Bomb kills Afghan election candidate, 7 injured

Agencies
October 17, 2018

Kandahar, Oct 17: A bomb placed under a sofa killed an Afghan election candidate on Wednesday, officials said, as deadly violence escalates ahead of the October 20 parliamentary ballot.

The Taliban quickly claimed responsibility for the attack, which takes the number of candidates killed so far during the campaign season to at least 10.

Jabar Qahraman had been meeting with supporters in his campaign office in the southern province of Helmand -- a Taliban stronghold -- when the attack happened, provincial governor spokesman Omar Zhwak told news agency.

Another seven people were wounded in the blast in the provincial capital Lashkar Gah.

The bomb had been hidden under Qahraman's sofa, Zhwak said.

"We have arrested several people in connection with the blast," he added. Provincial police spokesman Salam Afghan confirmed the explosion had killed one person and wounded at least two.

Most of the 10 candidates who have died in the lead-up to the election were murdered in targeted killings.

Qahraman was the second candidate killed in Lashkar Gah this month, after Saleh Mohammad Asikzai was among eight people killed in a suicide attack last week.

That incident came a day after the Taliban warned candidates to withdraw from the parliamentary election, which the group has vowed to attack.

Poll-related violence has increased ahead of the long-delayed vote, with hundreds of people killed or wounded in attacks across the country.

Qahraman, a former army general under the Communist regime in the 1980s, had long been in the Taliban's crosshairs.

President Ashraf Ghani sent Qahraman, a sitting MP, to Helmand as his special envoy in 2016 to help defeat the militant group. Qahraman later resigned.

Preparations for the ballot have been a shambles and with days to go, organisers are still struggling to distribute voting materials to more than 5,000 polling centres.

The election for parliament's lower house is seen as a dry run for the presidential vote scheduled for April and organisers have said it would not be delayed any further.

It also is seen as a key milestone ahead of a UN meeting in Geneva in November, where Afghanistan will be under pressure to show progress on "democratic processes".

Almost nine million people have registered to vote, but observers expect far fewer to turn out due to the threat of militant attacks and expectations of widespread fraud.

More than 50,000 members of Afghanistan's already overstretched security forces are being deployed to protect polling centres on Election Day.

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News Network
April 16,2020

Islamabad, Apr 16: The number of coronavirus cases in Pakistan topped 6000 while the death toll due to the virus has reached 117, Dawn reported citing official data on Wednesday.

Over 1,446 people have recovered in the country from the deadly virus that has killed over 1.3 lakh people worldwide.

The total number of cases in the country has reached 6297 with Punjab being the worst affected province with 3,016 cases. Meanwhile, Sindh has 1,688 cases of the deadly virus.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has reported 47 new cases of the coronavirus, taking the provincial total to 912. Most of the new cases are of Tableeghi Jamaat members who have travel history.

Balochistan has reported four new cases of COVID-19, taking the provincial total to 281 according to provincial government spokesperson Liaquat Shahwani.

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Imran Khan had announced the extension of the nationwide lockdown with relaxation to some sectors.

Addressing the media in Islamabad on Tuesday, Khan said, "We made the hard decision of imposing lockdown in the country which was very well implemented due to cooperation of the people."

The countrywide lockdown was imposed last month in a bid to stem the spread of coronavirus. Later, a two-week extension was announced in the restrictions until April 14.

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Agencies
July 18,2020

Days after Twitter accounts of several billionaires were hacked to engineer a crypto scam, Twitter on Saturday said it is embarrassed, disappointed and, more than anything, sorry for what happened with some of its high-profile users as attackers successfully manipulated its employees and used their credentials to access internal systems, including getting through the two-factor protections.

In the first detailed summary of the "social engineering attack" via a crypto scam that hit at least 130 users this week, Twitter said for 45 of those accounts, the attackers were able to initiate a password reset, login to the account and send Tweets.

"We are continuing our forensic review of all of the accounts to confirm all actions that may have been taken. In addition, we believe they may have attempted to sell some of the usernames," the micro-blogging platform said in a statement.

For up to eight of the Twitter accounts involved, the attackers took the additional step of downloading the account's information via "Your Twitter Data" tool.

This is a tool that is meant to provide an account owner with a summary of their Twitter account details and activity.

"We are reaching out directly to any account owner where we know this to be true. None of the eight were verified accounts," said Twitter.

The company said the attackers were not able to view previous account passwords, as those are not stored in plain text or available through the tools used in the attack.

"Attackers were able to view personal information including email addresses and phone numbers, which are displayed to some users of our internal support tools," informed Twitter.

In cases where an account was taken over by the attacker, they may have been able to view additional information, Twitter added, saying its forensic investigation of these activities was still ongoing.

"We are actively working on communicating directly with the account-holders that were impacted".

The company said it will soon restore access for all account owners who may still be locked out as a result of the remediation efforts.

The New York Times reported on Friday that the Twitter crypto scam can be traced back to a group of hackers who congregate online at OGusers.com, a username-swapping community where people buy and sell coveted online handles.

The report said that the Twitter hack is not from Russian, Chinese or North Korean hackers but was done by a group of young people, "one of whom says he lives at home with his mother".

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Agencies
January 4,2020

Stockholm, Jan 4: “I’m not the kind of person who celebrates birthdays,” Greta Thunberg said as she turned 17 on Friday, marking the occasion in inimitable style - with a seven-hour hour protest outside the Swedish parliament.

The climate activist braved winter conditions in her native Stockholm to continue the weekly Friday School Strike for the Climate campaign that helped catapult her to international fame.

“I stand here striking from 8am until 3pm as usual ... then I’ll go home,” Thunberg, Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2019, told Reuters.

“I won’t have a birthday cake but we’ll have a dinner.”

It’s been a busy 12 months for Thunberg, who crisscrossed the globe by car, train and boat - but not plane - to demand action on climate change.

“It has been a strange and busy year, but also a great one because I have found something I want to do with my life and what I am doing is having an impact,” she said.

When she was 15, Thunberg began skipping school on Fridays to demonstrate outside the Swedish parliament to push her government to curb carbon emissions. Her campaign gave rise to a grassroots movement that has gone global, inspiring millions of people to take action.

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