Legal experts’ remarks on removal of Musharraf name from ECL

KARACHI: The Supreme Court of Pakistan could extend the suspension of Sindh High Court orders for 15 more days in which the Sindh High Court ordered lifting travel ban on former military dictator Pervez Musharraf, legal experts said on Thursday.

The SHC while directing the government to lift travel ban on Musharraf further ruled that implementation of its order—removal of accused name from the Exit Control List (ECL)--- be suspended for 15-days so that the government may file appeal before the apex court.

“It seems the ball is now in the court of Supreme Court as it has to make a final decision,” says Justice (retd) Wajihuddin, former judge of the top court.

Eminent lawyer SM Zafar said that the Musharraf’s path to travel abroad will be clear if the government didn’t move the apex court against SHC decision.

Justice (retd) Tariq Mehmood said that although the reasons that were stated to put Musharraf on ECL were not substantial, the issue is now once again in the government’s hand.

Another law expert Babar Sattar said that the government will have to make a legal and political decision to resolve the imminent issue.

Kuwait to hire military experts from Pakistan

 

ISLAMABAD: The Kuwait government has announced the opening of its defence office in Islamabad under its diplomatic mission here and the Pakistan government has been formally informed about the decision. The Gulf state will also hire military experts from Pakistan.
The visa restriction on Pakistan nationals by Kuwait is also being removed next month. Kuwait will be the fourth country of the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member countries that is opening its Defence Wing in Islamabad.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Oman have their Defence Attaches in Pakistan while Bahrain and Qatar are without defence wings in Pakistan.The Kuwaiti Ambassador to Pakistan, Nawaf Abdulaziz Alenzi, has left for Kuwait to have further discussions with his government since the Kuwaiti government has decided to enhance cooperation with Pakistan in various fields.

Kuwait placed restrictions on visit visas from Pakistan about six years ago and since then the export of manpower to Kuwait had become minimal.Highly-placed sources told The News on Thursday that new dimensions of cooperation between Pakistan and Kuwait had conspicuous significance as more than 130,000 immigrants from Pakistan were rendering services in the Emirate.

Kuwait has acquired the services of more than 200 doctors from Pakistan in recent months and it is also planning to hire the services of more doctors from Pakistan within a couple of weeks. The process for that would start early next month.

Kuwait has also planned to engage the services of military experts for imparting training to its army consisting of more than 11,000 personnel. The defence wing of the embassy will greatly help in picking suitable experts from retired officers/trainers.

Kuwait is among the countries that had generously provided assistance to Pakistan in difficult times and in different fields.

First, the Nawaz Sharif government actively supported Kuwait when Iraq invaded the country and occupied it. The then army chief General (retd) Mirza Aslam Beg was keen to support Saddam Hussain’s forces that had invaded Kuwait but Nawaz Sharif ruled him out and decided to support Kuwait’s liberation. Kuwait had also been providing assistance to Pakistan in the supply of petroleum products in the past.

It is understood that once the restriction for visas relax, Kuwait will prefer to import skilled workers from Pakistan. Such export of manpower will greatly help in improving the economy of Pakistan and also help in enhancing the foreign exchange reserves, the sources said.

Kuwait belongs to the group of the GCC that is siding with Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain, the sources said.

Experts decode germs' DNA to fight food poisoning

WASHINGTON: Chances are you've heard of mapping genes to diagnose rare diseases, predict your risk of cancer and tell your ancestry. But to uncover food poisonings?

The nation's disease detectives are beginning a program to try to outsmart outbreaks by routinely decoding the DNA of potentially deadly bacteria and viruses.

The initial target is listeria, the third-leading cause of death from food poisoning and bacteria that are especially dangerous to pregnant women. Already, the government credits the technology with helping to solve a listeria outbreak that killed one person in California and sickened seven others in Maryland.

"This really is a new way to find and fight infections," said Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "One way to think of it is, is it identifying a suspect by a lineup or by a fingerprint?"

Whole genome sequencing, or mapping all of an organism's DNA, has become a staple of medical research. But in public health, it has been used more selectively, to investigate particularly vexing outbreaks or emerging pathogens, such as a worrisome new strain of bird flu.

For day-to-day outbreak detection, officials rely instead on decades-old tests that use pieces of DNA and aren't as precise.

Now, with genome sequencing becoming faster and cheaper, the CDC is armed with $30 million from Congress to broaden its use with a program called advanced molecular detection. The hope is to solve outbreaks faster, foodborne and other types, and maybe prevent infections, too, by better understanding how they spread.

"Frankly, in public health, we have some catching up to do," said the CDC's Dr. Christopher Braden, who is helping to lead the work.

As a first step, federal and state officials are rapidly decoding the DNA of all the listeria infections diagnosed in the U.S. this year, along with samples found in tainted foods or factories.

It's the first time the technology has been used for routine disease surveillance, looking for people with matching strains who may have gotten sick from the same source.

If this pilot project works, the CDC says it sets the stage to eventually overhaul how public health laboratories around the country keep watch on food safety, and to use the technology more routinely against other outbreaks.

"Genome sequencing really is the ultimate DNA fingerprint," said George Washington University microbiologist Lance Price, who uses it to study the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and says the CDC's move is long overdue.

Especially in foodborne outbreaks, the technology will increase investigators' ability to nab the right culprit, he said. The faster that happens, the fewer people may get sick.

"This is going to change everything as far as source attribution," Price added. "Recalls are expensive, the industry doesn't like them," and they've got to be accurate.

Today's standard tests sometimes miss linked cases or provide false leads. For example, U.S. officials in 2012 initially thought a salmonella outbreak in the Netherlands, associated with smoked salmon, was linked to cases here. Later sequencing showed the bugs were different.

"The current methods of subtyping salmonella aren't very good," said epidemiologist David Boxrud of the Minnesota Department of Health, part of a pilot Food and Drug Administration network that has begun sequencing that germ and certain others when they're discovered in food. State labs in Arizona, Florida, Maryland, New York, Virginia and Washington also participate.

Sequencing also promises to reveal drug resistance and how virulent a germ is more quickly than today's tests, and track how it's spreading from one person to another through tiny genetic changes that act like footprints.

Key to making it work is the computing power of a massive federal database being used to store the gene maps, said Duncan MacCannell, the CDC's senior adviser for bioinformatics. It's one thing to analyze bacterial DNA culled from a few dozen sick people during an outbreak, and another to compare samples from thousands.

Until recently, the CDC didn't have the "tools and approaches to make sense of this much data," he said.

The listeria project began as officials were investigating some sick Maryland newborns and their mothers. Genome sequencing showed those cases were linked to a California death, helping investigators determine which foods to focus on, said Dr. Robert Tauxe, CDC's leading foodborne disease sleuth.

Standard tests prompted recall of the FDA's suspect, a brand of Hispanic-style cheese. Last month, the government announced that sequencing also confirmed listeria from the recalled cheese matched germs from the patients.

"We expect to be able to match more and more of what we find in people to what we find in food," as the project grows, Tauxe said.

 

Track-II experts call India, Pakistan to move swiftly on key issues

NEW DELHI: An India-Pakistan Track II diplomacy initiative onFriday sent out a message to Islamabad and New Delhi, pressing on the new Indian government which emerges in April elections, to continue the positive initiatives taken under previous governments.

“Islamabad and New Delhi must move forward on a menu of outstanding items in order to move the region out from the shadows of instability, human insecurity and lost opportunities in trade, energy, information connectivity,” said a joint resolution issued after the 4th Delhi Dialogue arranged by the Jinnah Institute and Centre for Dialogue and Reconstruction, which concluded in New Delhi on Friday.

The dialogue brought together journalists, policy experts, academics, advocates, former military officials and diplomats from India and Pakistan for two days of intense deliberations to discuss a wide range of outstanding issues between both countries.

The session on Afghanistan saw support for an Afghan-led and Afghan-owned reconciliation process in Afghanistan and recognised that a peaceful Afghanistan is essential for regional stability.

It recommended that serious efforts be made towards exploring the possibility of Pakistan granting India overland transit rights for trade with Afghanistan and India granting overland transit rights to Pakistan for other South Asian countries.

Urging both countries not to let competing interests in Afghanistan negatively impact bilateral relations, it also urged the regional countries to initiate a dialogue on adopting a non-interventionist policy.

“We urge both countries to engage with each other to clarify each other’s apprehensions on a post-2014 Afghanistan. We recommend that opportunities for mutual cooperation in the development and reconstruction of Afghanistan be explored, especially under the aegis of Saarc,” said the resolution.

On Kashmir, the resolution agreed that the bilateral dialogue should be irreversible and uninterruptable and urged both India and

Pakistan to fully implement all agreed CBM’s cooperate on outstanding issues and address each other’s concern on key issues like “Kashmir as well as terrorism with the aim of resuming the stalled bilateral dialogue.”

Both governments were urged to urgently take up discussions on Jammu and Kashmir so that a solution that is acceptable to India,Pakistan and the people of Kashmir on both sides of the Line of Control can be found.

Of importance was a recommendation that Non-Discriminatory Market Access be granted by Pakistan to India at the earliest, urging India to remove all non-tariff barriers to facilitate trade between both countries.

A statement issued later by the Jinnah Institute said: “As South Asia and the wider region grapples with the menace of transnational conflict, a renewed vigor is required towards resuming the stalled bilateral dialogue between Pakistan and India participants agreed at the recently concluded Delhi Dialogue on Friday.”

Against the backdrop of the upcoming Indian elections, participants agreed that expected victory of a Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) could have a transformative effect on bilateral relations between both the countries.

Despite skepticism, participants unanimously hoped that the new government in New Delhi will build upon earlier initiatives taken under previous governments and expeditiously pursue the revival of the stalled dialogue process with Pakistan.

The Pakistani delegation impressed upon its Indian counterparts that unlike India, a cross-party consensus existed in Pakistan on improving relations with India and resolving all outstanding issues. They said that recent overtures of the Pakistan government presented an opportunity which must be reciprocated by India.

The participants also analyzed last year’s ceasefire violations and called on both Indian and Pakistani military establishments to regularise high level staff and field commander meetings to resolve any future untoward incidents on the LoC.

Noting that people-to-people contacts were essential in improving relations between the two nuclear armed neighbours, the dialogue participants recommended the extension of the one year multiple entry visa policy towards all category of travelers, particularly media-persons, artists, students and academics.

They urged both governments to ensure that the Wagah-Attari border is opened for 24 hour operations and both governments should explore opportunities for opening all economically feasible land routes between India and Pakistan for trade and travel, particularly Ganda Singhwala-Ferozpur, Muktasar-Fazilka and Khokhrapar-Munabao.

The Pakistan delegation comprised former ambassador Sherry Rehman, parliamentarian Shafqat Mahmood, former ambassador Aziz Ahmad Khan, former DG ISPR Lt Gen Athar Abbas, Syed Babar Ali, Arshad Zuberi, senior journalists Zahid Hussain, Mariana Baabar, Amir Mateen and Ammara Durrani.

The India delegation comprised former foreign secretary Salman Haider, former Ambassadors Jayant Prasad and Sharat Sabharwal, Dr Rajmohan Gandhi, Siddharth Vardarajan, Prem Shankar Jha, former Lt General Syed Ata Hasnain, Jyoti Malhotra, Suhasini Haidar, Gul Muhammad Wani, Sunil Sethi, and Syeda Hammeda.