Muslim population growth to outstrip non-Muslims: report

The worlds Muslim population will grow twice as fast as the non-Muslim population in the next 20 years, when Muslims are expected to make up more than a quarter of the global population, a study published Thursday predicts.

Using fertility, mortality and migration rates, researchers at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life project a 1.5-per cent annual population growth rate for the worlds Muslims over the next two decades, and just 0.7 per cent growth each year for non-Muslims. The study, called The Future of the Global Muslim Population, projects that in 2030 Muslims will make up 26.4 per cent of the worlds population, which is expected to total around 8.3 billion people by then. That marks a three-percentage-point rise from the 23.4-per cent share held by Muslims of the globes estimated 6.9 billion people today, the study says. More than six in 10 followers of Islam will live in the Asia-Pacific region in 2030, and Pakistan, which has seen a rise in radical Islam in recent months, will overtake Indonesia as the worlds most populous Muslim nation. In Africa, the Muslim population of the sub-Saharan country of Nigeria will be greater than that of Egypt in 20 years, the study projects. Israel will become nearly a quarter Muslim. The Palestinian territories have one of the highest growth rates in the world.And in Europe, Pew predicts the Muslim population will grow by nearly a third in 20 years, from 44.1 million people, or six per cent of the regions inhabitants in 2010, to 58.2 million or eight per cent of the projected total population by 2030.Some European Union (EU) countries will see double-digit percentages of Muslims in their population by 2030: Belgiums Muslim population is projected to rise from six per cent to 10.2 per cent over the next 20 years, while Frances is expected to hit 10.3 per cent in 2030, up from 7.5 per cent today.In Sweden, Pew predicts Muslims will comprise nearly 10 per cent of the population compared to less than five per cent today.Britains Muslim population is predicted to rise from 4.6 per cent to 8.2 per cent by 2030, and 9.3 per cent of the population of Austria is forecast to be Muslim by then, compared to less than six per cent of residents of the alpine country now.Russia, which is not a member of the EU, will continue to have the largest Muslim population in absolute terms in Europe in 2030, with 18.6 million Muslims or 14.4 per cent of the total population of the vast country.The United States, meanwhile, is projected to have a larger absolute number of Muslims by 2030 than any European countries other than Russia and France, but proportionally, Muslims will make up a much smaller percentage of the population of the United States than they do in Europe. The Muslim share of the US population is projected to grow from its current level of less than one percent to 1.7 per cent by 2030, making Muslims roughly as numerous as Jews or Episcopalians are in the United States, the study says.

US to Send 1,400 Extra Troops to Afghanistan

WASHINGTON: The United States has ordered an additional 1,400 Marines to southern Afghanistan to preempt a Taliban spring offensive, despite a planned troop drawdown starting in July, the Pentagon said Thursday.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Wednesday “approved additional Marine forces to southern Afghanistan to exploit and consolidate gains already achieved and apply pressure on the enemy during the winter campaign,” spokesman Colonel David Lapan told media.

The Marine contingent could start arriving within weeks and would only be on the ground for a short mission of less than 90 days, defense officials said.

The move was designed to cement tentative gains against the mostly Pashtun insurgency, with the hope of bolstering recently cleared areas between Kandahar city and Helmand province, officials said.

The 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, currently based on a ship in the Indian Ocean, would be heading to Afghanistan for the “winter campaign,” the head of US Central Command, General James Mattis, said later in a statement.

There are currently about 97,000 American troops in Afghanistan, along with 45,000 forces from other countries, and officials said the new Marines would not put the total number of US forces above the limit of 100,000 authorized by President Barack Obama.

“These forces are within the current authority,” Lapan said.

Obama last month said the US war strategy in Afghanistan was “on track,” but warned that gains won by his surge strategy at a heavy cost in casualties remained fragile and reversible.

That assessment came one year after Obama announced both a surge of 30,000 reinforcements to Afghanistan and gradual troop drawdown beginning in July 2011.

The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the Marine reinforcements, said that commanders were considering an even larger boost of up to additional 3,000 troops. Pentagon officials could not confirm that detail.

The new Marine deployment comes as a surprise given the preparations for withdrawals by the United States and its allies in Afghanistan, where a war against Taliban insurgents has dragged on for more than nine years, with nearly 2,300 coalition deaths, about two-thirds of them Americans.

US commanders are under pressure to show clear progress in Afghanistan in 2011 and successfully counter any upswing in Taliban attacks in the spring, or else face fresh public doubts about the course of the war.

Defense officials insisted the Marine deployment did not reflect difficulties in the war but was aimed at hammering home progress at a time when the insurgents usually pull back to prepare for fighting after the winter.

US officials see the American-led campaign in the south as make-or-break for the war effort, pinning their hopes on undermining the Taliban in its heartland.

The White House strategy review issued last month said progress in Afghanistan was evident in gains by Afghan and coalition forces against Taliban bastions around Kandahar city and in the Helmand province.

But the study was short on details, and did not include pointed criticisms of the Pakistani and Afghan governments that have featured in US government documents leaked in recent months.

Though pledging to work with Afghanistan to improve governance and reduce corruption, the review said little about countrywide graft, including in President Hamid Karzai’s government, which many analysts see as endemic to Afghanistan and a serious threat to the US-led war effort.

Madonna most talked about celebrity

LONDON: Madonna has emerged as the most talked about celebrity in the past ten years, grabbing most print space in newspapers and magazines.

The 52-year-old Material Girl beat off competition from TV mogul Simon Cowell and singer Robbie Williams to clinch the top spot, with her name appearing in UK
publications and magazines 46,000 times since the year 2000.

Cowell, 51, came second with 29,888 mentions and with a score of 28,563 ”Escape” hitmaker Williams took the third place in the study for website Clickliverpool.

Supermodel Kate Moss ranked fourth, being named 28,056 times, while pop princess Britney Spears came fifth with 27,588 score.

Despite constantly being in news for her personal and professional life, former Spice Girl Victoria Beckham ranked only sixth with a score of 25,833, while her soccer star husband David followed with 24,953.

King of Pop Michael Jackson (24,688), Beatles legend Paul McCartney (21,556) and Australian pop star Kylie Minogue (19,694) rounded off the top ten.

Lahore: IJT students protest turn nasty

A protest demonstration held by scores of Islami Jamiat Tulaba students and teachers turned nasty when some of the students barged into the Punjab Assembly premises, News Trends reported Wednesday.

The protest was staged at the Mall Road against the setting up of Board of Governors at all the institutes with the students calling upon the high-ups to save their study year.

When sensed the indifferent attitude of the officials concerned, the students marched onto the PA and damaged the walk through gate.
However, the charged students could not make into the main hall for heavy contingents of police baton-charged them and made them move to The Mall. The students then vent their ire on the vehicles parked over there and torched two of them.

Americans sicker but English die quicker says study

LONDON/CHICAGO: Older Americans suffer more chronic disease than their English counterparts, but the English die earlier, according to a study on Thursday that could

revive debate about whose health system is better.



Researchers at the U.S.-based RAND Corp and Britain’s Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) found that while Americans aged 55 and older have higher rates of chronic disease, they live longer than elderly people who get ill in England.



“If you get sick at older ages, you will die sooner in England than in the United States,” said James Smith, an economist with RAND in Santa Monica, California, who co-authored the study with James Banks and Alastair Muriel of the IFS.



“It appears that at least in terms of survival at older ages with chronic disease, the medical system in the United States may be

Less chance of depression among those who exercise: Research

People who take regular exercise during their free time are less likely to have symptoms of depression and anxiety, a research claims.
Researchers from the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London teamed up with academics from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health and the University of Bergen in Norway to conduct the study. Participants were asked how often, and to what degree, they undertook physical activity in their leisure time and during the course of their work. Researchers also measured participants’ depression and anxiety using the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale. People who were not active in their leisure time were almost twice as likely to have symptoms of depression compared to the most active individuals, the study found.

Alcohol more dangerous than crack or heroin: report

Alcohol is more dangerous than such illegal drugs as crack cocaine and heroin, a British study has found.
Researchers compared several drugs — including alcohol, ecstasy, marijuana, cocaine and heroin — against each other and measured the effects on both the individual and society. In terms of the effects on the individual, the British experts analyzed how addictive each drug is, and how much damage it causes to the body.
In terms of a drug’s effect on society, the researchers analyzed such factors as how much it costs the health care and prison systems. Overall, alcohol was the most harmful drug, followed by heroin and crack cocaine. Heroin, crack and methamphetamine were found to be the most harmful to the individual. Alcohol, heroin, and crack were the most harmful to others. A Canadian expert said he is not surprised by the findings, and expects the results would be similar if the study was conducted in Canada. Alcohol dwarfs those other drugs, said Dr. Marvin Krank, an addictions expert from the department of psychology at University of B.C. Krank said the accessibility of alcohol weighs largely in its ability to cause so much damage. In one of his studies, Krank and his colleagues followed 1,300 Canadian students for three years. During the most recent survey, when the students were in Grade 11, researchers found that 80 per cent of the students said they had drunk alcohol within the past year, and that 60 per cent had been drunk within the same time frame. It’s so widely available, it’s socially accepted; and in our college campuses, it’s considered a rite of passage, he said. Certainly, having drugs illegal makes them more difficult to obtain and putting a stigma on them makes them less likely to be used. The British research, published Monday in the medical journal Lancet, established a grading system in which each drug received a grade between zero and 100. When considering the overall effect of the drug — both the harm on an individual and on society as a whole — alcohol scored 72 points, while heroin and crack scored 55 and 54 respectively.

Higher education tied to rare form of diabetes

People who attend college may be at greater risk of developing a less common form of diabetes associated with autoimmunity, new study findings suggest.
Among more than 56,000 adults living in Norway, those who reached university were nearly twice as likely as adults who did not finish high school to develop autoimmune diabetes – an adult form of the disease similar to the type 1 diabetes that typically manifests in childhood. Clearly, higher education itself does not increase the risk of autoimmune diabetes, study author Lisa Olsson of the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden told Reuters Health. Rather, these results suggest that people who go to university have some other factor in their lives that predisposes them to this type of diabetes, she explained. Subjects with high education may have a different lifestyle (or) be exposed to other environmental factors than people with low education, which may increase their risk, Olsson said in an e-mail. She added that she and her colleagues used statistical tools to eliminate the influence of traditional risk factors – such as a family history of diabetes, obesity, smoking and lack of exercise – from the results, published in Diabetes Care. Other environmental factors must be involved in the explanation of these associations, Olsson noted. Furthermore, the risk of developing autoimmune diabetes was relatively low – out of more than 56,000 adults, only 122 were diagnosed with autoimmune diabetes. In contrast, more than 1,500 developed the more common form of the disease, type 2, which is closely related to obesity.In autoimmune diabetes, the immune system destroys beta cells, which are responsible for producing insulin. When diagnosed in children, it is called type 1 diabetes. In some cases, the loss of beta cells progresses slowly, causing the disease to appear for the first time in adults, when it is described as latent autoimmune diabetes in adults (LADA). Up to 12% of adults newly diagnosed with diabetes have the LADA form of the disease.Previous research has found that children from higher socioeconomic backgrounds appear to be more likely to develop type 1 diabetes. This study – which reviewed data collected from 56,296 people over 24 years — suggests that the link between higher education and autoimmune diabetes is present in adults, as well.One possible explanation for the link between LADA and higher education, Olsson noted, is that adults who have the means to attend university may experience fewer infections in childhood, which some researchers suspect predisposes children to type 1 diabetes.

Washington: Big powers fail to agree on capital reforms

The International Monetary Fund called Saturday for further study on global imbalances and exchange rate policies, stopping short of any specific calls to head off what some see as a looming currency war. The IMF steering committee, which has been struggling to find a consensus on easing currency tensions among key economies including China and the United States, said the organization should continue its study of the issue. While the international monetary system has proved resilient, tensions and vulnerabilities remain as a result of widening global imbalances, continued volatile capital flows, exchange rate movements and issues related to the supply and accumulation of official reserves, it said in a statement. Given that these issues are critically important… we call on the Fund to deepen its work in these areas, including in-depth studies to help increase the effectiveness of policies to manage capital flows. The statement from the International Monetary and Financial Committee, the policy arm of the IMF, stopped short of any specific call on China or others to change policies of using a low currency and accumulation of reserves to boost exports. There are frictions obviously, committee chair Yousaf Boutros-Ghali said at the conclusion of talks at IMF headquarters in Washington. These are being addressed. We have come to the conclusion that the IMF is the place to deal with these issues. IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, when asked about the failure to come up with a stronger statement, said that there is only one obstacle, and that is an agreement of the members. He added that I don’t believe action can be done in a way other than in a cooperative way. Recent IMF figures showed Beijing had currency reserves of 2.447 trillion dollars, the largest in the world and nearly 30 percent of the global total. Washington maintains that China purchases large amounts of dollars to keep the yuan artificially low, which distorts global trade by boosting Chinese exports. The has done little to ease fears of a global currency war, with the United States and China facing off over Beijing’s currency policies.

Trishala Dutt Has Desire To Act In Films

Reports of high-rise Bollywood indicate that Sanjay Dutt, the only daughter Trishala Dutt has expressed its willingness to work in the movies, and thought it would not call anger Dear Pope.

But can the women of the family enter the dot ever films?

The Trishala was raised in New York after the death of her mother and is kept away from the tinsel and glitter of the city it is not affected by the lure of Bollywood.

In one of the interviews with the magazine back in time, and quoted her as saying “My father never said ‘no’ to me to Bollywood.

Yes, I know he would not agree. But it has a soft corner for me, so I think it will be fine later. “Earlier also they do not deny that the experiment of Bollywood. Trishala also believed to have had a small task with the modeling done by the also short-term courses on behalf of the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York during the study.

Sources close to Sanjay to say that the actor was shocked at the news Trishala interested in film, said he did not know anything about that, and if this is true, was a bit of ‘news’ for him as well.

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