Latest news with #Ullah
The Star
3 days ago
- Business
- The Star
Streamlined alert systems could improve disaster and emergency response
BlackBerry's AtHoc platform sends notifications to relevant personnel in the field via email, SMS, or mobile app, doing away with having to individually contact key stakeholders or manually identify who is closest and available to respond to incidents like widespread fires or sudden floods. — BlackBerry Picture this: a natural disaster or major emergency strikes, and emergency services – police, fire, medical, and so on – need to be mobilised at the drop of a hat. In times like these, every second counts. Wading through call trees to find the right person in charge, who then has to repeat the process down the chain before the message is finally filtered to first responders on the ground, who then need to race to the scene to make up for lost time. According to Chris Ullah, BlackBerry's emergency services global business development lead, this has been a major bugbear when it comes to getting rapid mobilisation whenever there's a major incident. Ullah, a former police superintendent with Greater Manchester police in the UK, draws from his experience in the field, saying that it comes down to getting the right information to the right people as quickly as possible. "In all my service, whenever I've been involved in a major or critical incident, in debriefs and reviews afterwards, communication has always been at the top as being criticised or being a challenge," he says, adding that the police then considered a better solution than just picking up the phone and manually calling personnel one by one. This is where a solution like BlackBerry's AtHoc enters the picture, which serves as a secure critical event management platform to share information during major incidents, which Ullah says can cut down response times from over an hour down to just two minutes. Such a platform, which sends notifications to relevant personnel in the field via email, SMS, or mobile app, would do away with having to individually contact key stakeholders or manually identify who is closest and available to respond to incidents like widespread fires or sudden floods. "The old way of doing it would actually be: start picking up the phone, going down a phone tree, ringing people up one after the other. "Now, you can just send out an alert to all officers, maybe of a particular skill set or by location, asking 'are you able to return back to duty?', with a yes or no as a response," he says. For instance, an alert for 50 officers with a specific skill set might be sent out, and the first 50 who respond as available can be designated to report in. Once that quota is filled, the system will automatically send a cancellation notice to everyone else. BlackBerry's AtHoc solution has already seen widespread use in the UK for crisis communication, with over 2,000 organisations having deployed it. It has also seen use during major international forums with world leaders in attendance, such as the Group of Seven (G7) summit. It also includes geofencing, which is the ability to designate an area of interest on a map. This could be used to indicate a disaster has occurred at a particular location, which would then send a notification to the device belonging to law enforcement, emergency services, or rescue personnel near the geofenced area. A system like this also would not be limited to emergency response, but also act as support for day-to-day operations, such as managing which officers are on duty in specific areas. Officers can also receive notifications when entering burglary-prone neighbourhoods, geofenced zones for welfare checks on domestic abuse victims with protection orders, or areas where individuals under court-imposed curfews are being monitored.
Scroll.in
21-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
How Bengali Harlem's lost history challenges America's immigration certainties
As immigration enforcement intensifies across the United States, Alaudin Ullah finds himself immersed in a history most Americans have never heard about. The New York-based comedian-turned-actor and playwright has spent over 25 years documenting the forgotten story of his father and thousands of other Bengali Muslim seamen who jumped ship at American ports in the late 19th and early 20th century. Facing exclusion laws similar to today's deportation drives under President Donald Trump, these sailors embedded themselves in New York's Black and Latino communities in Harlem, opened some of America's first South Asian restaurants and rubbed shoulders with participants in radical political movements that would reshape the US. What Ullah discovered challenged everything he thought he knew and formed a new conception of South Asian immigration to the United States: it placed Bengali Muslims from present-day Bangladesh and India's West Bengal as the central protagonists in the narrative. An unknown chapter Ullah knew none of this history when he was growing up in an East Harlem housing project in the 1980s. Like many rebellious second-generation immigrants, he spent years rejecting his Bengali identity and distancing himself from the world of his father Habib Ullah. But in 1998, a decade after his father's death, Ullah began sharing fragmented stories of his father's arrival in New York with the academic and filmmaker Vivek Bald. Bald, whose own family had arrived after the 1965 Immigration Act opened doors for educated South Asian professionals to move to the United States, realised they were uncovering an older and unknown chapter of South Asian immigration. If Habib had arrived in the 1920s, he would have entered America when immigration from most of Asia was banned in the country and when the United States Supreme Court ruled that Asians were 'not free, not white'. Yet thousands of men like Habib found ways around the ban. When his ship docked in Boston, Habib stayed behind and eventually made his way to New York, where he found a job as a dishwasher in upscale hotels like The Commodore (a former name for the Hyatt Grand Central). 'He worked in the kitchens of these hotels alongside Black and Puerto Rican workers,' explained Alaudin Ullah. Habib Ullah's story and the history of other Bengali Muslim men like him is the focus of the documentary In Search of Bengali Harlem, completed in 2022 by Vivek Bald which features Ullah as the narrator. Play Habib Ullah married a woman named Victoria Echevarria, an immigrant from Puerto Rico. After Victoria's untimely death, Habib raised their son, Habib Jr, but sent their daughter to live with her mother's relatives and friends. In the 1960s, Habib returned to his village, Noakhali in present-day Bangladesh, for the first time in 40 years. It was no longer under British colonial rule. Partition had made Noakhali a part of East Pakistan. Habib married a young Bengali woman named Mohima. The two moved to Harlem and had two sons. The younger of the two, Alaudin Ullah was in his early teens when his father died. 'I had known little of him and blamed him for abandoning my half-sister,' said Ullah. 'And I didn't get a lot of answers about our past from my mother.' Mohima was isolated in the public housing complex they lived in, and struggled to raise her sons, said Ullah. Unlike neighbourhoods like Jackson Heights in New York today, where it is possible to live surrounded by people from your home country, Mohima was living in ethnically diverse Harlem where her family was among the only Bengalis in a Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood. In the early 20th century, Harlem became a hub for African American communities arriving from the American South, as well as immigrants from the Black, Hispanic and Asian diasporas. Bengali seafarers such Habib Ullah moved from the Lower East Side, where they initially worked, to Harlem, where undocumented immigrants like him could blend in and stay undetected by authorities. By the 1950s and '60s, many of those families had moved to other parts of New York or even farther away. The stories of these vibrant communities have faded in New York today. Perhaps, that process was accelerated by a 1965 change in US immigration law that drove a new wave of South Asians, particularly highly educated people, to the United States. These immigrations were often perceived as 'model minorities' who overshadowed undocumented working-class immigrants from the subcontinent. Stories like Habib Ullah's were largely unheard of when Bald and Ullah began their research. They dug up newspaper clippings, ship records and cross-checked marriage certificates to discover waves of Bengali immigration going back to the 1880s. By the 1940s, Habib Ullah and Victoria Echevarria ran the Bengal Garden restaurant in Midtown Manhattan, a precursor to the South Asian restaurants that would later dominate New York's Sixth Street. One thread running through the documentary is Ullah's search for a dimly remembered family photograph. It was said to show Ibrahim Choudry, a Bengali immigrant, standing with Malcolm X, the African-American leader who was prominent in the civil rights movement, surrounded by African American and South Asian Muslims. The photograph has acquired near-mythical status – a missing link that could cement the presence of Bengali migrants firmly in Black American history. Ullah is still hoping to find that photograph one day. 'What we do know is that Malcolm X and other contemporaries like Felipe Luciano from the Young Lords [a radical 1960s group led by Puerto Rican youth] would often eat at South Asian restaurants run by my father and his contemporaries,' said Ullah. These Bengali-owned establishments served some of the only halal food available in the city, drawing African American converts to Islam. Choudry and his contemporaries, including Ullah's father Habib Ullah, maintained an interest in subcontinental nationalism, forming social-cum-political clubs such as the Pakistan League of America. The League's membership – predominantly former seamen, along with their African American and Puerto Rican wives and children – embodied a very different model of community building from the other South Asian immigrant organisations that were to follow. In recent decades, New York's South Asian community has been transformed by newer waves of immigration settling in several parts of the city. It is easier for married couples to immigrate together, reducing the need to find partners in the US. 'Today's South Asian community has the luxury of numbers that my father's generation didn't have,' Ullah noted. 'But with that has come a kind of insularity. I think we've lost something important about what it means to be part of broader justice movements.'
Arab Times
31-05-2025
- Politics
- Arab Times
One dead after insurgents briefly seize control of city in southwest Pakistan and loot a bank
QUETTA, Pakistan, May 31, (AP): Dozens of armed separatists briefly seized control of a high-security area in a city in southwestern Pakistan on Friday, killing a government official and looting a bank before fleeing, police and officials said. Hidayat Buledi, a local government official, was killed and his home was set on fire in the attack on Sorab, in the Balochistan region, local police chief Hafeez Ullah said. He said Buledi was "martyred' while trying to protect women and children trapped inside the burning house during the assault. Ullah said several insurgents were killed in the shootout with police. The outlawed Baloch Liberation Army, or BLA, which was designated a terror group by the United States in 2019, claimed responsibility for the attack. In a statement, BLA said its fighters had taken control of key government buildings in Sorab. Ullah dismissed the claim, saying the insurgents fled when security forces responded to the assault. He said the attackers stormed Buledi's home and also set fire to several residences of government officials. Four civilians were injured. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif condemned the attack, saying the assailants targeted civilians, including women and children. Shahid Rind, a spokesman for the Balochistan government, blamed Indian proxies for the attack without offering any evidence. There was no immediate comment from New Delhi. Sorab, a city known for its apple and grape orchards, is located near a key China-Pakistan trade route, which includes roads and rail systems to link western China's Xinjiang region to Pakistan's southwestern Gwadar port on the Arabian Sea.
30-05-2025
- Politics
One dead after insurgents briefly seize control of a city in southwest Pakistan and loot a bank
QUETTA, Pakistan -- Dozens of armed separatists briefly seized control of a high-security area in a city in southwestern Pakistan on Friday, killing a government official and looting a bank before fleeing, police and officials said. Hidayat Buledi, a local government official, was killed and his home was set on fire in the attack on Sorab, in the Balochistan region, local police chief Hafeez Ullah said. He said Buledi was 'martyred' while trying to protect women and children trapped inside the burning house during the assault. Ullah said several insurgents were killed in the shootout with police. The outlawed Baloch Liberation Army, or BLA, which was designated a terror group by the United States in 2019, claimed responsibility for the attack. In a statement, BLA said its fighters had taken control of key government buildings in Sorab. Ullah dismissed the claim, saying the insurgents fled when security forces responded to the assault. He said the attackers stormed Buledi's home and also set fire to several residences of government officials. Four civilians were injured. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif condemned the attack, saying the assailants targeted civilians, including women and children. Shahid Rind, a spokesman for the Balochistan government, blamed Indian proxies for the attack without offering any evidence. There was no immediate comment from New Delhi. trade route, which includes roads and rail systems to link western China's Xinjiang region to Pakistan's southwestern Gwadar port on the Arabian Sea.
Yahoo
30-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
One dead after insurgents briefly seize control of a city in southwest Pakistan and loot a bank
QUETTA, Pakistan (AP) — Dozens of armed separatists briefly seized control of a high-security area in a city in southwestern Pakistan on Friday, killing a government official and looting a bank before fleeing, police and officials said. Hidayat Buledi, a local government official, was killed and his home was set on fire in the attack on Sorab, in the Balochistan region, local police chief Hafeez Ullah said. He said Buledi was 'martyred' while trying to protect women and children trapped inside the burning house during the assault. Ullah said several insurgents were killed in the shootout with police. The outlawed Baloch Liberation Army, or BLA, which was designated a terror group by the United States in 2019, claimed responsibility for the attack. In a statement, BLA said its fighters had taken control of key government buildings in Sorab. Ullah dismissed the claim, saying the insurgents fled when security forces responded to the assault. He said the attackers stormed Buledi's home and also set fire to several residences of government officials. Four civilians were injured. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif condemned the attack, saying the assailants targeted civilians, including women and children. Shahid Rind, a spokesman for the Balochistan government, blamed Indian proxies for the attack without offering any evidence. There was no immediate comment from New Delhi. Sorab, a city known for its apple and grape orchards, is located near a key China-Pakistan trade route, which includes roads and rail systems to link western China's Xinjiang region to Pakistan's southwestern Gwadar port on the Arabian Sea.
