Former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf Admitted To Hospital, Critical

 Former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf was on Thursday taken to a Karachi hospital after he fainted and his condition turned critical, media reports said.

Mr Musharraf was rushed to the PNS. Shifa Hospital in Karachi, Dunya News reported.

Mr Musharraf, 72, has had health issues earlier too, the report said. In 2014, he was taken to a hospital for a heart condition the day he was due to appear in a court.

US Mayor Apologizes For Ambulance Bill Sent To Family Of Boy Shot By Police

 The mayor of Cleveland apologized on Thursday after an ambulance bill was sent to the family of Tamir Rice, the black 12-year-old who was shot by police while holding a toy gun.

Rice's November 2014 death at the hands of a white officer in the US state of Ohio shocked Americans and the $500 bill sent to his family has only stoked further outrage.

"Asking Tamir's family to pay for his ambulance is heartless. Cleveland should drop this fee," Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said on Twitter.
Local media reported that lawyers for the Rice family said the bill only added "insult to homicide."

Faced with the snowballing controversy, Mayor Frank Jackson called a news conference on Thursday during which he admitted a mistake had been made.

"We will start off again apologizing to the Rice family if this has added to any grief or pain they may have" he said, surrounded by other city leaders.

Together they explained that the bill was sent under routine procedure and that it was meant for the boy's insurance company, not his family.

Surveillance video showed Rice was fatally shot within seconds of a patrol car arriving on the scene as he began to pull the toy gun out of his waistband. The boy died hours later in hospital.

The shooting followed a series of high-profile incidents of police violence involving black Americans and helped fuel protests against what some say is white police impunity despite discrimination against blacks.

In December, a grand jury declined to bring criminal charges against the Cleveland police officers involved in the fatal shooting.

ISIS opens new 'help desk' for militants to evade tracking

 ISIS has reportedly opened a new technical "help desk" that instructs terrorists on how to evade electronic surveillance and prevent them from committing security mistakes that could endanger their lives.

The Electronic Horizon Foundation (EHF) was launched on January 30 as a joint effort of several of the top ISIS cyber security experts, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) said in a new report.

While researchers have previously uncovered an ISIS "help desk" and 34-page manual that help extremists encrypt their communications, MEMRI said the EHF takes these services to a new level.

"Jihadis have long sought technical information, which has been confined in the past to various password-protected jihadi forums," The Hill quoted the MEMRI report as saying.

"However, the freedom and ease by which they can now obtain that information is alarming, especially when such information is shared over private and secure channels," it said.

North Korea Says South's Pulling Out Of Industrial Zone 'Declaration Of War'

 North Korea said it was kicking out all South Koreans from the jointly run Kaesong industrial zone today, calling the South's move to suspend operations, in retaliation for Sunday's rocket launch by the North, a "declaration of war".

The North declared the industrial park, run by the rivals as a symbol of cooperation for more than a decade, a military control zone, the agency that handles its ties with Seoul said, according to the official KCNA news agency.

Dozens of South Korean trucks were already returning across the border earlier in the day, laden with goods and equipment, after the South said it was pulling out.

"Unpardonable is the puppet group's act of totally suspending the operation in (Kaesong), finding fault with the DPRK's H-bomb test and launch of a satellite," the North's Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea said, referring to South Korea.

Isolated North Korea regularly dismisses the South as a puppet of the United States and just as regularly accuses both of acts of war against it.

DPRK is short for the North's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. North Korea tested what it said was a hydrogen bomb on Jan. 6 and on Sunday launched a rocket, putting a satellite into orbit.

The United States, Japan and South Korea said Sunday's launch was a ballistic missile test, and like last month's nuclear test, a violation of U.N. resolutions. The U.S. Senate voted unanimously in favour of tougher sanctions.

North Korea ordered South Koreans out of the zone by late afternoon, forbidding them to take anything other than personal belongings, KCNA said. South Korea said after the North's announcement that its top priority was the safe return of all of its people.

Russia Says US Planes Bombed Syria's Aleppo On Wednesday, Not Russian Ones: Report

Russia's Defence Ministry said today that US aircraft had carried out a bombing attack on the Syrian town of Aleppo on Wednesday, which the US later said had been carried out by Russian planes, the TASS agency reported.

TASS cited a defence ministry spokesman as saying that two US A-10 ground attack aircraft, flying from Turkey, had bombed objects in Aleppo.

The spokesman also said that a Pentagon spokesman had accused Russia of bombing two hospitals in the town on Wednesday.

US, South Korea, Japan Boost Data-Sharing In Response To North Korea Threat

The top military officers from the United States, South Korea and Japan said they agreed at a meeting on Wednesday to step up information-sharing and coordination of security efforts in light of increasing North Korean nuclear and missile threats.

The three chiefs of defense issued a joint statement calling North Korea's fourth nuclear test on Jan. 6 and Sunday's "long range missile launch" direct violations of UN resolutions and "serious provocations against the international community."

They said they agreed to firmly respond to Pyongyang's actions through "trilateral information sharing" and "to coordinate further on mutual security issues to enhance peace and stability in the region."

US Marine Corps General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, met in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, with Admiral Katsutoshi Kawano, head of Japan's Self-Defense Forces, while Army General Lee Sun-Jin, chairman of the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff, joined them by video teleconference.

Why Some Dogs Are Better At Problem-Solving Decoded

Dogs' inhibitory control, or the ability to inhibit or regulate attentional or emotional responses, may play a role in their individual differences in physical problem-solving task performance. (Representational Image)

Playing with objects may help dogs learn about their environment, similar to how it helps human infants, say scientists who have found that inhibitory control may affect physical problem solving in pet dogs.

Dogs' inhibitory control, or the ability to inhibit or regulate attentional or emotional responses, may play a role in their individual differences in physical problem-solving task performance, researchers said.

Researchers from the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna studied the effects of pet dogs' experiences interacting with the physical environment and their individual differences in inhibitory control on their physical problem-solving ability.

As many as 40 pet Border Collie dogs were assigned to three different conditions, and tested in an intensive series of inhibitory control tasks, such as wait-for-treat, and cognitive measures, such as size constancy over a period of 18 months.

Researchers found that differences in previous object-related experiences do not explain variability in performance in problem solving tasks.

Depending on the cognitive task, inhibitory control had a positive or a negative effect on performance and turned out to be the best predictors of individual performance in the different tasks.

According to researchers, dogs likely do not transfer knowledge about physical rules from one physical problem-solving task to another, but rather approach each task as a novel problem.

In addition, individual performance in these tasks may be influenced by the subject's level of inhibitory control.

Researchers suggest that studying the interplay between inhibitory control and problem-solving performance may make an important contribution to our understanding of individual and species differences in physical problem-solving performance.

The findings were published in the journal PLOS ONE.