Pakistan's ISI PR chief gets trolled for posting doctored video of retired IAF officer

Agencies
July 29, 2019

Islamabad, Jul 29: Pakistan's Director-General of Inter-Services Public Relations, Asif Ghafoor, attracted ridicule after posting a doctored video of war hero and retired IAF Air Marshal, Denzil Keelor on Sunday.

Ghafoor shared a video of Keelor on his Twitter account, claiming that the war veteran was talking about the "Indian failure" during the dogfight between the Indian Air Force (IAF) and Pakistan Air Force (PAF) on 27 February this year, just a day after the Balakot airstrikes.

Netizens were quick to point out that the video was recorded in 2015, approximately four years before the Balakot strikes.

In fact, the interview titled "Nehru lost India the war: Air Marshal Denzil Keelor speaks about India's battle losses" was posted by Wilderness Films India on 9 August, 2015, on the video-sharing website, YouTube. The former Air Marshal was invited by the production house for a talk on the wars of 1962 and 1965, according to its description.

Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman's clip — which was released by the Pakistani military — can be seen on the top right of the screen in the video posted by Ghafoor. The DG ISPR's doctored video is interspersed with visuals of a crashed plane.

Twitterati strongly reacted to Ghafoor's post, with many poking fun at his gaffe.

"You leave no stone unturned to advertise your incurable 'foot in mouth' disease. At your level, you should refrain from peddling amateurish morphed videos that make you a laughing stock on global platform. Kindly get a better video editor who bothers to edit out the giveaways," a Twitter user @Shonkho wrote.

Falling short of an apology, Ghafoor later acknowledged that the Keelor clip shared by him was indeed doctored.

The DG ISPR is yet to delete the video or formally apologise for his misstep.

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News Network
June 27,2020

Moscow, Jun 27: The number of people who have contracted the coronavirus infection in Russia has increased by 6,852 over the past day to a total of 627,646, the country's COVID-19 Response Center said in a daily update on Saturday.

"Over the past day, 6,852 new COVID-19 cases were confirmed in 85 regions of Russia, including 2,058, or 30 per cent, of asymptomatic cases," the response centre said.

Of the total 6,852 newly detected cases, 750 have been confirmed in Moscow, 366 in Moscow Region, and 280 in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Area, according to the report.

The reported daily dynamics included 188 new fatalities, which brought the cumulative death toll to 8,969.

Total recoveries now count 393,352, an increase of 9,200 over the past day, including 1,852 in Moscow, 1,421 in Moscow Region and 716 in St. Petersburg.

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Agencies
August 1,2020

Mexico City, Aug 1: The number of people, who have died of COVID-19 in Mexico, has risen by 688 to 46,688 within the past 24 hours, Deputy Health Minister Hugo Lopez-Gatell said.

The number of victims in Mexico is now higher than in the United Kingdom, where 46,119 people have died of the disease. The largest number of fatalities - 153,311 - has been recorded in the United States, while Brazil comes second with 92,475 deaths.

Lopez-Gatell also said on late Friday that the number of confirmed coronavirus cases had increased by 8,458 to 424,637 over the past day.

A day earlier, the Latin American nation recorded 7,730 new cases of the coronavirus, with 639 fatalities.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic on March 11. To date, over 17.5 million people have been infected with the coronavirus worldwide, with over 677,000 fatalities, according to Johns Hopkins University.

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News Network
June 8,2020

Hundreds of thousands of people across the world are joining the anti-racism demonstrations days after the killing of George Floyd in United Sates. 

The protests are being held in cities including London, Manchester, Cardiff, Leicester and Sheffield.

Demonstrators attached ropes to the statue of Edward Colston before pulling it down to cheers and roars of approval from the crowd. Images on social media show the statue was eventually rolled into the city's harbour. 

It was not the only statue targeted on Sunday. In Brussels, protesters clambered onto the statue of former King Leopold II and chanted "reparations".

The word "shame" was also graffitied on the monument, reference perhaps to the fact that Leopold is said to have reigned over the mass death of 10 million Congolese.

In London, thousands of people congregated around the US embassy for the second day running.

While protests were mainly peaceful, there were some scuffles near the office of Prime Minister Boris Johnson and outside the Parliament gates.

In Hong Kong, about 20 people staged a rally in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement on Sunday outside the US consulate in the semi-autonomous Chinese city.

"It's a global issue," Quinland Anderson, a 28-year-old British citizen living in Hong Kong, told The Associated Press news agency.

"We have to remind ourselves despite all we see going on in the US and in the other parts of the world, Black lives do indeed matter."

Several dozen demonstrators took part in a Black Lives Matter protest held in Tel Aviv's central Rabin Square.

A rally in Rome's sprawling People's Square was noisy but peaceful, with the majority of protesters wearing masks to protect against coronavirus. Participants listened to speeches and held up handmade placards saying "Black Lives Matter" and "It's a White Problem".

In Spain, several thousand people gathered on the streets of Barcelona and at the US embassy in Madrid.

Many in Madrid carried homemade signs reading "Black Lives Matter", "Human rights for all" and "Silence is pro-racist".

"We are not only doing this for our brother George Floyd," said Thimbo Samb, a spokesman for the group that organised the events in Spain mainly through social media. "Here in Europe, in Spain, where we live, we work, we sleep and pay taxes, we also suffer racism."

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