Police kill nine militants in Pakistan’s southwestern Balochistan province

KARACHI: Pakistan’s Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb on Friday urged the international community to ensure faster and simpler disbursements from a new global fund set up to help vulnerable countries respond to climate-related losses.

The Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD), established at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt in 2022 before being officially operationalized by 198 countries, aims to help developing and least developed countries (LDCs) cope with both economic and non-economic impacts of climate change, such as extreme weather events and slow-onset crises like sea-level rise and droughts.

Aurangzeb made the remarks while addressing a high-level dialogue over the issue, held on the sidelines of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s Spring Meetings in Washington.

“Emphasizing that simplicity and agility should be the guiding principles, the finance minister urged the need for speedy disbursements under the fund, unlike the experience of LDCs and other vulnerable nations with existing climate finance mechanisms,” Pakistan’s finance ministry said in a statement circulated after the dialogue.

Aurangzeb also stressed the importance of “the integrity of the whole process with adequate checks and balances,” according to the statement.

He said Pakistan had been among the strongest proponents of the fund, warning that climate change represents an “existential threat” to countries like his own.

Pakistan has experienced increasingly erratic weather patterns in recent years, including heatwaves, droughts, cyclones and glacial melting.

In 2022, record monsoon rains triggered floods that killed over 1,700 people, affecting 30 million more and causing economic losses exceeding $30 billion.

KARACHI: Pakistan’s polio eradication program confirmed a new case of the disease in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on Friday, bringing the total count to eight as the nationwide drive to inoculate millions of children continues.
Pakistan launched a campaign earlier this week to vaccinate over 45 million children against polio. The country reported 74 cases in 2024 and has planned three major vaccination drives in the first half of this year.
The current campaign is the second of 2025, with a third set to begin from May 26 to June 1.
“The Regional Reference Laboratory for Polio Eradication at the National Institute of Health Islamabad has confirmed a polio case from District Bannu, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa,” the lab said in a statement, adding this was the third case from the province this year.
It also urged parents to ensure that their children receive repeated doses of the polio vaccine to protect them from the disease.
On Wednesday, two security officials assigned to protect a polio vaccination team were killed in a gun attack in the Teri area of Mastung, in the southwestern Balochistan province.
Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan remain the last polio-endemic countries in the world. In the early 1990s, Pakistan reported around 20,000 cases annually, but by 2018, the number had dropped to eight. Six cases were reported in 2023 and only one in 2021.
Pakistan’s polio eradication program, launched in 1994, has faced persistent challenges, including vaccine misinformation and resistance from some religious hard-liners who claim immunization is a foreign conspiracy to sterilize Muslim children or a cover for Western espionage.
Militant groups have also repeatedly targeted and killed polio vaccination workers. Last week, gunmen attacked a vehicle and abducted two polio workers in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
On April 21, a militant was killed when a police team escorting a polio team on the outskirts of Wana, the main town in South Waziristan district, responded to a gun attack.