WikiLeaks expose

WikiLeaks expose

9/11 dominates US diplomacy

A decade after the Sep 11, 2001 attacks, the dark shadow of terrorism still dominates the United States' relations with the world, said the Times. "They depict the Obama administration struggling to sort out which Pakistanis are trustworthy partners against Al Qaeda, adding Australians who have disappeared in the Middle East to terrorist watch lists, and assessing whether a lurking rickshaw driver in Lahore, Pakistan, was awaiting fares or conducting surveillance of the road to the American Consulate."

3000 cables from Delhi to Washington

Among a cache of a quarter-million State Department cables released by WikiLeaks, 3,038 are from the US embassy in India, but no details were immediately available on the whistleblower website. Other cables pertain to communications from US missions in Islamabad, Colombo and Kathmandu. India was one of the countries reached out by top US diplomats before the much anticipated release of what the New York.

Hacking by Chinese

Another cable cited by the Times said a Chinese contact told the American embassy in Beijing in January that China's Politburo directed the intrusion into Google's computer systems in that country. The Google hacking was part of a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government, it said. They have broken into American government computers and those of Western allies, the Dalai Lama and American businesses since 2002, cables said. 

Saudi worries

Dispatches from early this year quote the monarch of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah, as speaking scathingly about the leaders of Iraq and Pakistan. Speaking to another Iraqi official about Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, King Abdullah said, "You and Iraq are in my heart, but that man is not." The king called Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari the greatest obstacle to that country's progress, the Times said citing a cable. "When the head is rotten," he said, "it affects the whole body."

Nuclear standoff with Pakistan

“They document years of painstaking effort to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon - and of worry about a possible Israeli strike on Iran with the same goal," the Times said. Detailing "a dangerous standoff with Pakistan over nuclear fuel" revealed by Wikileaks, the Times said: "Since 2007, the United States has mounted a highly secret effort, so far unsuccessful, to remove from a Pakistani research reactor highly enriched uranium that American officials fear could be diverted for use in an illicit nuclear device.

GM mosquitoes to fight dengue

GM mosquitoes to fight dengue

Genetically engineered mosquitoes thwart dengue

Fight against dengue would soon become more efficient, as scientists have successfully conducted an outdoor trial of genetically modified mosquitoes to sabotage the dengue spreaders. By the end of the six-month trial, populations of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which spread the dengue virus, had plummeted, reports New Scientist.

The transgenic mosquitoes

"It's a proof of principle, that it works," said Angela Harris of the Mosquito Control and Research Unit on the Caribbean island of Grand Cayman, where the trial took place. The MCRU conducted the trial with Oxitec, the company in Oxford that bred the GM mosquitoes. Oxitec breeds millions of males carrying an altered gene called tTA, which they pass down when they mate with females. 

A ‘self-destruct’ gene

The lethal gene overcomes the gene-reading machinery of larva and pupae, preventing them from growing properly and causing them to die before adulthood, breaking the insects'' life cycle. The researchers measured depletion of the population through weekly checks on eggs laid by the females in jam-jar-sized pots that were randomly dispersed throughout the trial plot. 

The experiment

For the first three months or so, the proportion of pots containing at least one egg gradually rose, reaching a peak of more than 60 per cent. But by the end of the experiment the proportion had fallen to 10 per cent.

Man over nature?

The researchers concluded that the number of females laying eggs nosedived because most were dying as larvae. The resources consumed by the doomed larvae and pupae before they die vie with normal rivals for resources, which helped to reduce the population.