Pakistan adopts legislative steps to protect investors and ensure tax benefits; investors can also benefit from strategic location

The President of Pakistan Asif Ali Zardari attaches a great importance to investment and business in Pakistan. To encourage investment, the Board of Investment was set up by the Pakistani government to fulfill all investor needs.To make it the vibrant organization envisioned by the President, the BOI has gone through a transformation in its structure and chain of command. The new BOI is an autonomous organization directly under the prime minister’s chairmanship, empowered to attract investment i

Pakistan is an immensely beautiful country and a great tourist destination. It is a land of splendors with the landscape stretching remarkably from the high mountain ranges in the northern areas to the plains and deserts of central Pakistan and the Arabian Sea in the South. Pakistan’s mountain ranges include the famous Himalayas, Karakoram and the Hindukush. There are several high peaks in Pakistan, with the tallest being K-2 (at 8,611 meters), which is also the second highest in the world. The

KARUIZAWA, Japan (AFP) ― Asia may be driving growth in the world economy but a Japanese businesswoman behind an innovative new school believes the region is over-reliant on Western-style leadership.Lin Kobayashi hopes her foundation outside Tokyo will help change that by breeding a wave of political and business leaders ― but with what she sees as a more “Asian” way of thinking.Building work on the International School of Asia, Karuizawa began in September. The launch of classes, all taught in E

Last week was a good one for former French President Nicolas Sarkozy. After a key ally held onto the leadership of his party on Monday, Sarkozy himself was all but cleared in a political funding scandal three days later. Sarkozy was called to testify on accusations of receiving money from Liliane Bettencourt, France’s richest woman and a principal shareholder of the L’Oreal empire.It was the first time he had been questioned since he lost his presidential immunity in May.In 2010, tapes were rele

TOKYO (AFP) ― Six days a week, winter or summer, 73-year-old Mitsumi Kobuna gets up at 5 a.m. to go to Tsukiji fish market to stock up his family-run stall.He will be at work for around 15 hours, in a job he has done for 55 years. He has noticed his body slowing in the last decade or so, but would really like to carry on for two or three more years.While governments in Europe have struggled to convince their populations to delay retirement, Japan has found no such resistance, and people like Kob

XILINHOT, China (AP) ― In a small town in northern China’s Inner Mongolia where sheep and cattle easily outnumber humans, Fan Chen paid a Communist Party boss three times an average urban resident’s annual salary to become a local police chief. The scheme was exposed and fell apart, but it was hardly explosive news. It received just a one-line mention in state media. And a friend of Fan’s defended him by saying that by current standards, his misdeeds were insignificant. “What he paid was simply

Since China’s Hu Jintao handed over power Thursday to his vice president Xi Jinping, the world may be hearing a new song in the communist country’s austere halls of power ― not from Xi, but from his wife.Peng Liyuan, endearingly nicknamed the “Peony Fairy,” rose to prominence as the sweet soprano at the forefront of the People’s Liberation Army with nationalistic folk songs like “People from our Village” and “On the Plains of Hope.” After enlisting as a regular soldier at age 18, her morale-boos

The Sultanate is second among Arab states in providing the judiciary independence from the executive

The Florida socialite and honorary consul for South Korea whose emails led to the resignation of CIA chief Gen. David Petraeus has found herself at the center of another scandal involving a leading military man.The email investigation has uncovered emails between Kelley and Gen. John Allen, the top U.S. military officer in Afghanistan, which raised suspicions of another affair.Kelley called for an investigation after receiving harassing emails by an anonymous sender. Those emails turned out to b