RAWALPINDI: No passenger was hurt after a Metro bus caught fire on Saturday morning near the 6th Road stop.

According to Rescue 1122, the Metro bus was destroyed after it caught fire while passing the bus stop on 6th Road. It said that rescue officials rushed to the scene and brought the fire under control.

Following the incident, the service between Rawalpindi and Islamabad was suspended. The reason behind the fire has yet to be ascertained.

It is worth mentioning that the plumes of smoke emanating from the gutted bus could be seen from afar. Videos shared on social media showed the red bus engulfed in flames as rescue workers tried to douse the blaze.

Last year, at least seven passengers suffered injuries when they jumped out of a Metrobus soon after it caught fire in Lahore on Ferozepur Road near Naseerabad Station.

In another similar incident in 2021, a Metro bus caught fire and was completely burnt, apparently due to a short circuit near Minar-i-Pakistan station in Lahore.

A gas explosion at a coal mine in northern China has killed at least 82 people, state media reported on Saturday, in one of the country’s biggest industrial disasters of recent years.

The blast occurred at 7:29pm (4:29PKT) on Friday at the Liushenyu coal mine in Shanxi province, according to state news agency Xinhua.

A total of 247 workers were underground at the time, most of whom were brought to the surface by Saturday morning, Xinhua said.

But the agency confirmed later that at least 82 people had died, adding that rescuers were still searching “intensively” for nine people who remained unaccounted for.

Footage published by state broadcaster CCTV showed helmeted rescuers carrying stretchers at the site, with ambulances visible in the background.

President Xi Jinping urged “all-out efforts” to treat the injured and called for thorough investigations into the incident, Xinhua said.

He “emphasised that all regions and departments must draw lessons from this accident, remain constantly vigilant regarding workplace safety… and resolutely prevent and curb the occurrence of major and catastrophic accidents”.

A person “responsible for” the company involved in the explosion has been “placed under control in accordance with the law”, Xinhua said.

State media initially reported four deaths and dozens trapped after levels of carbon monoxide — a highly toxic, odourless gas — in the mine were found to have “exceeded limits”.

Some of those stuck underground were in “critical condition”, that report said.

The death toll then jumped sharply as the morning wore on.

Lax safety protocols

Shanxi, one of China’s poorer provinces, is the country’s coal-mining capital.

Mine safety in the country has improved in recent decades, but accidents still occur in an industry where safety protocols are often lax and regulations vague.

In 2023, a collapse at an open-pit coal mine in the northern Inner Mongolia region killed 53 people.

And in 2009, an explosion at a mine in northeastern Heilongjiang province killed more than 100.

China is the world’s top consumer of coal and the largest greenhouse gas emitter, despite installing renewable energy capacity at record speed.

Corporate drama has lit up trading WhatsApp groups as investors with an appetite for the satori scripts watch TRG.

The Resource Group’s founder, the tech unicorn Zia Chishti, just won a battle to regain company control in court in Pakistan. Here is a simplified version of the long arc of this story.

The rise of Zia Chishti

Zia Chishti made a lot of money by inventing clear plastic braces whilst he was studying at Stanford University. The braces branded as Invisalign were cleared for sale a year after he founded what became Align Technology in 1997. By 2001, the company’s value had risen to one billion dollars, which in start-up terms is the definition of a unicorn.

Zia sold his share, however, and left all of this behind to conquer new worlds. He settled on forming a private equity company known as The Resource Group Pakistan (TRGP) in 2003, of which he became the founding CEO. At the same time, he made an international version of the company, TRG International Limited (TRGIL). This structure was put together by Zia with some partners.

The board of directors of the two companies overlapped. Captain Chishti kept largely the same crew, for what was in effect the same ship. All was well and the captain was at the helm. At the time, TRGP was looking to provide call centre services to companies for a fraction of the price such services would otherwise cost if handled in-house.

After a few years of call centre service, Zia realised he could make it all even more efficient if he added artificial intelligence to the mix. So he wrote a software which did just that, and founded a Washington-based company called Afiniti, which owned the software in 2005. Afiniti was half owned by TRGP. By 2017, it went on to become Chishti’s second unicorn at $1.7 billion.

At this point, TRG Pakistan was operating as a holding company for TRG International so that assets could be held and disposed of internationally without Pakistani regulatory involvement and the proceeds could be handled internationally. This structure created a firewall between the money and the Pakistani government, a no-brainer, as 250 million people will readily attest to.

The trigger

All was well until about 2019, when an employee at Afiniti made allegations of violent sexual misconduct against Zia, all of which came out in 2021. It destroyed his reputation and forced him to resign from various boards, including those held in TRG.

The captain was no longer steering the ship. He had been disgraced. And so what was left for the crew to do but mutiny?

Among TRGI’s many deep pockets was one lined with about $175 million, from the sale of one of its companies called e-TeleQuote. Because TRG Pakistan owned 69 per cent of TRGI, that money was due in its proportionate shares to the former. It had been decided by Zia to send the millions of dollars towards TRG shareholders by way of redemption which included himself. This would have been around $120 million.

But the board sans Zia disagreed. There were six common directors at the time between TRG Pakistan and TRG International. There was enough of a crew to mutiny now that the captain was on the gangplank and the crocodiles waited with open jaws below.

The TRGI board decided that the funds would not be repatriated and asked the TRGP board, mostly themselves, what to do. As these crew mates made decisions among themselves by wearing different hats as different boards, it was decided that TRGP would not accept the offer of redemption from TRGI. Meanwhile, the individual double-hatted directors did accept the redemption from TRGI in their personal capacities as shareholders when they were offered it. What was good enough for them was clearly not good enough for the company and the shareholders they were representing.

The story would have ended here without much controversy other than a difference of approach. But the double-hatted boards went further.

Biting the hand that feeds

They decided on a “third option” as proposed by themselves to themselves. They decided to park the TRGP share of sale proceeds of e-TeleQuote into a special purpose vehicle called Greentree Holdings which was going to now be authorised to invest the money belonging to TRGP.

This creative accounting would have still passed the smell test, had it not led to what happened next. Greentree began to use TRGP money to buy shares.

Inception? Infinite loop? Wattay idea, Sirjee? Actually, it is none of the above and a much more boring condition known as the state of being illegal.

A company’s own money cannot be used to buy its own shares. To do so would in effect deprive shareholders from their lawful gains through the company, by that company using those profits to buy their shares from them instead. Simple? Yes. But not if you have a hundred million dollars to play with.

Dozens of lawsuits arose—of insider trading, shareholder abuse, beneficial interests, third party speculators. Taking advantage of the chaos, one suit would be pointed at to delay another, whilst the TRGI-Greentree-TRGP loop de loop continued to operate without general meetings or fresh director elections. It is this period between 2022 and today which Zia Chishti alleges wiped $2 billion off TRG’s market value.

In court

Zia’s own action against all of this finally went to the Sindh High Court, where a comprehensive judgement by Justice Adnaan Iqbal Chaudhry set to naught all the actions of Greentree and ordered the shared holding register to be updated, the moneys to be returned and elections to be held. This was announced on May 20, 2025.

But was this game over?

For normal folk it was. When there’s a hundred million dollars out there, however, that’s where the games actually begin.

Comeback kid

A unique consortium of lawyers was hired by the group against Zia to appeal to the Supreme Court. Between Greentree, TRGI and TRGP, the brains-to-brawn ratio of lawyers was perfection. Appeals were listed with unprecedented speed, and then after a stay order was obtained, the files disappeared.

Upon enquiry, it was determined that the files were stolen from a courier van while in transit between Karachi and Islamabad. They were the only theft from the van. These files were then reconstituted. Amidst all this, in other proceedings a bunch of lawyers assaulted Zia Chishti in the corridors of a courtroom. These value-added legal services don’t come cheap, and these were deeper pockets than any company jurisdiction case had ever seen in Pakistan.

In the end, after much conjecture, a hearing was conducted during which Muneer A Malik and Uzair Bhindari represented Zia Chishti. The groups opposed to him argued every technicality known to law and man: the limitations of company jurisdiction; the pendency of dozens of other actions; the structure of such judicial miscellaneous applications. Chishti’s lawyers argued the very simple case that it actually was: a usurper crew of board members is attempting to hide behind technicalities to use money owed to shareholders to deprive them of benefits that ought to accrue to them.

That is all this case was. Hidden under all the multi-faceted proceedings, beneath all the legal jargon and the magnificently billed hours was basically the same problem courts see in company jurisdiction a hundred times a day: a company being used as a fiefdom, to perpetuate personal interests ahead of the rights of its shareholders.

Amidst it all, there were numerous weigh-ins. And Zia Chishti weighed as much as the opponents did, so the fight had to be fair. It had to be within the courtroom and it had to be by the law.

So, finally, a short order was pronounced by the Supreme Court in May 2026 which dismissed all the appeals against the Adnan Chaudhry order, and extraordinarily directed the anti-Chishti group to pay his legal costs too.

SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft splashed down into the Indian Ocean on Friday after the company performed a mostly successful test flight of the latest version of its enormous rocket.

The voyage was not without a few glitches, but SpaceX employees shown on a livestream roared in delight following the trial flight that comes as the firm owned by Elon Musk prepares a potentially record initial public offering.

The mammoth rocket blasted off into space at just after 5:30pm local time (2230 GMT).

The company did not intend to recover the booster or the upper stage, and the final splashdown was fiery but controlled, as planned.

“Splashdown confirmed!” the company wrote on X.

SpaceX primarily aimed to demonstrate its redesigns in flight.

The third-generation Starship spacecraft carried out a maneuver that saw it flip upright and reignite its engines for control, despite one being out of commission.

It also deployed its 22 mock satellites, including two that attempted to photograph the spacecraft’s heat shield for analysis.

The vehicle had coasted through space but was not in exactly the correct orbit after one of its engines malfunctioned during an initial burn.

“I wouldn’t call it nominal orbital insertion,” company spokesperson Dan Huot said, adding however, that it was “within bounds” of a previously analyzed trajectory.

After the Super Heavy booster separated from the upper stage as expected, Huot said on the livestream that the booster failed to complete its so-called boost-back burn.

The booster fell swiftly back to Earth, uncontrolled, into the Gulf of Mexico. SpaceX wasn’t planning to retrieve the booster anyway, but was still hoping for a precision return.

Musk applauded his team on X, calling the flight “epic”.

“You scored a goal for humanity,” he said.

‘Long way to go’

Friday’s flight followed an aborted trial one day prior.

The countdown clock stopped and started until it was determined that the last-minute red flags could not be addressed in time.

Musk quickly posted on X that “the hydraulic pin holding the tower arm in place did not retract”. SpaceX said that issue was corrected overnight.

The company is facing extra scrutiny after SpaceX filed earlier this week with US financial regulators to go public, likely in June, in what is expected to become a record IPO.

Friday marks Starship’s 12th flight overall, but the first in seven months.

The latest design is bigger than its predecessor, standing at just over 407 feet (124 metres) when fully stacked.

There’s a lot riding on SpaceX’s progress: the company is under contract with Nasa to produce a modified version of Starship to serve as a lunar landing system.

The US space agency’s Artemis programme aims to return humans to the Moon, as China forges ahead with a rival effort that’s targeting 2030 for its first crewed mission.

Clayton Swope, an aerospace expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told AFP that “the upgraded version of Starship did most of what SpaceX hoped it would do during the launch”. But he noted that significant time had lapsed since the last test flight.

Nasa is aiming in 2027 to test an in-orbit rendezvous between its spacecraft and at least one lunar lander, which both SpaceX and rival Blue Origin — the Jeff Bezos-owned firm — are racing to develop.

That Artemis phase is meant as a step towards carrying out a crewed lunar landing before the end of 2028, and before the end of Donald Trump’s presidency.

But for Swope, “there is a long way to go and many more test flights before Starship is ready for the next Artemis mission”.

Ahead of Friday’s test, Nasa Administrator Jared Isaacman appeared during the pre-launch SpaceX programme and said: “We’re looking forward to seeing this fly, because hopefully at some point in the not-too-distant future we’re going to join up in Earth orbit.”

Following the test, Isaacman posted praise on X, congratulating SpaceX on “a hell of a V3 Starship launch”.

“One step closer to the Moon … one step closer to Mars,” the Nasa official said.

United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Saturday opened a visit to India that will include talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, looking to renew ties with a usually like-minded partner a week after Washington’s warm summit with China.

Rubio, a devout Catholic, began his four-day, four-city tour by visiting the headquarters of Mother Teresa’s charity in the eastern city of Kolkata and praying over her tomb.

Wearing a yellow garland over his suit, Rubio, who was visiting India for the first time in his life, smiled before an assembly of nuns, all clad in the late humanitarian’s signature white and blue saris.

“Rubio spoke about aiding the homeless, terminally ill and those afflicted by leprosy,” Sister Marie Juan of Missionaries of Charity told reporters after his hour-and-a-half-long visit.

“He was happy to pray and we were also happy to have him,” she said.

Sergio Gor, the US ambassador to India and also a Catholic, later posted that the visit showed that the countries’ relationship was based “not only on strong policies, but also on shared values.”

Rubio, who is accompanied by his wife Jeanette, then flew to New Delhi, where he was scheduled to meet with Modi later on Saturday.

Before leaving on Tuesday, Rubio will also take part in a meeting of foreign ministers of the so-called Quad — Australia, India, Japan and the United States — four democracies seen as a counterweight to China’s presence in the Indian Ocean.

China has long been suspicious of the Quad, calling it an attempt to encircle it, and has chastised India in the past for taking part in it.

But Rubio’s trip comes as President Donald Trump is shaking up traditional assumptions about US priorities.

Trump paid a state visit to China last week, where he hailed the reception he received from President Xi Jinping despite limited concrete announcements.

Trump in Beijing spoke of the United States and China being a “G2” — a formulation that had fallen out of favour in recent years as US allies fear being shut out of Washington’s dealings with a rising China.

Eye on energy

While Trump rarely raises human rights, some elements of his base have expressed concerns over the treatment of Christians under the Hindu nationalist Modi, making Rubio’s choice of first stop highly symbolic.

Rights groups say there has been a rise in attacks on minority Christians across India, including vandalism of churches, since Modi came to power in 2014.

The government rejects the claims as exaggerated and politically motivated.

Ahead of the trip, Rubio called India a “great ally, great partner” and said the US would be looking to find ways to sell it more oil.

India’s fast-growing economy is reliant on energy imports and, like many countries, has been rattled by the US-Israeli attack on Iran, which retaliated by choking off the strategic Strait of Hormuz, sending global oil prices soaring.

India has historic ties with Iran but also a growing relationship with Israel, which Modi visited just days before the war.

But the conflict has also seen the re-emergence as a key US partner of India’s traditional adversary Pakistan, which has positioned itself as a mediator, with its powerful army chief flying to Tehran on Friday.

The United States was a Cold War partner of Pakistan but increasingly took a distance as it prioritised relations with India, seeing the world’s largest democracy as a natural partner in a global order marked by China’s rise.

Trump has turned away from long-held assumptions and warmed to Pakistan, which has lavished him with praise over his diplomacy in its short conflict with India last year, and has welcomed a cryptocurrency firm owned by the US president’s family.

Modi irritated Trump by not crediting him with ending the conflict, in which India struck Pakistan following the Pahalgam attack in India-occupied Kashmir.

Trump imposed punitive tariffs on India shortly afterwards, at rates higher than he had put on China, but they were eased under a trade deal.