QUETTA: Two policemen were martyred when Deputy Superintendent of Police Hameedullah Dasti’s car came under under heavy firing by unknown assailants on Sumungli Road in Quetta early Wednesday morning.

“DSP Dasti remained safe in the attack,” confirmed Balochistan police.

The deceased were identified as Muhammad Thair and Ayoub shah.
Chief Minister Balochistan Mir Abdul Quddus Bizenjo strongly condemned the attack and ordered an immediate inquiry into it.

“Terrorists don’t deserve any leniency,” the CM stated as he expressed his sorrow and grief with the bereaved families.

Last month, a customs official was killed in a firing incident early in the outskirts of Quetta.

The customs officials were travelling in a car when unknown assailants opened fire at the vehicle near Sheikh Zayed Hospital at Link road resulting in the death of Muhammad Fasim.

However reason of the attack remained unclear.

YANGON: Facebook has removed the page of a Myanmar monk once dubbed the “Buddhist Bin Laden” for his incendiary posts about Muslims, the company confirmed, as it faces pressure to clamp down on hate speech.

Wirathu, a prominent face of Myanmar’s Buddhist ultra-nationalist movement, had amassed hundreds of thousands of followers on the network, using it as a platform to attack Muslims, singling out the stateless Rohingya minority.

Nearly 700,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh since last August following a military crackdown in Rakhine state that has been likened to ethnic cleansing by the US and the UN, but which has been applauded by Myanmar nationalists online.
A Facebook spokesperson told AFP late Monday that Wirathu’s page had been removed.

“Our Community Standards prohibit organisations and people dedicated to promoting hatred and violence against others”, a Facebook spokesperson said in an email.

“If a person consistently shares content promoting hate, we may take a range of actions such as temporarily suspending their ability to post and ultimately, removal of their account.”

The page was taken down in late January. Wirathu could not be reached for comment, but he said in a video last year that his account had been temporarily banned for 30 days because “Facebook is occupied by the Muslims.”

Facebook use has grown exponentially in Myanmar since a quasi-civilian government opened up the telecoms sector in 2013, making it easier for people to access the internet in the largely Buddhist country.

Hardline monks like Wirathu took to the platform as well, gaining notoriety for fanning anti-Muslim hatred through inflammatory posts.
His tirades have been blamed for stoking sectarian violence, which has plagued Myanmar’s transition to democracy.

After Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi came to power in 2016, the government dissolved the Ma Ba Tha group to which Wirathu belonged, and slapped the monk with a one-year speaking ban.

But the man who once appeared on the cover of Time magazine as the “face of Buddhist terror” remains influential.

The social media giant has faced calls to rein in hate speech on its Myanmar accounts for years, with pressure mounting during the Rohingya crisis.

Thet Swe Win, a Yangon-based interfaith activist, said Facebook’s move sent a symbolic message about not tolerating hate speech.
But getting rid of the page will not resolve the problem, he warned.

“They remove his account but not his videos, and his religious hate speeches, they are still on Facebook and his followers are spreading it,” he said.

DOUMA: Russia called a daily “humanitarian pause” in Syria’s Eastern Ghouta, bowing to pressure to halt the carnage in the rebel-held enclave where bombardments eased late on Monday after hours of deadly raids.

A UN Security Council resolution for a 30-day truce had remained a dead letter since it was passed on Saturday, and Moscow, the Damascus regime’s main backer, ended up setting its own terms to stem one of the worst episodes of bloodletting in Syria’s seven-year-old conflict.

The United Nations, France and Germany had made pressing appeals for Russian President Vladimir Putin to demand its Damascus ally enforce a ceasefire, including in Eastern Ghouta where more than 500 civilians were killed last week.
Putin agreed to a five-hour daily window that would allow residents of the battered enclave east of the capital to emerge from their underground shelters.

“On the instructions of the Russian president, with the goal of avoiding civilian casualties in Eastern Ghouta, from February 27 — tomorrow — from 9:00 to 14:00 there will be a humanitarian pause,” said Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu.

According to a statement sent to AFP, he said there should be similar pauses in the southern Al-Tanf border region and Rukban, near the Jordanian border.

Shoigu said “humanitarian corridors” would be opened to allow civilians to leave.

The public would be informed with leaflets and text messages, and buses and ambulances would be waiting at a crossing to evacuate the sick and wounded, Moscow said.

UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said “five hours is better than no hours, but we would like to see an end to all hostilities extended by 30 days, as stipulated by the Security Council”.

“We will do our best… to deploy our trucks and humanitarian workers in this area,” he added.

Russia’s defence ministry warned the situation in Eastern Ghouta was “continuing to escalate”.

The intensity of the bombardment on Eastern Ghouta had eased somewhat in the past 48 hours but deadly strikes and shelling never stopped.

On Monday, at least 22 civilians, including seven children, were killed in new raids and artillery fire by the regime, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor.

Nine were members of the same family killed when their home collapsed on them in Douma, the main town in the enclave.

“The shelling of Ghouta stopped at 4:00 pm, before resuming in the early evening in a limited way,” said Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman.

“But artillery fire continued against the Al-Marj area” where clashes were ongoing between pro-regime forces and Jaish al-Islam rebels, he added.

An AFP correspondent in Douma said the bombardment had been very heavy overnight and impeded rescuers in their work.

The regime intensified its air campaign against Eastern Ghouta, which has been outside government control since 2012, at the beginning of the month.

On February 18, the Syrian government further turned up the heat on the territory controlled by Islamists and jihadists.

More than 550 civilians, almost a quarter of them children, have since been killed and extensive destruction wrought on the enclave’s towns.

The hospitals and clinics that were not destroyed by strikes have struggled to treat the more than 2,000 people wounded over the same period.

The United Nations said 76 percent of private housing in Eastern Ghouta has been damaged.

Residents trapped in the wreckage of their own homes have bled to death as rescuers were targeted even as they tried to save lives.

Much of the nearly 400,000-strong population of Eastern Ghouta has moved underground, with families pitching tents in basements and venturing out only to assess damage to their property and buy food.

On Sunday, a child died and 13 others suffered breathing difficulties and showed symptoms consistent with a chlorine attack after a regime air raid struck the town of Al-Shifuniyah, the Observatory and a medic said.

Russia dismissed reports of a chemical attack as “bogus stories”.

The regime has reinforced its deployment around the enclave in the past month, raising fears of a ground offensive that aid groups have warned could cause even greater suffering.

With the Islamic State group’s once sprawling “caliphate” now wiped off the map, the regime has looked bent on completing its reconquest and Eastern Ghouta is a key target.

The jihadists only control an estimated three percent of Syria territory, small pockets which various anti-IS forces continue to flush out.

Another flashpoint in Syria has been the northern region of Afrin, where Kurdish forces have come under attack from neighbouring Turkey since January 20.

Turkey has warned it did not consider that the UN ceasefire resolution, which is not limited to Eastern Ghouta but whose wording excludes operations against terror groups, should affect its offensive on Afrin.

Macron on Monday called Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who considers the Syrian Kurdish militia to be “terrorist”, to stress the truce should apply there too.

LAHORE: Instead of legislative matters, the treasury and opposition benches seemed more concerned about the marriages of Shehbaz Sharif and Imran Khan. Both PML-N and PTI went at each other with hammer and tongs, calling leaders of the other party “serial grooms”.

The pandemonium broke out when Minister for Housing, Urban Development and Public Health Engineering Syed Haroon Ahmed Sultan Bokhari, with a wry smile on his face, said he even allowed wedding ceremonies in parks of those people who hoped to marry three or four times.

Bukhari was responding to a question put forward by PTI minority MPA for Shunila Ruth who asked how many public parks were allowed to be used for wedding ceremonies. Bukhari said there were 813 small and big parks in Lahore, adding the law did not allow such functions, but they were still being held. The MPA found the information illogical, stressing that the law does not give permission for these ceremonies. The minister replied with a joke, saying that he even grants permission to those people who were marrying for the third or fourth time to host functions at these parks.

In reaction, the opposition MPAs stood up from their seats and said this was an irresponsible answer to a serious query. PTI’s Shaikh Khurram, naming the wives of the Punjab Chief Minister Mian Shehbaz Sharif, said that Imran Khan never forced a divorce

Opposition leader Mian Mehmoodur Rasheed and other PTI legislators Dr Murad Rass, Nabila Hakim Ali Khan and others also reacted strongly to the minister’s answer which clearly targeted their party chief Imran Khan.

Responding to another query by JI MPA Dr Waseem Akhtar who asked when the government would implement its “master plan” of clean drinking water and sewerage for the people of Bahawalpur, Bukhari admitted there was no doubt the southern area was deprived of several facilities.

He said several schemes had been launched in different areas, but the projects never reached completion due to the negligence of departments concerned. However, he assured that specific problems, if sorted out, would be resolved at the soonest.

Minister Syed Haroon Ahmed Sultan Bokhari also could not satisfy PTI’s Dr Nausheed Hamid who asked if the news that the government had allotted 15 marlas of property to land grabbers was correct. The minister responded that the information was incorrect and the land was only handed over to deserving people by then chief minister Nawaz Sharif in 1990. Hamid objected by saying the property was not given to deserving people.

On Monday, there were 34 questions related to the Housing, Urban Development and Public Health Engineering Department on the agenda. Of the total, only six were taken up and five discussed. One of them was the question of PTI’s Shunila Ruth who protested against the unsatisfactory answers.

Speaker Rana Muhammad Iqbal Khan had to leave the rest of the questions pending as the question-answer session time had finished due to a delay in the start of proceedings. The House was to begin at 2PM, but it started at 2:40pm instead.

The speaker adjourned the House for 10 minutes due to the absence of the minister and the department secretary concerned. After that, proceedings started again with a delay of more than 30 minutes. Meanwhile, PTI’s Nabila Hakim Ali Khan pointed to the quorum and said the government could not show the required number of legislators after which the assembly was adjourned till 10am on Tuesday.

KARACHI ‘: After removing Farooq Sattar as its convener a day earlier, the Rabita Committee on Monday requested the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) to appoint Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui as the party chief.

“Vide the minutes of the meeting of Rabita Committee held on February 11 at Bahadurabad, Sattar has been removed as convener. In his place Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui has been elected by two-thirds majority,” said an application written by deputy convenor Kanwar Naveed Jamil, bearing signatures of 26 of the total 35 Rabita Committee members.

A senior ECP official confirmed to The Express Tribune that the Rabita Committee’s plea for a new convener has been accepted and Siddiqui will replace Sattar. “We have not yet issued a notice, but Siddiqui will head the party.”

Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MOM-P) nominee for Senate election Barrister Farogh Naseem said that the party was not registered with Sattar, but he was its head.

“The Rabita Committee has removed Sattar with two-thirds majority. He is no longer the party head,” Barrister Naseem said, adding that Bahadurabad was the office of MQM-P and no one could claim it.

Responding to a question, he said, “The Rabita Committee has the authority to make such decisions under MQM-P’s constitution. It has also nominated candidates for the Senate election. Sattar can challenge it in court if he has any reservations over it.”

The general workers’ meeting convened by Sattar holds no legal or moral value as the Rabita Committee has removed him, he added.

When the Rabita Committee removed Sattar as convener, Sattar dissolved the committee in retaliation during a public meeting at KMC ground on Sunday night. He announced to hold intra-party elections on February 17 to elect a new body.