Rafia Zakaria

1 week ago | dawn.com | Rafia Zakaria

IT was a week of turnarounds. The Trump White House, eager to remain on the warpath with the rest of the world, came down with ridiculous and enormous tariffs for other countries. On April 2, 2025, President Donald Trump imposed a universal tariff on most nations, sending the US stock market into a tailspin, with trillions of dollars wiped out within days. For his part, President Donald Trump acted nonchalant and went off to play golf with the visiting Saudis.

2 weeks ago | internazionale.it | Rafia Zakaria

L a città pachistana di Karak, che sitrova nella provincia del Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, è nota per il suo rispetto delle tradizioni tribali, anche quando impongono un costo umano enorme. Anche lì, però, le cose stanno cambiando. E sono le donne il motore del cambiamento. Tra loro c’è Zahida Parveen. Suo padre lavorava alla scuola primaria femminile statale di Karak.

2 weeks ago | dawn.com | Rafia Zakaria

THE town of Karak in KP is located in a society known to uphold tribal customs and traditions, even if they exact a tremendous cost. Even here, however, things are changing — and it is women who are the drivers of that change. One such woman is Zahida Parveen, whose father worked at the Government Girls Primary School in Karak. She herself had an interest in education and wanted to be a schoolteacher.

3 weeks ago | thebaffler.com | Matthew Goodman |Rafia Zakaria |Pooja Bhatia

Forty-Five has become 47, and Donald Trump is now the first president to serve two nonconsecutive terms since Grover Cleveland. With protective tariffs anathema to Uncle Jumbo, as Cleveland was known to family and friends, the two wouldn’t have agreed on all counts, but our twenty-second and twenty-fourth president was also a downsizer cartoonishly obsessed with small government.

3 weeks ago | dawn.com | Rafia Zakaria

IT was an otherwise ordinary evening in Somerville, Massachusetts — a suburb of Boston. The last week of March had finally begun and the weather was warming up, heralding the arrival of spring. Thirty-year-old Rumeysa Ozturk was going to join some friends for iftar. Ozturk, who has a Master’s degree from Columbia University in New York, was a doctoral student at Tufts University. Quiet and soft-spoken, Ozturk, a Turkish national, had a valid student visa and was a Fulbright scholar.