Imran Khan warned by police not to hold rally in Islamabad

Pakistan’s government has issued a stark warning to ousted prime minister Imran Khan, saying that his supporters will not be able to hold a political rally in Islamabad on Wednesday, after a policeman was shot dead.

Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah said the policeman was shot by a supporter of Mr Khan, who in turn has accused authorities of carrying out a draconian campaign against his supporters.

Mr Sanaullah said the killing of the officer proves that Mr Khan is a “terrorist”.

“The decision has been taken to stop them from spreading their agenda of manipulation and division. These people have moved from abuses to bullets,” Mr Sanaullah said in a tweet on Tuesday, in which he did not repeat the “terrorist” accusation but accused Mr Khan's supporters of spreading “anarchy”.

“PTI's proposed long march has nothing to do with the democratic norms, as the party wants to spread anarchy in the country,” he added, using an acronym for Mr Khan's party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf.

Allies of Mr Khan accuse authorities of raiding 1,100 homes and arresting 400 people in overnight raids, before a rally in support of the former cricket star.

Since being removed from office in a vote of no confidence, Mr Khan has held mass political gatherings across the country in which he has accused his rivals of working covertly with the US government in a plot to unseat him.

On Tuesday, Mr Khan tweeted that his supporters in the PTI had a right to peacefully protest.

“The brutal crackdown on PTI [leaders and] workers in Punjab and Islamabad has once again shown us what we are familiar with ― the fascist nature of PML-N when in power,” he said in a tweet, referring to the party of current prime minister Shehbaz Sharif.

On Saturday, senior PTI leader and former minister Shireen Mazari was arrested near her house in the capital over a case involving a decades-old land dispute. She was briefly detained before a court ordered her release.

In 2018, Mr Khan was voted in by an electorate weary of the dynastic politics of the country's two major parties, with the popular former sports star promising to sweep away decades of entrenched corruption and cronyism.

He was brought down in part by his failure to rectify the country's dire economic situation, including its crippling debt, shrinking foreign currency reserves and soaring inflation.

Mr Sharif is now grappling with the same crisis, as well as rising militancy and soured relations with the West.

Sri Lanka's T20I squad

Thisara Perera (captain), Dilshan Munaweera, Danushka Gunathilaka, Sadeera Samarawickrama, Ashan Priyanjan, Mahela Udawatte, Dasun Shanaka, Sachith Pathirana, Vikum Sanjaya, Lahiru Gamage, Seekkuge Prasanna, Vishwa Fernando, Isuru Udana, Jeffrey Vandersay and Chathuranga de Silva.

Key facilities

Olympic-size swimming pool with a split bulkhead for multi-use configurations, including water polo and 50m/25m training lanes
Premier League-standard football pitch
400m Olympic running track
NBA-spec basketball court with auditorium
600-seat auditorium
Spaces for historical and cultural exploration
An elevated football field that doubles as a helipad
Specialist robotics and science laboratories
AR and VR-enabled learning centres
Disruption Lab and Research Centre for developing entrepreneurial skills

Red flags

Promises of high, fixed or 'guaranteed' returns.
Unregulated structured products or complex investments often used to bypass traditional safeguards.
Lack of clear information, vague language, no access to audited financials.
Overseas companies targeting investors in other jurisdictions - this can make legal recovery difficult.
Hard-selling tactics - creating urgency, offering 'exclusive' deals.

Courtesy: Carol Glynn, founder of Conscious Finance Coaching

'Cheb%20Khaled'

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Know your cyber adversaries

Cryptojacking: Compromises a device or network to mine cryptocurrencies without an organisation's knowledge.

Distributed denial-of-service: Floods systems, servers or networks with information, effectively blocking them.

Man-in-the-middle attack: Intercepts two-way communication to obtain information, spy on participants or alter the outcome.

Malware: Installs itself in a network when a user clicks on a compromised link or email attachment.

Phishing: Aims to secure personal information, such as passwords and credit card numbers.

Ransomware: Encrypts user data, denying access and demands a payment to decrypt it.

Spyware: Collects information without the user's knowledge, which is then passed on to bad actors.

Trojans: Create a backdoor into systems, which becomes a point of entry for an attack.

Viruses: Infect applications in a system and replicate themselves as they go, just like their biological counterparts.

Worms: Send copies of themselves to other users or contacts. They don't attack the system, but they overload it.

Zero-day exploit: Exploits a vulnerability in software before a fix is found.

Pharaoh's curse

British aristocrat Lord Carnarvon, who funded the expedition to find the Tutankhamun tomb, died in a Cairo hotel four months after the crypt was opened.
He had been in poor health for many years after a car crash, and a mosquito bite made worse by a shaving cut led to blood poisoning and pneumonia.
Reports at the time said Lord Carnarvon suffered from “pain as the inflammation affected the nasal passages and eyes”.
Decades later, scientists contended he had died of aspergillosis after inhaling spores of the fungus aspergillus in the tomb, which can lie dormant for months. The fact several others who entered were also found dead withiin a short time led to the myth of the curse.

Kareem Shaheen on Canada

Canada should look past the US election outcome

There would be no Alphonso Davies without open borders

Hard-hit Canada is springing back to life – or to the already cliched 'new normal'

Conflict, drought, famine

Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.

Band Aid

Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.