Pakistani Premier Yousuf Raza Gilani said the government would freeze defense spending in the upcoming budget, state media reported yesterday, as the country tries to tackle growing economic problems.
Nuclear-armed Pakistan, a key ally in the US-led “war on terror,” spent 275 billion rupees (US$4.1 billion) on defense during the current fiscal year ending on June 30, up from 250 billion rupees in the previous year.
“The government has decided to freeze the allocation for defense in the next national budget as a measure of Pakistan’s tangible display to seek peace with neighbors,” Gilani told parliament late on Monday according to state media.
Gilani said that in effect the defense budget would be “reduced in the context of inflation and rupee-dollar parity,” the official Associated Press of Pakistan news agency reported.
Without actually naming neighboring nuclear rival India, he said that he expected a “reciprocal gesture from our neighbor for the sake of peace and prosperity of the region.”
India and Pakistan, who have fought three major wars since independence from Britain in 1947, launched a slow-moving peace process in 2004.
Gilani added that “the defense ministry and the chief of army staff have fully endorsed the revised format of the defense services budget estimates.”
Pakistan has witnessed strong growth in recent years, backed by an influx of US aid, but global economic issues coupled with domestic political turmoil over the fate of President Pervez Musharraf have hit hard this year.
The state bank raised interest rates 1.5 points to 12 percent in May in a bid to curb soaring inflation. The bank said inflation was set to hit 11 percent this year, double the target of 6.5 percent.
Anger is mounting among the country’s 160 million people over shortages of food and other commodities, coupled with frequent power outages, factors that contributed to the defeat of Musharraf’s backers in February.
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
‘A THREAT’: Guyanese President Irfan Ali called on Venezuela to follow international court rulings over the region, whose border Guyana says was ratified back in 1899 Misael Zapara said he would vote in Venezuela’s first elections yesterday for the territory of Essequibo, despite living more than 100km away from the oil-rich Guyana-administered region. Both countries lay claim to Essequibo, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s territory and is home to 125,000 of its 800,000 citizens. Guyana has administered the region for decades. The centuries-old dispute has intensified since ExxonMobil discovered massive offshore oil deposits a decade ago, giving Guyana the largest crude oil reserves per capita in the world. Venezuela would elect a governor, eight National Assembly deputies and regional councilors in a newly created constituency for the 160,000
North Korea has detained another official over last week’s failed launch of a warship, which damaged the naval destroyer, state media reported yesterday. Pyongyang announced “a serious accident” at Wednesday last week’s launch ceremony, which crushed sections of the bottom of the new destroyer. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called the mishap a “criminal act caused by absolute carelessness.” Ri Hyong-son, vice department director of the Munitions Industry Department of the Party Central Committee, was summoned and detained on Sunday, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. He was “greatly responsible for the occurrence of the serious accident,” it said. Ri is the fourth person