Four armed robbers hijacked a Qingqi rickshaw carrying three sacrificial sheep at gunpoint in Karachi’s Ayesha Manzil area, police said on Friday.
According to a first information report (FIR), the complainant Mohammed Rashid Saleem said that he had purchased three sheep and was carrying them in his Qingqi rickshaw on Thursday when the incident occurred.
“Four suspects riding on two motorcycles snatched the rickshaw along with the animals at gunpoint and fled,” the FIR read, adding that the suspects also snatched cash and a cell phone from the victim.
According to a statement from the Karachi Police spokesperson, the Additional Inspector General of Police (AIG) Javed Alam Odho took notice of the incident and ordered action against the Azizabad station house officer for negligence, issuing orders to suspend his service for one year.
The AIG ordered that the suspects involved in the incident must be arrested within three days, with the recovery of the animals and rickshaw, otherwise, strict legal action will be taken, the statement added.
Days before Eidul Azha, people rush to cattle markets to buy sacrificial animals, with sheep usually costing upwards of Rs30,000.
In 2023, five animals worth Rs800,000 were stolen from a locked shop in Karachi’s Orangi Town, according to ARY News. The incident pointed to the growing security concerns around cattle markets, later raised in the Sindh Assembly.
United States President Donald Trump’s administration on Thursday revoked Harvard’s right to enrol foreign students — more than a quarter of its annual enrollment — in a major escalation of the president’s fight with one of the world’s most storied universities.
Trump is furious at Harvard, which has produced 162 Nobel prize winners, for rejecting his demand that it submit to oversight on admissions and hiring over his claims that it is a hotbed of anti-Semitism and “woke” liberal ideology.
“Effective immediately, Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor (Sevis) Programme certification is revoked,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrote in a letter to the Ivy League institution, referring to the main system by which foreign students are permitted to study in the United States.
Last month, Trump threatened to stop Harvard from enrolling foreign students if it did not agree to government demands that would put the private institution under outside political supervision.
“As I explained to you in my April letter, it is a privilege to enrol foreign students,” Noem wrote.
“All universities must comply with Department of Homeland Security requirements, including reporting requirements under the Student and Exchange Visitor Programme regulations, to maintain this privilege,” she said.
“As a result of your refusal to comply with multiple requests to provide the Department of Homeland Security pertinent information while perpetuating an unsafe campus environment that is hostile to Jewish students, promotes pro-Hamas sympathies, and employs racist ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ policies, you have lost this privilege.”
More than 27 per cent of Harvard’s enrollment was made up of foreign students in the 2024-25 academic year, according to university data.
Harvard did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A child lost his life, while 11 others were injured in different areas of Khyber Pakhtunkwa after trees and signboards fell due to strong winds and storms, officials said.
Speaking to Dawn.com, Rescue 1122 spokesperson Bilal Ahmad Faizi said, “A storm hit several KP areas, including Charsadda, Nowshera, Peshawar and Mardan on Sunday evening.”
The storm also hit parts of the capital Islamabad.
Faizi said a 10-year-old boy, Mohammad Hamad, died when a wall of a house collapsed in the Najib Abad area of Charsadda, adding that the injured were moved to the respective areas’ hospitals.
Due to the storm, the electricity supply was suspended in many areas of the city, due to which citizens had to face severe difficulties, he said.
He said that the Disaster Response Team of Rescue 1122 was immediately dispatched to the affected areas and work was underway to remove fallen trees from the roads.
At least three people were killed in Rawalpindi and Gujar Khan last month after an intense hailstorm, accompanied by heavy rain and gusty winds, battered the region.
Heavy hailstorms struck Islamabad and parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, causing widespread damage to vehicles, windscreens, and solar panels, while also triggering flash floods following intense rainfall.
The man who stabbed and partially blinded novelist Salman Rushdie onstage at a Western New York arts institute in 2022 was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Friday for an attack that also wounded a second man, the district attorney said.
Rushdie, 77, has faced death threats since the 1988 publication of his novel The Satanic Verses, which Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, denounced as blasphemous, leading to a call for Rushdie’s death.
Hadi Matar, 27, a US citizen from Fairview, New Jersey, was found guilty of attacking the author in the Chautauqua County Court in Mayville, New York, in February. He faced a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison on the attempted murder charge.
Video that captured the assault shows Matar rushing the Chautauqua Institution’s stage as Rushdie was being introduced to the audience for a talk about keeping writers safe from harm. Some of the video was shown to the jury during the seven days of testimony.
“He’s traumatised. He has nightmares about what he experienced,” Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt said after the sentencing hearing, referring to what Rushdie suffered.
“Obviously, this is a major setback for an individual that was starting to emerge in his very later years of life into society after going into hiding after the fatwa.”
Also hurt in the attack was Henry Reese, co-founder of Pittsburgh’s City of Asylum, a nonprofit that helps exiled writers. He was conducting the talk with Rushdie that morning.
Schmidt said Matar was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the second-degree attempted murder charge stemming from the attack against Rushdie and seven years for a second-degree assault charge for the stabbing of Reese. The sentences will run concurrently.
Rushdie, an atheist born into a Muslim Kashmiri family in India, was stabbed with a knife multiple times in the head, neck, torso and left hand. The attack blinded his right eye and damaged his liver and intestines, requiring emergency surgery and months of recovery.
Matar did not testify at his trial. His defence lawyers told jurors that the prosecutors had failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt the necessary criminal intent to kill needed for a conviction of attempted murder, and argued that he should have been charged with assault. Matar’s attorney Nathaniel Barone said his client will file an appeal.
“I know if he had the opportunity, he would not be sitting where he’s sitting today. And if he could change things, he would,” Barone said.
Matar also faces federal charges brought by prosecutors in the US attorney’s office in Western New York, accusing him of attempting to murder Rushdie as an act of terrorism.
Prosecutors accuse him of providing material support to Lebanon’s Hezbollah group, which the US has designated as a terrorist organisation.
Matar is due to face those charges at a separate trial in Buffalo.
France’s justice minister has ordered a probe into why investigators did not follow up two rape cases despite finding links to Dominique Pelicot, convicted in December for organising the rape of his then-wife Gisele by dozens of strangers.
Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin on Wednesday ordered the internal investigation to determine whether there had been any judicial “failures”, according to a letter of assignment seen by AFP on Friday.
Results are expected by the end of July.
Dominique Pelicot, 72, was sentenced to 20 years in jail for raping and organising for dozens of men to rape his then wife Gisele Pelicot from 2011 to 2020 while she was drugged.
The case, which shocked the world and turned his ex-wife into a feminist hero, was uncovered after police caught him filming up women’s skirts at a supermarket in 2020.
During the months-long trial, it emerged that Dominique Pelicot had also been arrested a decade earlier in a shopping centre for the same offence and that police had taken a sample of his DNA.
Investigators identified a “link to an unknown sample collected in a previous probe opened after an attempted rape” in 1999, as well as a connection to a second case of rape and murder dating back to 1991, the letter said.
Despite this, they do not appear to have further pursued these leads in 2010. Dominique Pelicot was only charged in both cases in January.
He has admitted to the 1999 attempted rape, but denied involvement in the 1991 rape and murder case.
Similarities in the two cases include both the victims having been young real estate agents aged 23, who were visited by a man under a false name to view an apartment.
In a separate case, Dominique Pelicot’s daughter, Caroline Darian, in March filed a legal complaint accusing her father of also drugging and sexually abusing her.
