The police today rescued advocate Naeem Bokhari from angry lawyers at Sukkur district courts. Bokhari earned the wrath of the lawyers as he had fired the first salvo against suspended Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry through an open letter listing a litany of allegations, which constituted the core of presidential reference against Iftikhar.

Bokhari had gone to Sukkur to appear for a petition filed by a client. The lawyers started shouting slogans against him for serving a military dictator in his conspiracy to subjugate the judiciary.

A group of young lawyers advanced towards him forcing Bokhari to run for the police protection. He was whisked away by the police.

Bokhari has earned countrywide virtual excommunication and faced a social and professional isolation because of his crucial role in the current judicial crisis. The Punjab Bar Council has expelled him and cancelled his licence to practise as a lawyer.

A judge of the Rawalpindi bench of the Lahore High Court provided Bokhari temporary relief by suspending the cancellation decision of the bar council. Bokhari in his petition took the plea that he was an approved advocate of the Supreme Court and could not be restrained to practise by a provincial organisation like the Punjab Bar Council.

Judge Shabbir Rizvi granted him temporary relief and sent the case to the Chief Justice of the Lahore High Court recommending that a large bench of the court should be constituted to take up the petition for final determination.

Paris, March 27
Stunned geneticists have discovered a pair of twins who are somewhere between identical and non-identical, the British science journal Nature reported yesterday.

The world's only known case of "semi-identical" twins almost certainly arose from two sperm cells that fused with a single egg, it said.

The ground-breaking toddlers comprise an infant who is a hermaphrodite, meaning that it has both male and female genitalia, while the other is a boy whose sexual organs have developed normally.

"Their similarity is somewhere between identical and fraternal twins," said Vivienne Souter, lead author of the study, reported online Nature.

The babies were born in the USA, but their location and their identity have not been disclosed. They have almost no hope of survival.

Non-identical, or fraternal, twins are formed when two eggs meet two sperm in the womb. Each is fertilised independently, and each becomes an embryo.

With identical twins, one egg is fertilised by one sperm, and the embryo splits at some later stage to become two distinct, but genetically equivalent, human beings.

In the case reported on Monday, one of two things happened, Souter said.

The first possibility is that an egg cell began to divide, without separating, and each budding part was then fertilised with a single sperm. The genes could then have gotten mixed up before the egg fully 
separated into two.

In this scenario, there was a mixing of genes within the double-fertilised egg. It then split into two cells, and each cell would have shed an unwanted set of chromosomes.

As a result, the children would have identical genes from their mother's side -- but would share only half of their genes on their father's side.

A double fertilisation of a single egg is not unheard of but until now offspring have never been known to survive.

"It's extremely unlikely that we will ever see another case," said Charles Boklage, an expert on twinning at Eastern Carolina University in North Carolina.

Souter said the case raised intriguing questions about twinning. "It makes me wonder whether the current 
classification of twins is an oversimplification," she said. — AFP

President Musharraf said on Tuesday that people have rejected opposition parties by refusing to come on the streets in response to their protest call on Monday.

“Only a few thousand active political workers in major cities joined the protest while the masses distanced themselves from their politics of politicising a purely judicial and legal issue,” Musharraf told a big public rally in Rawalpindi.

“The people have proved by the action that they are not with these elements,” he added.

President Musharraf did not directly attack any political leader or party. However, Punjab Chief Minister Chaudhry Pervez Elahi specifically named exiled premiers Benazir Bhutto and Mian Nawaz Sharif, who had called for public demonstration of solidarity with lawyers’ struggle to protect independence and freedom of judiciary.

He said Bhutto and Nawaz had betrayed the people and their parties, PPP and PML-N, and lost support of 
common man.

The demonstrations in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad were impressive in terms of participation of activists of the PPP and PML-N, who were also extended support by other opposition groupings and parties like MMA, PTI and ANP.

They, however, failed to enthuse common people and exposed their divisions by maintaining a distance from each other and mainly raising partisan slogans. Bhutto’s insistence that she would not join the religious grouping Muttahida Majlise Amal in any anti-Musharraf movement has upset all plans to offer a formidable political challenge to Musharraf despite the serious crisis he faces in the backdrop of eruption of judicial crisis and lawyers’ countrywide campaign to restore the independence of judiciary.

Musharaf insisted that he had introduced real democracy for the first time in the country and cited introduction of local governments, ensuring that present assemblies completed their full tenure, freeing the media, empowering women and protecting rights of minorities as his major achievements in bolstering a democratic culture.

He said some elements want to disrupt this process to deny common man fruits of democratic progress.

The President also urged the people to help the government in combating extremism and eliminating terrorism. He said extremist organisations are misleading the youth and preparing them for suicide attacks by promising them that they would go to paradise.

Musharraf rejected international criticism that his government is violating human rights and manipulating disappearances through secret agencies. He said most of the disappeared people had gone to jihadi organisations, who were using them for acts of terrorism.

He said his government had devoted past over seven years in strengthening the security of Pakistan and restoring the economy. It had now embarked on programmes to transfer the benefits of progress and development to common man.

The President launched a Rs 15-billion project to build an expressway in the heart of Rawalpindi city along a stream Leh that causes havoc by flooding low-lying areas of the city during monsoon season. He promised to bring Rawalpindi at par with twin city and capital Islamabad in terms of development while reminding the people that it houses the general headquarters (GHQ) of the army.

Islamabad, March 27
Former Pakistan premier and PPP chief Benazir Bhutto has reportedly told Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) chief Nawaz Sharif at a recent meeting in London that the MMA should have no role in the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy’s (ARD) protest against the government.

Sources privy to the meeting said that Benazir told Nawaz that they should desist from taking MMA’s help in strengthening the ARD.

“We should strengthen the ARD forum, instead of seeking cooperation from the MMA in our protest against the suspension of the Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry and other issues,” the Daily Times quoted her as telling Sharif at the meeting.

The sources said that Sharif told Bhutto that this was the proper time for all opposition parties to unite against President Pervez Musharraf. — ANI

Dania Beach (Florida), March 27
Former Playboy playmate Anna Nicole Smith had died of an accidental overdose of a sleeping medication and other drugs, the Florida authorities said yesterday.

Broward county medical examiner Joshua Perper said Smith died of “combined drug intoxication” with the sleeping medication chloral hydrate as the major factor. Smith was taking a lengthy list of other medications, including methadone for pain, he said.

Perper said Smith had been on several anti-depressant and anti-anxiety drugs prior to her death.

“We found nothing to indicate any foul play,” said chief Charlie Tiger of the Seminole, Florida, police department.

Perper said the detailed autopsy also showed no evidence of disease. — AP

Brussels, March 27
European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana and Iranian nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani, spoke on the telephone yesterday on Tehran's nuclear dispute with the West, and expect to talk again soon, an EU spokeswoman said today.

The U.N. Security Council had tightened sanctions on Iran over its refusal to halt uranium enrichment which the West suspects is aimed at developing nuclear weapons.

“The call was to renew contacts, to explain what the international community had done and to explain its willingness to re-establish a dialogue to prepare the conditions that should allow full negotiations to start,”Solana's spokeswoman Cristina Gallach said. She said they had agreed to speak again in the coming days.

“Yesterday was to re-establish contact. There was no discussion on the substance,” she said, adding that Larijani had it made clear that Tehran was against the U.N. resolution.

Solana underlined the unity of the international community and the willingness of the major powers to relaunch talks with Tehran on economic, technical and political incentives to resolve the stand-off, Gallach said.

The Security Council, voted unanimously on Saturday to impose new sanctions targeting Tehran's arms exports, a state-owned bank and the elite revolutionary guards.

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, immediately rejected the council's demand to suspend uranium enrichment, which can be used for making bombs and to generate electricity.

He maintained Iran's programme was for peaceful purposes. — Reuters