“Both the parties have agreed on a power-sharing formula as we have the required number of seats in the National Assembly (NA) to form the government,” PML-N President and former Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said on Tuesday evening during a joint press conference in Islamabad.

Following days of negotiations between the two parties, it has been decided that Sharif will be the joint candidate for both parties for the slot of Prime Minister and PPP Co-Chairman Asif Ali Zardari will be the joint candidate for the President’s slot, Xinhua news agency reported.

Sharif said that the independent candidates, who emerged victorious in majority by securing m ore than 100 seats, were invited to form the government, but they failed to achieve the required numbers.

He added that other parties such as the Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan, the Pakistan Muslim League, and the Istehkam-e-Pakistan Party supported PML-N and PPP in the government-making endeavour.

Acknowledging that the road ahead for the coalition government will be challenging, Sharif said that the coalition alliance is prepared to confront and overcome the obstacles together.

The upcoming government will work together to pull the country out of the ongoing crises, he said, expressing the hope to be able to deliver.

Speaking on the occasion, PPP Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari said the details of the sharing of key constitutional offices between the PPP and PML-N will be announced in the coming days.

Expressing hopes for success in addressing Pakistan’s challenges, the PPP Chairman said that the news of the political alliance of the PPP with the PML-N to form a coalition government will lead to a positive response from the markets and bring stability.

Earlier, the Election Commission of Pakistan announced the result of 265 out of 266 seats for the NA after the country held general elections on February 8 to elect a government for the next five-year term, with no political party securing a simple majority, compelling parties to make alliances to form the government in Centre.

His wife Nadine Streak took to social media to confirm the news. “In the early hours of this morning, Sunday the 3rd of September 2023, the greatest love of my life and the father of my beautiful children, was carried to be with the Angels from his home where he wished to spend his last days surrounded by his family and closest loved ones,” she wrote on Facebook.

This comes a week after fake reports of Heath’s death were circulated on social media. His former teammate, Henry Olonga, who had posted the unverified news on his official X profile, later apologised for the gaffe.

Streak played 65 Tests and 189 ODIs for Zimbabwe from 1993-2005 while scoring 4933 runs and taking 455 wickets for his country across formats. He still remains the only Zimbabwe bowler with more than 100 Test and over 200 ODI wickets. In 2021, hewas banned for eight years from cricketing activities for violating the ICC’s anti-corruption policy by allegedly leaking inside-information about T20 leagues, including the Indian Premier League.

According to a statement issued by Committee spokesperson Svetlana Petrenko, forensic and genetic testing identified all 10 bodies recovered from the site of the August 23 crash and the findings “conform to the manifest” of the plane.

However, there was no mention of what might have caused the crash.

The 62-year-old Prigozhin and some of his top lieutenants were believed to be on the list of passengers and crew members on board the ill-fated plane.

All seven passengers and three crew died when the plane plummeted from the sky halfway between Moscow and Prigozhin’s home town St Petersburg.

Prigozhin had attempted a daylong mutiny against Russia’s military two months ago, leading his mercenaries from Ukraine towards Moscow. President Putin decried the act as “treason” and vowed punishment for those involved.

Kremlin then cut a deal with Prigozhin, with help from Belarus, to end the armed revolt, saying he would be allowed to walk free without facing any charges and to resettle in Belarus.

But questions remained about whether Prigozhin would be allowed to go scot free for the brief uprising that easily posed the biggest challenge to Putin’s authority of his 23-year rule.

A US intelligence assessment concluded that an intentional explosion caused Prigozhin’s plane to crash.

The world suspected that Putin had plotted the assassination of his one-time aide, but Moscow rejected that theory as a “complete lie.”

The crash took place on Friday, when two aircraft were performing a combat task, the statement said on Saturday as quoted by Xinhua news agency report.

The regional prosecutor’s office launched criminal proceedings into the crash on charges of violation of flight rules, said the Prosecutor General’s Office.

An investigation into the collision is underway.

While Afghanistan’s last-known Jew fled the country shortly after the Taliban takeover, the Sikh and Hindu communities are believed to have shrunk to just a handful of families, RFE/RL reported.

Under the Taliban, Sikhs and Hindus have faced severe restrictions, including on their appearances, and have been banned from marking their religious holidays in public, leaving many with no choice but to escape their homeland, RFE/RL reported.

“I cannot go anywhere freely,” Fari Kaur, one of the last remaining Sikhs in the capital, Kabul said.

“When I go out, I’m forced to dress like a Muslim so that I can’t be identified as a Sikh,” she said, in reference to the Taliban’s order that all women must wear the all-encompassing burqa or niqab.

Kaur’s father was killed in a suicide attack targeting Sikhs and Hindus in the eastern city of Jalalabad in 2018.

The attack reportedly led as many as 1,500 Sikhs to leave the country, including Kaur’s mother and sisters.

But Kaur refused to leave and stayed in Kabul to fulfil her father’s dream that she finish school, the RFE/RL report said.

In March 2020, 25 worshipers were killed when Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K) militants stormed a Sikh temple in Kabul.

Following the attack, most of the remaining members of the minority left Afghanistan.

Again, Kaur refused to leave. But now, more than two years after the Taliban seized power, she said the lack of religious freedom under the militants has left her no choice but to seek refuge abroad.

“We have not celebrated our key festivals since the Taliban returned to power,” she said.

“We have very few community members left behind in Afghanistan. We cannot even look after our temples.”

There were up to 100,000 Hindus and Sikhs in Afghanistan in the 1980s. But the war that broke out in 1979 and the onset of growing persecution pushed many out.

During the civil war of the 1990s, the Taliban and rival Islamist groups pledged to protect minorities. But many Sikhs and Hindus lost their homes and businesses and fled to India, the report said.

When the Taliban regained power in August 2021, it attempted to assuage the fears of non-Muslim Afghans. The militants visited Sikh and Hindu temples to try and assure the remaining members of the communities of their commitment to their safety and well-being.

But the Taliban’s draconian restrictions on Sikhs and Hindus have forced many to seek a way out of their homeland, RFE/RL reported.

Niala Mohammad, the director of policy and strategy at the nonprofit Muslim Public Affairs Council in Washington, said the situation for religious minorities in Afghanistan — including Hindus, Sikhs, Bahai’s, Christians, Ahmadis, and Shia Muslims — has deteriorated sharply under Taliban rule.

“The situation continues to deteriorate as political extremist factions that claim to represent Islam, such as the Taliban, ascend to power in the region,” said Mohammad, who was previously the South Asia analyst for the US Commission on International Religious Freedom.

“This exodus of diverse religious groups has left a void in the country’s social fabric.”

Like the other defendants in the case who have surrendered so far, the 77-year-old Trump had his mug shot taken during the booking process, a first for any serving or former US president.

In the photograph released by the sheriff’s office, he scowled at the camera while dressed in a dark blue suit, white shirt and red tie.

Speaking to reporters after his arrest, Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, said it was a “very sad day for America.”

Trump was given the inmate number “PO1135809” by the Fulton County Jail, which listed his height as six foot three inches (1.9 meters), his weight as 215 pounds (97 kilograms) and his hair color as “Blond or Strawberry.”

The billionaire has been criminally indicted four times since April, setting the stage for a year of unprecedented drama as he tried to juggle multiple court appearances and another White House campaign. His arrest came one day after he spurned a televised debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, featuring eight of his rivals for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, all of whom lag well behind him in the polls.

Shortly after his arrest, his campaign launched t-shirts that displayed the same. The t-shirt has been listed on the Trump campaign’s official website for $34, with the words “Never Surrender” written below the mugshot.

Trump, who is running for president in the 2024 election, has already made history as the first former US president to face criminal charges-not once but four times. This, however, was the first time he had to pose for a booking photo.

Following her conviction last week, a judge issued a life sentence for 33-year-old Lucy Letby on Monday, reported Reuters.

Letby murdered five baby boys and two baby girls at the neonatal unit of Countess of Chester Hospital in north-west England by injecting the infants with insulin or air or force-feeding their milk.

“This was a cruel, calculated and cynical campaign of child murder involving the smallest and most vulnerable of children,” said judge James Goss, who sentenced her to life imprisonment with no prospect of release.

“There was a deep malevolence bordering on sadism in your actions … You have no remorse. There are no mitigating factors … You will spend the rest of your life in prison,” he spelt out.

Life imprisonment is very rare in the UK. Three women in Britain have received such a sentence before, including serial killers Myra Hindley and Rosemary West.

Letby, Britain’s most prolific serial child killer of modern times, was found guilty of seven counts of murder and seven of attempted murder following a 10-month trial at Manchester Crown Court.

The former US president, who is preparing to contest the 2024 elections, raised the issue of high taxes in India on certain American products and threatened to slap reciprocal taxes on New Delhi if he wins a second term, reported PTI.

During his first term as US president from 2016 to 2020, Trump had described India as ‘tariff king’. He even terminated India’s preferential market access — Generalised System of Preferences (GSP) — to the US in May 2019, alleging that India have not given the US “equitable and reasonable access to its markets.”

Despite facing several court cases and indictments, Trump is leading the Republican presidential primaries with over half of the GOP votes according to major national polls.

“The other thing I want to have is a matching tax where, if India charges us — India is very big with tariffs. I mean, I saw it with Harley-Davidson. I was saying, how do you do in a place like India? Oh, no good sir. Why? They have 100 per cent and 150 per cent and 200 per cent tariffs,” the 77-year-old former President said in an interview with Fox Business News.

“So, I said, so they can sell their Indian motorbike. They actually make a bike, an Indian motorbike. They can sell that into our country with no tax, no tariff, but when you make a Harley, when you send it over there — because they were doing no business. I said, how come you don’t do business with India? The tariff is so high that nobody wants it. But what they want us to do is, they want us to go over and build a plant, and then you have no tariff,” Trump said.

“They said, well, that’s not good. That’s not our deal, okay? That’s not our deal. And I came down very hard on them. But India is very big. Brazil is very big on tariffs, I mean, very, very big. We had a couple of people, like the senator from a place called Pennsylvania that I love. But this guy was just horrendous. I said, let me ask you a question. If India is charging us 200 per cent, and we’re charging them nothing for products, can we charge them 100 per cent? No, sir, that’s not free trade. Can we charge them 50 per cent? No, sir. Twenty-five, 10, anything? No. I said, what the hell is wrong? There’s something wrong. You know what I’m talking about,” he said.

“If India is charging us too, so what I want to have is a — call it retribution. You could call it whatever you want. If they are charging us, we charge them,” Trump made it clear.

That won’t be music to the ears of Indian business houses.

“The city was attacked by Ukrainian drones. The facades of two office buildings of the Moscow City were slightly damaged. There were no casualties,” Russia’s state news agency TASS reported, quoting Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin as saying.

As per Russian Defence ministry, Ukraine tried to attack Moscow buildings with drones, one of which was destroyed in the air over the territory of the Odintsovo district and two others were suppressed and crashed in the Moscow City.

The capital’s Vnukovo airport was closed for arrivals and departures for a brief period, the defence ministry added.

Though the Russian Defence ministry termed it an attempted terrorist attack, Ukraine is yet to comment on it.

The evening crash of an Antonov plane at the airport was due to “a technical fault during take-off,” the office of the Sudanese Army spokesman said on Sunday in a statement.

The nine killed include four military personnel, but a girl survived the crash, according to the statement.

Sudan has been witnessing deadly clashes between the Sudanese Army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in the capital Khartoum and other areas since April 15, Xinhua news agency reported.

The Port Sudan airport, located about 890 km east of Khartoum, has been used as the country’s main airport after Khartoum International Airport became out of service because of armed clashes between the warring parties.