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Pak not behind terror in other nations: Pervez
Pak govt reaffirms stand on foreign students
Infiltration charges baseless: Pak
Injured in UK, surgery in India
Now, man clones his best friend
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Pak not behind terror in other nations: Pervez
Islamabad, August 4 “When people just get up and start accusing Pakistan, that annoys me,” General Musharraf told the BBC when asked if he gets angry when his country is blamed for terrorism in other parts of the world. He said nations should work together to fight terrorism and called for a balanced approach. “I keep saying in the fight against terrorism the coalition must encourage each other, coordinate efforts, cooperate with each other.” “That is a better course of action rather than straight throwing blame on each other. That is counter-productive, I think,” he said, adding that Pakistan was not responsible for terrorism in other countries. General Musharraf said he believed Al-Qaida’s command and control structure in his country had been demolished and he doubted whether London bombers had received orders directly from Osama bin Laden. After the July 7 London bombings which killed 56 people, British Prime Minister Tony Blair had called on Pakistan to crack down on extremists in religious schools. General Musharraf has ordered all foreigners studying in madarsas in Pakistan to leave. The police in Pakistan has detained over 600 people in the past two weeks in a crackdown on extremists.
— PTI |
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Pak govt reaffirms stand on foreign students
Islamabad, August 4 The announcement came last evening after ruling Pakistan Muslim League (PML) chief Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain met President Gen Pervez Musharraf at his camp office in Rawalpindi and reportedly asked him to reconsider his decision on foreign students. According to media reports, Hussein said deportation would convey wrong signals to the outside world on that all seminaries in the country had been involved in imparting training to militants. President Musharraf had last week announced to deport all foreign students back to their respective countries days after the arrest of some 600 religious students and alleged extremists in a countrywide crackdown, launched after the British authorities blamed three Brintons of Pakistan-origin of carrying out the July 7 London bombings. Two of these boys reportedly visited Pakistan last year and one of them stayed with a religious seminary in Lahore. “Hussein discussed with Musharraf the government’s decision to deport all foreign students or those with dual nationalities, studying in seminaries,” said an official spokesperson after the meeting. He said the government had decided to deport all those students (foreigners and dual nationality holders) after taking into confidence the leadership and that no change would be made in this decision.
— UNI |
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Infiltration charges baseless: Pak
Islamabad, August 4 Pak Foreign Ministry spokesman Muhammad Naeem Khan claimed that India had made the comments in order to justify deploying more troops to fight an insurgency in Kashmir. ''We reject these baseless allegations,'' Mr Khan said. ''The Indian Government wants to deploy additional troops in Kashmir on the pretext of so-called training camps,'' he claimed. India's Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee told Parliament in New Delhi yesterday that a large number of militant-training camps had been activated in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK) and the militants were poised for infiltrating into Indian territory. Mr Mukherjee's statement also reflected growing concern in New Delhi about violence in Kashmir after the Indian Army reported a surge in militant infiltration last month and said it had killed dozens of militants.
— Reuters |
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Injured in UK, surgery in India
London, August 4 Elliott Knott, who was captain of the west Dorset Warriors swimming team, was told he would have to wait 17 weeks for an appointment, then at least nine months for an operation at the NHS. His mother was outraged at the waiting time and has paid £ 6,000 to fly her son to Delhi on Tuesday for treatment, ‘The Times’ daily reported today. Elliott can barely stand and has to be helped around his home near Dorchester. The debilitating condition is caused when a vertebra slips out of line in the spinal column and presses on a nerve. Elliott, who was due to begin his higher secondary examination at Thomas Hardy School, had to stop attending classes because of the pain. In May, Elliott’s local hospital in Dorchester, which does not carry out the procedure, referred him to Southampton General Hospital. His parents, who are both design engineers, considered private treatment but that would have cost £ 25,000. They discovered that the operation could be done in India for £ 4,700. Elliott and his mother, who are flying to Delhi on Tuesday, will be there for 18 days. It is hoped that he will be back at school within weeks.
— PTI |
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Now, man clones his best friend
Man's best friend has joined the long list of animals that have been cloned in the laboratory but the scientists behind the world's first cloned dog have warned that the procedure is too dangerous to create carbon copies of favourite pets.
Scientists in South Korea have announced that they have produced a cloned puppy created from skin cells taken from the ear of an adult male Afghan hound. Parts of the cells were incorporated into canine eggs cells to produce more than 1,000 cloned embryos, one of which was carried by a golden labrador acting as a surrogate mother for the cloned puppy. Professor Woo-Suk Hwang of the Seoul National University and his colleagues overcame the technical problems and on Wednesday unveiled the result of their research — an Afghan hound called Snuppy, a puppy named after the Seoul National University's initials. Snuppy was born in April and was one of two cloned dog embryos to be delivered alive. The second, born in May, died of pneumonia just three weeks after birth. The scientists had created 1,095 cloned embryos and implanted all of them into the wombs of 123 canine surrogates. Yet only three pregnancies were confirmed, one of which ended in a miscarriage. The extremely low success rate — two puppies from 123 surrogate mothers and more than 1,000 embryos — underlines the dangerous and haphazard nature of the cloning technique which scientists use to create clones of adult animals. Professor Hwang and his colleague Professor Gerald Schatten of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in Pennsylvania said the aim of the study was to investigate the possibility of creating cloned embryos for producing stem cells rather than to develop a new way of reproducing animals or humans. Both scientists emphasised the research should not be seen as bringing human reproductive cloning any closer, or even making it ethical to clone favourite pets. "We are not in the business of cloning pets. Nuclear transfer (cloning) is an extraordinary tool for scientific and medical research. It has never been about reproductive medicine or making any members of our family — even our pets," Professor Schatten said. Professor Hwang, whose team also produced the first cloned human embryos and the first viable stem cells from cloned human embryos, said cloning dogs would help scientists understand the problems of creating stem cells from cloned embryos and would not lead to the cloning of human babies. Being able to clone dogs would enable scientists to better understand the genetic basis that accounts for the differences between different dog breeds and it might also lead to better veterinary treatments using stem cells, he
said. — By arrangement with The Independent |
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