News YAK

Pakistan has once again assured the world that it is devoted towards fighting extremism and maintaining peaceful relations with all its neighbours.

Pakistan Minister for Information and Broadcasting Sherry Rehman met British High Commissioner to Pakistan, Robert Brinkley and stated that “Pakistan is steadfast in its commitment towards elimination of extremism and for maintaining peaceful relations with all its neighbors.”

In a bid to defuse tension between India and Pakistan, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi may visit India next week.

On Yang’s arrival, India is expected to provide evidence of Pakistani element’s involvement in the Mumbai terror attacks.

Yang Jiechi will also hold a meeting with his Indian counterpart, Pranab Mukherjee on the latest developments in Indo-Pak relations trying calm down the things between two neighbours.

Pranab Mukharjee had spoken with Yang last month and urging him to pressurise Pakistan to arrest the culprits of the Mumbai terror attacks.

Doctors say that the childhood illness that Oscar-winning Hollywood star John Travolta’s son Jett had been suffering from, scientifically called Kawasaki disease, could not be blamed for his death because it was unlikely to cause the boy’s reported seizure.

"Seizures are not part of Kawasaki disease," the New York Daily News quoted Dr. Stanford Shulman, a specialist in the disease at Northwestern University''''''''''''''''s Feinberg School of Medicine, as saying.

"If a teenager had a seizure and died, that would not commonly be due to Kawasaki disease," the expert added.

Two buses were reportedly set ablaze today by protesting Trinamool Congress-backed auto-rickshaw operators who were agitating against a court ban on ageing public transport vehicles in the city.

The strike turned violent with irate auto drivers vandalising a government bus at Park Circus.

The agitators turned violent, and stoned and set fire to a West Bengal Transport Corporation bus. The bus was only partially damaged as locals managed to douse the flames. No one was injured.

Women opting for IVF treatment would soon get rid of the traumatic drug therapy, for the researchers from Oxford Fertility Unit have found that freezing the embryos can significantly reduce long-term health risks.

The researchers found a drastic improvement in the success rate of fertility treatment using frozen embryos.

The procedure reduces the need for repeated cycles of hormone therapy and egg extraction, which can be traumatic and result in serious side effects such as polycystic ovary syndrome.

Following Pakistan’s rejection to extradite any Pakistani national to India, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has asked Pakistan to hand over “criminals” responsible for the Mumbai attacks so that they can face trial in India.

Singh hoped that "some sense" would prevail in the Pakistani leadership and that it would recognise that those behind the “horrible acts” in Mumbai should to be brought to justice.

The political game in Pakistan’s Punjab Province is taking a new turn, with neither the PPP nor the PML-N willing to compromise or budge on their respective stances.

The Nation quotes political observers as saying that the distance between PPP Governor Salman Taseer and PML-N Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif is widening with the passage of time and warns that a direct confrontation between them may create a new problem, especially for the province and for the country in general.

A two-day conference held here last month on the cultural heritage of Kashmiris, has declared that there is a need to forge “a peaceful pathway through identifying and implementing a series of steps that will lead to a prosperous and cohesive future for all of the people of Kashmir, wherever they may reside.”

In its eight-point declaration, the conference recognising that, irrespective of their location, all people of the Former Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir share a unique and ancient heritage.

In separate encounters, the security personnel have gunned down four militants in eastern Imphal and Bishenpur Districts of Manipur.

Reports reaching here from Imphal said that a joint team of police commandos and Assam Rifles raided Sanjenbam village in Imphal East District on Saturday morning after getting some leads on militant movement in the area.

During the search operation, the militants shot gunfire at the security forces and vice-versa. One militant was gunned down during the retaliatory fire from the security personnel. Rest of them managed to rescue.

In a bid to put an end to Israel''s bombing of the Gaza Strip, Scottish singer Annie Lennox and English stand-up comedian Alexei Sayle have joined high-profile campaigners in voicing their concerns.

During a news conference in London, Lennox said that TV footage of the attacks, which have taken the lives of more than 400 innocent people, left her shaken.

“A few days after Christmas I came downstairs, put the television on and saw smoke pyres emanating from buildings and it shook me to the core,” the BBC quoted her as saying.