Man who moved family to Pakistan kills daughter over TikTok content
A man who had recently brought his family back to Pakistan from the United States has confessed to shooting dead his teenage daughter, motivated by his disapproval of her TikTok content, police said.
The shooting happened on a street in the southwestern city of Quetta on Tuesday. The suspect, Anwar ul-Haq, initially said that unidentified gunmen shot and killed his American-born, 15-year-old daughter before he confessed to the crime, police official Babar Baloch said.
“Our investigation so far has found that the family had an objection to her dressing, lifestyle, and social gathering,” another police investigator, Zohaib Mohsin, said. “We have her phone. It is locked,” he told Reuters. “We are probing all aspects, including honour killing.”
The family had recently returned to Balochistan province in predominantly Muslim Pakistan, a nation with conservative social norms, having lived in the United States for about 25 years, Baloch said.
The southwestern city of Quetta:
The suspect has U.S. citizenship, the officer said. He said Haq had told him his daughter began creating “objectionable” content on the social media platform TikTok when she lived in the United States.
He told police that she continued to share videos on the platform after returning to Pakistan. Baloch said the main suspect’s brother-in-law had also been arrested in connection with the killing.
Police said they had charged Haq with the murder. They did not offer proof of Haq’s U.S. citizenship except for the suspect’s own testimony and declined to say whether the U.S. embassy had been informed of the incident.
His family declined to respond to a Reuters’ request for comment.
More than 54 million people use TikTok in Pakistan, a nation of 241 million. The government has blocked the video-sharing app several times in recent years over content moderation.
This week hundreds of Pakistani journalists rallied against a proposed law to regulate social media content that they say is aimed at curbing press freedom and controlling the digital landscape.
The law would establish a regulatory authority that would have its own investigation agency and tribunals. Those found to have disseminated false or fake information face prison sentences of up to three years and fines of 2 million rupees ($7,200)
Digital media in Pakistan has already been muffled with measures by telecom authorities to slow down internet speeds, and social media platform X has been blocked for more than a year.
TikTok, which has about 170 million U.S users, was briefly taken offline in America just before a law requiring its Chinese owner ByteDance to either sell it on national security grounds or face a ban took effect on January 19.
Islamabad often takes issue with what it terms “obscene content” with the social media platform, which has lately started complying with requests from Pakistan to remove certain content.
Over 1,000 women are killed each year in Pakistan at the hands of community or family members over perceived damage to “honour”, according to independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.
That could involve eloping, posting social media content, fraternising with men, or any other infraction against conservative values relating to women.
Australian teacher captured by Russian forces in Ukraine is alive
An Australian man who was feared dead after being captured by Russian forces is alive, foreign minister Penny Wong has announced.
Oscar Jenkins, 32, a teacher who signed up to fight for Ukraine against Russia, was taken captive in December last year. A video showed him being struck by a Russian interrogator, sparking fears for his life.
“The Australian government has received confirmation from Russia that Oscar Jenkins is alive and in custody,” Ms Wong said on Wednesday.
Australia still has “serious concerns for Mr Jenkins as a prisoner of war”, she said.
“We have made clear to Russia in Canberra and in Moscow that Mr Jenkins is a prisoner of war and Russia is obligated to treat him in accordance with international humanitarian law, including humane treatment.”
Canberra has called on Russia to release Mr Jenkins.
“If Russia does not provide Mr Jenkins the protections he is entitled to under international humanitarian law, our response will be unequivocal,” Ms Wong said.
Russia has previously warned that foreign fighters in Ukraine will not be afforded the rights given to lawful combatants according to international humanitarian law.
“I wish to make an official statement that none of the mercenaries the West is sending to Ukraine to fight for the nationalist regime in Kyiv can be considered as combatants in accordance with international humanitarian law or enjoy the status of prisoners of war,” a defence ministry spokesperson was quoted as saying by TASS after Russian forces invaded Ukraine in 2022.
“At best, they can expect to be prosecuted as criminals. We are urging all foreign citizens who may have plans to go and fight for Kyiv’s nationalist regime to think a dozen times before getting on the way.”
Ms Wong thanked Ukrainian foreign minister Andrii Sybiha and the International Committee of the Red Cross president for their “ongoing advocacy for Mr Jenkins”.
The Russian ambassador said Mr Jenkins was in the custody of the armed forces, The Guardian reported. His health condition is said to be “normal”.
Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is providing consular support to Mr Jenkins’ family.
Another foreign fighter who trained with Mr Jenkins said earlier this month that he believed the Russian forces had executed the Australian prisoner to make an example of him, The Sydney Morning Herald reported on 14 January.
Soon after, prime minister Anthony Albanese said that his government was “gravely concerned” about the capture of Mr Jenkins and warned of the “strongest action possible” if reports of his death were correct.
On 14 January, Australia summoned Russian ambassador Alexey Pavlovsky to answer questions about Mr Jenkins’s status. “The Russian Federation is obligated to treat all prisoners of war in accordance with international humanitarian law,” a spokesperson said in a statement at the time.
DeepSeek goes quiet for lunar new year despite worldwide buzz
DeepSeek, the Chinese startup that shook the world of technology this week with its groundbreaking artificial intelligence models, has taken a break for the lunar new year holiday.
The firm rocked the industry and global stock markets – wiping off around a trillion dollars in value from US stocks on Monday – by releasing cost-effective and open-source AI models rivalling the most advanced models of American tech giants OpenAI, Google and Meta.
And while the Silicon Valley, the Wall Street and the American political establishment, including new president Donald Trump, were still discussing the implications of DeepSeek’s breakthrough, the company’s headquarters in Hangzhou went quiet for the weeklong lunar new year holiday.
The last update to DeepSeek was issued late on Monday, and local media reports said the start-up’s offices were deserted for the holidays from Tuesday morning.
The lunar new year is based on a 12-year cycle, each linked to an animal in the Chinese zodiac paired with one of the five elements of metal, wood, water, fire, and earth. The festivities began on Wednesday, marking the year of the wood snake.
There was still buzz around the company, however, with security turning away uninvited guests at its headquarters, Tech in Asia reported.
The company claimed earlier this week that its advanced AI model, named R1, was trained at a fraction of the cost of its western rivals such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which employed a larger volume of expensive Nvidia chips to train.
DeepSeek said its AI model cost less than $6 million in computing power to train with older Nvidia H800 chips, in sharp contrast to the billions poured into creating similar systems by US companies like OpenAI, Meta and Google. The startup was forced to rely on older chips because the US had banned the export of advanced Nvidia systems to China in a bid to curtail its progress in AI.
DeepSeek’s success against such steep odds quickly led to sharp changes in the fortunes of major American AI companies. Shares of Nvidia plunged 17 per cent on Tuesday, marking the biggest single-day loss in market value of a company in history of over $500bn (£402bn).
Mr Trump warned the Chinese startup’s success was a “wake-up call” for the US tech industry.
“DeepSeek’s release of a premium level AI tool, available freely, with a reported miniscule development cost has shaken faith in Silicon Valley and American dominance in the rapidly developing AI market,” Richard Whittle, an economist at the University of Salford, said.
In spite of their remarkable achievement, the DeepSeek team keep a low profile. The startup’s controlling shareholder is Liang Wenfeng, who also co-founded a quantitative hedge fund called High-Flyer. It is unclear how much stake the hedge fund has in DeepSeek.
Government records indicate that High-Flyer owns patents for the chips used to train AI models.
Not much is publicly known about the other employees of Deepseek, whose official name, according to government records, is Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Fundamental Technology Research Co Ltd.
A study posted by the company on its AI model in the arXiv database credits nearly 70 employees.