Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Mohammad Ishaq Dar has arrived in Washington DC, where he is scheduled to meet his US counterpart, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, at the Department of State.
They will discuss important facets of Pak-US relations exploring ways and means to strengthen bilateral ties, with a particular focus on promoting trade, investment and economic cooperation, state-run media Radio Pakistan reported.
The deputy prime minister is also scheduled to speak at the US think tank, The Atlantic Council, sharing Pakistan’s perspective on regional and global issues as well as the future of Pak-US relations.
Pakistan’s Ambassador to US Rizwan Saeed Sheikh and senior embassy officials received Dar at the train station in the US capital.
Reciprocal tariff: Pakistan officials to meet Trump administration, Bloomberg reports
During his week-long visit, Dar attended high-level signature events of Pakistan’s UN Security Council (UNSC) presidency in New York, while he met UN Secretary General António Guterres, on the sidelines of the High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) on Sustainable Development, as well.
A day ago, Bloomberg, quoting US State Department Spokesperson Tammy Bruce as saying, reported that a Pakistani delegation will soon meet the administration of US President Donald Trump in a bid to reach an agreement on a trade deal.
In a US Department of State press briefing on Wednesday, Bruce said she will attend the meeting between the Pakistani delegation and US officials.
Islamabad is looking forward to the 29% reciprocal tariffs to be lifted that the Trump administration levied initially, Bloomberg said. The South Asian country has proposed to increase imports of soybeans and cotton, while it already is the second-largest buyer of US cotton by value, after China. Whereas, Pakistan’s biggest export destination is the United States.
Bilateral ties between Pakistan and US have improved in recent times, with Trump’s holding a rare meeting with Field Marshal Asim Munir at the White House.
The FO stated on July 19 that FM Dar’s visit is an indication of Pakistan’s increasing importance in both its relations with the US and the global landscape.
Moreover, in order to complete a trade agreement, Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb has also visited the United States and met with US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer in Washington recently to advance economic cooperation, as per the Ministry of Finance.
Reuters last week reported that the negotiations, focused on reciprocal tariffs, are part of a broader push to reset economic ties at a time of shifting geopolitical alignments and Pakistan’s efforts to avoid steep US duties on exports.
Georges Abdallah, a 74-year-old Lebanese teacher who became a left-wing symbol for the Palestinian cause, has been freed by France on Friday after 41 years in jail.
Described by his lawyer as “the man who has spent the longest time in prison for events linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Abdallah left jail in the south of France in the early hours of Friday and was due to be put on a flight directly to Beirut.
Convicted in 1987 for complicity in the murders in France of two diplomats – one American, one Israeli – Abdallah has gradually been forgotten by the wider public.
But his release remained a cause célèbre for activists on the Marxist-Leninist left, with which he still identifies.
His stern-looking bearded face continued to peer from banners in left-wing demonstrations; and once a year protesters gathered to demand his freedom outside his prison in the Pyrenees. Three left-led French municipalities declared him an “honorary citizen”.
Though eligible for parole since 1999, he saw successive requests for liberty turned down. According to supporters, this was because of pressure on the French government from the US and Israel.
Interviewed recently by the French news agency AFP at his cell in Lannemazan jail, he said he had kept sane by focusing on the Palestinian “struggle”.
“If I had not had that… well, 40 years – it can turn your brain to mush,” he said.
On the walls of his cell, Abdallah kept a picture of the 1960s revolutionary Che Guevara and postcards from supporters around the world. A desk was covered with piles of newspapers.
AFP
Abdallah was eventually released from Lannemezan prison in southern France in the early hours of Friday
Born in 1951 into a Christian family in northern Lebanon, in the late 1970s Abdallah helped set up the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions (LARF) – a small Marxist group dedicated to fighting Israel and its closest ally, the United States.
At the time Lebanon was embroiled in a civil war. In 1978 and again in 1982 Israel invaded south Lebanon to combat Palestinian fighters based there.
Abdallah’s group decided to hit Israeli and US targets in Europe, and carried out five attacks in France. In 1982 its members shot and killed US diplomat Charles Ray in Strasbourg, and Israeli diplomat Yakov Barsimantov in Paris. In addition a car bomb blamed on LARF killed two French bomb-disposal experts.
Abdallah was arrested in Lyon in 1984. Tailed by French intelligence officers, he thought he was being followed by Israeli assassins and gave himself in at a police station. Initially he was charged only with having false passports and criminal association.
A short time later a French citizen was kidnapped in northern Lebanon, and the French secret service entered a negotiation via Algeria to engineer an exchange.
The French citizen was freed, but just before Abdallah was to be released police in Paris found a cache of weapons at his flat, including the gun used to kill the diplomats. This made his release impossible.
Two years later in the run up to his trial, Paris was hit by a spate of attacks which killed 13 people. These were blamed by politicians and the media on allies of Abdallah trying to pressurise France into freeing him. Later it was established that in fact they were the work of the Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah, under instructions from Iran.
In the trial, Abdallah denied involvement in the murders but defended their legitimacy. He was given a life sentence.
Getty Images
Georges, seen here between two police officers, was convicted in the 1980s
Of the more than 10 requests for release since 1999, only one came close to success. But in 2013 then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote to the French government expressing the hope that it could find a “way to contest the legality” of a court decision to free Abdallah.
Her message was later made public by WikiLeaks.
Interior Minister Manuel Valls then refused to sign the expulsion order on which Abdallah’s release was contingent.
This year the appeal court decided that the length of Abdallah’s detention was “disproportionate”, and that he no longer posed a threat. It said again that his release must immediately be followed by expulsion from France.
“This is a victory for justice, but it is also a political scandal that he was not released before, thanks to the behaviour of the United States and successive French presidents,” said his lawyer Jean-Louis Chalanset.
Among the people who campaigned for his release was the 2022 Nobel literature prize winner Annie Ernaux, who said he was a “victim of state justice of which France should be ashamed”.
Yves Bonnet, the intelligence chief who tried to negotiate Abdallah’s exchange in 1985 and is now a member of the far-right National Rally, said he was “treated worse than a serial killer” and that “the United States was obsessed with keeping him in jail”.
According to a report in Le Monde newspaper, no Palestinian prisoner – even those condemned to life imprisonment in Israel – has served more than 40 years in jail. Abdallah served 41.
Rescue teams race to find survivors after deadly school building collapse in western India.
At least four children have been killed and 17 others injured after the roof of a school building collapsed in India’s western state of Rajasthan, according to local reports.
The tragedy took place on Friday morning shortly after daily prayers at a government-run school in Barmer district. Authorities say about 25 to 30 students were inside the classroom when the ceiling suddenly gave way.
Local police believe the building’s deteriorating structure, worsened by recent heavy rainfall, may have caused the collapse. “Some of the injured are in critical condition,” senior police officer Amit Kumar told the Press Trust of India.
Rajasthan’s education minister, Madan Dilawar, said he had instructed officials to oversee the medical treatment of the injured and ensure families receive support. “I have directed the authorities to make proper arrangements and to oversee the injured children’s treatment, and to ensure they do not face any kind of difficulties,” he told AajTak news channel.
Dilawar added that a formal investigation would be launched to determine the exact cause. “I have also spoken to the collector and directed authorities to take stock of the situation and help in whatever way possible,” he said.
Footage broadcast on Indian television showed locals and emergency workers using cranes to clear debris as anxious parents looked on. The sound of relatives wailing could be heard near the site.
Rescue efforts were ongoing late into the day. Local media said 32 students had been pulled out alive so far, though some were severely injured.
“Instructions have been given to the concerned authorities to ensure proper treatment for the injured children,” Rajasthan Chief Minister Bhajanlal Sharma said in a statement on X.
Rajasthan, known for its extreme weather, has experienced intense monsoon rains in recent weeks, raising concerns over the safety of ageing infrastructure in rural schools.
Stitching freedom: How Hindu women in Sindh are tailoring a future beyond poverty
MIRPURKHAS, PAKISTAN: In the quiet town of Sufi Colony on the outskirts of Mirpurkhas, the hum of 20 sewing machines fills the air each morning as women gather for work at the BRIT Women’s Garment Unit.
Among them is 25-year-old Sanjana Dileep, the fastest stitcher on the floor, a divorced mother of one, and one of the four women who co-own the factory.
“In the factory we manufacture suits and jackets that are exported,” Dileep said, her voice calm but proud. “We do a variety of sewing there.”
Launched with a Rs2 million ($7,000) interest-free loan under the Sindh government’s People’s Poverty Reduction Program (PPRP), BRIT has become a symbol of what financial inclusion can mean for marginalized women, especially in Hindu-majority villages where caste, religion and gender often intersect to limit opportunity.
“Earlier, we were living in poverty … But now we are doing this work that fetches us a good salary,” Dileep told Arab News, saying she now supports an extended family of eight, including a cancer-stricken uncle.
In rural Sindh, female labor force participation stands at just 10.8 percent, compared with 49.1 percent for men, according to the Pakistan Labour Force Survey 2020‑21.
In Mirpurkhas district, where the BRIT factory is located, over 1.68 million people live, more than 70 percent in rural area, with a literacy rate of just 34.8 percent among women. Social indicators show that 37 percent of children in the district are engaged in child labor, the highest rate in Sindh.
In this context, the BRIT Women’s Garment Unit offering stable income and skill development represents a rare opportunity for personal and community uplift.
On average, women at the BRIT unit earn around Rs25,000 ($88) per month, a life-changing income for families in southern Sindh. The garments they stitch — cargo jeans, jackets, and other apparel — end up in supply chains that serve global brands like Izod and NewYorker, through large Karachi-based exporters such as Apex Garments and H. Nizam Din & Sons.
“We have 20 machines right now that are fully occupied as some of these females are training while others are working,” said Mohan Das, a project supervisor.
He said the unit is planning to scale up to as many as 100 machines.
“WORK WITH DIGNITY”
In Mirpurkhas district, where employment, especially for women, is rare and often informal, the BRIT initiative has opened a new path.
Hindu women, who typically work as housemaids or on farms, now have access to structured jobs and a degree of independence.
“The Hindu community here is very poor and women usually work as housemaids in the village so we thought about setting up a plant like what we have established, this BRIT female garment plant,” said Das.
Eighteen-year-old Madhu Omprakash joined BRIT a month ago. She is now one of its fastest learners.
“This job is giving a lot of [financial] support to my family and we are doing this with dignity,” she said, explaining that she took the job to help pay for her education and support her widowed mother and two younger sisters.
She dreams of becoming a doctor.
Another tailor, Kaushila, was found stitching inner linings for export jackets, her arms wrapped in traditional colorful Thari bangles.
“I am sewing about 15 to 20 pieces daily that are of different rates and fetch me as much as Rs800 [about $3] a day,” she said.
The factory currently produces around 5,000 pieces each month, earning about Rs600,000 ($2,100) for its owners. The CMT (Cut, Make and Trim) model enables them to partner with larger firms that supply pre-cut fabric and export the finished goods.
“Yes, absolutely, we produce export products,” Das said. “We bring [cut clothes] from Karachi’s big companies like Apex, Emaan, Zohra and manufacture it for further exports.”
But the global economic picture is changing.
Das says uncertainty in international textile demand, especially from the US, has affected their export pipeline.
“Our business has shrunk and that’s why we have focused on local sales,” he said. “Our female tailors don’t sit idle.”
Marketing manager Lal Chand said the team is now approaching local brands such as Mama’s Choice and Al Jobat Garments and exploring the possibility of building their own export platform to bypass middlemen.
“We are planning to create our own export platform and manufacture products to directly export,” he said.
Syed Shahanshah, district manager of the Sindh Rural Support Organization (SRSO), which implements the PPRP program, said BRIT is among several microenterprises the eight-year initiative helped launch before it formally concluded in June 2025.
“Our ultimate objective is to promote job creation, livelihood improvement and poverty reduction,” he said. “The kind of awareness this community has got — we are receiving different business plans from them. This project has a future in the eyes of the government and I am sure about its expansion.”
Dileep, too, believes the project is just beginning.
“I belong to the Hindu community and we want to expand this factory as this is benefitting us,” she said.
“Earlier my father and brother used to work, but now we too are working and earning money. That really excites us.”
The Palestinian journalists and videographers working with Australia’s national broadcaster to bring us the stories from inside Gaza are hungry and weak, the ABC’s Middle East correspondent Matthew Doran said this week. One colleague “does not have the strength to hold a camera any more”, has lost 34kg and can hardly talk on the phone, Doran wrote.
“And it could seriously impact how we can tell the broader story of the Gaza war.”
The scenes of aid seekers scrambling for food, babies lying silently in hospital beds and Palestinians protesting against Hamas for prolonging the war would be impossible without these Palestinian freelancers, Doran warned.
The ABC correspondent was among some of the world’s biggest news outlets, including BBC News, Agence France-Presse (AFP), the Associated Press and Reuters who said they were “desperately concerned” about the journalists in Gaza after widespread warnings of mass starvation.
With Israel denying international reporters access to Gaza, most of the world’s news outlets rely on Palestinian freelancers to inform the world, but hunger and lack of clean water is making them ill and exhausted, with some telling agencies they are too weak to work.
“One of the biggest and most important stories in the world … will soon be more difficult to tell, as our colleagues struggle to help us tell it,” Doran said.
Doran’s online analysis was accompanied by several broadcast reports on starvation on the 7pm bulletin across the week. “The ABC has worked with a variety of independent journalists in Gaza over the past two years, but in recent weeks that has become increasingly difficult as displacement and starvation make it harder for journalists in Gaza,” a spokesperson for ABC News told Weekly Beast.
Following Trump’s playbook
Meanwhile, the Murdoch campaign to denigrate if not privatise the ABC – “a massive government-funded monstrosity” – continues apace.
According to Daily Telegraph columnist and blogger Tim Blair, an Australia without the ABC is “beautiful” and we should follow the US administration’s lead and defund public media.
In May, Trump issued an executive order blocking NPR and PBS from receiving taxpayer funds through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).
This week, federal lawmakers voted in support of the plan to claw back $1.1bn from the CPB, the umbrella organisation that helps fund both NPR and the non-commercial TV network PBS.
“Donald Trump’s modern and visionary US government is now preparing to slash some $1.7bn from public media funding,” Blair wrote. “That’s an ABC-and-a-half delightfully subtracted from taxpayer outlay.
“Think of all the money we’d save, and all the economic, cultural and emotional energy we could direct instead towards the positive and productive.
“Also, think of all the ABC presenters who’d suddenly be able to reach much larger audiences just by shouting on public transport.”
Blair’s view is not shared by the majority of Australians, who consistently rate the ABC’s impartial coverage of local, national and global affairs as the country’s most trusted news source.
The ABC news website is number one on the monthly Ipsos news rankings, with an audience of 13 million. The Daily Telegraph meanwhile comes in at 17, with 3 million. (Guardian Australia is sixth with 7.3 million.)
And this week, the ABC was celebrating 15 years of the ABC News channel, which is Australia’s most watched news channel.
Old dog still barks
Gerard Henderson’s byline photo on Sky News Australia
Another ABC critic, Gerard Henderson, is using his new platform on Murdoch’s Sky News Australia to continue his decades-long criticism of Aunty. His campaign began in his tedious Media Watch Dog column in 1988 as a newsletter mailed out by the Sydney Institute.
The rightwing thinktank run by Henderson publishes his lengthy screed each week online, and for more than a decade it was republished by The Australian each Friday. The Australian stopped carrying Henderson’s Media Watch Dog column late last year, but Hendo found refuge on the website of Sky News.
His new home also gave him access to Sky’s media program where he appears to variously “slam” ABC Insiders, “question” why the ABC didn’t cover Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon press conference or “torch” the ABC “for continually promoting the Teals even after the election”. These videos are then published by The Australian. The Oz continues to carry his opinion column, which the paper picked up after the Sydney Morning Herald dropped it.
Daily Mail cops criticism
The deputy premier of Victoria, Ben Carroll. Photograph: Joel Carrett/AAP
Victoria’s deputy premier, Ben Carroll, was highly critical of the Daily Mail for publishing a claim on Tuesday that a child at a centre where alleged childcare paedophile Joshua Dale Brown worked had tested positive for an STD. At a press conference Carroll said the story was not true and the Department of Health had asked the publication to take it down.
“It is highly insensitive to families, and it is completely untrue,” Carroll said. “From what we have advised, there is no child that has been tested positively for an STD. This must be horrifically traumatic for all families and parents involved in this, and we do hope that the author behind it makes contact with the Department of Health and gets their facts straight.”
The editor of the Daily Mail, Felicity Hetherington, did not comply with the request and the story remains online.
“As the article states, it is based on information provided by sources close to the investigation,” she told Weekly Beast. “The article will be also updated to include Mr Carroll’s comments.”
The lead paragraph of the story was amended to include the word “reportedly” and the headline includes the deputy premier’s denial.
“A child who attended a daycare centre where a worker was subsequently charged with more than 70 child sex offences has reportedly been infected with a sexually transmitted disease,” the new version says.
The new business of influence
Influencer Tammy Hembrow at Australian fashion week in Sydney in May. Photograph: Brendon Thorne/Getty Images
Influencer and fitness model Tammy Hembrow, 31, is a staple in the Daily Mail, where her outfits, relationships and workout routines provide near-daily fodder.
So when the Daily Mail reported this week that Hembrow’s “very revealing outfit” of “a tiny silk crop top and matching skirt set by Arcina Ori” was worn to the Australian Financial Review magazine’s 30th anniversary at the Sydney Opera House, we sat up and noticed.
The first cover of the Australian Financial Review magazine in 1995
The first edition of AFR magazine, in 1995, carried a cover story about how Australian dynasties preserved wealth, and not much has changed. The anniversary edition features a gold-foiled cover with its gatefold partner Rolex.
A celebration dinner at the Opera House’s Bennelong restaurant, sponsored by Range Rover which ferried some guests to the venue, was attended by everyone from Malcolm and Lucy Turnbull and ABC chair Kim Williams to business leaders Robin Khuda of AirTrunk, Morgan Stanley chief executive Richard Stanley and the managing partner of Gilbert + Tobin, Danny Gilbert.
It turns out we should not have been surprised Hembrow was a guest. She held her own among the finance crowd, many of whom were members of the Rich List, Young Rich List and the Power List from the AFR.
In 2022, Hembrow’s then $38m fortune saw her appear on the magazine’s Young Rich List for the first time. She used social media to build businesses including fitness app Tammy Fit and clothing brand Saski Collection.
The latest rich list has her fortune at $56m.
Tributes for Peter Ryan
Former ABC News Breakfast host Michael Rowland has paid tribute to his colleague Peter Ryan OAM, who died on Friday aged 64 from metastatic thyroid cancer.
We told you in June that Ryan, the ABC’s senior business correspondent and a 45-year veteran of journalism, was retiring.
“When I last saw him in hospital a few weeks ago, Peter was full of old stories and good cheer, despite his health challenges, Rowland said. “An avowed Beatles tragic, he gave me no shortage of tips and fun facts as I was heading off on a visit to Liverpool. It was an afternoon I will always treasure.”
Ryan leaves behind his wife, Mary Cotter, and daughter Charlotte.
Language warning
Vanessa Kirby and Pedro Pascal at The Fantastic Four: First Steps premiere in Los Angeles on 21 July. Photograph: Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images for Disney
Your reaction to a viral video published by the Nine Entertainment youth outlet Pedestrian TV probably depends on your age.
At a press junket for the movie The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Pedestrian reporter Rebekah Manibog casually asked one of the movie’s stars, Vanessa Kirby, the following question: “But jumping right into you, Vanessa, you’ve kind of become a social media icon for your forcefield, snatched, cunty fierceness face.”
Shock and confusion crossed Kirby’s face as she interrupted Manibog’s question with: “Oh, oh my god, I don’t know if that’s a good thing.”
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Her co-star, Pedro Pascal, saved the interaction by jumping in to explain the slang, which is apparently so common in queer and internet culture, the reporter felt comfortable throwing it into an interview.
“Cunty-face just means fierce, fabulous, beautiful, strong, it’s good, it’s good, I promise,” Pascal said.
