‘Around 200 detained at Moscow anti-putin protest’

MOSCOW: Russian police on Sunday detained around 200 activists gathering in central Moscow for an unauthorised protest against President Vladimir Putin, state news agency and a monitoring group reported.

Radical opposition activist Vyacheslav Maltsev had appealed on his website for his supporters to hold protests across Russia on Sunday, calling for a “people’s Revolution” and for an immediate end to Putin’s rule.

“Currently the number of detained has reached 200,” a police source told TASS after supporters of the banned radical opposition group gathered in central Moscow beside the Kremlin walls.

OVD-INFO, which monitors detentions at political protests, said that 212 people were held in Moscow, as well as 25 people in five other cities.

Many of those detained were carrying knives, knuckledusters and pistols that can fire rubber bullets, TASS reported. It said police were detaining activists after searching them.

An AFP photographer said police, some in helmets and bullet-proof vests, picked up the protesters one by one in central Moscow close to the Kremlin.

A reporter for popular Echo of Moscow radio station, Andrei Yezhov, wrote on Twitter that he had been detained and posted video from inside a police van, saying most of those held were in their early 20s. He was later released without charge. Maltsev last year ran for a parliament seat and has a popular Youtube channel with critical political commentary. LONDON: Under a new legislation to be debated in the UK’S House of Lords later this week, children under the age of 13 will be banned from joining Facebook and Twitter to keep them safe from child abuse on the social media platforms.

According to a report in The Telegraph, the government’s Data Protection Bill will legally enshrine the age at which children will be allowed to create accounts on social media platforms.

The proposal, however, might not get support from cross-party peers who are insisting that the measure must be accompanied by new rules forcing companies to adapt their sites for younger users.

The move comes as Home Secretary Amber Rudd is to meet executives from the Internet giants in the US this week.

Writing in a national daily The Sun on Sunday, Rudd said social media giants must do more to stop child sexual exploitation, adding that the companies have a “moral duty” to go “further and faster” in their efforts to tackle the abuse. LONDON: Mosques in Britain refused to perform the last rites of Salman Abedi, the suicide bomber who blew himself up at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester earlier this year, killing 22 victims.

The remains of the 22-year-old were flown to Tripoli in Libya, the country of his origin, where the burial was conducted, according to ‘The Sun’.

But he was still reportedly denied an Islamic burial ceremony.

“After Manchester mosques refused to bury the remains of terrorist Salman Abedi, British authorities allowed his family to move him to Libya, where he was buried in Tripoli,” claims Noman Benotman, of antiextremist think tank Quilliam.

Abedi grew up in Britain and is thought to have visited the North African country from where his parents had emigrated regularly in the last six years.

Libya is a hotspot for the Islamic State (ISIS) terror network and Abedi is believed to have been trained in bombmaking by an ISIS explosives expert, a former car mechanic from the West Midlands region of the UK.

The news of his burial emerged as another media report claims the UK’S intelligence officials missed key warnings that could have put the Manchester bomber under surveillance as a “high-priority” target. SYDNEY: Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Sunday turned down a renewed offer from New Zealand to resettle some refugees from a Papua New Guinea (PNG) detention centre, the media reported.

About 600 men are refusing to leave a de-commissioned Australian centre on Manus Island saying they fear attacks from locals, reports the BBC.

Turnbull said he would not, at this time, take up the offer from his New Zealand counterpart Jacinda Ardern.

The two leaders held talks earlier on Sunday.

Ardern had said she could not ignore “the human face” of what Australia was dealing with.

Under a policy, Australia refuses to take in any asylum seekers trying to reach its territories unofficially by boat. Those who arrive are placed in camps on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea (PNG), and on the Pacific island of Nauru.

New Zealand first said it would take 150 of the asylum seekers in 2013, but the offer has been repeatedly rejected by Australia, the BBC reported.