The State Bank of Pakistan report showed Pakistan’s current account swung into surplus after showing a considerable improvement in May 2026.

The central bank said the current account had a surplus of $459 million in May 2026, compared with a loss of $276 million in April. This is a huge reversal of the country’s foreign account situation in a month.

The current account too continued to be in surplus in the first eleven months of the current fiscal with a total balance of $255 million.

The data indicated that the current account gain was mostly driven by an increase in workers’ remittances that helped balance external pressures and supported the return to positive territory.

Meanwhile economists remarked that the consistent rise in remittance inflows also played a crucial role in strengthening the external account and enhancing overall balance of payments stability over the time.

Almost all children around the world are exposed to at least one climate hazard, with up to 1.8 billion children at risk from droughts and 1.2 billion from extreme heat, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said in a report released Tuesday, naming Pakistan among the countries most vulnerable to climate hazards.

UNICEF said children are “disproportionately affected” by a range of rising climate-related threats and countries need to rapidly invest in infrastructure, adaptation and disaster management capacity to decrease their vulnerability. Below are some of the details from UNICEF’s Children’s Climate Risk Report.

The research examined a wide range of ⁠climate dangers, as well as the effects of air pollution and the threat of vector-borne diseases like malaria.

It also looked at data on access to water, health care and social services globally.

The report warned of a “dangerous cascade of multiple, overlapping hazards” that could overwhelm governments and social services, as many as 1.1 billion children globally being exposed to at least three overlapping climate dangers.

“It’s not just the exposure to the single hazards like floods or droughts or heat waves and extreme heat that children face, but it is the exposure to multiple hazards,” said Rohini Sampoornam Swaminathan, UNICEF statistics manager and one of the authors of the report.

Exposure to tropical storms reached 662 million children, to riverine floods 337 million, to coastal floods 33 million, and to malaria 1 billion children, largely in Africa.

In 2024, climate threats hindered the education of 242 million youngsters across 85 countries.

Somalia, Madagascar, Myanmar, Cambodia and Pakistan were most at risk, UNICEF said.
The biggest numbers of children exposed to drought are in agriculture based economies like Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Tanzania.

The dangers of drought, desertification, heat stress and flash floods were “disproportionately” high for children in landlocked countries, with water stress expected to increase in countries such as Botswana and Burkina Faso.

The United States government said in a legal filing seen by AFP on Tuesday that strikes against Iran were launched using Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence program Grok.

June 15 brief defends the gas turbines used by a huge data centre belonging to the trillionaire’s company xAI, targeted by an environmental complaint.

The US Department of Justice said in the brief that “the lawsuit threatens American national, economic, and energy security by seeking to shut off the power supply for artificial intelligence innovation that supports the Department of War’s military operations.”

Federal prosecutors also called Pentagon AI head Cameron Stanley, who testified under oath that Grok is already in use in Project Maven, the US military’s AI-assisted targeting tool that was first driven by Anthropic’s Claude model.

Stanley’s statement said the project’s Maven Smart Systems (MSS) “enabled US forces to strike more than 2,000 munitions at 2,000 different targets in 96 hours during Operation Epic Fury.”

Stanley commended Musk’s technology and “the substantially improved operational efficiency offered by the Grok Gov Model.”

The NAACP, a civil rights group fighting for the rights of Black Americans, is suing xAI, saying it’s operating dozens of turbines without permits and breaking the Clean Air Act.

The rights group believes they pollute majority-Black neighbourhoods. But xAI says the turbines are transitory and transportable, and therefore not subject to regulation.

In late February, the government terminated its contracts with Anthropic because it refused to permit its technologies to be utilised for fully automated attacks or the bulk surveillance of Americans.

The Pentagon then turned to Anthropic’s competitors such as Google, OpenAI and xAI to continue its quest for AI.

More than 600 Google employees have called on the firm not to deploy AI to the military for sensitive operations. Some people have wider worries about the risks of AI.

But the US military’s move to AI is slow and in March the government had to admit that Claude was still being used to fight the war in Iran.

A close confidant of President Donald Trump, Musk rolled xAI into his space exploration company SpaceX in February and on June 12 it went public in the largest IPO in history.