News stories by Irfan Ahmed, page 2

MIANWALI, Pakistan, May 10 (IPS) - For 70-year-old Ghulam Fatima, the upcoming general elections on May 11 promise to be unlike any she has witnessed before in Pakistan.

LAHORE, Apr 28 (IPS) - Younas Gill, a self-employed tax accountant, sits on the pavement in Joseph Colony, Lahore, staring at the place where, until about a month ago, his home had stood.

LAHORE, Feb 26 (IPS) - Twenty-seven-year-old Muhammad Arif works at a steel re-rolling mill in Lahore, capital of Pakistan's northeastern Punjab province, producing steel ingots from scrap.

LAHORE, Oct 03 (IPS) - One does not always need a time machine to travel into the past – a visit to a typical brick kiln in Pakistan’s Punjab province is enough to evoke a time when human beings were traded like animals and slavery was rampant.

LAHORE, Jul 25 (IPS) - At a time when spiraling input costs and perennial shortages of irrigation water are breaking countless farmers’ backs, a small village community on the outskirts of Lahore appears to have been spared.

As International Labour Day approaches, rights groups in Pakistan are redoubling their efforts to win freedom for six incarcerated union leaders in Faisalabad, the country’s textile hub, who are currently serving a combined jail term of 590 years for supposedly violating the country’s ‘anti-terror’ laws.

A knock on her front door throws Beenish, a 28-year-old housewife from Lahore, into a fix: should she allow the female volunteer vaccinators to administer the oral polio vaccine (OPV) to her two-year-old son, or not?

This is the time of year when picturesque Chitral Valley in the northwestern corner of Pakistan sees a huge influx of tourists. But local residents fear a backlash from the events in Abbottabad, some 300 miles southeast, as authorities put up an extraordinary security cordon throughout this tourist haven.

For Waqas Ahmed, 9, the sight of half a dozen gun-totting policemen—perched on the rooftop of the mosque in his neighbourhood—was very disturbing, to say the least. He had been used to seeing a security guard frisking the faithful during Friday prayers. But what he saw this time on his way to the mosque to say his Eid ul

Imagine writers, scholars and folk performers from eight South Asian countries coming together to share their common heritage and culture while promoting peace and harmony at the same time.