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Bomb hurled outside Pranab Mukherjee's hotel in Dhaka
DHAKA: A homemade crude bomb of low intensity was hurled on Monday outside the Sonargaon Pan-Pacific hotel in Dhaka where President Pranab Mukherjee is staying.
No one was injured in the blast which took place around 2 pm, said Apoorva Hassan, the officer in-charge of Tejgaon police station.
Two persons came on a motorcycle and hurled the bomb wrapped in a cap near the SAARC fountain, about 50 yards away from the hotel at a street intersection, he said.
The two managed to escape and no one was arrested in this connection, he added.
Security around the hotel has been further strengthened after the attack.
It was not immediately whether the President, on a three-day state visit to Bangladesh, was inside the hotel or not.
The incident came on the second day of the 48-hour strike called by fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami party against the sentencing of three of its top leaders in 1971 war crimes cases. — PTI
DSP's killing: UP minister Raja Bhaiya resigns
LUCKNOW: Uttar Pradesh minister Raghuraj Pratap Singh, alias Raja Bhaiya, quit on Monday, a day after he was booked for the murder of a senior police officer, an official said. The Food and Civil Supplies Minister was charged with conspiracy to kill Deputy Superintendent of Police Zia-ul-Haque.
Zia-ul-Haque was killed with two others in Balipur village in Pratapgarh district on Saturday
night during violence that followed the murder of the village head, Nanhe Yadav.
Besides Raja Bhaiya, seven of his associates were also booked.
Parveen, the wife of the slain officer, has accused the minister of conspiring to kill her husband as he was investigating a “sensitive matter”.
Zia-ul-Haque was first attacked by an angry mob and then shot in the leg and chest from a point-blank range, an official said.
The case was registered on Sunday evening after Zia’s family refused to allow his funeral until a case was registered against the controversial minister.
The minister’s close associates who have been booked in the case, include panchayat head Gulshan Yadav and driver Rohit Singh. They have been charged with murder.
Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav has announced ex-gratia of Rs. 20 lakh to the family of the deceased police official and transferred Pratapgarh Superintendent of Police (SP) Anil Rai and posted L.R. Kumar as the new district police chief. — IANS
Ruckus as J&K
Assembly debates Afzal Guru hanging
JAMMU: Tempers ran high in the Jammu and Kashmir assembly on Monday when a debate on the hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru was underway. Chief
Minister Omar Abdullah and the main opposition party Peoples Democratic Party levelled charges against each other.
Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) leader Mehbooba Mufti started the debate, saying it was "inhumane" that Afzal Guru's family was not allowed to meet him one last time before the execution was carried out February 9.
Mehbooba Mufti sought suspension of all regular business of the House to "discuss this issue of urgent nature". The ruling National Conference and the Communist Party of India-Marxist too wanted a discussion on the issue in the
House.
Mehbooba Mufti blamed the Chief Minister for his failure to protect the life of Afzal Guru, convicted for the conspiracy that led to the December 13, 2001, attack on Parliament.
Afsal Guru's mercy petition was rejected by President Pranab Mukherjee last month.
Mehbooba Mufti said: "Had the state government acted in time, Afzal Guru's life could have been saved. While Tamil Nadu and Punjab could save the lives of the two convicts from their states who were sentenced to death, Omar Abdullah's government did nothing."
The remarks drew vehement protests from members of the National Conference.
The Chief Minister plunged into the discussion, accusing the PDP of
"politicising the issue".
"The PDP makes it appear like I was the one responsible for the hanging of Afzal Guru," Omar Abdullah said.
In the acidic exchange that followed, PDP members raised slogans and approached the Speaker's chair raising slogans against the government.
Jammu and Kashmir Assembly Speaker Mubarak Gul had allowed the discussion Monday after first adjourning the
House for ten minutes, following a din when the demand for a discussion of the issue was first raised.
Members of the National Panthers Party, the Bharatiya Janata Party and
Independent MLAs raised slogans protesting the killing of two policemen in north Kashmir.
Afzal Guru was hanged to death on February 9 after he was found guilty of plotting the attack on the Indian
Parliament on December 13, 2001.
Guru's family was informed of the execution through a letter sent by speed post, which only arrived 48 hours after the hanging.
Guru was buried in Delhi's Tihar jail.
His family and major political groups in Kashmir are asking for the return of the mortal remains of Afzal Guru, so that a burial can be conducted in accordance with religious tradition.
The issue of debating the matter in the assembly had created fissures between the two parties in the ruling coalition, National Conference and
Congress.
While the NC was in favour of a debate, the Congress was opposed to it. — IANS
12 schoolchildren
die in Jalandhar mishap
JALANDHAR: Twelve children were among 13 killed and ten other students injured when a brick-laden truck collided with their school van in Jalandhar district on Monday morning.
The children, students of a private school, were headed for the school when the mishap occurred near Jaheera village in Lambhra, close to Nakodar, a senior police official said.
The driver of the school van was also killed in the mishap.
“The mishap took place at 8 am in Jaheera village when the bus of Akal Academy was taking students to the school,” Jalandhar SP (Rural) Rajinder Singh said.
Around 30 children were stated to be travelling in the van when the truck laden with bricks collided with it. — PTI
One held in Hyderabad blasts case
RANCHI: A man has been arrested here in connection with the February 21 Hyderabad blasts, police said on Monday.
“A man identified as Manzar Imam has been arrested,” Superintendent of Police Vipul Shukla told
PTI.
However, he refused to give details.
The National Investigation Agency (NIA) has been searching for him for the last two years in connection with the Ahmedabad blast incident too and had come twice to Ranchi’s Bariatu area looking for him in the past.
The twin blasts in Hyderabad’s Dilsukhnagar had left 16 people dead. — PTI
Baby born with HIV infection cured
CHICAGO: A baby girl in Mississippi who was born with HIV has been cured after very early treatment with standard HIV drugs, US researchers reported on Sunday, in a potentially ground-breaking case that could offer insights on how to eradicate HIV infection in its youngest victims.
The child's story is the first account of an infant achieving a so-called functional cure, a rare event in which a person achieves remission without the need for drugs and standard blood tests show no signs that the virus is making copies of itself.
More testing needs to be done to see if the treatment would have the same effect on other children, but the results could change the way high-risk babies are treated and possibly lead to a cure for children with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
"This is a proof of concept that HIV can be potentially curable in infants," said Dr Deborah
Persaud, a virologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who presented the findings at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Atlanta.
The child's story is different from the now famous case of Timothy Ray Brown, the so-called "Berlin patient," whose HIV infection was completely eradicated through an elaborate treatment for leukemia in 2007 that involved the destruction of his immune system and a stem cell transplant from a donor with a rare genetic mutation that resists HIV infection.
"We believe this is our Timothy Brown case to spur research interest toward a cure for HIV infection in children," Persaud said at a news conference.
Instead of Brown's costly treatment, however, the case of the Mississippi baby, who was not identified, involved the use of a cocktail of widely available drugs already used to treat HIV infection in infants.
When the baby girl was born in a rural hospital in July 2010, her mother had just tested positive for HIV infection. Because her mother had not received any prenatal HIV treatment, doctors knew the child was at high risk of infection. They transferred her to the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, where she came under the care of Dr Hannah Gay, a pediatric HIV specialist.
Because of her risk, Dr Gay put the infant on a cocktail of three HIV-fighting drugs - zidovudine (also known as AZT),
lamivudine, and nevirapine - when she was just 30 hours old. Two blood tests done within the first 48 hours of the child's life confirmed her infection and she was kept on the full treatment regimen, Persaud told reporters at the conference.
In more typical pregnancies, when an HIV-infected mother has been given drugs to reduce the risk of transmission to her child, the baby would only have been given a single drug,
nevirapine.
Researchers believe use of the more aggressive antiretroviral treatment when the child was just days old likely resulted in her cure by keeping the virus from forming hard-to-treat pools of cells known as viral reservoirs, which lie dormant and out of the reach of standard medications. These reservoirs rekindle HIV infection in patients who stop therapy, and they are the reason most HIV-infected individuals need lifelong treatment to keep the infection at bay.
After starting on treatment, the baby's immune system responded and tests showed diminishing levels of the virus until it was undetectable 29 days after birth. The baby received regular treatment for 18 months, but then stopped coming to appointments for a period of about 10 months, when her mother said she was not given any treatment. The doctors did not say why the mother stopped coming.
When the child came back under the care of Dr Gay, she ordered standard blood tests to see how the child was faring before resuming antiviral therapy.
What she found was surprising. The first blood test did not turn up any detectible levels of HIV. Neither did the second. And tests for HIV-specific antibodies, the standard clinical indicator of HIV infection, also remained negative.
"At that point, I knew I was dealing with a very unusual case," Dr Gay said.
Baffled, Dr Gay turned to her friend and longtime colleague, Dr Katherine Luzuriaga of the University of Massachusetts, and she and Persaud did a series of sophisticated lab tests on the child's blood.
The first looked for silent reservoirs of the virus where it remains dormant but can replicate if activated. That is detected in a type of immune cell known as a CD4 T-cell. After culturing the child's cells, they found no sign of the virus.
Then, the team looked for HIV DNA, which indicates that the virus has integrated itself into the genetic material of the infected person. This test turned up such low levels that it was just above the limit of the test's ability to detect it.
The third test looked for bits of genetic material known as viral RNA. They only found a single copy of viral RNA in one of the two tests they ran.
Because there is no detectible virus in the child's blood, the team has advised that she not be given antiretroviral therapy, whose goal is to block the virus from replicating in the blood. Instead, she will be monitored closely.
There are no samples that can be used by other researchers to confirm the findings, which may lead skeptics to challenge how the doctors know for sure that the child was infected.
Persaud said the team is trying to use the tiny scraps of viral genetic material they have been able to gather from the child to compare with the mother's infection, to confirm that the child's infection came from her mother. But, she stressed, the baby had tested positive in two separate blood tests, and there had been evidence of the virus replicating in her blood, which are standard methods of confirming HIV infection.
Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said although tools to prevent transmission of HIV to infants are available, many children are born infected. "With this case, it appears we may have not only a positive outcome for the particular child, but also a promising lead for additional research toward curing other children," he said.
Dr Rowena Johnston, vice president and director of research for amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research, which helped fund the study, said the fact that the cure was achieved by antiretroviral therapy alone makes it "imperative that we learn more about a newborn's immune system, how it differs from an adult's and what factors made it possible for the child to be cured."
Because the child's treatment was stopped, the doctors were able to determine that this child had been cured, raising questions about whether other children who received early treatment and have undetectable viral loads may also be cured without their doctors knowing it.
But the doctors warned parents not to be tempted to take their children off treatment to see if the virus comes back. Normally, when patients stop taking their medications, the virus comes roaring back, and treatment interruptions increase the risk that the virus will develop drug resistance.
"We don't want that," Dr Gay said. "Patients who are on successful therapy need to stay on their successful therapy until we figure out a whole lot more about what was going on with this child and what we can do for others in the future."
The researchers are trying to find biomarkers that would offer a rationale to consider stopping therapy within the context of a clinical trial. If they can learn what caused the child to clear her virus, they hope to replicate that in other babies, and eventually learn to routinely cure infections. — Reuters
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