HEC refuses time extension for degrees verification

ISLAMABAD: Higher Education Commission (HEC) has refused to give two months extension to Karachi and Sindh universities for verification of degrees of parliamentarians.

HEC sources told Geo News that Karachi and Sindh universities sent incomplete report to HEC regarding verification of degrees of 214 parliamentarians, which was sent back to universities for further verification. The universities are seeking time extension for two months for comprehensive verification. 

However, HEC has refused to give two months for verification process and directed these institutions to complete the process as early as possible. If it is not possible, send concern record to HEC for verification, sources added.

Study: Test-tube kids face increased cancer risk

A large study suggests a higher rate of childhood cancer among test-tube babies, but researchers say the reason probably has nothing to do with how the infants were conceived.

UN Observes Nelson Mandela International Day

The U.N. General Assembly last year declared July 18th as Nelson Mandela International Day.  It was set as a day to recognize contributions made by the former South African president to a culture of peace and freedom.  At the General Assembly's first observance of the day, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, in recorded remarks, that when he met Nelson Mandela, he was struck by his charisma and charm. 

But, Mr. Ban added, he was most impressed by his humility. "Nelson Mandela's accomplishments came at great personal cost to himself and his family.  His sacrifice not only served the people of his own nation, South Africa, but made the world a better place for all people everywhere.  Today, on the first Nelson Mandela International Day, we thank him for everything that he has done for freedom, for justice, for democracy.  He showed the way.  He changed the world.  We are profoundly grateful," he said.

Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, South Africa's minister of international relations, told the General Assembly that Nelson Mandela's birthday is observed in South Africa by people devoting time to community service. "This service to humanity is what defines the United Nations.  By celebrating Mandela Day, we are reaffirming our commitment to the values and mission for which the United Nations was established," he said.

At a news conference, the South African foreign minister urged U.N. member states to secure a non-permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council for South Africa in the years 2011-2012.

Speaking at the General Assembly on behalf of the United States, Ambassador Brooke Anderson said South Africa, once seen as the world's epitome of racism, has now become its paragon of reconciliation.

"Sometimes it takes great leaders to remind us of the truths that we hold self evident.  Nelson Mandela is such a leader, and we are fortunate to walk the earth in his days.  We hope that this day in his honor will remind all our citizens of his towering, healing and joyful example.  When he won his country's first free election on May 2, 1994, then President-Elect Nelson Mandela called the birth of democracy in South Africa a small miracle.  It was indeed a miracle, but there was nothing small about it.  For that great gift, on behalf of the United States, let me simply say, Mandiba, we thank you," she said.

Nelson Mandela's 92nd birthday is on Sunday.

Mexico Drug Gang Hits Cops with Car Bomb

Members of a northern Mexico drug gang rammed a car bomb into two police patrol trucks Thursday in the border city of Ciudad Juarez on Thursday, killing two officers and a medical technician, and wounding nine people.
Federal police said the attack - which may be one of the first uses of an explosive-packed car in Mexico - was in retaliation for the arrest of a top leader of the La Linea drug gang, Jesus Acosta Guerrero, earlier in the day.
Seven officers and two civilians were wounded in the attack, said a state police source who was not authorized to be quoted by name. He said the compact passenger car had apparently been carrying some kind of explosive or inflammable device when it rammed the police pickup trucks.
Federal police confirmed in a statement that the car rammed the patrol vehicles, but were not immediately available to confirm what, if anything the car was carrying.
Police said the man arrested Thursday, Acosta Guerrero, 35, was the "operations leader" of the la Linea gang, which works for the Juarez drug cartel.
It said he was responsible for at least 25 executions, mainly of rival gang members, and also ordered attacks on police.
Drug gangs have previously attacked Mexican soldiers and law enforcement officers with grenades and powerful rifles, but seldom have been known to use explosives.
Further south in Chihuahua state, where Ciudad Juarez is located, gunmen shot and killed the nephew of the governor-elect during a botched kidnapping, authorities said Thursday.
Mario Medina, nephew of Governor-elect Cesar Duarte, was shot in the back Wednesday as he tried to escape from his assailants in the state capital, also named Chihuahua, state prosecutors' spokesman Eduardo Esparza said.
Medina, 42, was at his parents' business when the assailants tried to kidnap him, Esparza said. Police had not discovered a motive.
More than 1,400 people have been killed in drug violence in Chihuahua state, most of them in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas. There have been more than 23,000 killings throughout the country linked to drug violence since President Felipe Calderon deployed thousands of soldiers and federal agents to drug hotspots in late 2006.
In the northern state of Nuevo Leon, authorities said the bodies of four men who had been shot to death were found on a street in the affluent Monterrey suburb of San Pedro Garza Garcia.
The four men had their hands bound with tape and were blindfolded, the state prosecutor's office said in a statement.
Nuevo Leon has seen an increase in drug violence that authorities say stems from a fight between the Gulf cartel and its former ally, the Zetas gang of hit men.
Mexican and U.S. officials say the Gulf cartel has aligned itself with the Sinaloa and La Familia gangs, which are seeking to wipe out the Zetas in northeastern Mexico.
In the Pacific coast state of Guerrero, police said that they found the body of a man Thursday whose head and fingers had been cut off.
The body was found in a plastic bag in the state capital, Chilpancingo, and the head was found next to it.
In the coastal resort city of Acapulco, also in Guerrero state, drug traffickers left a banner on a boulevard accusing local police of protecting Edgar Valdez Villarreal, a U.S.-born enforcer known as "La Barbie." The banner was signed "B.L.," an apparent reference to the remnants of the Beltran Leyva cartel, which split with Villarreal.
Also Thursday, the Mexican navy reported it found 8 metric tons of a precursor chemical used to make methamphetamines in shipping containers at the Pacific coast seaport of Manzanillo.
Drug traffickers have turned to phenylacetic acid after Mexico effectively banned imports of another precursor, pseudoephedrine.

Latest Adobe Reader Version Distributed from Official Download Site

Adobe began distributing the latest patched version of its Adobe Reader product directly from the official download site. The standard practice until now was to offer the installer for the last single-dot version and update it on first run. Because of its ubiquity, for the past several years Adobe Reader has been one of the preferred target of cyber criminals looking to infect users with malware. The flurry of zero-day remote code execution vulnerabilities discovered in the product has brought Adobe strong criticism from the information security community.

Studies have shown that the vast manjority of users fail to update software applications, leaving themselves exposed to attacks. And to make matters worse, Adobe's policy until two days ago involved distributing full installers only for single-dot versions, like 9.3, from its Download Center, despite the latest patched of the product being 9.3.3.

One year ago, the company explained that making double-dot versions available in the same manner it releases single-dot ones, would delay the release of critical security updates and actually increase the window of exposure for users. This is because over 70 installers for each language/platform pair would need to be generated and tested for each release, implying a much lengthier quality assurance process.

Since then, the developer has settled on a compromise and earlier this year announced that it will deliver double-dot releases as full installers, but only for the most popular language/platform pairs.  For the Windows version this means English, German, Spanish, French and Japanese, for Linux, the same, but without Spanish, while for Mac only English-language installers are available.

Last year Adobe introduced a quarterly security update cycle for its Adobe Reader and Acrobat products, which means that these double-dot installers will be updated every four months if no out-of-band update is released. However, at the end of May, Brad Arkin, Adobe's director of product security and privacy, revealed that monthly security updates are currently being considered. It will be interesting to see how the company handles the full installer issue if that happens.

The latest Adobe Reader double-dot version for Windows can be downloaded from here.

The latest Adobe Reader double-dot version for MAC can be downloaded from here.

The latest Adobe Reader double-dot version for UNIX can be downloaded from here.

Dallas-area mayor, teen daughter are shot dead

A spokeswoman for a Dallas-area city says the mayor and her teenage daughter have been shot dead.

Community Information Officer Sharon Logan says the bodies of 55-year-old Mayor Jayne Peters and her 19-year-old daughter, Corrine Peters, were found at their home in Coppell (kuh-PEL) on Tuesday night.

Logan says in a statement that police discovered the bodies after council members expressed concern that the usually prompt mayor did not show up for a council meeting. Police found no signs of forced entry.

City police made no immediate comment.

Jayne Peters had been mayor of Coppell, 15 miles northwest of Dallas, since 2009. Corinne Peters graduated from Coppell High School this year.

Steinbrenner and the City: A Whirlwind

The life of George Steinbrenner is a ramp across modern New York, a bridge that spans the whirlpool of one man’s spinning psyche and the transformation of America’s biggest, baddest city. He raged. He wept. He won. He brought back prodigals, forgave them their urine tests. He broke laws, promises, lives. He did charity. He grafted his ego onto the back pages of newspapers. He blasted Frank Sinatra through stadium loudspeakers. He championed ordinary New Yorkers, then took them for every last penny.

He has been a part of the city’s landscape since 1973, making a vast fortune with winning teams and by threatening to leave.

“He calls up the next day,” Edward I. Koch said Tuesday, remembering the end of a long negotiation in 1987 that had concluded — or so Mr. Koch thought — with a firm deal to extend the Yankees’ lease on the old stadium. Mr. Koch, then the mayor, had no interest in sports but wanted to make sure that the Yankees did not leave, and so the city agreed to improve parking and road access if the team would sign an extension of its lease.

The mayor was relieved to have the haggling and threats brought to an end. One provision that would continue from the old deal was the city’s 10 percent share of cable television revenue.

“He said, ‘I need two weeks to decide’ on an option on some obscure matter that really didn’t affect the city, and we didn’t care which option he chose,” Mr. Koch said. “So fine. It didn’t matter to the city which one he chose. We had shaken hands.”

Two weeks later, the phone rang. “He called and said he was not going to sign the contract, that the options were not acceptable,” Mr. Koch said. “The reason, we found out, was that in the two-week period, he had negotiated an increase in his cable television contract from $50 million to $500 million, and he didn’t want the city to get 10 percent of $500 million.”

Had there been an actual handshake? “We really had shaken hands,” Mr. Koch said. “It wasn’t a metaphorical handshake. He was a very good businessman. There was also a ruthless quality, and that was a demonstration of it.”

After the Sept. 11 attack, the Yankees began playing “God Bless America” during the seventh-inning stretch; the song is still played at every game.

But members of the Giuliani administration recalled that a few weeks after 9/11, the Yankees balked at using the stadium for a memorial service. Mr. Steinbrenner was reported to have said the field would be damaged by the musicians and choirs. Rudolph W. Giuliani, a frequent guest at the ballpark, exploded, an aide recalled.

“Rudy said, ‘It’s our stadium; send 20 cops up there, get the keys and figure out how the lights work,’ ” the aide said.

The matter was amicably resolved.

AT some point in the 1980s, Mr. Steinbrenner began floating the notion that the Bronx was too wicked a place for a sports franchise to survive. Unless, possibly, someone built the team a new stadium. He made these pronouncements as the team was entering an era of prosperity unmatched in its spangled history.

During the 1950s, in the golden light of Mickey Mantle, the team never drew two million fans. Even in 1961, when Roger Maris hit 61 home runs and the Yankees won the World Series, attendance was just 1.7 million.

It was not until 1976, when the Bronx was on the verge of burning, that the team drew two million spectators. The more homicides in the Bronx, the higher the attendance at Yankee Stadium. Of course, good left-handed relief pitching also helped. Still, Mr. Steinbrenner eventually won the day: one of the wealthiest sports teams on earth would get around $1 billion in public subsidies for a new stadium.

As his health declined, Mr. Steinbrenner existed behind a scrim of bland quotes in news releases. “They should have let him pass from being part of the notoriety into the obscurity of old age,” Mr. Koch said.

He remembered the elation of the city when the Yankees won the World Series in 1978, a troubled time. “We put the trophy in the rotunda at City Hall,” Mr. Koch said. “I knew, as the Romans knew, that the people require circuses and theatrics.”

George Steinbrenner knew it better than anyone.