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10 Israeli soldiers die in Hizbollah rocket attack
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Musharraf ‘faced’ court martial after Kargil debacle Malaria parasite’s deception unveiled
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10 Israeli soldiers die in Hizbollah rocket attack Beirut, August 6 The soldiers were killed and nine were wounded, medics said, when a rocket struck a group of reservists called up for the Lebanon offensive in the northern village of Kfar Giladi. Soldiers near the scene held their heads and one wept as a military ambulance pulled away. Helicopters landed nearby to fly the badly wounded to hospitals further from the war front. Blood-stained boots stood against a wall. Stretchers lay on the ground, covered in blood. One officer looked at the bodies, some covered by blankets, and shook his head in disbelief. "I don't recall so many dead ever. This is terrible," said Ron Valensi, head of the upper Galilee municipal council and a resident of Kfar Giladi, speaking on Channel 2 Television. Lebanon's parliament speaker Nabih Berri said his country rejected the U.S.-French draft Security Council resolution because it would let Israeli forces to remain on Lebanese soil. Berri, a Shia politician who has been the main channel between Hizbollah and Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, said the draft ignored the Beirut government's seven-point plan calling for a ceasefire, the withdrawal of Israeli forces and the return of all displaced civilians among other things. "Lebanon and all of Lebanon rejects any resolution that is outside these seven points," Berri told a news conference. Hizbollah, backed by Syria and Iran, has killed 56 Israeli soldiers and 33 civilians in the conflict, sparked when its men snatched two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid on July 12. The Israeli army said today it had captured one of the Hizbollah fighters who took part in the seizure of the soldiers. At least 747 people have been killed in Lebanon during the war, including five who died in air raids on the Shia village of Ansar overnight. Three civilians were killed in a strike near the southern village of Naqoura, security sources said. Two more civilians died when an Israeli air strike hit a pickup truck driving about 40 metres ahead of a U.N. aid convoy heading for the southern city of Tyre, U.N. sources said. A Lebanese army soldier was killed in an air raid near Tyre. U.N. peacekeepers in south Lebanon said a mortar round fired by Hizbollah wounded three Chinese members of the force. Israel views the U.N. draft favourably, a senior government official and Israeli media said, noting that it allowed Israel to respond to Hizbollah attacks after a truce and did not order Israel to withdraw its 10,000 soldiers from southern Lebanon. Israel wants its troops to remain until an international force can take over. Hizbollah says it will keep fighting until Israel stops bombing Lebanon and withdraws all its forces. Israel's cabinet met to discuss the U.N. draft resolution, which could be put to a vote in New York on Monday or Tuesday. The draft was hammered out in negotiations between the United States, Israel's main ally, and France, touted as leader of the anticipated international force for Lebanon. Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon said Israel would keep attacking Hizbollah targets in Lebanon and its soldiers would stay there until the international force arrived. "We must continue the fighting, continue to hit whoever we can hit from Hizbollah," Ramon told Army Radio. Israel's definition of Hizbollah targets has included more than 70 bridges, as well as roads, ports, airports, radar stations, television and telephone masts, factories, farms and countless homes pummelled into ruin by bombing across Lebanon. A second U.N. resolution is envisaged a week or two after the first is adopted, setting conditions for a permanent ceasefire and authorising the international force. Berri said the first draft resolution would "drop Lebanon into internal strife or be impossible to implement". Lebanon will seek support for its position from Arab foreign ministers due to meet in Beirut on Monday. Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem arrived by land a day early. The war coincides with an Israeli military offensive in the southern Gaza Strip to recover another captured soldier. An air strike killed one Palestinian in the strip on Sunday, bringing to at least 167 the number of Palestinians killed in the campaign, more than half of them civilians. In the West Bank city of Ramallah, Israeli forces detained Palestinian parliament speaker Aziz Dweik, a Hamas leader. — Reuters
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Thousands recall Hiroshima N-holocaust, pray for peace Hiroshima, August 6 In an annual ritual to mourn the more than 220,000 people who ultimately died from the blast, a crowd, including survivors, children and dignitaries, gathered at the Peace Memorial Park, near ground zero where the bomb was dropped. “Radiation, heat, blast and their synergetic effects created a hell on Earth,” said Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba. Lamenting a global trend towards nuclear proliferation, Akiba called for a campaign to free the world of atomic weapons. “Sixty-one years later, the number of nations enamoured of evil and enslaved by nuclear weapons is increasing,” Akiba told the crowd gathered under a blazing summer sun. “The human family stands at a crossroads. Will all nations be enslaved? Or will all nations be liberated?” The Peace Bell tolled at 8:15 a.m. — the moment the B-29 warplane, named Enola Gay, dropped the bomb on August 6, 1945 — as the crowd stood and bowed their heads for a moment of silence. The United States dropped a second atomic bomb on the southern city of Nagasaki on August 9. Six days later, Japan surrendered. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi vowed to abide by Japan’s pacifist constitution and non-nuclear policy. “Japan, the only country that has suffered atomic bombings in the human history, has the responsibility to keep telling the international community about its experience,” Koizumi said. “With the resolve not to let the tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki repeat itself anywhere, Japan has delivered on its pledge not to wage war in the past 61 years.” — Reuters
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Islamabad, August 6 At least 40 bodies have been recovered in Mardan, the second biggest city in North West Frontier Province, and officials fear that the toll might cross 50. The bridge collapsed yesterday in a central residential area of the city, about 50 km from the provincial capital Peshawar. ''People were standing on the bridge and watching the floods when it was washed away. So far, we have recovered 40 bodies but fear more might have died,'' Javed Ahmed, the top administration official in Mardan, told Reuters. Ahmed said the central and residential parts of Mardan, which has a population of 5 lakh, had been flooded due to heavy rains and the damage to property was considerable. Torrential rains and heavy flooding in recent weeks have caused extensive damage and deaths in NWFP and POK parts of which were also hit by a devastating earthquake last year. Incessant rains have forced some 6,000 quake survivors living in mountain areas to move to camps. — Reuters
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Musharraf ‘faced’ court martial after Kargil debacle
Islamabad, August 6 Nawaz Sharif had “constituted a military inquiry committee that recommended the court martial” of Army Chief Musharraf, but the General, now the President, overthrew the government and “stole” the report from the Prime Minister’s house “to save his face,” Joint Secretary of Pakistan Muslim League-N (PMN-N) Siddiqul Farooq, who released the 100-page ‘white paper’ yesterday, was quoted in the media here as saying. Anticipating court-martial in the wake of the Kargil debacle, Farooq said, Musharraf overthrew the Sharif government on October 12, 1999 to save his “neck.” “The General wanted to take over in the first week of August, but he had to hold his horses till October,” he said. Musharraf had
willfully avoided constituting a commission to fix the responsibility for the huge military defeat that had demoralised the entire nation, Farooq said.
— PTI
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Malaria parasite’s deception unveiled Washington, August 6 Robert Minard, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) international research scholar, his postdoctoral fellow, Rogerio Amino, at the Institute Pasteur in Paris, and Volker Heussler at the Bernhard-Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, Germany, used real-time imaging to track malaria infections in live mice. They found that like the ancient Greek warriors who hid inside a giant hollow horse to gain entry to Troy, the malaria parasites, called Plasmodium falciparum, wrap themselves in a structure made of liver cell membrane that enables them to sneak past immune cell sentinels and return to the bloodstream. “The parasite has evolved this complex structure. The best image to describe it is the Trojan horse, because it both transports the parasites and camouflages them,” said Minard. The malaria parasite passes from a mosquito’s saliva to a human’s blood, and then travels to the liver, where it infects and kills liver cells. After it leaves the liver, the parasite moves back into the bloodstream to infect and kill red blood cells. The rupturing of blood cells causes the worst symptoms of the infection, which can be deadly to children, pregnant women, and others with weak immune systems. A team led by Heussler’s noticed irregular protrusions on the surface of liver cells that had been grown in a culture dish and infected with malaria. Amino then captured a series of images inside living mice at one-second intervals to track the parasites’ journey. By using parasites labelled with a green fluorescent marker and staining the mouse’s blood vessels with a red fluorescent marker, Amino was able to record microscopic images inside the animal’s liver. He found that not only did the structures Heussler’s group saw on the liver cells in the culture dish, called merosomes, protrude from the animal’s liver cells as well, but they pinched off and carried the parasite safely into the blood vessels. “That is the beauty of this technique. You can really see what happens in real time-there are no gaps,” said Amino. The scientists also found that while the parasites are physically hidden inside the merosome, they further protect themselves with a biochemical cloaking device. They prevent the dying liver cell from broadcasting a chemical “death signal” that would normally tell a macrophage to ingest it. “The parasite did not evolve this complex system for nothing. It is probably very important that the parasite not travel free in the liver,” said Minard. The researchers are hopeful that the discovery will lead to new ways of treating the deadly disease that kills millions of people every year. — ANI
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