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  • Saudi-led coalition vows to hit Yemen’s Houthis despite truce offer

    Brigadier General Ahmed Asseri, spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition, said the Houthis had changed the situation by targeting cities in recent days, and vowed that the coalition would go after leaders of the rebel group.

    “The Houthis are now targeting the borders of the kingdom and the situation is that we will defend our citizens,” Asseri told Reuters, adding that 15 people were wounded in Houthi shelling on the city of Najran on Thursday evening.

    “Coalition forces will deliver a harsh response starting this moment, so that those who carried out this operation will pay the price,” he said earlier on Saudi state television.

    Asseri said Saudi-led forces would keep all options open, but declined to say if a ground offensive was being planned.

    The remarks came hours after Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir announced at a joint news conference with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry that the kingdom was ready to offer a five-day humanitarian ceasefire if the Houthis honoured the truce.

    “The pause will affect all of Yemen for a period of five days,” Saudi foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir said. “The actual date will be announced shortly as well as the requirements.

    “This is all based on the Houthis complying with the ceasefire.”

    International concern about Yemen’s dire humanitarian situation has grown as fighting, air strikes and an arms embargo have caused civilian deaths, internal displacement, destruction of infrastructure and shortages of food, medicine and fuel.

    The offer of a truce came days after the Houthis had shelled Saudi border towns, prompting renewed coalition air strikes in Yemen, and as the rebels advanced into a last central area of Aden, a city whose fate is seen as pivotal to Yemen’s civil war.

    Kerry welcomed the Saudi truce offer and said neither Riyadh nor Washington was talking about sending ground troops to Yemen.

    Asseri had said late on Wednesday that all options were open, including ground operations, to stop attacks on Saudi towns.

    The United States has supported the Saudi-led coalition, which began strikes against the Houthis and forces loyal to ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh on March 26 with the aim of restoring the government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

    Riyadh fears the Houthis, who are allied to its foe Iran, will dominate Yemen, and that the advance of Shi’ite Houthi fighters into Sunni areas will provoke sectarian fighting that al Qaeda can exploit.

    Iran has denied Saudi and Yemeni government charges it arms and trains the Houthis.

    CONTINUED FIGHTING

    Air raids to suppress further Houthi shelling struck the group’s stronghold of Saada, near Yemen’s Saudi border, and the small port of Maidi on Wednesday.

    On Thursday, Houthi-linked al-Masirah TV showed fighters in a key district of Aden, and reported that the presidential palace was in their hands.

    n a letter to the United Nations, the Houthis called for international action to stop what they described as Saudi aggression and crimes against the Yemeni people.

    Villagers from Yemen’s northern Hajah province say many residents have left their homes because of the Saudi bombardment and are seeking refuge in other areas where they lack food.

    Most of those displaced are from the Haradh district near the border with Saudi Arabia, an area which has come under heavy artillery and air attack since the Houthis shelled Saudi villages from there.

    Earlier, the Houthis said they had shelled a Saudi air defence facility north of Najran after killing eight people in the town on Tuesday and Wednesday. Another two Saudis were killed by Houthi shells in Jizan province.

    The Arab coalition has been wary of putting boots onto the ground in Yemen, aware of the difficulties of tackling a well entrenched guerrilla army in its own mountainous terrain.

    A Saudi Apache helicopter was damaged in an emergency landing near the border on Thursday, a Gulf official said, denying an earlier report by al-Masirah that the aircraft had been shot down by the Houthis. He said the pilots were safe.

    Fighting across Yemen on Wednesday killed 120 people, mostly civilians, including at least 40 who were trying to flee Aden in a boat that was struck by Houthi shells, rescue workers and witnesses said. (Reuters)

  • SHC rejects Saulat Mirza’s plea for deferment of execution

    According to ARY News, the court while rejecting the petition filed by Nikhat Mirza, said that it could not decide the plea  since the Supreme Court had already passed an order on the matter.

    The court had directed the home secretary and the provincial chiefs of prisons of Sindh and Balochistan on Thursday to submit their respective comments on the petition.

    A division bench headed by Justice Naimatullah Phulpoto had ordered the two provincial governments to ensure filing of comments by the respondent authorities until Friday (today).

    The wife of Saulat Mirza in her petition, pleaded the court to stay the implementation on the death warrant of her husband till the re-investigation into the murder of former KESC chief Shahid Hamid concluded.

    She had also asked the court to include in the probe leaders of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) who were named in her husband’s confessional statement released a few hours before his execution was scheduled to take place on March 19.

    Nikhat had also said her husband would help bring the other accused to justice and added that if Mirza was hanged, the evidence would be buried and no one else would ever dare to speak the truth.

    Former MQM worker Saulat Mirza is set to be hanged on May 12 in Machh Jail after his death warrant issued for a third time on May 2.

    He was sentenced to death in 1999 for murder of then managing director of Karachi Electric Supply Corporation Shahid Hamid, his driver Asif Brohi and gunman Khan Akbar in 1997 in Karachi.

  • PTI leader demands ban on MQM

    (more…)

  • Motorway police foils suicide attempt in Karachi

    (more…)

  • Fehmida Mirza sees Sindh govt as ‘threat’

    In her word with anchorperson Kashif Abbasi in ARY News program ‘Off the Record’, Fehmida Mirza claimed that there is a threat to her family by the Sindh government.

    “There are some people who are bent on expelling us from the party,” she claimed. “Those asking to pick either Peoples Party or my husband should feel ashamed.”

    When asked that her family may also have to face what happened with Mir Murtaza Bhutto, the former speaker extemporarily sought mercy by Almighty Allah.

    Fehmida Mirza castigated that whatever is happening with her family was extremely disheartening and it seems to her as if Mohtarma Benzair Bhutto martyred today.

     

  • Saulat’s wife demands arrest of ‘real murderer’

    Speaking at ARY News program ‘Off The Record’ hosted by Kashif Abbassi, Ms Nighat Mirza said her family had been receiving threat calls from South Africa and Canada.

    She claimed that Saulat Mirza was a driver at the time when KESC’s then chief Shahid Hameed was murdered in 1997.

    To a question, Ms Nighat said Saulat started naming names when the party disowned him after much assurances.

    She recalled that senior MQM leaders used to assure her family that Saulat will be released from jail as proofs against him were weak.

    “After having been ditched by the party, Saulat decided to bring this party practice to a halt and he subsequently wrote confessional statement and named leaders who were behind criminal and terrorism activities,” added his wife.

    She said Saulat had named Babar Ghouri in his confessional statement as Ghouri was behind foul plays in the city.

  • For diabetes control, surgery and intensive lifestyle change about equal

    Researchers followed 40 people with diabetes and poorly controlled blood sugar for one year, giving half of them weight-loss surgery and offering the other half a non-surgical alternative, so-called intensive medical management. Both options produced similar reductions in blood sugar.

    “Individuals motivated to impact their health can have substantial diabetes and weight improvements,” said senior study author Dr. Allison Goldfine, a researcher at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston.

    Worldwide, nearly one in 10 adults had diabetes in 2014, and the disease will be the seventh leading cause of death by 2030, according to the World Health Organization.

    Most of these people have type 2 diabetes, which is associated with obesity and aging and happens when the body can’t properly use or make enough of the hormone insulin to convert blood sugar into energy. Left untreated, diabetes can lead to nerve damage, amputations, blindness, heart disease and strokes.

    While physicians have long recommended exercise, weight loss and a healthy diet to control blood pressure and minimize complications, in recent years a growing number of obese people with diabetes have been offered weight-loss surgery as an alternative way to shed pounds and get blood sugar under control.

    Goldfine and colleagues studied a type of weight-loss surgery known as laparoscopic adjustable gastric banding, a minimally invasive procedure that involves placing an adjustable inflatable belt around the upper portion of the stomach. The band can be made of silicone and tightened by adding saline. It effectively reduces the amount of food the stomach can hold, and people are advised to eat portions about the size of a shot glass post-surgery.

    The study team compared this surgical intervention to aggressive medical management by a team of specialists in endocrinology, diabetes education, exercise physiology, nutrition and behavioral health. These participants had two-hour weekly group sessions for three months as well as calorie-restricted meal plans and supervised exercise sessions.

    At the start of the study, participants were typically obese and about 51 years old. Many of them were taking medication to control blood sugar, lower cholesterol or treat hypertension.

    The main goal of the study was to see which treatment alternative was most effective at helping to lower hemoglobin A1c, a protein in red blood cells that gets coated with sugar over time, making it a gauge of average blood sugar levels in the past few months.

    After one year, six of 18 surgery patients (33 percent) and five of 22 non-surgical patients (23 percent) achieved the target A1c level below 6.5 percent, where diabetes is considered well-controlled.

    Within three months, seven people in each group lost at least 10 percent of their body weight, but after one year the surgical group achieved a greater weight loss than the participants in medical management.

    Because the study was so small, and only followed participants for a year, more research is needed to compare the long-term impact of these treatment options, the researchers acknowledge in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.

    “Success over one year is no guarantee of longer term success, regardless of the intervention,” Sheri Colberg, a professor of exercise science at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, said by email. With both the gastric band surgery and diet and exercise, many people are unable to sustain weight loss over time, said Colberg, who wasn’t involved in the study.

    After two years, there should be a much more dramatic weight loss with surgery compared with diet and exercise, John Dixon, head of clinical obesity research at Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, Australia, said by email. People getting this surgery, if managed appropriately, can lose as much as 20 percent of their body weight by two years and keep it off, said Dixon, who wasn’t involved in the study.

    While the new report offers clear evidence that intensive lifestyle management can achieve improvements in diabetes after one year, this method may not work over the long term to reduce the risk of cardiovascular complications or deaths in patients with diabetes, Dixon said. There is, however, a growing body of evidence suggesting that surgery reduces mortality, he said. -Reuters

  • Pakistani men rated third most ‘sexiest’ in the world

    Yes, you read it right. Leading global dating website ‘MissTravel.com’ has rated Pakistani men as the third most sexiest in the world.

    The website published a list of most desirable nationalities based upon a poll with over 100,000 Americans to find out the hottest of breeds around the world.

    Results suggested Irish men and Armenian women to be ruling the list for their foreign accent and tempting looks.

    The results however brought a surprise to the Pakistani nation as Pakistani men were ranked as the third most alluring species among the entire masculine world.

    The complete list of world’s sexiest nationalities is as follows:

     

    The Sexiest Nationalities – Men

     

    1. Irish

     

    1. Australian

     

    1. Pakistani

     

    1. American

     

    1. English

     

    1. Scottish

     

    1. Italian

     

    1. Nigerian

     

    1. Danish

     

    1. Spanish

     

     

    The Sexiest Nationalities – Women

     

    1. Armenian

     

    1. Barbadian/Bajan

     

    1. American

     

    1. Colombian

     

    1. English

     

    1. Australian

     

    1. Brazilian

     

    1. Filipina

     

    1. Bulgarian

     

    1. Lebanese

  • Modi says China has ‘right’ to seek regional influence

    While ties between the nuclear-armed nations have long been strained over a bitter border dispute, China’s recent push to forge closer ties with countries in India’s backyard has caused some alarm in New Delhi.

    But in an interview with Time published Thursday, Modi said nations have a “natural tendency” to want to increase their influence, which was their right so as long as they respected human rights and international rules.

    “You referred to the increase in Chinese influence in the region and in the world,” he told the magazine in a rare interview.

    “I think it is a very natural tendency for the nations to increase their influence in the international space, as they pursue their international relations with different countries.

    “I firmly believe that with due regard to international rules and regulations, and with full respect for human values, … each country has the right to increase its presence, its impact and influence internationally for the benefit of the global community.”

    Modi, who is due to fly to Beijing next Thursday on his first trip since being elected a year ago, has signalled he will pursue a more muscular foreign policy than India’s previous left-leaning government.

    Since coming to power, Modi has sought to revive India’s role as a champion of South Asia, mindful of how China has forged closer ties in recent years with neighbours such as Sri Lanka, Nepal and the Maldives.

    With Pakistan a long-time ally of Beijing, many observers have said that China is seeking to encircle India with “a string of pearls”.

    Relations between the two countries are dogged by mistrust stemming from a brief, bloody border war in 1962 over the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, areas of which Beijing claims as South Tibet.

    Modi warned China to shed its “expansionist mindset” at an election rally last year. China hit back, saying it “never waged a war of aggression to occupy any inch of land of other countries”.

    But in the interview, Modi said the two countries have shown “great maturity” in recent decades and were committed to “economic cooperation”.

    “It is not a volatile border. Not a single bullet has been fired for over a quarter of a century now. This essentially goes to prove that both countries have learnt from history,” Modi said. -AFP

  • LNG import price to be finalized soon: minister

    While briefing National Assembly Standing Committee on Petroleum, Shahid  Khaqan Abbasi said a team of Qatar has already arrived in Pakistan and is negotiating the rates along with the terms and conditions at which Pakistan is set to import the super-chilled fuel.

    He said the LNG will cost $11.5 per cubic feet including all the expenditures.

    The Petroleum Minister informed committee that if the same amount is spent on producing electricity from LNG instead of furnace oil, there will be an increase of 10 percent in the efficiency of the power plants while increase of about 50 percent will be witnessed when compare to diesel.

    He said that there will be a saving of around $1 billion if all the existing power plants consume LNG instead of furnace oil.

    Shahid Khaqan Abbassi also informed that Independent Power Producers (IPPs) are not co-operating in buying of LNG while Bahria Town, DHA and K-Electric have shown interest in purchase of LNG.