (APP): Pakistan on Wednesday said that its foreign policy was centered on peace, stability and economic development.

Addressing the 18th Meeting of Secretaries of Security Council of SCO Member States through zoom link, Secretary National Security Division Engineer Aamir Hassan, who headed the Pakistan delegation, reiterated Pakistan’s commitment to the objectives of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).

ISLAMABAD, Mar 29 (APP): The New Democratic Party (NDP) of Canada has called on the Canadian government to boycott the G20 events in Kashmir and Chandigarh, Punjab, and ban Bharatiya Janata Party leaders and officials from traveling to Canada for abusing minorities and hurling threats against Canadian lawmakers.

The demand was supported by the World Sikh Organization of Canada (WSO), according to media reports.

NEW DELHI, March 29. /TASS/: All declared goals of the special military operation will be achieved despite increasing military assistance to Ukraine from the West, the secretary of Russia’s Security Council, Nikolay Patrushev, said at a meeting with his counterparts from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s member-countries in New Delhi on Wednesday.

KABUL, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Afghan forces have discovered weapon caches in the southern Helmand and northern Baghlan provinces over the past couple of days, officials said Wednesday.

In the first achievement, which occurred in the southern Helmand province, the personnel of the General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI) or the country's counter-intelligence agency launched operations in Greshk district on Tuesday, discovering a weapon cache containing a variety of arms and ammunition, a GDI statement asserted.

ISLAMABAD (AP) — Calls mounted Wednesday for the Taliban to free a girls’ education activist arrested earlier this week in Kabul, as a government minister defended the detention.

Matiullah Wesa, founder and president of Pen Path — a local nongovernmental group that travels across Afghanistan with a mobile school and library — was arrested in the Afghan capital on Monday.

Islamabad, Mar 28 (PTI) Pakistan's government on Tuesday night introduced a bill in the parliament to curtail the discretionary powers of the chief justice, hours after Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said that "history would not forgive us" if parliament did not enact laws to curtail the powers of the country's top judge.

Law Minister Azam Nazeer Tarar presented 'The Supreme Court (Practice and Procedure) Act, 2023', which was approved by the Cabinet earlier in the evening.