Washington, July 21 : The Pakistani-American Leadership Centre (PAL-C), a leading advocacy group on the Capitol Hill, has urged the United States to respect Pakistan’s territorial integrity.

In an open letter to U. S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, the organisation urged Washington to strengthen capacity-building assistance for its South Asian partner to effectively curb militancy in the border region, the Daily Times reported. 

Lahore, July 21: The Pakistan Army and then President General Pervez Musharraf grilled all prospective candidates before appointing them as ministers in the government.

This is Pakistan’s former Religious Affairs Minister Ejaz-ul-Haq’s claim, and he adds that former Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz was also interviewed by army generals before he was made the country’s Finance Minister.

The Daily Times quoted him as saying that in those days, a minister was first interviewed by army generals and then by Musharraf.

Aziz, Ejaz claimed, was quite keen to become Pakistan’s Finance Minister, adding that the Chaudhry brothers had reservations about his appointment.

Islamabad  - Clashes between paramilitary troops and militants left at least 38 people dead and dozens injured in Pakistan's insurgency-hit south-western province of Balochistan, media reports said Monday.

Fighting broke out in the Uch area of the Dera Bugti district in Balochistan Saturday when security forces launched a search operation to arrest rebels, who had attacked a gas field and killed an engineer of the state-managed exploration company.

Islamabad, July 21 : Scientists have determined that the emerging new understanding of the Indus Civilization suggests that it might have been “a powerhouse of commerce and technology in the 3rd millennium B. C. E.”

According to a recent report in the journal Science, though there is much written about the Indus Civilization, this report is different because it highlights how our scientific - in this case archaeological - knowledge on the subject is not only expanding, but changing.

Striking new evidence from a host of excavations on both sides of the tense border that separates India and Pakistan has now definitively overturned the second-class status given to the Indus Civilization. 

Washington, July 21: In the eyes of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani is a master manipulator.

A New York Times report says that American officials describe General Kayani “as a smart and urbane general, at once engaging and inscrutable, an avid golfer with occasionally odd affectations.”

At meetings, he is known to spend several minutes carefully hand-rolling a cigarette, and after taking one puff, stubs it out.

Most CIA veterans agree that relations between CIA and Pakistan’s ISI is like a bad marriage, in which both spouses have long stopped trusting each other but would never think of breaking up because they have become so mutually dependent.

London, July 21: Western intelligence agencies have reportedly claimed that Afghanistan was fast turning into a safe haven for foreign militants, after the fall of Iraq, as more and more young militants were getting attracted to Afghanistan to take part in a “more pristine” jihad over there.

“Iraq is seen as a defeat. The image of Afghanistan is seen as a more pristine jihad,” timesonline. com quoted Brian Glyn Williams, who researches jihadist websites for the Combating Terrorism Centre at the US military academy at West Point, as saying.