����ֱ��

ISLAMABAD: The United States has designated a Baloch separatist group as a foreign terrorist organization, the State Department said, a move hailed Tuesday by Pakistani officials.
The designation of the Balochistan Liberation Army and its fighting wing, the Majeed Brigade, blamed for deadly attacks in insurgency-hit Balochistan province, coincides with the visit of Pakistan’s army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, to the US
It also comes less than two weeks after Washington and Islamabad reached a trade agreement expected to allow American firms to help develop Pakistan’s largely untapped oil reserves in resource-rich Balochistan and to lower trade tariffs for Islamabad.
In a statement, the State Department said it is “designating the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) and its alias, the Majeed Brigade, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), and adding the Majeed Brigade as an alias to BLA’s previous Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) designation.”
The BLA was first designated an SDGT in 2019 after several terrorist attacks. The US statement said that, since then, both the group and the Majeed Brigade have claimed responsibility for additional attacks.
It also said that in 2024, the BLA claimed responsibility for suicide bombings near the airport in Karachi and in the port city of Gwadar in Balochistan.
In 2025, the group said it carried out the hijacking of the Jaffar Express train traveling from Quetta to Peshawar, killing 31 civilians and security personnel and holding more than 300 passengers hostage, according to the US State Department.
“Today’s action taken by the Department of State demonstrates the Trump administration’s commitment to countering terrorism,” the US statement said.
There was no immediate comment from Balochistan nationalists and separatist groups. Balochistan has long been the scene of insurgency, mostly blamed on groups including the key outlawed Baloch Liberation Army, which the US designated a terrorist organization in 2019. The province is also home to militants linked to the Pakistani Taliban.
Separatists in Balochistan have opposed the extraction of resources by Pakistani and foreign firms and have targeted Pakistani security forces and Chinese nationals working on multibillion-dollar projects related to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.

WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump extended a trade truce with China for another 90 days Monday, at least delaying once again a dangerous showdown between the world’s two biggest economies.
Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that he signed the executive order for the extension, and that “all other elements of the Agreement will remain the same.” Beijing at the same time also announced the extension of the tariff pause, according to the Ministry of Commerce.
The previous deadline was set to expire at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday. Had that happened the US could have ratcheted up taxes on Chinese imports from an already high 30 percent, and Beijing could have responded by raising retaliatory levies on US exports to China.
The pause buys time for the two countries to work out some of their differences, perhaps clearing the way for a summit later this year between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, and it has been welcomed by the US companies doing business with China.
Sean Stein, president of the US-China Business Council, said the extension is “critical” to give the two governments time to negotiate a trade agreement that US businesses hope would improve their market access in China and provide the certainty needed for companies to make medium- and long-term plans.
“Securing an agreement on fentanyl that leads to a reduction in US tariffs and a rollback of China’s retaliatory measures is acutely needed to restart US agriculture and energy exports,” Stein said.
China said Tuesday it would extend relief to American companies who were placed on an export control list and an unreliable entities list. After Trump initially announced tariffs in April, China restricted exports of dual-use goods to some American companies, while banning others from trading or investing in China. The Ministry of Commerce said it would stop those restrictions for some companies, while giving others another 90-day extension.
Reaching a pact with China remains unfinished business for Trump, who has already upended the global trading system by slapping double-digit taxes – tariffs – on almost every country on earth.
The European Union, Japan and other trading partners agreed to lopsided trade deals with Trump, accepting once unthinkably US high tariffs (15 percent on Japanese and EU imports, for instance) to ward off something worse.
Trump’s trade policies have turned the United States from one of the most open economies in the world into a protectionist fortress. The average US tariff has gone from around 2.5 percent at the start of the year to 18.6 percent, highest since 1933, according to the Budget Lab at Yale University.
But China tested the limits of a US trade policy built around using tariffs as a cudgel to beat concessions out of trading partners. Beijing had a cudgel of its own: cutting off or slowing access to its rare earths minerals and magnets – used in everything from electric vehicles to jet engines.
In June, the two countries reached an agreement to ease tensions. The United States said it would pull back export restrictions on computer chip technology and ethane, a feedstock in petrochemical production. And China agreed to make it easier for US firms to get access to rare earths.
“The US has realized it does not have the upper hand,’’ said Claire Reade, senior counsel at Arnold & Porter and former assistant US trade representative for China affairs.
In May, the US and China had averted an economic catastrophe by reducing massive tariffs they’d slapped on each other’s products, which had reached as high as 145 percent against China and 125 percent against the US
Those triple-digit tariffs threatened to effectively end trade between the United States and China and caused a frightening sell-off in financial markets. In a May meeting in Geneva they agreed to back off and keep talking: America’s tariffs went back down to a still-high 30 percent and China’s to 10 percent.
Having demonstrated their ability to hurt each other, they’ve been talking ever since.
“By overestimating the ability of steep tariffs to induce economic concessions from China, the Trump administration has not only underscored the limits of unilateral US leverage, but also given Beijing grounds for believing that it can indefinitely enjoy the upper hand in subsequent talks with Washington by threatening to curtail rare earth exports,” said Ali Wyne, a specialist in US-China relations at the International Crisis Group. “The administration’s desire for a trade détente stems from the self-inflicted consequences of its earlier hubris.”
It’s unclear whether Washington and Beijing can reach a grand bargain over America’s biggest grievances. Among these are lax Chinese protection of intellectual property rights and Beijing’s subsidies and other industrial policies that, the Americans say, give Chinese firms an unfair advantage in world markets and have contributed to a massive US trade deficit with China of $262 billion last year.
Reade doesn’t expect much beyond limited agreements such as the Chinese saying they will buy more American soybeans and promising to do more to stop the flow of chemicals used to make fentanyl and to allow the continued flow of rare-earth magnets.
But the tougher issues will likely linger, and “the trade war will continue grinding ahead for years into the future,’’ said Jeff Moon, a former US diplomat and trade official who now runs the China Moon Strategies consultancy.