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The Urban Present

The urban present

Soon after the 1998 census results were made public, Reza Ali, an urban planner and researcher from Lahore, wrote a path-breaking article called ‘How urban is Pakistan?’, in which he…

Straws in the Syrian whirlwind

THE pendulum of zealotry almost always ushers in intellectual subterfuge in its wake. The lightning, if not spontaneous, takeover of Damascus by mediaeval militias is being predictably applauded by Western journalists as…

Measures aimed at checking inflation

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) for October 2024 was 7.2 percent against 6.9 percent the month before – a rise of 0.3 percent which, barring June 2024 when it rose…

My enemy’s enemy

AMERICA has allies while its enemies have proxies; America’s allies have governments that must be supported while its enemies have regimes that must be changed. And right now, in the…

Iran shrugs off Israel strikes, showing restraint

After Israel’s deadly strikes, Iran lauded its defences while media outlets dismissed the assault as “weak”, signalling what analysts say is the Islamic republic’s reluctance to escalate further. Saturday’s Israeli…

Iran hits back

FOR the first two weeks of this month, the Western media’s main focus was on how Iran might react to an egregious Israeli provocation. On the first of April, a…

Deniable truths

THEY are all dead: the feisty Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci and her 14 interviewees — prominent amongst them Henry Kis­singer, King Hussein of Jordan, Yasser Arafat, Mrs Golda Meir, Indira…

Long war threat

WHEN the negotiators for the TTP threatened, by some accounts, a long war on Pakistan, I wonder whether their Pakistani interlocutors reminded them that in a long war it is…

Pakistan’s food insecurity dilemma

PAKISTAN’S new government will face old and persistent problems. The most ominous challenges relate to the state of the economy and, in particular, the food insecurity faced by the poorest…