The Pakistan Government denied media reports yesterday that it was lobbying Afghanistan to drop its alliance with Washington and look to Islamabad and Beijing to forge a peace deal with the Taliban and rebuild its economy.

David Cameron has made a sternly worded attack on the Pakistan government's performance, complaining that Islamabad lacks capacity, is responsible for too much waste, collects too little tax, and needs to tackle corruption.

David Cameron announced £650 million in assistance for Pakistani education today, as part of an effort to launch a "fresh start" in Britain's relationship with the south Asian country.

The diplomatic relationship between Pakistan and the US – testy and fraught with mutual suspicion – bears out as few others the dictum of Lord Palmerston's that countries have no permanent friends or allies, only permanent interests.

Blood was met with demands for more blood today as angry Christian demonstrators demanded that the killers of slain Pakistani minister Shahbaz Bhatti be captured and hanged.

Pakistan's government minister for religious minorities died today after being shot by gunmen in the capital Islamabad, hospital officials said.

Senator John Kerry was in Islamabad yesterday to push for the release of Raymond Davis, an American consulate employee facing charges over two killings.

The long and fractious search for a replacement for the late Richard Holbrooke as a special US envoy to both Pakistan and Afghanistan is over, but the job of filling his shoes is looking more impossible than ever, not least because of an expected exodus of top American officials from Kabul this year.

The United States may scrap upcoming talks with Pakistan about the war in Afghanistan to further pressure Islamabad to free an American accused of shooting dead two Pakistanis, US officials said.

A court in Lahore has ordered the Pakistani government not to release an American official arrested over a double shooting in the city and said that his name should be added to the "exit control list" so that he cannot leave the country.

The bodyguard who murdered the liberal Pakistani Governor Salmaan Taseer says he was inspired by sermons from two Islamic clerics.

"Who the hell are these illiterate maulvis to decide whether I'm a Muslim or not?" Salmaan Taseer asked me, a month before he was brutally assassinated outside his Islamabad home by his own bodyguard.

The governor of Pakistan's central Punjab province, a senior member of the ruling party, was shot dead by one of his bodyguards in Islamabad today, plunging the country into a new political crisis.