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In a surprise choice that bodes poorly for proposed peace talks, the Pakistani Taliban on Thursday appointed as its new leader the hard-line commander responsible for last year’s attack on Malala Yousafzai, the teenage Pakistani education activist.

Mullah Fazlullah, the head of a militant faction in the northwestern Swat Valley,

Mr. Fazlullah is best known for ordering public beatings, executions and beheadings, and delivering thunderous radio broadcasts — in which he denounced polio vaccinations, among other topics

“There are three threats,” says Graham Allison, an expert on nuclear weapons who directs the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. The first is “a terrorist theft of a nuclear weapon, which they take to Mumbai or New York for a nuclear 9/11. The second is a transfer of a nuclear weapon to a state like Iran. The third is a takeover of nuclear weapons by a militant group during a period of instability or splintering of the state.”

There is evidence to suggest that neither the Pakistani army, nor the SPD itself, considers jihadism the most immediate threat to the security of its nuclear weapons; indeed, General Kayani’s worry, as expressed to General Kidwai after Abbottabad, was focused on the United States. According to sources in Pakistan, General Kayani believes that the U.S. has designs on the Pakistani nuclear program, and that the Abbottabad raid suggested that the U.S. has developed the technical means to stage simultaneous raids on Pakistan’s nuclear facilities.

According to both Pakistani and American sources, vans with a modest security profile are sometimes the preferred conveyance. And according to a senior U.S. intelligence official, the Pakistanis have begun using this low-security method to transfer not merely the “de-mated” component nuclear parts but “mated” nuclear weapons. Western nuclear experts have feared that Pakistan is building small, “tactical” nuclear weapons for quick deployment on the battlefield. In fact, not only is Pakistan building these devices, it is also now moving them over roads.

Black people four times more likely to die from Covid-19, ONS finds

Black people are more than four times more likely to die from Covid-19 than white people, according to stark official figures exposing a dramatic divergence in the impact of the coronavirus pandemic in England and Wales. The Office of National Statistics found that the difference in the virus’s impact was caused not only by pre-existing differences in communities’ wealth, health, education and living arrangements.

after other pre-existing factors had been accounted for, and females from those ethnic groups were 1.6 times more likely to die from the virus than their white counterparts.

The Pakistani Taliban has announced an indefinite ceasefire with Pakistan's government after talks brokered by the Afghan Taliban government.

The Pakistani Taliban (TTP) said substantial progress had been made at the talks in Kabul, and the truce extended until further notice.

The group has enjoyed a close but ambiguous relationship with the Afghan Taliban, reports the BBC's Secunder Kermani in Islamabad.

He tried to make a handful of minced meat stick to a skewer, and said, sardonically, “See here, true Sharia has finally arrived in Swat.”

2009, the Pakistani Army launched an offensive to drive the Taliban out of Swat—and forced Fazlullah across the border, into Afghanistan. These days, the valley is relatively peaceful, and Pakistani tourists have returned in droves.

Mehsud, who had been “killed” by American drone strikes on at least two previous occasions, was actually killed by another drone strike at the start of November—transforming him overnight, in the eyes of Pakistani politicians and commentators, from a mass murderer into a marty

I had the privilege of following Malala Yousafzai, on and off, for six months in 2009, documenting some of the most critical days of her life for a two-part documentary.

When Malala opted for some trashy American sitcoms, I was forced to remind myself that this girl – who had never shuddered at beheaded corpses, public floggings, and death threats directed at her father — was still just a kid.

she is a teenager, fighting for her life after being gunned down by the Taliban for doing what girls do all over the world: going to school.

he Taliban said on Saturday that they would not participate in international peace talks, citing what they claimed were increased American airstrikes and Afghan government military operations.

The talks, convened by the United States, China, Pakistan and Afghanistan, were expected to start this month in Pakistan.

Afghan and Pakistani government officials said the talks would continue despite the Taliban statement, but pushed the start date back to sometime later this month.

Before the news cycle—and the president himself—got consumed with the new White House tell-all last week, Donald Trump made a good foreign policy decision, albeit seemingly in haste. The administration announced it was suspending security assistance to Pakistan, on the grounds that the country is continuing to arm, assist, fund, and provide sanctuary to a wide array of Islamist militant groups that are murdering U.S. troops and their allies in Afghanistan. Well-placed sources involved with calculating the relevant funds have told me that this was not a planned policy and took the other agencies, not to mention the Pakistanis, by complete surprise. Rather it was an ex post facto response to Trump’s January 1, 2018 tweet vituperatively repining that:

The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!

The United States was well into the surge at this point; between NATO forces and Afghan forces, there were hundreds of thousands of troops to resupply, all of whom had relied on the routes through Pakistan. The need to find alternative routes by land and air—including through Central Asia—ended up costing the Americans about $100 million per month more than the previous arrangement. Many feared that while this worked to get supplies into Afghanistan, it would not be sufficient to get massive amounts of war materiel out of Afghanistan when the United States and NATO withdrew. Consequently, the U.S. government hoped that Pakistan would reopen the ground routes. But it turns out that weaning itself off them was not such a bad option after all.

The drive-by shooting took place late Saturday night in the southern port city of Karachi. Four me

This was the third high-profile killing of a rights activist in Karachi in recent years and points to the immense dangers faced by activists in a country troubled by religious extremism a

Mr. Zaki, 40, a blogger, rose to prominence after he campaigned with other activists against Maulana Abdul Aziz,

Mr Zaki was dining in a restaurant in the city's north when suspects opened fire from motorbikes, reports say.

The spokesman for a splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban has said they were behind the shooting.

He said they killed him because of his recent campaign against a cleric of the Red Mosque in Islamabad.

Things came to a head in December 1970, when Sheik Mujib-ur-­Rahman, a pipe-smoking Bengali leader, and his party, the Awami League, won the elections on the promise of autonomy for East Pakistan.

Gen. Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, egged on by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the second-place finisher, arrested Rahman and ordered the army to crush the Bengalis. Dominated by Punjabis, the army moved brutally, shooting and detaining Bengali leaders, intellectuals and anyone who opposed them.

Yahya, its military leader, became Nixon’s secret liaison with the Chinese leader Zhou Enlai. Yahya helped lay the groundwork for the visits to China by Kissinger and then Nixon. It’s hard to overstate just how earth-changing Nixon and Kissinger regarded their trips to China — and how important they thought they were for bringing them about.

In the telling of some American officials, the C.I.A. drone campaign in Pakistan has been a triumph with few downsides

and the pace of the strikes, which officials frequently describe as “surgical” and “contained,” has dropped sharply over the past year.

Pakistani town that has become a virtual test laboratory for drone warfare,

History is often held hostage by the highest bidder — whoever gets to tell the story ends up defining what happened. What happened in 2014? What mattered in 2014? It depends whom you ask.

Historical narratives recount political, economic or social events, but rarely tell stories of the everyday. The mundane nuances of life are often ignored precisely because they are so personal. But private stories are usually the ones that we connect with most

Modes of storytelling like painting and rap allow us to engage with those personal stories, becoming the vehicles through which history passes.

The C.I.A., which has been at the heart of the 20-year American presence in Afghanistan, will soon lose bases in the country from where it has run combat missions and drone strikes while closely monitoring the Taliban and other groups such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. The agency’s analysts are warning of the ever-growing risks of a Taliban takeover.

Any deal now would have to work around the uncomfortable reality that Pakistan’s government has long supported the Taliban. In discussions between American and Pakistani officials, the Pakistanis have demanded a variety of restrictions in exchange for the use of a base in the country, and they have effectively required that they sign off on any targets that either the C.I.A. or the military would want to hit inside Afghanistan, according to three Americans familiar with the discussions.

Recent C.I.A. and military intelligence reports on Afghanistan have been increasingly pessimistic. They have highlighted gains by the Taliban and other militant groups in the south and east, and warned that Kabul could fall to the Taliban within years and return to becoming a safe haven for militants bent on striking the West, according to several people familiar with the assessments.As a result, U.S. officials see the need for a long-term intelligence-gathering presence — in addition to military and C.I.A. counterterrorism operations — in Afghanistan long after the deadline that Mr. Biden has set for troops to leave the country. But the scramble for bases illustrates how U.S. officials still lack a long-term plan to address security in a country where they have spent trillions of dollars and lost more than 2,400 troops over nearly two decades.

On Feb. 4, 2019, a Facebook researcher created a new user account to see what it was like to experience the social media site as a person living in Kerala, India.For the next three weeks, the account operated by a simple rule: Follow all the recommendations generated by Facebook’s algorithms to join groups, watch videos and explore new pages on the site.

The result was an inundation of hate speech, misinformation and celebrations of violence, which were documented in an internal Facebook report published later that month.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story“Following this test user’s News Feed, I’ve seen more images of dead people in the past three weeks than I’ve seen in my entire life total,” the Facebook researcher wrote.

The report was one of dozens of studies and memos written by Facebook employees grappling with the effects of the platform on India. They provide stark evidence of one of the most serious criticisms levied by human rights activists and politicians against the world-spanning company: It moves into a country without fully understanding its potential impact on local culture and politics, and fails to deploy the resources to act on issues once they occur.

A bomb tore through a Shiite mosque in Peshawar, in northwestern Pakistan, on Friday, killing at least 57 people and wounding more than 100 in one of the worst terrorist attacks in Pakistan in several years.

Police officials said that at least one gunman on a motorcycle had killed two police guards before entering the mosque and detonating what appeared to be a suicide vest, while another official said there were two attackers.

Asked if they were able to identify the bodies, he said that in many cases the police had just brought severed body parts to the hospital.

How did American culture arrive at these moments? A new research paper by Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, Australia, offers as useful a framework for understanding what’s going on as any I’ve seen. In “Concept Creep: Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology,”

concepts like abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice, “now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before,”expanded meanings that reflect “an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm.”

“they also have potentially damaging ramifications for society and psychology that cannot be ignored.”

It appears to be the first time the United States has repeatedly used cyberweapons to cripple another country’s infrastructure, achieving, with computer code, what until then could be accomplished only by bombing a country or sending in agents to plant explosives.

If Olympic Games failed, he told aides, there would be no time for sanctions and diplomacy with Iran to work. Israel could carry out a conventional military attack, prompting a conflict that could spread throughout the region.

Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, took reporters on a tour of the plant and described grand ambitions to install upward of 50,000 centrifuges. For a country with only one nuclear power reactor — whose fuel comes from Russia — to say that it needed fuel for its civilian nuclear program seemed dubious to Bush administration officials.