Chairman Pakistan Peoples Party Bilawal Bhutto Zardari has said that life and property of the people should be protected at all costs.He was addressing a high level party meeting in Karachi on Sunday.He said the issue of sit-in at Faizabad Interchange ...

LONDON � About 11 percent of medicines in developing countries are counterfeit and likely responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of children from diseases like malaria and pneumonia every year, the World Health Organization said Tuesday.

It's the first attempt by the U.N. health agency to assess the problem. Experts reviewed 100 studies involving more than 48,000 medicines. Drugs for treating malaria and bacterial infections accounted for nearly 65 percent of fake medicines.

WHO's director-general said the problem mostly affects poor countries. Between 72,000 and 169,000 children may be dying from pneumonia every year after receiving bad drugs. Counterfeit medications might be responsible for an additional 116,000 deaths from malaria mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, according to scientists at the University of Edinburgh and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine commissioned by the WHO.

"Imagine a mother who gives up food or other basic needs to pay for her child's treatment, unaware that the medicines are substandard or falsified, and then that treatment causes her child to die," WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement. "This is unacceptable."

Counterfeit drugs include products that have not been approved by regulators, fail to meet quality standards or deliberately misrepresent an ingredient, according to WHO, which published the two reports.

In 2013, WHO set up a voluntary global monitoring system for substandard and fake drugs and has received reports of about 1,500 problematic medicines including drugs that claim to treat heart problems, diabetes, fertility problems, mental health issues and cancer. WHO also reported problems of fake vaccines for diseases including yellow fever and meningitis.

WHO credited the database with saving the lives of several dozen children in Paraguay after an analysis showed they were affected by a contaminated drug contained in a cough medicine that had killed 60 adults in Pakistan several months earlier in 2013.

WHO said the cases of fake medicines it found are only "a small fraction" and that problems may be going unreported. The agency estimated countries are spending about $30 billion on counterfeit drugs.

Source: Voice of America

Royal Navy of Oman Commander Rear Admiral Abdullah Bin Khamis Al-Raisi called on Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Zafar Mahmood Abbasi in Islamabad on Tuesday.They exchanged matters of mutual interest.Earlier, the Commander Royal Navy of Oman also inspecte...

PENTAGON � The United States has tripled the number of air-delivered munitions in Afghanistan this year and is training hundreds of soldiers who will soon start advising the Afghan army in combat areas outside of military bases.

U.S. General John Nicholson, the top commander of international forces in the country, said via teleconference from Afghanistan Tuesday that the increased air power has allowed Afghans to more aggressively pursue the Taliban.

The increased air power is made possible by new authorities granted to U.S. forces in Afghanistan under the administration of President Donald Trump. Under former president Barack Obama's administration, U.S. airstrikes were limited to cases of self-defense when the Taliban were in close enough range to present a direct threat to American and Afghan forces.

As of October of this year, the U.S. had conducted more than 2,700 airstrikes in Afghanistan, Resolute Support spokesman Army Lt. Col. Kone Faulkner told VOA.

1,000 US soldiers outside the wire

During the briefing, Nicholson outlined a major effort aimed at improving the Afghan offensive that is expected to begin when the weather warms next year.

The U.S. Army is training 800-1,000 soldiers, whom Nicholson calls volunteers, for its first security force assistance brigade.

The Army will produce a total of six security force assistance brigades to advise the Afghan army at the battalion level, known as the "kandak" level in Afghanistan. U.S. military officials say this strategy has been successful with American troops who have been advising Afghanistan's special forces at a lower level during the past two years.

This will enable us to help the Afghans with their offensive operations simultaneously in multiple corps, Nicholson said.

The general said the advisers will operate in teams that will be backed up by additional American enablers, in order to protect the U.S. forces and their Afghan counterparts.

The new strategy, however, puts hundreds more Americans at risk of getting caught in combat as they advise their Afghan partners in the field.

The goal is to secure portions of the population who are living in contested areas before the upcoming Afghan election. The government controls about 64 percent of the population, the Taliban controls about 12 percent of the population and the other 24 percent live in contested areas.

Trump's Afghan strategy

The new Afghanistan strategy Trump announced in August adds about 3,000 American troops and additional NATO coalition partners to the Afghan fight, the bulk of whom will advise and assist Afghan forces down to the brigade level.

The strategy also aims to focus on major players in the region, including India, China, Russia, Iran and Pakistan. U.S. leaders have expressed frustration over Pakistan's seeming unwillingness to prevent terrorists from using their territory to escape pressure in neighboring Afghanistan.

Tuesday, when asked if the coalition has seen any significant change in Pakistan cracking down on militants crossing into Afghanistan, General Nicholson told Pentagon reporters, "We are hoping to see those changes, we are hoping to work together with the Pakistanis going forward to eliminate terrorists who are crossing" the border.

Source: Voice of America

The top U.S. general in Afghanistan said on Tuesday that he had not seen a change in Pakistan's support for militants so far, despite President Donald Trump taking a tougher line against Islamabad.U.S. officials have long been frustrated by what they s...