Sartaj Aziz briefs heads of P5 Missions on India's unprovoked firing on LoC, Working Boundary

ISLAMABAD (Web Desk)  - The Adviser to the Prime Minister on Foreign Affairs, Mr. Sartaj Aziz briefed the heads of Missions of the permanent members (China., France, Russian Federation, UK and USA) of the UN Security Council on Friday afternoon regarding the continued unprovoked ceasefire violations by the Indian occupation forces at the Line of Control (LoC) and the Working Boundary (WB).

The Adviser strongly condemned the reprehensible attack on the civilian bus in the Neelum Valley on 23 November 2016, in complete violation of the 2003 Ceasefire Understanding and international law, especially the international humanitarian law. The Indian occupation forces also fired upon the ambulances that had come to rescue the injured people from the site of the attack. The deliberate targeting of civilian populated areas is condemnable and deplorable and must be investigated.

He referred to persistent ceasefire violations by India, especially during the last two months, resulting in the loss of more than 45 innocent civilian lives and injuries to more than 139 others at the LoC and WB in an effort to divert international attention from the continuing human rights violations in the Indian occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IoK). He stated that the Indian belligerence is a threat to the regional peace and security and can lead to a strategic miscalculation, which would be disastrous for the region.

Sartaj Aziz has also addressed letters to the Foreign Ministers of the permanent members of the UN Security Council, on the escalation at the LoC and Indian ceasefire violations. Copies of these letters were also handed over to the heads of Missions.

The Adviser once again called upon the permanent members of the UN Security Council to play their crucial role in maintaining global peace and security and urge India to immediately put an end to the escalation and bloodshed at the LoC. 

Karachi: Rangers arrest MQM-London activist, recover arms

KARACHI (Dunya News) - Rangers conducted an operation in Garden Shoe Market area of Karachi on Friday and arrested a terrorist Ateeq alias Chinga belonging to Muttahida Qaumi Movement-London (MQM-London) on charges of having links with Indian spy agency RAW, Dunya News reported.

According to Rangers spokesman, the arrested terrorist was involved in extortion and target killing cases in the city. Rangers also recovered huge cache of arms from an under-construction shop in the Garden Shoe Market on the information provided by the arrested terrorist. 

The spokesman further informed that arms stored in the building, included two LMGs, four SMGs, one 22-bore riffle, three 12-bore pistols and 5809 bullets, were to be used in target killing incidents in Karachi on the instruction from top leadership of MQM-London.

Gujranwala: Protest held against Indian aggression on LOC

GUJRANWALA: (Dunya News) – A protest demonstration was on Friday held against Indian aggression on Line of Control (LOC). The demonstrators raised slogans against India and in the favour of Pakistan army on the occasion, reported Dunya News.

The demonstrators were carrying banners and placards on this occasi

The protestors were demonstrating against the Indian aggression in Azad Kashmir. The demonstration was attended by women and children and large numbers. The rally started from Sheranwala Baagh and ended at Lahori Gate.

ISLAMABAD (Dunya News) – Outgoing Chief of the Army Staff (COAS), General Raheel Sharif convened a one-on-one meeting with President Mamnoon Hussain on Friday as he arrived at the President House to attend a farewell dinner.

The president hosted a farewell ceremony for the outgoing army chief tonight which was attended by Chief of Naval Staff (CNS), Admiral Zakaullah, Chief of Air Staff (CAS), Air Vice Marshal Sohail Aman and federal ministers among others. While addressing the gathering, President Mamnoon Hussain said that General Sharif s services for the country would be remembered always and that his role in maintaining security across the country was unmatched.

He further said that the outgoing chief has asserted that targeted operation in Karachi would continue until extremism is eliminated. Earlier in the day, the army chief paid farewell visits to garrisons in Bahawalpur, Multan and Okara.

General Sharif inaugurated an advanced arts school while also visited 10 Corps Headquarters today. Furthermore, the outgoing leader of the military convened a meeting with Ambassador of the United States (US), David Hale who acknowledged General Sharif’s achievements against banned outfits.

Prime Minister (PM) Nawaz Sharif is to choose an army chief out of five names that are under consideration after he concludes his two-day visit to Trukmenistan.

The premier held a meeting with the President of Turkmenistan today and is scheduled to return on Saturday.

On Thursday, General Sharif was hosted a farewell dinner by the Prime Minister at the Prime Minister House.

History won't deny Pakistani efforts over Kashmir dispute: Gilani

SRINAGAR (Dunya News) – Syed Ali Gilani, one of the leaders of All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) has said on Friday that positive efforts by Pakistan over dispute of Kashmir with India would not be denied in history.

In an exclusive talk with Dunya News, Gilani said that Kashmiris would side with Pakistan if Indian government lodged a war against the neighbour. He reported that Indian state-terrorism claimed 98 innocent lives in the valley in past five months.

Over 825 youth have lost eyes to the use of pellet guns, he added. 

Gilani branded Pakistan Army as the ‘Islamic army’.

India has been occupying Kashmir valley for at least seven decades and have fought three wars with Pakistan over the dispute.

Indian government, after separation of the subcontinent, had vowed to have referendum done and act accordingly but nothing has been done until 2016.

NANKANA SAHIB (Dunya News) – At least four people were killed as roof of a house caved in due to cylinder blast in Nankana Sahib today (Saturday). According to details, Malikabad’s locals turned on stove to fight cold and slept after which it exploded late night, causing roof collapse. Mother Allah Rakhi and her three children eight-year-old Azam, seven-year-old Nazim and five-year-old Maria trapped under the rubble.

Getting information about the incident, rescue team arrived at the scene and shifted the victims to hospital where they succumbed to injuries.

Communication between two proteins is what triggers the cell tent to lose its shape and become unanchored, their research found.

This allows the cells to travel to other areas of the body.

The researchers said their findings could help prevent the spread of lung cancer.

Writing in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers from York and the University of Texas describe how the communications centre of a cell - known as the Golgi apparatus - receives a signal from proteins which prompts the movement of membrane sacks inside it.

This movement alters the shape and surface of the cancer cell, allowing it to break free from its moorings and move around freely.

Dr Daniel Ungar, from the University of York's biology department, said it was apt to think of the cancer cell resembling a tent structure.

"It has fixed sides to hold its shape and is firmly anchored to the ground in order to secure its contents.

"In order to move the tent, we have to rearrange its contents and collapse its sides in order to lift it out of its anchored position and carry it away," he said.

He added that a similar process happens with cancer when it spreads - its outer edges are altered leaving it unanchored.

The study found that a protein called Zeb1 was critical to this process and the research team now want to look at how to target the protein without damaging healthy cells, in which the protein also exists.

The researchers only looked at lung cancer cells and do not know if the same process occurs in other cancers.

The infection has been linked to thousands of babies being born with underdeveloped brains.

Some areas have declared a state of emergency, doctors have described it as "a pandemic in progress" and some are even advising women in affected countries to delay getting pregnant.

But there is much we do not know.

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Monkey experiments showed low status alters the immune system in a way that raises the risk of heart disease, diabetes and mental health problems.

One expert said the findings were "terrifically applicable" to people.

The findings, in Science, had nothing to do with the unhealthy behaviours that are more common in poorer groups.

The gulf in life expectancy between the richest and poorest is huge - in the US it is more than a decade for women and 15 years for men.

Part of the explanation is that people from poorer backgrounds are more likely to have a worse lifestyle - including smoking, little exercise and diets containing junk food.

But the latest study goes further to show low status - with all of those other factors stripped out - still has an impact on the body.

Looking at 45 non-human primates allowed scientists to adjust only social status to assess its impact - something impossible to do in people.

The captive Rhesus monkeys - who were all female, unrelated and had never met before - were divided one-by-one into nine new groups of five.

The newest member nearly always ended up at the bottom of the social order and became "chronically stressed", received less grooming and more harassment from the other monkeys.

A detailed analysis of the monkeys' blood showed 1,600 differences in the activity levels of genes involved in running the immune system between those at the top and bottom.

It had the impact of making the immune system run too aggressively in those at the bottom. High levels of inflammation cause collateral damage to the body to increase the risk of other diseases.

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One of the researchers, Dr Noah Snyder-Mackler, told the BBC News website: "It suggests there's something else, not just the behaviours of these individuals, that's leading to poor health.

"We know smoking, eating unhealthily and not exercising are bad for you - that puts the onus on the individual that it's their fault.

"Our message brings a positive counter to that - there are these other aspects of low status that are outside of the control of individuals that have negative effects on health."

Further experiments showed the immune system was not fixed and could be improved, or made worse, by mixing up the social rankings.

Sir Michael Marmot, one of the world's leading experts on health inequalities and based at University College London, said the findings were "extraordinarily interesting" and underpinned much of his own research.

He told the BBC News website: "This is hard science saying there's a plausible biological mechanism that results in clear differences depending where you are in the hierarchy.

"The gateway through which the social environment impacts health is the mind. Whether it is unhealthy behaviours or direct stress, the mind is crucial and this study is lending real credence to that."

While Rhesus macaques do form strict societies, they are far more simplistic that human ones.

But Prof Graham Rook, from University College London, told the BBC Newswebsite: "All the evidence is showing the findings are terrifically applicable to humans."

He pointed to evidence suggesting people at the bottom end up with worse health when the top gets richer, even if they themselves do not get any poorer.

He said: "It is something governments just don't understand; they think people at the bottom have got cars, have got TVs, so compared with people in India they're enormously wealthy.

"But that really isn't the point, they feel they are at the bottom of the heap."

Hierarchies are a fixture of society. However, the researchers believe more can be done to ease the health problems coming from being bottom of the pile.

Dr Snyder-Mackler said: "Status is always relative, but if we could flatten the slope so the differences between the highest and lowest weren't as much, or find ways to focus attention on lower social environments so they are not as 'crappy' we could mediate some of those consequences.

"It's a hard problem that might never be fixed, but it might be possible to make it less worse."

Not only does the study expand the catalogue of known viruses, it also indicates they have existed for billions of years.

The findings were published in the journal Nature.

Few would argue that all living species on Earth are susceptible to viruses – these microscopic parasites are ubiquitous.

But virologists have long suspected that our current view of the diversity of viruses is blinkered – all too often constrained to those causing disease in humans, animals and plants, or to those that we can grow in the laboratory.

A trip to a tropical rainforest or the African savannah gives a snapshot into the incredible diversity of visible life on Earth, but understanding the potentially mind-boggling myriad of minuscule viruses has not been so easy.

Capturing new viruses is not like netting a new species of butterfly – viruses are invisible.

Undeterred by this practical problem an international team was keen to survey invertebrates for new viral species.

Invertebrates are spineless creatures and the group includes many familiar animals, such as insects, spiders, worms and snails. They represent the vast majority of animal species in the world today.

Scientists wanting to work out the totality of viral "life" – although many virologists would argue that viruses are not truly alive – are starting to adopt techniques that reveal their genetic calling cards, revealed in the things they infect.

Just like powerful new telescopes are peering deeper into space, revealing a wealth of hitherto unknown stars, next-generation sequencing techniques are providing new insight into the magnitude of the invisible world of viruses; a world we call the virosphere.

We are familiar with DNA, the "stuff of life" that makes up the blueprint of our genomes. But many viruses use a different chemical to construct their genomes – a substance known as RNA.

Just like DNA, this consists of strings of individual building blocks, or bases; each designated by a different letter: A, C, G and U.

Next generation sequencing allows researchers to quickly determine the sequence of these letters. And if you work out the order of the letters on any chain of RNA, you can determine if it belongs to a virus and whether or not the virus is new.

Its potential for virus discovery is huge.

The research team collected around 220 species of land- and water-dwelling invertebrates living in China, extracted their RNA and, using next-generation sequencing, deciphered the sequence of a staggering 6 trillion letters present in the invertebrate RNA "libraries".

When the researchers analysed this mass of data they realised that they had discovered almost 1,500 new virus species – a whopping number by any measure. Many of these were so distinct that they did not easily fit into our existing virus family tree.

Prof Elodie Ghedin from New York University, who was not directly involved with the study, told the BBC: "This is an extraordinary study providing the largest virus discovery to date.

"It will no doubt remodel our view of the virus world and redraw virus phylogeny.

"This is what happens when you combine a bold and brute force approach with the right technology and the right set of eyes."

Even though some invertebrates carry viruses that can infect humans - like zika and dengue - the study authors do not think that these newly discovered viruses pose a significant risk.

However, this cannot be ruled out entirely, and Prof Ghedin thinks that this is an important issue to address.

"If we have learned anything from these types of true discovery projects is that when we start looking into places we haven’t looked at before, we find an incredible richness that goes beyond what was suspected.

"It also makes a strong case for expanding virus surveillance to invertebrates in our quest to better understand (and predict) emerging viruses," she said.

The research also showed that throughout time viruses have been trading genetic material to create new species – an incredible feat according to Prof Eric Delwart from the University of California, San Francisco, who told the BBC: "It shows a lego-like ability of different viral functional units to be recombined to create new viruses even when they originate from highly divergent viruses. The plasticity of viral genomes continues to amaze."

Not only have these studies expanded our view of the diversity of viruses, they have also provided a more complete picture of virus history, as Prof Edward Holmes from the University of Sydney, who was involved in the study explained: "We have discovered that most groups of viruses that infect vertebrates – including humans, such as those that cause well-known diseases like influenza – are in fact derived from those present in invertebrates."

He also believes that his group's data shows that viruses have been infecting invertebrates for possibly billions of years, raising the prospect that invertebrates are the true hosts for many types of virus.

The researchers hope that next-generation sequencing can pave the way for virus discovery in a variety of other species. And it does not stop there.

Prof Delwart thinks that further analyses of existing next-generation datasets may yield additional virus species unlike any that we have seen before.

If future studies reveal anywhere near this number of new viruses, then we’ve only just scratched the surface. It seems that the virosphere is set to explode.

Jonathan Ball is a professor of virology at Nottingham University. This coming Saturday, he will be taking part in CrowdScience, the new BBC World Service science weekly, which starts with a question from listener Ian in Jordan which is "where did viruses come from?"