Pakistan and Iran on Friday agreed to enhance economic ties and open two more border crossings to increase trade.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who arrived on a two-day state visit to Pakistan, met Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and held talks on matters of mutual interest, Islamabad said in a statement.
“Our trade and economic ties have suffered due to sanctions. We have agreed to strengthen our bilateral ties in diverse areas of trade, economy and energy,” the statement quoted Sharif as saying.
Photo: Reuters
After the talks, Sharif and Rouhani witnessed the signing of six agreements related to trade and economy, including a “Five-Year Strategic Trade Cooperation Plan”.
Sharif said both countries also decided to open two additional crossing points along their border to encourage trade.
Rouhani, according to the Pakistani statement, said the two sides discussed ways to explore new opportunities for cooperation in the energy sector, including the export of electricity from Iran to Pakistan.
He said they also discussed ways to boost bilateral trade and to move forward a bilateral free-trade agreement.
The Iranian president said the two sides explored the possibility of sea trade between Pakistan’s Gwadar Port and Iran’s Chabahar Port.
“Pakistan and Iran consider each other’s security as their own security,” Rouhani said, adding that there was “a will and resolve of the two countries to combat extremist and terrorist groups and not to allow such elements to shatter peace in the region.”
Pakistan is counting on a joint project with Iran to solve a long-running power crisis that has sapped economic growth.
A US$7.5 billion Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline intended to feed Pakistani power plants was inaugurated with great fanfare in March 2013, but the project immediately hit quicksand in the form of international sanctions on Tehran.
Tehran has built its own section of the 1,800km pipeline, which should eventually link its South Pars gasfields to the Pakistani city of Nawabshah near Karachi.
As part of an ambitious US$46 billion economic corridor linking western China to the Middle East through Pakistan, Beijing recently started work on the section of pipeline between Nawabshah and the port of Gwadar close to the Iranian border.
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country