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Pakistan installs fishing nets at security outposts to block drone attacks

Al Jazeera

The April 16 attack was claimed by Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), commonly known as the Pakistan Taliban, and its fighters then opened fire from all sides of the Sarki Piyala police checkpost in Hangu district, about 30km (18 miles) from the border with Afghanistan and a hotbed of deadly attacks by armed groups, mainly the TTP. "There was a great deal of fear because we were in the middle of a battle. At that moment, we did not even know whether we would make it back home alive," Khan told Al Jazeera. To defend against such attacks, the police in Hangu came up with an unlikely, low-cost solution - fishing nets strung several metres overhead between the checkpost's rooftops and perimeter walls, forming a kind of aerial ceiling. Simple in construction and resembling what fishermen use for their work, the netting was first installed two months ago, according to the local police.


Supporters of jailed ex-PM Imran Khan march to Pakistan capital

BBC News

Image caption, Some 5,000 people took to the streets on Sunday carrying red-and-green flags of Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party Thousands of supporters of Pakistan's jailed ex-prime minister Imran Khan are marching to the capital Islamabad as they call for his release. Concerns over the 73-year-old's health have grown louder in recent months. His family claims he has lost most of his vision in his right eye after prison authorities failed to take action. The cricket star-turned-politician, who faces charges in more than 100 cases, was jailed for 14 years over corruption last year. Khan said all the cases against him are politically motivated.


How to watch Pakistan vs. India in the Asian Games final online for free

Mashable

Say More Look Up Top creators, ranked Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Creator Playbook Mashable Selects In My Bag AI at School Safety Net Versus Trending Now All Series How to watch Pakistan vs. India in the Asian Games final online for free Joseph Green is the Global Shopping Editor for Mashable. He covers VPNs, headphones, fitness gear, dating sites, streaming, and shopping events like Black Friday and Prime Day. All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers. If you buy something through links on our site, Mashable may earn an affiliate commission. This weekend's sport schedule is extremely busy.


Pakistan says it launches air strikes on Afghanistan after drone attacks

Al Jazeera

Pakistan says it has carried out air strikes on 10 locations in Afghanistan used to store and launch drones, some of which were used in cross-border attacks. The air strikes on Thursday were carried out as tensions grow between the former allies over attacks by armed groups in Pakistan, which triggered their worst fighting in years in February. The air strikes were "deliberate, precise, calibrated, and proportionate, and strictly limited to identified military objectives directly linked to the attempted attacks against Pakistan", Pakistani Information Minister Attaullah Tarar wrote on X. He condemned a "deliberate and unlawful incursion into Pakistan by drones" on Wednesday. "This constitutes a blatant violation of Pakistan's sovereignty and territorial integrity and is a grave and unacceptable act of aggression," he said.


Pakistan's new drone deal is with Trump-backed firm also selling to India

Al Jazeera

Pakistan's new drone deal is with Trump-backed firm also selling to India Share Pakistan's new drone deal is with Trump-backed firm also selling to India on social media On September 16, a delegation from Powerus, a year-old United States drone company backed by two sons of President Donald Trump, was received by Pakistan's military chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, at military headquarters in Rawalpindi. A day later, the company announced it had received a "limited procurement order" from Pakistan's Ministry of Defence for unmanned aerial systems. It also said it had signed a separate memorandum of understanding (MoU) with senior Pakistani defence officials. But for analysts studying Pakistan's venture in drone technology, even bigger concerns have arisen from information that has since emerged. Less than three months earlier, the same company had given an Indian defence manufacturer the exclusive right to make and sell its drone interceptor technology in India.


No fire alarms or sprinklers at Pakistan neonatal unit where fire killed 14, report finds

BBC News

An official inquiry into a Pakistan hospital fire that killed 14 babies last month has found the neonatal unit lacked fire alarms and sprinklers, while firefighters reported that escape routes were locked or obstructed. One firefighter, who asked to remain anonymous, told the BBC he had heard from other rescue workers that entering the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) hospital in Islamabad was extremely difficult. The doors were locked so they had to break through the windows to enter. Even after getting inside, the doors leading towards the ward were locked. PIMS has not provided a comment on the report and its findings.


The Other Side of Paradise: How Pakistan Crushed Protests in Kashmir

TIME - Tech

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Tutoring centre roof collapses killing 14 children in Pakistan

Al Jazeera

At least 14 children were killed when the roof of a private tutoring centre collapsed outside Lahore, Pakistan. Officials said the unregistered centre was operating inside a residential building with an unsafe roof. Why is MAGA in meltdown over the Supreme Court birthright ruling? Supreme Court's divided ruling on birthright citizenship may be revisited Iran says it couldn't export a'single barrel of oil' during US blockade Mexican fans keep Ecuador's team awake before World Cup showdown


SentinelKilnDB: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for OBB Brick Kiln Detection in South Asia Using Satellite Imagery

Neural Information Processing Systems

Air pollution was responsible for 2.6 million deaths across South Asia in 2021 alone, with brick manufacturing contributing significantly to this burden. In particular, the Indo-Gangetic Plain; a densely populated and highly polluted region spanning northern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and parts of Afghanistan sees brick kilns contributing 8-14% of ambient air pollution. Traditional monitoring approaches, such as field surveys and manual annotation using tools like Google Earth Pro, are time and labor-intensive. Prior ML-based efforts for automated detection have relied on costly high-resolution commercial imagery and non-public datasets, limiting reproducibility and scalability. In this work, we introduce SENTINELKILNDB, a publicly available, hand-validated benchmark of 62,671 brick kilns spanning threekiln types Fixed Chimney Bull's Trench Kiln (FCBK), Circular FCBK (CFCBK), and Zigzag kilns - annotated with oriented bounding boxes (OBBs) across 2.8 million km2 using free and globally accessible Sentinel-2 imagery. We benchmark state-of-the-art oriented object detection models and evaluate generalization across in-region, out-of-region, and super-resolution settings. SENTINELKILNDB enables rigorous evaluation of geospatial generalization and robustness for low-resolution object detection, and provides a new testbed for ML models addressing real-world environmental and remote sensing challenges at a continental scale. Datasets and code are available in SentinelKilnDB Dataset and SentinelKilnDB Bench-mark, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.


Trump's Team Wants Him to Accept an Iran Deal He's Already Rejected

WIRED

As chaotic negotiations over the end of the Iran war continue, US negotiators think they have the framework for a deal in place. Now they just have to sell the president on it. President Donald Trump's negotiators face the arduous task of trying to convince the president that a deal he previously rejected is their best option in Iran . Last month, Trump initially gave his blessing for a so-called "cash for uranium" deal, under which the US would release around $20 billion in frozen funds in exchange for Iran handing over its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, sources familiar with the matter tell WIRED. Trump's negotiators, vice president JD Vance, special envoy Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, received repeated approvals from the president while they were in Islamabad, giving them confidence a deal was close.