Karachi [Pakistan], August 11 (ANI): Karachi has witnessed a disturbing surge in road accidents, with at least 546 lives lost and 8,136 people injured in the first seven months of 2025, ARY News reported.
Heavy vehicles have played a significant role in these fatal accidents, claiming the lives of 165 people.
The fatalities include 425 men, 51 women, 51 boys, and 19 girls, highlighting the widespread impact of these accidents on families and communities. Trailers have been responsible for the highest number of fatalities, killing 62 people, while water tankers have claimed 37 lives, dumpers 32, and buses 20.
Authorities have urged stricter enforcement of traffic rules and improved road safety measures to curb the rising number of deadly accidents in the city, as per ARY News.
In a separate incident, at least seven dumpers were set ablaze by enraged residents following the deaths of a brother and sister duo in a high-speed, heavy traffic accident on Rashid Minhas Road in Karachi.
A speeding dumper ran over a motorcycle on Rashid Minhas Road in the Federal B Area, killing a 22-year-old woman, Mahnoor, and her 14-year-old brother, Ahmed Raza, while leaving their father critically injured.
Following the incident, angry residents set fire to seven dumpers in the area.
Heavy contingents of police and Rangers arrived at the scene and brought the situation under control. SSP Gulberg stated that the dump truck driver has been taken into custody.
Police have arrested 10 suspected individuals involved in the rioting and torching of dump trucks and shifted them to the police station, adding that further arrests will be made with the help of CCTV footage and video evidence.
Meanwhile, officials of the Dump Truck Association staged a sit-in protest on the Super Highway.
Association leader Liaqat Mehsud claimed that not seven but nine of their vehicles had been damaged, vowing not to leave the highway until the culprits are arrested. (ANI)
(This content is sourced from a syndicated feed and is published as received. The Tribune assumes no responsibility or liability for its accuracy, completeness, or content.)
One person has died in Turkey after a magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck the north-west province of Balikesir on Sunday evening.
An 81-year-old woman passed away shortly after she was pulled out from rubble in the town of Sindirgi, which was the epicentre of the quake, Turkey’s interior minister said.
Sixteen buildings collapsed as a result of the tremors, and 29 people had been injured, Ali Yerlikaya added.
Turkey’s disaster management agency said the quake was recorded at around 19:53 local time (16:53 GMT), and was felt as far away as Istanbul.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued a statement wishing a swift recovery to everyone who was affected, and said that all recovery efforts were being closely monitored.
“May God protect our country from any kind of disaster,” he wrote on X.
Search and rescue operations have now concluded, and the interior minister said that there were no other signs of serious damage or casualties.
Pictures from Sindirgi, however, show large buildings totally flattened and towering piles of twisted metal and debris.
Berkan Cetin/Anadolu via Getty Images
Sergen Sezgin/Anadolu via Getty Images
Turkey is located at the intersection of three major tectonic plates, and experiences frequent seismic activity as a result.
In February 2023, more than 50,000 people were killed when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake devastated the south-eastern region of the country.
A further 5,000 were killed in neighbouring Syria.
More than two years on from that quake, hundreds of thousands of people remain displaced.
Timothée Chalamet intensifies split speculations on Kylie Jenner’s birthday
Kylie Jenner marked her 28th birthday with a sun-soaked art therapy session and an IV drip retreat.
The Kylie Cosmetics founder shared an insider look at the daytime celebration, with Timothee Chalamet, 29, nowhere to be seen.
While it is likely that the French-American actor might have been caught up in filming the upcoming Dune: Part Three and Marty Supreme, he still made no public mention of her birthday on social media. Instead, he only shared a cryptic post about dreaming big.
The apparent snub has intensified split speculation, especially as the pair haven’t been seen together in over a month. Adding to the rumours, Jenner recently admitted she has been listening to breakup songs on repeat.
Neither Chalamet nor Jenner has publicly addressed the rumours.
The couple have been romantically linked since early 2023 and made several PDA-packed public appearances at awards shows earlier this year, including the Golden Globe Awards, the BAFTA Film Awards, and the Oscars, following their red carpet debut together at the 70th David di Donatello Awards in Rome.
Five Al Jazeera journalists were killed in a targeted Israeli airstrike in Gaza on Sunday, the network said, with the Israel Defense Forces claiming one was a Hamas leader posing as a journalist.
The network said that Anas al-Sharif; another journalist, Mohammed Qreiqeh; and camera operators Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal and Moamen Aliwa were killed.
The network reported that they died “in a targeted Israeli strike on a tent housing journalists in Gaza City.” The Al Jazeera Media Network said in a statement that the killings were a “targeted assassination.”
Al-Sharif and the other journalists were stationed opposite the Al-Shifa Hospital complex when they were killed, the statement said.
The Israel Defense Forces claimed that al-Sharif was “the head of a terrorist cell in the Hamas terrorist organization and was responsible for advancing rocket attacks against Israeli civilians and IDF troops.”
The IDF said in a statement about the killing that it had “previously disclosed intelligence information and many documents found in the Gaza Strip” that it said confirm that al-Sharif was a member of Hamas.
Al Jazeera reported Sunday that al-Sharif was a well-known Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent who reported extensively from northern Gaza.
Al-Sharif and Al Jazeera have previously denied accusations that he was a terrorist.
In October 2024, the IDF shared a photo on X of al-Sharif and five other Al Jazeera journalists it claimed were “Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists.” The Al Jazeera Media Network called the claims “baseless” and “fabricated accusations.”
“Al Jazeera fear these allegations may serve as a pretext for further violence against the journalists, mirroring the tragic fates of other media professionals targeted and killed by Israeli occupation forces,” the media network said at the time.
The Committee to Protect Journalists said that Israel has a longstanding practice of accusing journalists of being terrorists without providing credible evidence.
It called al-Sharif one of Al Jazeera’s best-known journalists, who has recently been reporting on starvation in Gaza to a lack of aid allowed in the territory.
“Israel’s pattern of labeling journalists as militants without providing credible evidence raises serious questions about its intent and respect for press freedom,” CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah said in a statement. “Journalists are civilians and must never be targeted. Those responsible for these killings must be held accountable.”
After an IDF spokesperson accused al-Sharif of being affiliated with Hamas’ military wing in July, al-Sharif told the CPJ that he was being retaliated against for news coverage that made Israel look bad.
“All of this is happening because my coverage of the crimes of the Israeli occupation in the Gaza Strip harms them and damages their image in the world. They accuse me of being a terrorist because the occupation wants to assassinate me morally,” al-Sharif told the CPJ then.
Al Jazeera, a network funded by Qatar’s government, said that 10 of its staff have been killed by Israel since Israel launched the war in Gaza in 2023.
Israel’s government has also accused the network of biased coverage of conflicts and violence involving itself and the Palestinian territories.
In May 2024, Israel’s government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu voted to shut down the channel’s local offices. Netanyahu at the time called it an incitement channel.
Al Jazeera has repeatedly denied the allegations of incitement made by Israel.
Israel launched the offensive in Gaza, targeting Hamas, after the Hamas-led terror attacks against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in which 251 people were taken hostage. Many of the targets of those attacks were civilians, including people attending a music festival.
Over 61,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the offensive began, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in the enclave.
Israel last week said that it will take control of Gaza City, an escalation of the war. The move was criticized, and Germany announced that it is suspending the export to Israel of military equipment that could be used in Gaza.
A security researcher said flaws in a carmaker’s online dealership portal exposed the private information and vehicle data of its customers, and could have allowed hackers to remotely break into any of its customers’ vehicles.
Eaton Zveare, who works as a security researcher at software delivery company Harness, told TechCrunch the flaw he discovered allowed the creation of an admin account that granted “unfettered access” to the unnamed carmaker’s centralized web portal.
With this access, a malicious hacker could have viewed the personal and financial data of the carmaker’s customers, track vehicles, and enroll customers in features that allow owners — or the hackers — control some of their car’s functions from anywhere.
Zveare said he doesn’t plan on naming the vendor, but said it was a widely known automaker with several popular sub-brands.
In an interview with TechCrunch ahead of his talk at the Def Con security conference in Las Vegas on Sunday, Zveare said the bugs put a spotlight on the security of these dealership systems, which grant their employees and associates broad access to customer and vehicle information.
Zveare, who has found bugs in carmakers’ customer systems and vehicle management systems before, found the flaw earlier this year as part of a weekend project, he told TechCrunch.
He said while the security flaws in the portal’s login system was a challenge to find, once he found it, the bugs let him bypass the login mechanism altogether by permitting him to create a new “national admin” account.
The flaws were problematic because the buggy code loaded in the user’s browser when opening the portal’s login page, allowing the user — in this case, Zveare — to modify the code to bypass the login security checks. Zveare told TechCrunch that the carmaker found no evidence of past exploitation, suggesting he was the first to find it and report it to the carmaker.
When logged in, the account granted access to more than 1,000 of the carmakers’ dealers across the United States, he told TechCrunch.
“No one even knows that you’re just silently looking at all of these dealers’ data, all their financials, all their private stuff, all their leads,” said Zveare, in describing the access.
Zveare said one of the things he found inside the dealership portal was a national consumer lookup tool that allowed logged-in portal users to look-up the vehicle and driver data of that carmaker.
In one real-world example, Zveare took a vehicle’s unique identification number from the windshield of a car in a public parking lot and used the number to identify the car’s owner. Zveare said the tool could be used to look-up someone using only a customer’s first and last name.
With access to the portal, Zveare said it was also possible to pair any vehicle with a mobile account, which allows customers to remotely control some of their car’s functions from an app, such as unlocking their cars.
Zveare said he tried this out in a real-world example using a friend’s account and with their consent. In transferring ownership to an account controlled by Zveare, he said the portal requires only an attestation — effectively a pinky promise — that the user performing the account transfer is legitimate.
“For my purposes, I just got a friend who consented to me taking over their car, and I ran with that,” Zveare told TechCrunch. “But [the portal] could basically do that to anyone just by knowing their name — which kind-of freaks me out a bit — or I could just look up a car in the parking lots.”
Zveare said he did not test whether he could drive away, but said the exploit could be abused by thieves to break into and steal items from vehicles, for example.
Another key problem with access to this carmaker’s portal was that it was possible to access other dealer’s systems linked to the same portal through single sign-on, a feature that allows users to login into multiple systems or applications with just one set of login credentials. Zveare said the carmaker’s systems for dealers are all interconnected so it’s easy to jump from one system to another.
With this, he said, the portal also had a feature that allowed admins, such as the user account he created, to “impersonate” other users, effectively allowing access to other dealer systems as if they were that user without needing their logins. Zveare said this was similar to a feature found in a Toyota dealer portal discovered in 2023.
“They’re just security nightmares waiting to happen,” said Zveare, speaking of the user-impersonation feature.
Once in the portal Zveare found personally identifiable customer data, some financial information, and telematics systems that allowed the real-time location tracking of rental or courtesy cars, as well as cars being shipped across the country, and the option to cancel them — though, Zveare didn’t try.
Zveare said the bugs took about a week to fix in February 2025 soon after his disclosure to the carmaker.
“The takeaway is that only two simple API vulnerabilities blasted the doors open, and it’s always related to authentication,” said Zveare. “If you’re going to get those wrong, then everything just falls down.”
Fiber may be best known for digestive health, but it’s also key for a healthy heart.
This underconsumed nutrient may help lower cholesterol, blood pressure and blood sugar.
Fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, nuts and seeds are top fiber sources.
When it comes to heart health, most of us are focused on what we shouldn’t eat. However, keeping your heart healthy isn’t just about avoiding saturated fat and sodium. There are certain nutrients that are instrumental for better heart health. The most important, yet underrated, one may be fiber. “Dietary fiber acts in multiple ways on cardiovascular health,” says cardiologist Adedapo Iluyomade, M.D. “It blunts post‑meal glucose and insulin surges, helps create a gut microbiome environment that generates short‑chain fatty acids with anti‑inflammatory effects, and consistently tracks with lower rates of coronary events and cardiovascular mortality.”
Yet, almost all of us aren’t getting enough of this heart-supporting nutrient. “That gap is one of the quiet drivers of our country’s heart‑disease burden,” says Iluyomade. Read on to learn why fiber is critical for a healthy heart, plus quick, tasty ways to work more of it into your favorite meals and snacks.
How Fiber Can Improve Heart Health
Aids in Lowering Cholesterol
Fiber may be best known for its digestive health benefits. But there’s one kind of fiber that’s been proven to lower cholesterol, namely soluble fiber. How does it work? “Soluble, gel-forming fibers bind bile acids in the small intestine,” says Iluyomade. “Your liver then pulls LDL cholesterol out of circulation to make new bile, reducing LDL.” Soluble fiber is so powerful, in fact, that it’s our No. 1 nutrient to lower cholesterol.
The strongest evidence is for viscous soluble fiber from oats, barley and psyllium husk. However, you can also find soluble fiber in apples, pears, broccoli, sweet potatoes, beans and lentils.
Helps Manage Blood Sugar
High blood sugar can spell trouble for multiple aspects of your health, including your heart. Enter fiber. Fiber helps maintain healthy blood sugar levels after meals because it slows nutrient absorption in the digestive tract. Iluyomade likens it to “a traffic cop for carbs” because it regulates how quickly sugar from food moves into the bloodstream. “Over time, those steadier numbers translate into slightly lower average blood sugar and better insulin response,” he says.
Research has found that soluble fiber is particularly beneficial for blood sugar management. In addition to slowing carbohydrate digestion, it is also believed to work by positively influencing good gut bacteria that help regulate insulin and blood sugar levels. Fiber-rich foods additionally contribute to feelings of fullness and satisfaction. This, in turn, may be beneficial for weight management, which can impact long-term blood sugar control.
May Lower Blood Pressure
A lesser-known benefit of fiber is its ability to lower blood pressure. “Packing more fiber into meals—think oatmeal, berries, beans and crunchy veggies—tends to reduce blood pressure by a few points,” says Iluyomade. The link is so strong that one systematic review and meta-analysis of 83 studies found that consuming just an extra 5 grams of soluble fiber per day significantly lowered blood pressure. And the more soluble fiber a person ate, the more blood pressure-lowering benefits they experienced. While the cause is still being studied, Iluyomade says that the extra bulk of fiber-rich foods nudges people toward lower-sodium, lower-calorie foods while also feeding good gut bacteria that make compounds that relax blood vessels.
Strategies to Eat More Fiber
If you’d like to add more heart-friendly fiber to your meals and snacks, these simple strategies can help.
Experiment with Oats: Oats are loaded with a powerful soluble fiber called beta-glucan. While a bowl of oatmeal is a great way to get your day off to a heart-healthy start, there are loads of other tasty ways to put these heart-supporting whole grains to work. Try adding oats to smoothies, bake them into snack bars or granola bars, or fold them into crab cakes or meatloaf. For even more beta-glucan, try adding barley to soups and stews. Like oats, it’s packed with this cholesterol-lowering fiber.
Swap in Some Plant Protein: Plant proteins like beans, tempeh and tofu are easy ways to score heart-healthy plant protein and fiber in one shot. For instance, 1 cup of tofu provides 44 grams of protein, which is comparable to the amount in 1 cup of diced, cooked chicken breast. However, the tofu gives you 6 grams of fiber, while the chicken (like all animal proteins) has zero fiber.,
Try New Fruits and Vegetables: Fruits and veggies are filled with fiber, yet most of us don’t eat enough of them. One way to make this happen is by trying new types of produce. The variety can help with meal satisfaction by introducing new flavors and textures. Mixing up your fruit and vegetable varieties can also provide a new favorite to add to your regular rotation.
Add Produce to Mixed Dishes: You don’t need to eat fruits and vegetables alone or as a side dish to reap their fiber. Mixed dishes like pasta with marinara sauce or spring vegetables, veggie casseroles or a veggie-topped pizza are all great vehicles for squeezing in more fiber-rich fruits and vegetables.
Think Nuts and Seeds: Nuts and seeds are a surprising source of fiber. An ounce of almonds, pistachios or sunflower seeds provides roughly 3 grams of fiber. That’s more than 10% of the 28-gram Daily Value for fiber., , To work more of these gems into your day, add nuts or seeds to cereal, salads, yogurt, pasta and grain dishes. Or, for a quick fiber-filled snack, whip up a satisfying batch of energy bites.
Heart-Healthy Recipes to Try
Our Expert Take
Fiber is a key nutrient for heart health, yet few of us eat enough of it. In addition to lowering cholesterol and blood pressure, a fiber-rich diet also keeps your heart healthy by regulating blood sugar. While all fiber is good for you, the best evidence for heart health is for soluble fiber. Easy ways to increase your fiber intake include eating more oats and barley, swapping in plant proteins for some of the animal protein in your diet, adding vegetables to mixed dishes, and sprinkling nuts and seeds over your cereal, yogurt or salad. Because, in the end, it’s the small consistent changes that are the most powerful.
Despite coming out over a decade ago, Batman: Arkham Knight still looks better than a lot of the AAA games that released over the last year. It was so visually stunning, it’s little wonder that the PC version of the game suffered from so many brutal performance issues when the settings were cranked up, even on the beefiest PCs.
Happily, Rocksteady continued to patch the game consistently afterwards, slowly turning Arkham Knight into one of the truly standout games of the generation. There’s always room for improvement though, and one of the few areas where the game can look a little jarring on returning is in its textures. These have aged more quickly than the rest of the game, but thankfully there’s a new mod that should put any concerns in that area firmly to bed.
As first reported by DSOGaming, modder GPUnity has released an HD Texture Pack for Batman: Arkham Knight that, as the name would suggest, updates all of the game’s existing surface textures. GPUnity was one of three modders that worked on the project alongside Neato and Mr. Binks, with each working on a different area of the game’s textures.
When hopping on to play, you’ll notice the Batmobile has a fresh coat of paint while the game’s other textures have been upscaled. Batman’s legendary cape even has some extra details for the truly eagle-eyed among you.
This latest effort for Arkham Knight comes after GPUnity also did similar work for the previous games in the series. For Arkham Asylum there was the 4K Texture Pack, alongside Batman: Arkham City Redux for the sequel. He also released another graphics mod for Arkham Origins related to that game’s shadows, FOV and snow deformation.
The best way to get your hands on it is via mod distributor Nexus Mods, where it can be found in the Arkham Knight section.
In a career that spanned close to 40 years, the late satirist and comedian John Clarke played thousands of people. In his native New Zealand he was Fred Dagg, sheep farmer and gumboot philosopher. In Australia he was best known as one half of Clarke and Dawe – the voice of an endless parade of risible politicians, shonky businessmen and overconfident idiots.
His magic trick was to play them all as himself. His eldest daughter, Lorin Clarke, explains it in her father’s own words. “He used to say to me, ‘If you ask some actors to play Hamlet, they will become a Danish prince, and they will research Danish princes. If you ask me to play Hamlet, Hamlet comes from Palmerston North.’”
In Lorin’s new documentary about her father, But Also John Clarke, his old friend and fellow New Zealander Sam Neill puts it this way: “John was a polymath. He could write, he could perform, he could knock up a poem for you, but there was always that John Clarke thing in the middle of it.”
Clarke died suddenly in 2017 aged 68, after suffering a heart attack on a bushwalk in the Grampians, Victoria. He had been birdwatching, a beloved pastime. The then Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said Clarke’s satire – of which he was a frequent target – “served a noble purpose. It spoke truth to power. It made our democracy richer and stronger.”
Not all who felt the blade of Clarke’s wit were so generous. In the film the British comedian Ben Elton tells Lorin that “sometimes, when John skewered a target, they didn’t even know they were dead until the following day”. In the late 70s Clarke was all but run out of New Zealand, where Dagg had become a cultural phenomenon, and annoying gadfly.
Originally, the film’s title was Not Only Fred Dagg But Also John Clarke. At the last minute, it was shortened, with a compromise: in New Zealand, it screens as Not Only Fred Dagg (after Clarke’s death, Dagg’s uniform of bucket hat, shearer’s singlet, shorts and gumboots went on display at Te Papa Museum in Wellington).
The shortening of the title annoyed Lorin. “Don’t write that eye-roll into your piece!” she says laughing, immediately after rolling her eyes on our Zoom call. “I love the title, I think it’s funny and playful, and it’s a slight nod to Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s Not Only … But Also. But, you know, shorter titles work better in things like listings and so on.”
The majority of the film is given over to the stultifying forces that created Dagg. In this guise Clarke was, in the actor and director Oscar Kightley’s words, “the godfather of New Zealand comedy” – the dustbowl-dry, ultra-deadpan wit that runs through the films of Taika Waititi and the work of Flight of the Conchords.
Rhys Darby, who played the Conchords’ hapless band manager, Murray, describes Dagg’s character as “a kick in the head with a gumboot we all kind of needed”. At the time of Dagg’s first appearance on NZBC in the early 70s (then New Zealand’s only television broadcaster, now known as TVNZ 1), broadcasters still spoke in perfectly rounded British accents.
Dagg punctured such pretensions. His was a comedy of the familiar: for the first time, a New Zealander was holding up a mirror to the country. Clarke picked a national archetype – a sheep farmer – and turned him into a fool with seven sons, all named Trevor, but also a relatable, laconic everyman. A newspaper headline described him as the thinking man’s Paul Hogan.
In a small country, Dagg’s success was overwhelming. Fred Dagg’s Greatest Hits, a novelty album made in four hours, is claimed to have been the biggest-selling debut by a New Zealand artist until it was topped by Lorde’s Pure Heroine. But Dagg also made enemies – as Neill notes, New Zealanders lop tall poppies even quicker than Australians.
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Lorin Clarke interviews Australian comedian Shaun Micallef
Clarke moved to Australia in 1977. By then a new father, he laid low – waiting, watching and listening. He was learning a new vernacular. The Dagg character was becoming a prison: “To him [moving to Australia] felt like a chance for reinvention,” Lorin says. For a few years Clarke avoided performing, concentrating on writing.
He re-emerged on The Gillies Report, calling the fictitious sport of Farnarkeling, perhaps the most extreme showcase for Clarke’s love of language: the game was “engaged in by two teams whose purpose is to arkle, and to prevent the other team from arkeling, using a flukem to propel a gonad through sets of posts situated at random around the periphery of a grommet”.
Sports-mad Melbourne, especially, went into a frenzy. Letters poured in to the Age. Somewhere, Roy and HG were taking notes. Wendy Harmer, who starred alongside Clarke on The Gillies Report, tells Lorin that by the early 80s, “he had us nailed”; by 1987 Clarke and (Bryan) Dawe made their debut on ABC Radio.
It’s easiest to see Clarke’s influence, perhaps, on Working Dog productions: just as Dagg was a playful reflection of the New Zealand national character, The Castle poked gentle fun at Australia’s small suburban aspirations and law of the vibe. The TV series Utopia owes an obvious debt to the Olympic piss-take The Games, co-written with Ross Stevenson.
The debut of The Games was one occasion when Clarke expressed his frustration with his masters at the ABC. Today such a program would be given less time to find its feet. Clarke – who always regarded his audience as far smarter than his bosses – wanted to give viewers space to pick up what he called the grammar of the show so they could become fluent in it.
Ultimately, they came to love and trust Clarke because, no matter who he was playing, he somehow remained himself. Jana Wendt, who hosted Clarke and Dawe on A Current Affair from 1989 to 1996, notes that it was all in Clarke’s eyes – that inimitable, mischievous look to camera that invited the audience in on the joke.
“There was something watchful about him, even when he was pretending to be somebody else,” Lorin says. “There was a layer of awareness there, and he had really protective relationship with his audience. I wanted to honour that.”
